The Red Dress at the VFW Hall

The Red Dress

That night, after Kim went home, I opened my closet to find a sweatshirt.

The red dress was hanging at the very end, in a dry cleaner bag, where it had been for four years.

I bought it for our 15th anniversary. Nick took me to the supper club in Watertown, the one with the fish tank in the lobby.

I wore that dress one time. It was too nice for anything else we ever did.

It was a plain red dress. Knee length, elbow-length sleeves, a little fullness in the skirt. Nothing fancy by anybody’s standards except ours.

I took it out of the bag and held it up and looked at it for a long time.

The party was the next night. I had been planning not to go.

I had been planning to say my counts were low, which was true, and stay home with a heating pad and the television.

But standing there with that dress in my hands, I thought about Marlene saying a scarf does the same job.

I thought about all those people who had put their twenties in a coffee can for me. I thought about hiding.

And I decided I was done hiding. Not to shame anybody. Just to stop.

I hung the dress on the outside of the closet door, where I would see it first thing in the morning.

When Nick came to bed, he saw it hanging there. He looked at it, and then at me, and then at my bare head on the pillow.

He did not ask. He just reached over and put his hand on my head, very gently, like you would touch a sleeping baby.

Saturday Morning

I slept late. Chemo will do that. When I woke up, it was after nine, and I could hear a sound coming from our bathroom that I could not place at first.

It was a buzzing. Steady. Then it stopped, and started again. I lay there listening and finally understood. It was the clippers.

I got up and went down the hall in my robe. The bathroom door was closed. I stood outside it and did not knock.

After a while the buzzing stopped, and I heard the water run, and then the door opened.

Nick stood there with his head shaved smooth. He had used a razor after the clippers. There was a little nick by his left ear with a square of toilet paper stuck to it.

He had beautiful hair. Thick and dark, with a little gray at the sides. I had loved that hair for nineteen years.

And now there was none of it, and he was standing there grinning at me like a boy.

“Now we match,” he said.

I could not say anything. I put my hand over my mouth.

He came out and put his arms around me, and I felt his smooth head against my smooth head, and that was when I cried, finally, for the first time since the shower.

“You didn’t have to,” I said into his shirt.

“I know,” he said. “I wanted to. I wasn’t letting you walk in there by yourself.”

He had not told me he was going to do it. He had not asked.

He had just gotten up early on a Saturday and done it, so that whatever I decided, I would not be the only bald head in that hall.

Then he kissed the top of my head and went to dig his navy sport coat out of the back of the closet.

He had worn it to two funerals and one wedding. He had to let the belt out on his khakis one notch, and he complained about it the whole time.