Excerpt from Locks

The cancer drugs stole my hair. Plucked me naked. What's grown back is like a message spelled out millimetre by millimetre: I'm not who I thought I was. A redhead. Whimsical. Someone whose nickname could be Pumpkin. The new crop, near black and coarse, is all business. Each follicle mocks me, says, "Red, schmed!" then pushes out its dark strand. I hate it even more than I hated being bald.

"I just love it," says my hairdresser, Li, who is always ready to lie in the name of hair. I return to her hydraulic chair after an eternity of illness without the hurrah I imagined would follow me in like a whirlwind, little bells above the door heralding Crystal Gayle, Rapunzel, Goldilocks. Reality is more subtle: pipedin adult contemporary, an enviable scatter of tufts on the floor, stubborn mirrors conspiring to show me a swollen, pallid version of my true self with two inches of the dreaded dark hair.

"I'm thinking highlights," says Li. She uses a voice like many acquaintances do now, intended not to further disrupt my brittle bones. I feel I am being spoken to from very far away. Li opens her fingers into a splay and runs them abruptly through the rough mass several times, alternating hands, like her palms are planes taking off from the crown of my head.

"Or more sophisticated," she says, reassessing, reading something in the tussle. "Back to red, maybe."

"No. Not red." I'm thinking about my husband, the first time he ever loosened the red bun I used to like to wear low on the nape like a tomato. The image gets blurred by self-pity, so I shake it away.

"Blonde," I say. "White-blonde, like snow."

Li's hands come out of my hair, pause palms down. My head could be a drum she will play. Her shocked silence lasts a long time and I feel oddly ashamed to be undergoing yet another evaluation.

"Blonde's always big," she finally agrees, with gumption. "It'll refresh you."

My treatment schedule resulted in my sometimes seeing the same people at the cancer centre. Like this one old woman--lungs, Stage 3--who knit incessantly. She was Estonian. So said the nurses, who all loved her positive attitude and the patterned mittens she would give out to anyone who wanted them. This woman would wheeze and wheeze while her needles went click-click, click-click, contentedly stitching away her life. A goddamned swan song in patterned double-knits. I would turn the volume up high on my iPod and look away, feeling rage, like boiling water, pouring through my insides. I wished I could take those knitting needles and stab the old woman's heart. Stab my nurses. Stab the tube that was feeding me poison so that the liquid exploded out. One time, when my iPod battery died and I was feeling suffocated by the needlework two chairs down, I finally snapped. "For God sakes!" I yelled at the old woman. "Will you please can it?" One nurse who'd never liked me put a finger to her lips in a violent shushing gesture. Without thinking, I flipped her the bird and laughed, even though I knew it wasn't funny. I turned to look at the old woman. She was facing resolutely away from me. Her forearms had fallen against her sides. The needles and wool webbing were plopped on her belly in a vanquished red and green pile. She sniffled a while, her shoulders heaving, then began to snore. I watched her irregular breathing, couldn't look away for the satisfaction it gave me. Mind you, I always looked to that side--away from the arm getting the drip. But still.

"You won't want me to stay just because of all that's happened. I know that much." He said this not long after I was finally home for good. I guess my husband was so used to speaking to people on my behalf, he'd begun to confuse his will with my own. We were sitting at the kitchen table, where I once pictured myself sitting for life. He'd brought home takeout Thai.

"You never liked this neighbourhood anyway," he said, trying to be lighthearted.

"I like the library."

"Hmm," he said disapprovingly. "Look, we'll wait till you've found your feet, but you won't want this to drag on forever."

"I want this to drag on forever."

He put his face in his hands and started to cry while I went on eating. All the crying of that period! It was epidemic. But the food was delicious. I liked the sweet and the spicy together. I loved the lime. The surface of things did matter, I thought. Taste. Touch. Appearances. The semblance of normal life was my ticket back to the world of the living. This new woman, "clean" of cancer, released from the pen of hospital and chemo, needed a husband. At any cost.