The Bigness of the World

Upon Completion of Baldness

My girlfriend returned from Hong Kong bald, thoroughly bald, the bumps and veins of her skull rising up in relief, as neat and stark as the stitching on a baseball. When we embraced, I noted that her scalp had a sickly yellowish cast to it, the influence of the airport’s fluorescent lights apparently, for once we were home, the yellowness had vanished, leaving nothing but white. It may surprise you to know that I did not address her baldness immediately, right there in the airport, but I did not. Rather, we stepped free of our embrace and then rode the escalator down a level to retrieve her suitcase, though I will admit to standing a step above her as we descended in order to survey the very top of her head, the crown, which appeared freer of veins than the rest of her head and brought to mind a bird’s belly.

“How was Hong Kong?” I asked as we waited for the conveyor belt to start up and produce her suitcase.

“Tiring,” she said with a small, exhausted smile meant to confirm her reply.

Then we stood in silence for several minutes, waiting for her bag to appear, which it did, bright orange and easy to spot. The closest I come to experiencing a sense of wonder in regard to the world and its workings is at the moment that I catch sight of a familiar piece of luggage, last seen thousands of miles away, chugging up the conveyor belt from the bowels of the airport. I simply do not expect it. Perhaps this seems overly pessimistic, for something must be done with those scores of bags so carefully collected and tagged on the other end. They cannot all simply disappear into nothingness. True. However, I fully expect the other travelers’ bags to arrive; it is only the appearance of my own that provokes awe. Furthermore, for the sake of full disclosure, I will reveal that only once has my luggage actually gone astray, and not during one of my more complicated international flights but after the shortest hop imaginable — fifty minutes, Denver to Albuquerque, Albuquerque being home.

When we walked from the car to the house, the chilly desert air seemed to startle her as though, in that moment, she realized that there was a price to be paid for having no hair, and while I still said nothing, I was happy to see her suffer just a bit. She unpacked immediately, unusual for her, while I sat on the bed and watched, focusing on her hands, which dipped in and out of the suitcase, bearing all of the familiar clothing with which she had departed just a week ago, several pairs of black dress pants and lots of orange — blouses, sweaters, a scarf. Somehow she can combine black and orange and not come off looking as though she’s dressed for Halloween, but with her nude head bobbing atop her shoulders like a pumpkin, it occurred to me that things might be different now. And still I said nothing, for I hadn’t decided yet what it was that I felt — anger, sorrow, embarrassment, perhaps all three.

“Here,” she said, handing me a plastic bag containing what appeared to be individually wrapped squares of candy, but when I unwrapped a cube and set it on my tongue, it was definitely not candy. I sucked on it a moment and then bit down.

“Bouillon?” I inquired politely. She laughed, and it sounded the same, rich and frothy, but when I glanced up, her head was bald, and she stopped.

“Dried tuna with wasabi,” she said, and we fell silent.

We brushed our teeth together, both of us vying for the sink, a common occurrence, but when the mint of the toothpaste mixed with the residual taste of dried tuna and wasabi, I nudged her quickly out of the way and leaned over the bowl, gagging. When I glanced up in the mirror, she was there behind me, perhaps looking concerned, though I cannot be sure of that. I do know that with the toothbrush protruding from her mouth, her baldness seemed almost mechanical, as though her head were nothing more than a giant socket, a home for various parts. Later, when we were in bed, I opened my eyes, expecting to see her head illuminated, a full moon rising over her pillow, but there was nothing, only the faint throttle of her breathing.

We had spoken just once while she was away, the day after she arrived in Hong Kong, a brief conversation that seems, in retrospect, to have focused solely on our neighbors, the retired wrestling coach and his wife, who had not yet removed their Christmas lights although it was past Saint Patrick’s Day and moving swiftly toward Easter. “Shall I speak to them about it?” I had asked, but she sounded distracted, which at the time I attributed to jet lag. Could it be, I now wondered, that she was already bald, even then? That as I was speaking to her about such trivial matters as Christmas lights, she was pressing the telephone to her bald head fifteen hours ahead of me in Hong Kong? Thus, the first discernible emotion related to her baldness: anger. Or perhaps annoyance. Yes, simple annoyance, for it would not do to overstate the matter.

