My Mother's Wigs
I walked into the consignment store just as it was closing.
An older man tried to bar my way at the door, but I pushed past him. The gray-haired lady behind the counter saw me and knew immediately why I had come.
"Call the police!" she said.
I walked straight for the back wall and began pulling wigs off their styrofoam heads, I was so angry my hands were shaking.
I dropped one onto the floor and a worker, a little old lady one-third my size, picked it up and put it behind her back, facing me with an impudent look like we were playing some sort of game.
No, this was no game.
I looked down at her.
"Gimme, the wig, bitch," I said.
They weren't my wigs, actually. They belonged to my late mother, Jean.
And they didn't belong here.
These people didn't deserve them.
When my mother was in her early 40s, she suffered what's known in the world of women’s personal couture as a three-alarm fire.
Her hair was thinning.
She didn’t lose it entirely, but those long luxurious auburn locks of her youth were now long gone. What remained wasn’t that bad in my opinion. Yes, it was on the meager side, but she could have went with sort of a short-and-sassy look you often see these days.
You know, that one with the feathered flips, color and attitude.
But my mother had a better solution.
Wigs.
Wigs of all colors, styles, highlights and temperaments. Wigs that matched her mood and the fashion of the day, which happened to be the crazy 1960s, when those sassy bouffants were all the rage.
When she donned those wigs, my oldest sister says now, our mother went from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
And fly she did.
Each wig made its own statement.
There was the Marge Simpson — layered and high, oh, so high. I mean, you would not want this woman to sit directly in front of you at the movie theater.
Those big-haired gals down in Texas had nothing on our mother.
And my absolute favorite, the Dolly Madison, with its dangling wiglet that bounced on her shoulder, just for effect.
Jean switched between a half-dozen at any given time, storing those ladies-in-waiting on ghostly styrofoam heads you see in store-window displays, all of them pointing toward her bed so she could admire them and in the morning select her look for the day.
When he went to sleep each night, the lights finally dimmed, my father used to say that he always felt like he had an audience.
And he did.
My mother, you see, was the life of the party, compared to our father’s much more reserved sense of style.
First of all, she liked to talk.
Some say — spuriously, I insist — that I actually take after her.
She had this outrageous fashion sense, preferring these leopardy outfits with zippers and big buttons and fluff and garishly loud colors — getups that I’d guess were not designed with a mother-of-seven in mind.
She also liked to laugh.
Oh, boy, did she.
At home, she was always sort of sullen — washing her clothes, doing her ironing, drinking her tea, maybe snapping open a beer in the morning, if she felt like it, all without having much to say to us kids still left in the house.
I always said she was a bony shoulder to cry on.
But then, the telephone would ring with one of her girlfriends calling to check in and she would come absolutely alive.
The change was almost startling in its suddenness and entirety.
She'd start some story with the word, "Actually ..." and then she was off to the races.
How she would laugh!
Really, it was more of a cackle, that hit my teenage ears like something you’d hear from a farmer’s pen full of old hens, perched atop their eggs, clucking and calling out.
She, of course, disagreed.
And she cared not a whit what I thought, anyway.
Well, those calls often got her so fired up with fun that she’d rush up the stairs, don her wig-of-the-day and fire up her yellow 1972 Ford Pinto that waited in the garage, roaring off to continue said conversation in person, no doubt laughing all the way.
My mother got so involved in her storytelling that, during her weekly women’s bowling league — she’d throw her 12-pound ball down the lane and then turn away before it hit the pins, to finish telling some story.
Much of her standup material involved misadventures with her wigs.
Jean worked as a part-time waitress in a staid restaurant called the Top O’ the Hill. I considered a fashion runway for my mother and her wigs. One evening, she sported one of the taller varieties, which apparently caught on the bottom of a hanging plant in the middle of the restaurant.
This, mind you, in front of maybe 100 people, an audience that might have included our neighbors, Joe and Helen Brady, and maybe Father Thomas Guyder, the pastor at St. Joseph’s Church just across the street, which held the masses my mother attended religiously.
She turned to see the wig dangling there, the mouths of diners, no doubt, agape.
But Jeannie had style; she had chutzpah.
She walked right across that restaurant floor, grabbed that wig, put it back on, and went about her waitressing business.
She did harbor a distinct sense of privacy.
At home, her wigs and public persona safely stored upstairs, she always wore a headdress we came to call her babushka. Looking back, she looked rather stylish, in her robe, standing at her ironing board, watching “Hollywood Squares,” cackling at the antics of her favorite comedian, Paul Lynde.
The point is, she never let anyone, even us kids, see her with her naked, thinning hair.
As we all got older, I admit, I could not imagine my mother without her wigs.
