He was worried about his mother, even if Rachelle didn’t believe it. He was worried about his mother, two surgeries down, maybe another on the way, and he was worried about his daughter and his wife, who had both forgotten how to smile, and he was, on a smaller scale, worried about his father, who seemed adrift and sad now that he had left Benny’s mother and was playing the field, the sixty-year-old suburbanite field, which he couldn’t imagine was a particularly fun field, and, for the first time in his life, he was least worried about his sister, who, he was pretty sure, even as closed off as she was, as unrelentingly cranky, might actually have met someone and fallen in love.
But his hair! He’d always had his hair, his crown of glory: thick, jet-black, with jaunty waves that set it slightly on its end. He wore it a half inch longer than his conservative co-workers did, and he liked to believe that it gave him a youthful edge over them. In college, he’d worn it even longer and had busy sideburns as well, which gave him a grubby bad-boy look, as bad as a ZBT at the University of Illinois could be. His hair was one of the things that had drawn Rachelle to him; he wasn’t as boisterous as his brothers, he didn’t push for the easy joke, not because he was shy—he was plenty funny, he thought—but because he was usually extremely stoned. Still, in the corner by the stereo, at an off-campus party thrown by one of the brothers, a purple-green-swirled glass bong someone had brought back from his summer travels in Amsterdam seated before him, strong, silent, fit, slightly pie-eyed, with a tight T-shirt, tight Levi’s, and I-don’t-give-a-shit flip-flops, and with a head of hair so thick there was no way he didn’t have a kick-ass gene pool, Benny got the hottest girl in the room without lifting much more than that bong to his lips.
Forever he’d had that hair. That was the one thing he should not have had to worry about, and yet there it was, sliding off his head every morning in the shower like sunburned skin after a weekend at the beach. There was now a significant bald spot on the back of his head, and the hair at his temples had started to recede. He could only wonder what would happen next: Would his body shrink, too, into the shape of a frail old man, and would his wife eventually reject him? Was he dying? Or was he merely getting old?
Even as the answers sat right before him, that perhaps all this worry about his wife, his mother, his daughter, and on and on, had manifested itself so obviously in a physical way, he refused to believe that it was as simple (although, of course, it was not simple at all) as that, and so he went to see Dr. Harris, a good guy, a straight shooter, and also the owner of a nice head of hair himself, his graying and cut short but still thick and attractive.
“It could be a number of things,” said Dr. Harris. “Genetics, that’s first on the list.”
“It’s not genetic,” said Benny, his legs swinging slightly from the exam table, 8:00 A.M. on a Monday, an urgent appointment after a weekend of hair loss. “Not on my mother’s side, not on my father’s side. No one’s bald.”
“Stress is another possibility,” the doctor said gently to Benny. They belonged to the same synagogue, and their wives were in a book club together, and he had heard all about Rachelle lately, how she had insisted the last time they had all met (they were discussing The Help) that pastries no longer be served at their meetings. No pastries, no cheese, no crackers. Just crudités, and don’t even try to sneak ranch dip in there, she wouldn’t hear of it; ranch dip was all sugar. There was nothing wrong with making a dietary request, but it was the way that she said it. She was violent in her articulation—“I swear to God, she almost sounded British,” said his wife—and she was righteous. No wine either. Empty calories. As a doctor, Roger Harris technically had to agree with Rachelle, but as a human being he wondered if she had gone off the deep end. (“What’s the point of having a book club if you don’t get to eat brownies and drink wine?” said his wife. “Otherwise I’ll just stay home.”)
Benny stared at his doctor, the wise man, the trusted source of knowledge. He wanted to be able to talk to him about his problem; he wanted to be able to talk to anyone. He used to be able to talk to his wife about everything. They had been on the same team since they were seniors in college. There was an accidental pregnancy, and there was no question they’d be getting married, keeping those babies, the twins, twice as much to love. They were in this life together. And now she was the problem, one of them anyway. He couldn’t bring himself to admit out loud to this relative stranger sitting before him that the best part of his life had suddenly become the worst. Still, he was no liar.
“Who doesn’t have stress?” said Benny. “I think there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have it. But this much?” He pointed to his head with both index fingers.