I lay there listening to her sinuses rattle for a good hour before I got out of bed and, in an attempt to understand the situation — her motivations, my reticence — began to write this all down, to record the details as they occurred to me and then to study what I had written, to analyze it in much the same way that I would a text, the analyzing of texts being both my forte and my livelihood. I suspect that most people would be happier if they could manage their relationships in this way, applying their professional training toward making sense of their personal lives as well, though I am obviously in a better position to do so than, say, a plumber or somebody who handles money for a living.

I must confess that, in recording these simple facts, I immediately encountered a snag: in the first sentence, I wrote “my girlfriend,” but only after elaborate hesitation, realizing that I had no fixed designation for her other than her name, which is Felicity, an overtly, almost aggressively, symbolic name that I have nevertheless learned to use without smirking. I briefly considered lover, but felt that the term put a disproportionate emphasis, inaccurately I might add, on one particular aspect of our relationship. As for partner and significant other, nothing need be said. Thus it was that I chose the unequivocally precise (albeit bland) designation girlfriend, though not without experiencing the aforementioned hesitation, for simply put, girlfriend sounds juvenile and might mislead one about our ages, which I will now describe as fortyish.

As I wrote, I could not help but dwell, with some frustration, on certain matters that I had hoped to discuss with Felicity before we returned to school the next day, but she had chosen to arrive home bald instead, preempting discussion. There was the ongoing situation with Mr. Matthers, who, like us, was in his first year of employment at the school, a private high school, technically without a religious bent, though there are shades of such everywhere these days. Felicity had laughed when I told her, early on, that it would behoove us (yes, I used behoove) to pay attention to the stir that he was already causing; the three of us were hired together, I pointed out sternly, and thus were associated with one another in the minds of our colleagues, but she said that it behooved us (mocking me, no doubt) to pay attention to ourselves.

At that point, there had been only the vague reports that Mr. Matthers was teaching with both hands held in the air, not fully extended like in a holdup, but partially, with his hands sprouting out just above his shoulders. I began to hear more specifically about this strange behavior from my students, many of whom were in his science classes. One day, while my tenth graders worked at their desks diagramming sentences, which, for the record, I still consider a worthy endeavor, I crept down the hall and around the corner to Mr. Matthers’s room. He was wearing a tan lab coat with Let’s Bake Bread stenciled across the front, standing before the class with his heels together and his toes pointed out at a ninety-degree angle, in what we were taught was the appropriate stance for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or acknowledging “The Star-Spangled Banner” when I was young. And yes, his hands were aloft, not gesturing or even keeping rhythm with what he was saying but simply floating, perfectly still, as though he had thrown them up in a moment of surprise and forgotten them there.

However, that night at dinner, when I informed Felicity that I had gone down to Mr. Matthers’s classroom and witnessed his strange behavior firsthand, she remained dismissive. “Maybe it’s part of a science experiment,” she suggested, chewing as she spoke.

“A science experiment,” I replied incredulously, though I paused to swallow first. “The students say that he teaches the entire class like that. How could it possibly be part of a science experiment?”

“Well, perhaps Mr. Matthers is experiencing problems with his circulation. Perhaps he is simply following the advice of a doctor,” she had suggested next.

“Perhaps,” I replied. “But wouldn’t he explain this to the students if that were the case?”

“Perhaps Mr. Matthers is of the opinion that his duty to the students is to explain science,” she replied, getting in the final “perhaps,” though I knew that she did not care for Mr. Matthers either.

That had been our last discussion of the matter, but during her week away, a second problem had arisen with Mr. Matthers, one that I wanted to apprise her of before she returned to school. I couldn’t very well rouse her from a deep, jet-lagged sleep to do so, but the next morning, once we were in the car, I turned to her and said, “Mr. Matthers has been up to his old tricks.” She was still bald, of course — not that you would imagine otherwise.

Our commute took approximately twenty-five minutes, enough time to have discussed both Mr. Matthers and the other situation had Felicity been amenable to a discussion, which she was not on that particular morning. There were signs. Some mornings, she turned toward the window and rested her forehead against the glass, “appreciating its coolness,” she said. Other days, she hummed, a habit she’d had as long as I’d known her. In both cases, I knew not to make any conversational overtures. I do consider it worth mentioning that she did not hum when she was alone, at least not to my knowledge. Rather, the humming was a purely public gesture, a means by which she kept others at a distance. I had pointed this out to her — the impoliteness of it — because that is the sort of thing that one wants to know, but she just laughed.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Humming is a joyful sound, an expression of tranquillity and ease.” What does one say to that?

