The Red Dress at the VFW Hall

What Harold Did Not Know

I need to tell you about Harold, because people always want to know where the men were.

Harold Fenske drove a grain truck for the co-op for thirty-one years. He has hands like baseball mitts and a laugh you can hear across a parking lot.

He is not a man who handles money in that house. Marlene paid the bills for fifty years.

Harold signed whatever she slid across the table. That was their way, and it worked for them.

Nick asked me that night, lying in bed, whether his dad knew. I said I didn’t think so.

I said I didn’t think Harold had looked inside that coffee can once since the day it went up.

“Then I’ll tell him,” Nick said.

“No,” I said. “Let it be. If he finds out, let it not be from us, days before his party. He’d be ashamed. He’d be ashamed for her.”

The Scarf Week

That week I tried the scarf. I really did. Kim, my sister, drove over from Watertown with a grocery bag full of them, cotton ones and silky ones and one with little anchors on it.

We stood in front of my bathroom mirror and she showed me three ways to tie them. They kept slipping.

My scalp was sore and tender, and the knot at the back pressed on it, and the silky ones slid right off.

“You’d look fine in a scarf,” Kim said, and then she saw my face in the mirror and stopped talking.

It was not the scarf. It was Marlene’s voice saying vanity. It was the word sitting in my chest like a stone.

I had not wanted the wig to look pretty. I had wanted it so I could walk into the post office and not have everyone know.

On Friday Kim came back with Nick’s clippers. What was left of my hair was patchy and thin, and it was coming out faster than I could pick it off my clothes. We decided to finish the job ourselves.

I sat on the closed toilet lid with a towel around my shoulders. Kim plugged in the clippers. Her hand was shaking so badly she had to stop twice.

“I can do it,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I’ve got it. Hold still.”

It took about four minutes. When she was done, she turned off the clippers and set them on the sink and put both hands over her face, and she cried. My big sister, who did not cry at our dad’s funeral.

I did not cry. I looked in the mirror at a woman I did not know. Pale, smooth, my ears sticking out further than I remembered. My eyes looked enormous.

“I look like an egg,” I said, and Kim laughed so hard through her tears that she had to sit down on the edge of the tub.