Free It Takes a Worried Man by Brendan Halpin Page B

Toys “R” Us after buying the clippers and look longingly at the video game systems. I do not now nor have I ever owned a video game system, but I am in the grips of another fit of “Buy my way out of this” fever, and my current obsession is video games, because TV sucks really bad but I don’t really ever have the energy to read or do much of anything creative except write, and I can only really do that when I am feeling shitty. I look at all the systems then decide I can’t do it tonight because Kirsten would totally kill me. Whenever I have mentioned getting a PlayStation or something in an even half-joking way, she has absolutely forbidden it, and right now while she is losing her hair, feeling like shit, and has a hose sticking out of her neck is not the greatest time for me to start defying her wishes. Plus, there is just something creepy and depressing about Toys “R” Us. Maybe it’s all the crying kids. Maybe it’s the harried looking adults. Whatever it is, it feels like a desperate place, and buying anything there would feel like a desperate act, so I run back in the cold rain to my car and my clippers.
    I get home and attack Kirsten’s head with the clippers. I have never used them before, so I fit them with the biggest attachment and start trying to cut through Kirsten’s hair. The clippers keep getting clogged, and when that happens, I have to sort of tug them out, which pulls on the hair still attached to Kirsten’s head, causing her to say, “Ow!” on top of being very tired and cranky already. So I start with scissors. I indiscriminately hack off her hair until it is close to pixie length. Then back to the clippers. Now they are working much better, and we progress through the attachments until we reach one eighth of an inch. It is like mowing the lawn–the clippers just sail over her head, buzzing it down to stubble. This is kind of satisfying, but it also makes me kind of sad to see all her hair on the floor. She can’t move very well because of the hose sticking out of her neck, and it really feels like I am removing the last brick from the wall of denial that has served us so well. Up to now she has been feeling bad, but mostly just tired, and she has looked basically normal but for the various hoses sticking out of her. Now she has patchy tennis ball fuzz. Miraculously, I manage to focus on the satisfaction of a job well done and I do not cry. Perhaps even more miraculously, Nan, who is watching the whole affair and who I was convinced was going to start bawling, does not.
    I keep finding myself thinking, You don’t know what love is till you shave your wife bald.  Of course that’s not really true, but it also is. I mean, I meant it when I said for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, but I kind of thought that meant, you know, we wouldn’t have any money for a while, I’d buy her lozenges when she had a cold and then listen to her complain about her arthritis when she was eighty.  I never really thought it meant shaving her head while she fights for her life at age thity-two.
    When we are done with Kirsten, we start on me. I attack my own head with the scissors, then Kirsten and I go after my hair with the clippers. I go beyond the eighth-of-an-inch attachment to no attachment at all, which cuts me down to one sixteenth of an inch. I then head to the bathroom, lather up my head and shave it with my Gillette Sensor. I am surprised to find that my scalp is much less sensitive than my cheeks and neck, and except for the fact that it’s kind of tough to tell when you miss a spot in the back, it’s really not that bad to shave your head with a razor.
    We settle into bed that night, and Kirsten is sort of in agony from the hose sticking out of her neck. She lies down and I have to pull her up because she can’t use the muscles in her neck to pull herself up because it hurts too much. So I yank her up a few times, give her my pillow to prop her up more, and feel sad