Ten minutes into our commute, she had still offered none of the positive indicators that meant she welcomed conversation. She had not turned toward me with her left arm flung up along my seat back, fingertips extended invitingly. Nor had she called me DriverDriver, which was her nickname for me, borrowed from our friend Sandy, an accounts analyst who was often perplexed by the workings of the human mind. Aware of her shortcoming, Sandy administered personality assessment tests to all of her employees and then interacted with each according to the guidelines prescribed for his or her personality type. When she asked Felicity and me to take one of these tests as well, to help her be a “better friend” as she put it, we of course obliged. I tested into the driver camp for both primary and secondary traits, thus the nickname.

Drivers are the control freaks, the ones who cannot let anything slide, though the nickname was meant as a joke, of course, a play on the fact that I literally never let anyone else drive. I’ve tried, but I get panicky the minute anyone else is behind the wheel. It’s the speed, I suspect, for I feel the same way when a plane surges forward on takeoff, moving faster and faster down the runway with no possibility of turning back: my heart rate accelerates, and I am struck by an overwhelming desire to scream, “Stop the plane!” I can imagine few things more mortifying, and the fear of embarrassing myself in this way somehow only exacerbates my panic. Still, I have found that I can calm myself in the middle of these attacks by focusing on something small and unchanging, a meaningless line of text from the airline catalog or the knuckles of my hands.

“Mr. Matthers is up to his old tricks,” I repeated, for though Felicity had not extended any of her conversation invitations, neither was she humming or resting her forehead against the window.

“What has he done now? Taken to overseeing the labs with his legs bowed?” she replied, in a voice suggesting that she really did not care to know. Still, she had asked, and that was enough of an opening, particularly if I ignored the latter half of her question.

“Well,” I said, perhaps too eagerly. “Remember how you commented just last week that Mrs. Chavez is really starting to show?” Mrs. Chavez, who, like Felicity, is a math teacher, announced just after the Christmas holiday that she was pregnant.

“I do.”

“Well, Mr. Matthers has taken to asking her, every time he sees her, in fact, whether she has ever experienced a miscarriage. On Thursday, four or five of us were in the lounge, and we all heard him. We knew about it already, of course, because Mrs. Chavez had mentioned it to several of us.” This made it sound as though I were one of the people that Mrs. Chavez confided in, though that was not the case. “Then, Ms. Gutierrez scolded him right there in front of everyone. She told him that it wasn’t proper to ask any woman, but especially a pregnant one, whether she’d ever had a miscarriage.”

“And has he stopped?” Felicity asked, showing more interest than I expected.

“Well, I haven’t heard of anything else, but I left right at the bell on Friday. I had the show, you know.”

The show, because I realize that I haven’t explained about the shows yet, was a cat show in Los Angeles, for which I left immediately after school on Friday, returning Sunday afternoon in time to grade a set of mediocre essays before picking Felicity up from the airport. Felicity and I are both highly skilled cat judges and, as such, find our services requested at cat shows all over the world. When we were hired at the school, the principal, who is a cat lover as well (though of the mixed-breed, pound-affiliated variety), was quite accommodating about our obligations. In turn, as a gesture of goodwill, we put forth that, except in cases of emergency, we would not accept judging duties that resulted in our being absent from work at the same time. Thus, Felicity agreed to do the Hong Kong show while I stayed behind, holding up our end of the bargain, teaching while she was off, as it turned out, having her head shaved.

By this time, we were pulling into the school parking lot, so Felicity was preoccupied, taking it all in after a week away, her head pivoting in tight, frenetic movements, like a sparrow’s, which might have been the way she always moved her head, though, in the past, her hair was there to soften things. We got out of the car, walked across the parking lot and through the front doors, our paths diverging immediately — mathematics left, English right.

