Apple and the Destination Wedding

 
The month before my brother’s wedding, my roommate adopted a hairless cat. “Adopted” is a generous word. He obtained a cat—off Craigslist, I think—from some guy whose daughter both begged for and lost interest in the cat within two months.
 
My roommate was kind of a hoarder. Newspapers piled in the corners of our house, along with seventeen empty containers of Folger’s coffee and crates of analog media—birthday home videos, a boxed set of BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, a book to guide you through every sorry inch of the alt-right pipeline. This was the first time his accumulation habits extended to a living thing.
 
Immediately, he forgot the cat. He gave it a designated couch cushion and the deal was done. He didn’t even name it. I held out for two days, watching the neglected thing skulk around our living space until I gave in, mostly because the apartment, which used to have a faint scent of mold and Febreze, now smelled like cat piss.
 
I took the sorry creature to the vet in a carrying case and blew my entire paycheck at a PetSmart. I named him Ringworm, which wasn’t nice. It also lost accuracy as all the fungus and parasites were expelled from his body after about a week. As my affection grew, I started to call him Ringo, which almost felt like a real name. I looked it up and learned it was the Japanese word for “apple,” and this christening made me feel sweet toward him.
 
I joined a forum for sphynx owners and doomscrolled through posts about skin conditions and oil stains. I had been against pets due to my allergies. So I guess my roommate was being conscientious in getting a cat without the fur to trigger my clogged throat, red eyes, dripping nose. Although, by this point, my roommate didn’t take credit for Ringo’s presence at all. He watched me prepare his food, lather coconut oil into his skin, and rub his wrinkled forehead as if the entire arrangement were my idea.
 
Busy from this cat business, I missed my brother’s fiancé’s bachelorette party in Vegas. It was too early to bring Ringo to a boarding center. It would have scarred him emotionally. I was supposed to be a bridesmaid, but as a sister-in-law, I figured I should have some leeway. The invitation was extended out of obligation, anyway: it’s not like the bride really wanted me there to see her shoot down whiskey sours and wear penis-shaped accessories. It’s not like I really wanted to be reminded of my brother’s penis or what he chose to use it for. My place in the wedding party was diplomatic, like an honorary degree. Still, my brother scolded me for being a no-show, for not responding to the group texts, for not sending my order for the catered breakfast, for not sending money in time for the professional hair and makeup.
 
I told him I was busy with my new cat, Ringo. I was doing something important. I was stewarding life.
 

*

 
During a Tuesday shift at the cafe, I found myself preoccupied with thoughts of Ringo. He had thrown up a pile of oatmeal-textured yellow that morning before I left, and I ached to get back to the apartment to see if more vomit awaited me or if the sick had left his stomach. Maybe I was feeding him the wrong food.
 
George, a regular, stumbled in with his usual unwieldy backpack full of screenplay-writing equipment, various shades of khaki fabric covering every inch of his body. He rubbed the stubble dotting his neck before stepping up to order.
 
“Hey, pretty girl,” he greeted me.
 
I thought about an alternate universe in which PrettyGirl was my first name, as I wrote “cortado” on his paper cup.
 
“You should wear your hair loose,” he said. “Looks better.”
 
I smiled.
 
After he found his seat, I reflexively pulled my hands through my tangled ponytail, which now felt tight and heavy, pulling out several strands that I rolled around in my fingers like wet twigs.
 
I took my break with my coworker Sam around the back of the building. He asked if George gave me a hard time. I tried to bite around a soggy tomato sandwich but kept picturing the small pool of liquid Ringo retched up onto my blue Ikea rug.
 
“No, he just gave me some advice,” I said.
 
“How generous.”
 
As I pulled a slice of tomato dripping with mayo out of the bread and dropped it onto the pavement, Sam’s cell phone rang out with dentist-waiting-room music. He silenced the alarm, pulled a small plastic bottle from his tote bag, grabbed a pill, and dry-swallowed it. The last time I dry-swallowed something, I burned a hole in my esophagus.
 
“Birth control?”
 
He laughed. It was his finasteride, which he had already told me about. He told anyone he could about his hair-loss prevention strategies. I looked at his forehead. His hairline wasn’t noticeably receding. Maybe Sam had an image of himself or his masculinity that he wasn’t ready to let go of. I understood the fixation—the desire to preserve yourself in your most beautiful and perfect youthful moment.
 
I passed my fingers through my ponytail again and eyed the loose strands left behind in my palm. Always shedding my DNA off in little pieces.
 
That evening, Ringo seemed to eat and behave normally, as if the vomit of the morning had been something I merely imagined. After confirming he was feeling healthy once more, I put off dinner to shave my head. I wanted to get rid of some of the volume—just the sides and a slight undercut. The mane sprouting from my scalp had become cumbersome—I felt weighed down and itchy. As the razor buzzed over my skin, I watched my strands fall into the sink and clog the drain. It felt right when the razor grazed my ear, so I kept going. I shaved everything, even my eyebrows. When I was finished, my roommate scooped up all the strands I left behind and put them in a plastic grocery bag. I rubbed coconut oil into Ringo’s skin and slathered some on my bald head, too. We both smelled like a cold drink at the beach.
 
Now that my hair was gone, he trusted me more; I could tell. He nuzzled up against me and purred.
 

*

 
A few days later, my mother showed up at my apartment unannounced. Apparently, I hadn’t made arrangements for my room at the hotel for the wedding, which was a week away. She already booked it for me several months prior, but I should have been more considerate, so she came by to scold me. Then she saw my head, shrieked, and fell down the stairs. It’s lucky they were carpeted. I led her to the couch, sat her down, and prepared an ice pack for her head.
 
“Your beautiful hair, what happened?” she sobbed.
 
