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Marcia Talley: Sing It to Her Bones

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Marcia Talley Sing It to Her Bones

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She lost her job. She almost lost her life. Now Hannah Ives is taking her first brave steps back into the world, wearing a wig and her heart on her sleeve after a frightening bout with breast cancer. But in the small Chesapeake Bay town where she came for a vacation, she does not find the relaxation she deserves. Instead Hannah finds a body – of a girl who disappeared eight years before.

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It’s called downsizing or rightsizing. Reduction in force. A RIF. Whatever. It means you’re fired. A quality management team somewhere on the tenth floor had been throwing darts at our organizational chart, pinning a major portion of Whitworth & Sullivan’s Technical Support Department to the wall, smack dab through the o in Support.

Fran, we heard later, had gone all glassy-eyed and sullen when they told her, refusing to believe that half her staff was about to be tossed onto the street. “It’s a business decision,” they explained, and gave her two days to get with the program. She stonewalled, so they called in the managing partner, an ex-marine named Cooper, who had no qualms about summoning us individually to the firm’s best conference room, offering coffee or juice-the charming, disarming, oh-so-personal touch-and then, whack! kneecapping us with the news.

When it was my turn, I chose an upholstered chair opposite Fran with about as much enthusiasm as a candidate for a root canal. Nobody said anything at first. While Coop thumbed through the papers stacked in front of him, as if trying to remember my name, I settled uncomfortably into the chair, attempting to blend inconspicuously into the gold damask, a little hard to do when you’re wearing a red plaid dress. I crossed my right leg over my left, then, because I was nervous, tucked my right patent leather toe behind my left calf. It’s a bad habit I picked up somewhere. It makes me look like a pretzel.

Outside that window in Washington, D.C., two floors down, I knew K Street would be alive with lunch-hour traffic. Attorneys and secretaries, bankers and lobbyists, folks who still had jobs would be heading out to drop a small fortune at Charlie’s Crab or a few bucks over at the Lunch Box. It was a day to take your lunch to Farragut Square and sit in the sun. Let it soak through your skin and warm your bones, bones like mine, which had been sucked cold by the air-conditioning.

Inside, while Coop oozed on about severance pay and maintenance of health benefits, I stared at Fran, who sat straight-backed and immobile, like an ice sculpture. I willed her to look at me, but she focused on his reflection in the tabletop. If Jones of New York had issued shotguns along with its suits, I thought, Old Cooper’s shirtfront would have been a sodden mass of red and we would have been picking bits of lung and rib out of the oriental carpet. I concentrated on the way his yellowish hair sprouted from his upper forehead in spiky clumps and how his earlobes wobbled when he talked. Frankly, when he laid the news on me, I didn’t know whether to run out and hire a lawyer to sue his ass or fall down and kiss his feet.

The first week, though, I was mad as hell. Poor Paul learned to lay low at home. He’d nursed me through all five stages of grief when I lost my breast, and he told me, in a good-natured way, that he wasn’t sure he could face starting all over again at stage one. In the evenings he would retreat to his basement workshop, where he’d bang away with a hammer or cut wood into curious shapes, coaxing hideous screams out of the table saw and claiming between trips upstairs to the refrigerator for a cold beer that the job didn’t matter. Even after the unemployment checks stopped coming and my severance pay was exhausted, even then, he insisted, if I hadn’t found another job, we’d manage. I knew we weren’t anywhere near qualifying for food stamps. Paul was a full professor, after all, with tenure. He taught math at the Naval Academy.

One evening several weeks later, as I was sulking in front of the TV-watching some gawd-awful made-for-TV movie and plotting some fantastic but improbable revenge involving Coop, Fran, handcuffs, cockroaches, hidden cameras, and the FBI-Paul’s sister, Connie, called. “The next time you need a wig, Hannah,” she complained, “call the Cancer Society first and get a recommendation. You have no idea how many shops I had to call before I found one that didn’t specialize in wigs and accessories for the transgender community!”

Mentally I smiled and added leather collars with studs to my revenge.

Connie wasn’t really as put out as she sounded. “Thanks awfully, Connie,” I told her. I could hear ice clinking in a glass as she drank. Her usual, I suspected, a diet Coke with lime. If she’d had what she called a Good Art Day, there’d be rum in it. “I really appreciate your help. I just wasn’t up to it, and I’m damn tired of wearing this stupid turban.”

“I thought you looked kind of cute in that psychedelic hat I gave you. Whatever happened to it?” The ice clinked again, and I could hear the TV in the background. She was watching the same movie as I was. While I was struggling to remember what I had done with that hideous hat, she went on. “It’s at Tysons Corner, this shop I found. A place called Brighter Day. We’ll go there tomorrow, then have a blowout lunch at the food court. That should cheer you up!”

How shopping for wigs could cheer a body up, I couldn’t imagine, especially when underneath one would still look like a nuclear accident victim. But when we got there just as the shop opened, Brighter Day turned out to be a friendly place, with racks and racks of special bras and swimwear, attractive head wraps on wall pegs, drawers of breast prostheses, and a large selection of bangs and wigs. You could practically build a woman out of all the body parts on display. It also had a private room to try it all on in. The saleswoman escorted us there, then left us on our own with a double quartet of heads. I sat on a bench covered with flowered chintz and tried on a cute blond number that, except for my brown eyes, made me look alarmingly like Eva Gabor.

“It’s discrimination,” I complained, half to Connie and half to Eva in the mirror. “Ageism, plain and simple. Or maybe the cancer.”

“They didn’t deserve you, Hannah.” She draped a shoulder-length pageboy bob over the tips of her fingers, smoothed out the bangs, then rotated her wrist until the too-black hair swung crisply back and forth.

“Twenty years of my life I gave them, Connie! Twenty effing years! I clawed my way up from lowly paralegal to head of Archives and Records. And this is the thanks I get? I even chaired the United Way Campaign, for Christ’s sake!” I snatched a halo of Orphan Annie curls off my head and arranged them crookedly on a styrofoam head that stared back at me, eyelessly.

“You’ve got a great résumé. You’ll land another job eventually.” Connie handed me the wig she was holding.

“I don’t have a résumé. I haven’t written a résumé in years! I don’t even want to write a résumé!” I studied myself in the mirror and decided I looked like I was auditioning for a part as an extra in Miss Saigon. I had to laugh.

Eventually I chose an ash brown, Princess Di-ish sort of do that looked very much like my own hair, back when I had some. Combed and styled by the saleswoman, I felt more normal than I had in weeks. With my turban stashed in a wig box, we left the store and headed for California Pizza Kitchen.

I had my mouth all set for the artichoke pizza, but Connie surprised me by walking right past the familiar doorway, forcing me to hurry after her, leaving my favorite pizza lying forsaken and unassembled in the kitchen. Connie was being beckoned by an elephant, serenaded by a tree, inexorably drawn by steam rising from a tangle of jungle vegetation outside the Rainforest Café.

“Well, this is certainly different,” I remarked as Tracy the Talking Banyan Tree delivered a sober report on the harmful effects of deforestation. I wondered what Lord & Taylor thought of its new neighbor.

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