And so, I did not tell her about the other incident, the one that had nothing to do with Mr. Matthers at all. It happened on Friday, during third period, with the tenth graders, of whom I am rather fond. I had started them on Salinger, despite the fact that another English teacher, whose name I shall not disclose, had suggested that Salinger, with all his “New Yorkiness,” had little to “say” to a group of students who had grown up here in New Mexico.

“I believe that Salinger has something to say to all tenth graders,” I had replied, perhaps overearnestly. “I myself was once a tenth grader growing up in Minnesota, and I found that he had plenty to say.” I do not buy into this idea that one learns more from literature that is familiar; in fact, it seems only logical that one would learn most from subject matter that one has not already mastered through the daily grind of one’s existence, which is what I shall tell my colleague the next time she bothers me about Salinger.

I arrived in the classroom just as the bell was ringing, for I had paused briefly outside Mr. Matthers’s room on my way back from the teachers’ lounge, which is where I generally spend second period, my free hour. When I entered the classroom, the students were unusually still, already in their seats and seemingly engrossed in their Salingers. I felt a momentary thrill at being proven correct, but I had not turned to my right as I entered, so I did not yet know what was there, written in large letters on the blackboard.

“Good morning, class,” said I, then waited while they responded in kind, for one of the things that we had been working on was the forgotten art of basic, cross-generational politeness. They always had plenty to say to one another, but on the first day of class, they had stared blankly at me when I greeted them, and so I had related the story of my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kjelmer, who required us to line up at the end of each day and pass by her on our way out of the room, pausing to shake her hand and thank her for some specific contribution that she had made to our educations that day. I am fairly sure that we did not find this odd or extreme, but my students had stared at me in horror as I recounted the tale, a few of them even gasping, as though each day had ended with the beheading of a student rather than this basic gesture of appreciation.

Having acknowledged their return greeting with an inclination of my head, I turned around toward the board, and there, in an awkward teenage scrawl, was their summary of my relationship with Felicity:

MISS LUNDSTROM & MISS SHAPIRO ARE LEZZIE LOVERS!!

My immediate reaction, as you might expect, was akin to my feelings upon takeoff — that is, I felt remarkably close to crying out, “Stop the plane!” Instead, I did what a speech teacher long ago had advised, which was always to act in opposition to what one’s nerves dictated. Thus, instead of mumbling and stammering my way through a demand to know whose work this was on the board, I turned back toward the class and asked, in a very precise, audible tone, whether anyone could recall my position on the ampersand.

There they sat with their mouths drifting open like a choir fading out after a sustained high note, and so I took several steps backward toward the board and pointed, with a surprisingly steady finger, at the offending ampersand. “This symbol, as you may recall, is called the ampersand. Like all symbols used to replace perfectly good words, it is, in my opinion, a symbol primarily of laziness and should be tolerated only on signs or in computer programming.” With the side of my hand, I deftly swiped at the ampersand, then picked up a piece of chalk and neatly wrote the word and in its place.

“Well,” I said, turning again to the class. “Who would like to go next?”

They were familiar with this exercise, of course, for each time I handed back a set of essays, I selected five particularly poor sentences from among them, which I copied onto the blackboard. Then we worked our way through them, one at a time, making corrections and revisions. Nonetheless, I was surprised when Keith, a short boy with a purple smattering of acne, raised his hand.

“Keith,” I said.

“The exclamation points?” he asked.

“What about them?” I prodded.

“Do you really need two of them?” The students understood how I felt about the exclamation point, the impact of which I illustrated early on by passing around a print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

“Good,” I said. “Though I think that begs the question, Do we really need even one?” I held the chalk out and Keith came dutifully to the front of the room, erased the exclamation marks, and inserted a simple period in their place.

“Well, I suppose that naturally brings us to the excessiveness of all uppercase lettering, does it not?” I said, the students nodding as I rewrote the statement in lowercase, retaining the essential capital letters, of course.

We turned our attention to word choice then, with Clara S., as she always signed her name, suggesting that lezzie seemed “informal — or something.”

“Hmm,” I replied. “Yes, I suppose that a case could be made for informal. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the word lezzie?”

“It’s spelled wrong?” suggested Beth, an exceedingly poor speller who walked with a strange, gliding motion, as though she were skiing.

“I know,” cried Manuel, who was the sort to answer only those questions that the other students had already, and unsuccessfully, attempted. “It’s prejudicial.” He sat back with his long arms crossed triumphantly, a gesture that did nothing to endear him to the other students.