She was elegant until the day she died, at age 80.
Once, while traveling in Beijing with my parents, my wife suddenly announced to a crowd of Chinese strangers that they were in the midst of an American celebrity.
“Don’t you know who she is?” my wife challenged.
And then my mother’s newfound fans were upon her, wanting to touch her, just be in her presence. She cackled that day, for sure, and later, at the retelling of the story.
If was a far cry from another trip I’d taken with my parents — this time to Italy — when we ran for a train on a windy day in Florence, my mother holding onto her wig, or parrucca in Italian, for dear life.
Yes, my mother was her wigs and her wigs were her.
Years ago, when I began dying my hair a bright and very-phony-looking blonde, both my mother and an older sister disapproved of the look.
“Jaaaaahn,” Jeannie would say in her flattened Upstate New York accent. “Why do you have to wear your hair like that?”
That is, until I told them both I’d make a deal: I’d stop dying my hair if my mother would stop wearing her wigs and my sister would no longer wear makeup to the gym.
The complaints were silenced, just like that.
Our Jeannie met her end in a car crash in 2008.
All the kids flocked to northern Florida from around the world to bury their mother, say their goodbyes and figure out what we would do with our Dad.
Going through her things, a challenge soon arose.
What to do with her precious wigs?
They deserved a good home, with someone who loved them as much as our mother did. Someone suggested a storefront charity just down Route 200 in Ocala, Fla.
But when I called the place, I sensed that something was amiss.
There was no ‘We’re sorry for your loss,” nope, merely instructions to come before 2 p.m. and to make sure to use the back door.
So we did.
Well, these folks were no warmer in person than they were over the phone.
They were all in their 70s, maybe 80s, and they had no doubt been doing this job for far too long. They stiffly offered us a receipt for tax purposes (as if that’s why we were doing this) and we went on our heartbroken say.
The very next day, I was cruising down Route 200 in our rental car with one of my sisters and a family friend, Betsy. That’s when Sister Three decided she needed something black for the following day’s funeral.
She recalled that she’d seen something in the shop where we’d donated the wigs.
She asked me to stop.
I pulled up and me and Betsy waited in the parking lot outside, the car running.
I did not want to go back in there.
My sister returned moments later.
“They won’t let me in,” she said. “They said they closed at 4 p.m.”
My anger, as it is sometimes wont to do, ignited like a grease fire.
“But it’s just 4 p.m. now,” I said. “Didn’t they recognize you from yesterday?”
They had, apparently.
That was it.
I swung open the driver-side door and marched toward the shop, a man on a mission.
An old geezer at the door tried to block my way but I was easily past him.
As I walked in, the old folks inside tensed up like people waiting for colonoscopies.
Then I spotted them there, displayed on the wall, arranged just so.
A lifetime of my dear mother’s wigs.
If I wasn’t mad then (and I was, bulieve me, I was) I was then.
“Call the police,” the old biddy said from behind the counter.
I walked up to the display and began snatching wigs off their lifeless heads.
I knew which ones were Jeannie’s.
How could I forget?
Just then, an old woman employee half my size snatched one of my Mom’s wigs and hid it behind her back, like a smart-assed kid playing some schoolyard game.
“Gimme the wig, bitch,” I heard myself say.
She wouldn’t.
It was a Florida standoff.
As I calculated how much jail time I’d get for use of force, the counter biddy spoke up.
“Give him the wig,” she said.
She did.
And then I was out door, dropping wigs as I went, hurrying back to retrieve them.
I opened the trunk, tossed them inside like bags of cash from some bank robbery.
Then I hopped back behind the wheel of the car, which was still running.
As I roared back onto Route 200, Betsy turned to me and said, ever no nonchalantly.
“What did you just do?”
“These people are not getting my mother’s wigs,” I said.
Then we broke it down: The old biddy had our address, we’d given it to them when we donated the wigs. Of course, they were going to call the police, who would not doubt show up at my parent’s home and give my proud and grieving father a heart attack.
Damn.
I took out my cell phone and dialed.
“Who are you calling?” Betsy said.
As a former reporter on the cop beat, I knew what to do.
“Marion County Sheriff’s Department?” I said. “Can I speak to the duty sergeant?”
Then I breathlessly explained what had just happened.
He listened and then calmly, maybe he even laughed, I can’t recall, said these words.
“Well, they are your wigs, aren’t they?”
They were indeed.
Now they were.
The next day, we found another, more deserving, charity.
I can only hope that those wigs went to a good home, to a style-conscious woman who loved them and the statements they made as much as my own mother did.
And so many years later, I still celebrate both Jean and her beloved wigs.
Because, come to think of it, my own hair is sort of thinning these days.
I am, after all, my mother’s son.