We Are Not Ourselves(112)

Her heart ached when she signed the “Assessment of Capacity to Choose a Surrogate Decision Maker” form, because during the evaluation, the doctor had asked Ed who she was. “My wife,” Ed had said, as if there were nothing plainer.

“Do you want your wife to have the power to make decisions on your behalf?” the doctor asked with exaggerated deliberateness, as if to convey the gravity of what Ed was signing over.

Ed laughed and asked the doctor if he was married. The doctor nodded.

“Then it won’t surprise you to hear that my wife has been calling the shots as long as we’ve been married,” Ed said, and the doctor chuckled in husbandly sympathy before checking the box beside “This patient has the capacity at this time.” It amazed her how winning Ed had been able to be even at a moment like this.

She signed with a certain stoicism a form consenting to participate on his behalf, but it was the “Record of Choice of a Surrogate Decision Maker” form that nearly made her lose her composure, because it was the only one Ed had to sign himself, and he started his signature an inch above where he should have and angled it down and through the line in a way that made it look as if he was falling down as he did it.





45


Eileen keenly missed Curt, her hairstylist, and not just because he knew how to handle her cowlicks. She missed Curt’s entertaining conversation, the way he indulged her interest in politics and made her keep a toe dipped in the ocean of popular culture, the tide of which receded from her as soon as she stopped seeing him. Every time she checked out at the Food Emporium, it seemed, she recognized fewer of the faces on the covers of celebrity magazines.

She wasn’t about to go back to Jackson Heights for Curt, though, so she couldn’t avoid the hairstylist in Bronxville, even though it intimidated her to go in there. The salon was fancier than Curt’s place, with a miniature Japanese pond and leather seats in the waiting area. She was afraid to get into political conversations there, as she never knew who felt what, or who was listening, and she wouldn’t read any of the offerings on the coffee table—People, Us, Premiere, Entertainment Weekly—because she didn’t want to give anyone a reason to look down their noses at her, even though everyone else flipped through them with guilt-free relish. She couldn’t escape the feeling that there was a different set of rules for her that she’d never had properly explained.

The Bronxville salon was practically a full spa, offering nail care, massages, facial treatments. As stylists, they were skilled technicians, giving her what she asked for and leaving her a little cold. Her hair would look great for a couple of days, with a chilly perfection to it, the cut preserved so unchangingly that it looked as if she’d been fitted for a wig. Then, one morning a few days in, it would refuse to fall in line with the brush, and she would have to wait long enough until she could justify going in.

Curt gave her what she didn’t know she wanted. His cuts were understated; sometimes she wondered whether he cut much at all or just stood there talking and making snipping motions with the scissors. He always swept the shorn locks away before he took the smock off her, so she never got to examine the evidence. Weeks after an appointment, though, people were still asking her if she’d just had her hair done.

? ? ?

One day in the last week of March, when she was waiting to have her hair cut, she heard the woman before her—who despite being a little older than her was wearing stiletto heels and had alternating streaks of chocolate, caramel, and butterscotch dye in her hair—tell the hairstylist about the miracle they’d performed cleaning her mink at Bronxville Furrier after she’d leaned against some wet paint. Eileen saw the fur hanging on the hook. It looked shiny and full, as if it had just gotten a cut, shampoo, and blowout itself. The way the woman discussed her fur, it was as though she were actually discussing something else, speaking in a secret code that Eileen could decipher only if she had the corresponding key. She’d had the thought before that a fur might just be the thing to make her feel she belonged in this town.

A week later, when she walked past Bronxville Furrier and saw that they were having a spring sale, she went in and purchased a mink. It was so plush and full and enveloped her so thoroughly that she felt as though she had shrunk down to her teenaged size just by putting it on. In some quarters, it wasn’t so fashionable anymore to own a fur coat, what with all the work PETA activists had done to stigmatize the wearers of them, but fur seemed to still have a foothold in Bronxville. She had the two important things—money to buy it with, or at least a still-viable line of credit, and someone to go out with in it. Who knew how long either would last?

“What about our rainy day savings?” Ed asked when he saw it.

“If it rains any harder than this,” she said, “not even Noah’s Ark would save us.”

? ? ?

The weather was too warm for her new coat, but the Saturday after she’d bought it was chilly, and she decided that this might be the last chance she’d have to put it on for half a year. She made a reservation for seven o’clock at Le Bistro on Pondfield, the fancy place across from the post office that she’d been wanting to go to for months. She and Ed parked a few blocks up, where Kraft met Pondfield, because she wanted to take a little stroll through town and be seen. As soon as she started walking, though, she felt overdressed. No one else was in fur, and the truth was that she hadn’t seen many women her age in fur since she’d moved.