“What would you suggest?” I asked.

“Lesbian?” Manuel replied after a careful pause, having the good grace to uncross his arms as he spoke. Still, the other students became quiet, unsure perhaps where lesbian stood on the “prejudicial” scale, but I was saved the need to make a reassuring response by Tina, a shy girl, partial to plaid, who asked, “Isn’t that redundant? I mean, you know they’re lesbians because they’re both women and they’re lovers.” Had I been in a different frame of mind, I might have turned the discussion to her seemingly unconscious reference to me and Felicity in the third person, though hadn’t I been urging the students all year to please, oh please, just distance themselves a bit from the text?

“Nice work, Tina,” I said, and she blushed deeply, in keeping with the type of personality that is attentive to redundancy.

The critique session took nearly half an hour, at the end of which the students slumped in their seats, looking dazed and exhausted. On the board was our final revision: Ms. Lundstrom and Ms. Shapiro are lovers. Of course, we had changed “Miss” to “Ms.” in both cases, for, as I pointed out to them, Ms. Shapiro and I were not schoolgirls, nor was this the 1950s.

* * *

Felicity and I were introduced six years ago by a mutual friend whom I shall call Sally. Sally and I had, once upon a time, been English majors together, but she had gone on to accept a position, temporary she assured me at the time, with a company that replaced windshield glass. The company, however, was not accustomed to having employees who could put an estimate into proper letter format or utilize the semicolon, and soon she had been promoted to regional manager. There was a long period after college during which Sally and I were not in contact, but when I moved to the Twin Cities, I called her and we met for lunch. She looked nearly the same, although puffier and with a penchant for purple, and when she asked what I had been doing for the last fifteen years, I blurted out this parallel list of accomplishments: I had earned a master’s degree, done some teaching, and established that I was a lesbian.

Sally was new to the idea of knowing lesbians and admitted to being somewhat nervous, though she seemed unable to articulate the source of her nervousness. I have found that, when presented with this revelation, many people take a careful step back, keeping their mouths shut for fear of saying something wrong, but I have always found myself more charmed by those of Sally’s nature, those who barrel right in, unaware that a list of right-and-wrong-things-to-say even exists. Thus, while Sally confessed to a certain nervousness, it was certainly, and refreshingly I might add, nothing that compelled her to err on the side of caution. She telephoned not long after our lunch meeting to announce that she had just met another lesbian, suggesting, with much enthusiasm, that I might wish to meet her new acquaintance, a customer named Felicity whose windshield had been shot out by a neighbor who resented people parking on the street in front of his house.

“And why might I want to meet somebody with such a ridiculous name?” I asked.

Sally paused, for I don’t think that it had occurred to her that her suggestion might be met with anything but equal, possibly greater, zeal. “You’re of the same ilk,” she said at last.

Assuming that by ilk she meant a shared orientation, I replied that her “lowest common denominator” approach to matchmaking was a bit insulting.

“But you’re both lesbians,” she insisted indignantly.

“That,” I explained, trying to be gentler, “is the ‘lowest common denominator’ to which I refer. It is a necessary factor, true, but it hardly qualifies as, well, ilkiness.” In her defense, she did not know the special attachment I had to the word ilk.

Sally, however, was of a persistent nature, and so, several weeks later, when she and I again met for lunch, Felicity was there as well, though I learned afterward that she had been no more apprised of this meeting than I. At the time, I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation, which dealt with the practicalities of teaching grammar and writing to older-than-average students. I had discovered, for example, that in a class made up largely of women in their fifties, coordinate and subordinate clauses made sudden sense for them when likened to marriages, the former a marriage in which the two parties were equals, the latter a marriage in which one party was dependent on the other for meaning. In my dissertation, I had neglected to mention, as a corollary to this discovery, that many of the women steadfastly purged their writing of all subordinate clauses following this lesson, suddenly seeing something shameful in each if and because.

I arrived for lunch that day bearing a list of problematic sentences from my dissertation, hoping to review them with Sally in order to ensure that my meaning, as I intended it, was patently clear, even to the less engaged reader. I saw no reason to alter my plans simply because Felicity was present. In turn, she felt that it was perfectly acceptable to interrupt me and my troubling sentences almost immediately with the following observation: “You have no control over what the reader thinks; you do realize that, I would hope. It doesn’t matter what you intended.”

