A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You Read Online Free PDF Page B

askew, two women lie side by side, a young woman curled up beside her baldmother. The daughter’s eyes are shut, but the mother’s are wide open as she stares at the ceiling, her free hand curled around her daughter’s shoulder.
    The Taxol drips steadily for three and a half hours, from an old-fashioned glass bottle, solid and pale blue. All the other stuff drips from Jetson-style packets, flimsy and benign. Taxol is a heavyweight in an upside-down jug, one fat bubble at a time floating up to the undersurface, entering the transparent slice of silver bubbles before it is bumped aside by the next rising bubble. Charley will be at Fishers Island by the time the Taxol is gone, making food that Mai will not eat. Ellie will eat the lamb kabobs at midnight, will eat the shepherd’s pie or crab cakes for lunch, while Mai sips ginseng tea and eats barbecue potato chips.
    E llie drives them onto the ferry, and they sit in the car for the entire crossing. Mai leans her head back, and although she is always beautiful to Ellie, even Ellie can see that she looks bad. There’s nothing wrong with bald babies; everything about them, even the ugly ones, is made to be revealed, and every feature is nicely in proportion to their big, satiny heads. Every time Ellie looks at Mai, she misses her silver-blond braid and is grateful that her eyebrows, narrow gold tail swipes, have held on. Mai’s naked head has a pair of dents halfway up the back, and a small purplish birthmark behind the left ear, and although her skin has always been amazingly soft and poreless, the disappearance of even her fine body hair is a little jarring to both ofthem. They know each other’s pubic hair and leg-shaving rituals and scars, completely and without comment. Ellie is furry and tan, Mai is smooth and white. But smooth is one thing, Mai says, egg is another.
    When Mai and Ellie studied the wig catalogue, before going for the high-end, handmade, real-hair wigs that are brought to your house, and then to your hairdresser for final adjustment, Mai contemplated auburn pixie cuts and platinum bouffants and even a long jet-black pageboy, parted in the middle à la mid-career Cher. Charley walked in and out four times while they flipped through the catalogue, and finally he called Mai into the bedroom so he could speak to her privately.
    “I don’t think you need a wig,” he said.
    It is love, of course, that makes Charley tell Mai that no wig is necessary, that he likes her bald and odd, and that no pretense is called for, or even tolerable, between them. It is love that he intends to convey.
    “Okay. I’ll see.” I’m an intelligent woman, Mai thinks, how did I marry the village idiot? After twenty years, during which you have presumably been paying some kind of dim attention to the kind of person I am, how could you imagine that I would want to parade around my own home grotesque and vulnerable? Do you think, would thinking at all lead you to believe that it would somehow please me to have you now be
kind
about my appearance?
    “It might be fun to experiment. I’ve never been an exotic brunette—this could be your last chance,” Mai says.
    Charley does not want an exotic brunette. He wants hiscool, white, lanky wife back, with her normal spicy smell and her pale silky hair pulled into a smooth knot. The thought of her suddenly appearing in public with her chemically puffed face and a witch’s wig makes him miserable, and so ashamed of his pettiness that he wishes Mai were completely healthy or dead.
    “Whatever you want. Maybe it will liven things up around here.” They have not made love since Mai was diagnosed.
    “Maybe. Don’t hold your breath.” The privilege of cancer is that Mai is allowed to close her eyes, as if she is all worn out from surgery and chemo, and not look at Charley’s lonely, frightened face.
    Charley puts his hand on Mai’s shoulder, although he thinks it may be the wrong thing to do, and she stiffens. He pulls his hand