I’d had my fill of critical theory by that time, so I certainly did not need to be eating lunch with some amateur reader-response critic, but when I suggested, coyly, that perhaps she had been reading too much Stanley Fish, she stared back at me blankly. “I don’t believe that I am familiar with Mr. Fish’s work,” she replied, overly politely I felt. “I’m simply making a point about the way that people communicate. This conversation is a perfect example,” she added, pointing her fork at me severely and, I might add, not unbecomingly. “I’m saying one thing, but you think I’m talking about something else entirely, about some Fish fellow, whom I’ve never even heard of.”

I will admit that her use of whom left me undone, even with that preposition dangling unattractively at the end, but then I’m afraid that I’ve always been attracted to such things, the ability to differentiate between subject and object forms, a refusal to use if when the situation requires whether.

“This,” she was saying, “is what makes mathematics so appealing. The number one is simply that — one. Everyone who sees it thinks the same thing.” She looked smugly at me across the table.

“Yes,” I replied. “But numbers are just as much symbols as words are.” I had nowhere to go from there, but I babbled on. “This,” I said, pounding the table, “is a table, the actual, tangible thing, not to be confused with the word. The same can be said for your number one, I am afraid.” I sketched out the number in the air between us.

Of course I was ashamed of myself, using basic Plato to impress this woman, though, to her credit, she did not look impressed. There was a moment of stiff silence, which compelled me to continue. “To quote one of my students, ‘Why is a sheep a sheep and not a rock?’ ” I said lamely, a bit of irrelevant nonsense to end the discussion, but to my great pleasure, she laughed. Sally, in case you were wondering, was still present, sitting there eating her Cobb salad and, I was to find out later, listening to us argue and regretting the fact that she had ever thought us ilkstresses (my word, of course, not the windshield-fixing Sally’s).

* * *

Over the next few days, Felicity and I did not discuss her baldness or the incident with the chalkboard or even the ongoing escapades of Mr. Matthers, who had just posted several signs in the teachers’ lounge announcing that he was interested in acquiring used Tupperware, the word used underlined thrice. She made a point of emphasizing her busyness and her jet lag, and before we knew it, it was Friday and I was off again, this time to a cat show in Scottsdale, and when I returned on Sunday evening, taking a taxi from the airport as we had planned, Felicity was gone. I’m sure that to the average, discerning reader, this comes as no surprise, and so I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw it coming.

She left a short letter, of course, in which she explained that she had moved into a studio apartment downtown and purchased a used car, drawing entirely on her “own funds,” she was careful to note. The car, she wrote, had belonged to one of the teachers at the school, but she did not refer to this teacher by name, an omission that struck me as a total denial of the degree to which our lives were intertwined. She acknowledged this interconnectedness only at the very end when she wrote that it was her desire that we not “advertise” the change in our relationship at work, that she did realize there would be speculation and gossip, particularly after she filed her new address with the school secretary, but that she hoped we could “absent ourselves from such conversations and treat each other with the politeness and friendly rivalry accorded colleagues.”

I was most bothered by the reference to her “own funds,” for I was not aware of any funds other than the meager sum of money that resided in our joint checking account, though the mystery of these funds resolved itself soon enough. I made a quick sweep of the house, noting that she had taken all of her books, an easily accomplished task for we had never merged our collections, but left those that we had acquired together. Appliances and kitchen items also remained, though when I counted the cutlery and dinnerware, both of which we had purchased in sets of twelve, I found that each set now consisted of eleven pieces — a consolation, for had there been two of each missing, it would have suggested a situation that I lacked the emotional wherewithal to face.

One of my suitcases was gone, but I forgave her this, for I had taken her suitcase with me to Scottsdale, the suitcase that we always fought over because it was light and maneuverable and orange — easy to spot on the luggage carousel. I fetched it from where I had parked it just inside the door and, not one to let sorrow sideline the moment’s practical requirements, began to unpack — placing clothes in the hamper, hanging my toothbrush in its usual slot, though both were now available, and transferring the set of essays that I had graded on the plane into my briefcase.

Inside the suitcase’s small, inner compartment, which overzealousness required that I check even though I had not used it, I discovered a piece of paper folded carelessly in half. It bore a pinhole near the top, and several Chinese characters marched down one side, so I knew immediately that it had been left behind after Felicity’s less-methodical style of unpacking, carried out exactly one week earlier upon her return from Hong Kong. The rest of the text, which was in English, read thusly:

NOTICE

Kindly to all hotel guests.

A Hong Kong film company has need of the following:

1. Several women (Caucasian) to serve as extras. Roles require British Victorian maidens, but as there is no speaking requirement, Americans and Australians are acceptable. Costumes provided. No stipend, but scene involves eating. Real food provided.

2. Caucasian woman, any age, for horror film. No speaking, but must be willing to shave head on camera. Upon completion of baldness, a fee of $2500 (U.S.) will be paid in cash.

Interested parties should please inquire from Mr. Simon Woo, front desk, for contact particulars. Thank you.

I read the notice twice, the English teacher in me making mental corrections, before tucking it away inside my desk, in the notebook containing this account, and though I tried to sleep then, I could not. Finally, I rose, retrieved this notebook, and proceeded to read back over my text thus far, but gone were my student days when everything seemed clearer in the middle of the night. I did realize, in looking back over what I had written, that I had said nothing of Felicity’s hair, beyond noting its absence. For the record, it was blond, though not purely so, but I dislike expressions such as dirty blond and dishwater blond. Perhaps what I most admired about her hair, purely from an aesthetic point of view, were the two patches of white that grew in little tufts on either side of her head, directly at her temples. A beautician told her once that these white patches were caused by the use of forceps during childbirth, which I liked to think was the case, suggesting as it did that her stubbornness-bordering-on-truculence had been there all along, making its debut in her unwillingness to cooperate with her own birth, and while the beautician had seemed confident in her theory, she had also maintained with equal assurance that she herself had been born with the ability to understand both German and Chinese, so you can understand my reluctance to put full faith in her explanation.

When I parked in the school lot the next morning, I looked around at the other cars, wondering which was the used car that Felicity had purchased with her own funds, the source of which I had identified but did not wish to dwell upon. She and I did not cross paths that morning, which was not surprising, for, as I have already indicated, math and English occupied different sides of the school. I made it through my first class and chose to spend my free period in my classroom rather than in the teachers’ lounge, so I was there, sitting at my desk, when my tenth graders arrived, Salingers in hand. It was impossible, of course, that they knew anything of our breakup, but I could not shake the feeling that they sensed something, for they struck me as oddly muted that morning, restrained, like caricatures of what they believed perfect students to be.

I handed back their essays, the ones that I had graded on the airplane in a state of oblivion as my bald girlfriend was transporting her few possessions, via her new used car, to her studio downtown, but when I turned toward the blackboard to copy out the five worst sentences from their papers, something struck me, perhaps the memory of the last sentence that we had revised, pushing and prodding it into some sort of straightforward, grammatically sound ideal: Ms. Lundstrom and Ms. Shapiro are lovers. In any case, as I stood there at the board, chalk in hand, set to record their most recent transgressions, I began to sob. I did so quietly, of course, but eventually they understood that something was amiss, and I felt them become perfectly still behind me. For several minutes, I stared at a particular spot on the blackboard, at what appeared to be the remains of a letter b, composing myself, and then I turned to face my tenth graders, wholly unprepared for the looks of sheer terror and helplessness that sat upon their faces. We stayed as we were, facing one another, I in front of the blackboard and they, sitting erect in their seats, eyes focused uniformly downward, with the exception of Tina, my timid, plaid-wearing redundancy expert, who sat in the back row regarding me closely and nodding.

“Class,” I said at last, “please forgive me. I am not in the habit of indulging in such outbursts.” At hearing me sound reasonably like myself, they tilted their faces upward again, relief settling collectively upon them; I recalled, in that instant, the vulnerability of youth. I would like to say that this put me fully in charge of my emotions and that the remainder of the class passed without incident, but that was not the case. Rather, as the tears began to flow once more down my face, I blurted out — in an attempt to explain myself and perhaps offer reassurance — these words: “Ms. Shapiro is bald.”