“Oh, this?” I asked, rubbing my head—the feeling of fresh baldness and complete cleanliness already faded. “It was a bit of an impulsive decision, I guess.”
 
Ringo jumped onto the couch as I brought the ice pack to her. He meowed. My mother shrieked again.
 
“You’ve met Ringo,” I said.
 
“You could enter him in an ‘ugliest cats’ competition.” She scowled.
 
I think my mother would have understood better if I told her I shaved my head because a coworker was going through chemotherapy or as a statement against women’s oppression or climate change. Maybe I would have felt better if that was my reason too.
 
She hadn’t seemed this disturbed about me since the time I got really skinny a few years ago and she pulled me out of school for a semester. This was different, though. That time, I was shrinking out of myself, trying to whittle away every part of me until there was nothing left. Now, I felt more like myself than ever, as if the hair I shaved was a pruning of the vine.
 
She dragged me into the car, Ringo sitting faithfully on my lap, and drove me to a wig store. The radio blasted Elton John.
 
“You couldn’t wait just a few more weeks to violate yourself, could you?” She scoffed while pulling into the parking lot of a strip mall. “I knew you’d find some way to make this wedding about you.”
 
I wasn’t thinking about the wedding at all and hadn’t for months, which maybe was selfish in an entirely different way.
 
In the store, Leslie-the-sales-associate kept pulling out gaudy beach-waved heads of blonde and brunette while I sat holding Ringo. I grabbed a light-brown bob that seemed understated enough and placed it on my head.
 
Leslie nearly screeched. “Gorgeous! You look beautiful. Just stunning.”
 
I grimaced at the words I felt such a mental distance from: beautiful, gorgeous, stunning. Leslie must have thought this was a more emotional moment than it actually was, visually diagnosing me as a cancer survivor or person with alopecia. My mother was too embarrassed to correct her and tell her that instead, I had intentionally removed all my hair in what she suspected was a manic episode. I didn’t mind Leslie’s misplaced pity because it kept her from sending Ringo out of the store.
 
I looked in the mirror. The wig behaved unnaturally, curling right above my shoulders as if I were a cartoon character. I could tell by my mother’s relieved sigh that this was the look we were going for, so I forced a smile, my cheeks contorting like stretched taffy. Ringo hissed and lept from my grasp. I felt guilty.
 
“I love it,” I said.
 
My mother paid the $300 with a scribble in her checkbook. I couldn’t even pretend to reach for my wallet because I’d left it at home.
 
Back in the car, she suggested ice cream and headed toward a local shop before hearing my answer. I couldn’t turn down a food offering from my mother, not since That Time, or else I was liable to be cross-examined and sent back to a psych ward.
 
“I’m bringing you home for the next week,” my mother said with Rocky Road clinging to the sides of her lips. We were eating in the parked car, the still warm air suffocating. “We’re too close to the wedding. Everyone’s stressed. We should be together as a family.”
 
“I have work,” I said.
 
“Good excuse to quit,” she responded. “You’ve been loitering around in that cafe for too long. It’s been two years since you graduated, and what do you have to show for it?”
 
I don’t think she realized this was a mean thing to say.
 
“We could always call your uncle and get you started with some assistant work at the firm,” she continued. “It’s not glamorous, but a paralegal salary is more than enough for comfortable living.”
 
“What about Ringo?”
 
“Ringo?”
 
I motioned toward my cat, whose presence my mother had completely ignored for the past hour. “Can he come home with me, too?”
 
“Can’t you find a boarder?”
 
I scoffed. “I’m not going anywhere without him. Not even the wedding.”
 
He meowed and pawed his face. My mother said nothing and turned the engine on. When we loaded my luggage, she carried his litter box and food down to the car.
 

*

 
A week later, I stepped back into my hotel room after the rehearsal dinner. Ringo was curled up on the bed, waiting for me. He yawned and stretched out every limb of his body when I placed the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the front door. I felt a little jealous of him, that he got to enjoy a fancy hotel room without having to endure any of the uncomfortable social events necessitating it.
 
The rehearsal dinner had been loosely nautical themed, so the women came with sparkly blue painted on their eyelids as their men strode in behind them with tridents. I didn’t know rehearsal parties could be themed. For some reason, my mother encouraged my impulse to dress as a pirate, so I stood there with that horrible bob and an eye patch, over- and incorrectly dressed.
 
My brother had pulled me aside during the night to tell me how much it meant to him that I had come. It really hadn’t taken much effort on my part—after a few days spent populating my childhood desk with used dishes and vaguely looking through job boards, I found myself transported to a hotel on the central coast like magic. The conversation with my brother, which I’m sure began as a wellness check prompted by our mother, landed somewhere a little cryptic. At one point, he told me he hoped I could find my own life’s path toward contentment. His cheeks were pink from wine or bashful happiness.
 
My mother had booked me a room with a queen bed, chaise lounge, and kitchenette, along with an ominous door leading to her and my father’s suite. The place felt ridiculously big and luxurious for just one person and their cat.
 
I kicked off my shoes, peeled away my socks, and hurled the wretched wig across the room. In the bathroom, I unveiled the fresh razor I had bought at a pharmacy during my extended homecoming. It hadn’t felt the most prudent to shave my head again under my mother’s roof, but here, I had privacy and fluorescent lighting. I brought the instrument to my scalp and smoothed myself over, removing the stubby foliage obscuring my true self. Slowly, to relish it.
 
The bridesmaid dress my mother and I picked out three days before—a minimalist emerald silk slip—hung in a dry-cleaning bag from the shower rod beside me. For ease, I put down the razor and removed my shirt, then my necklaces, and then my pants. I still felt uncomfortable, so I removed my bra too. I looked in the mirror as I bladed away the ghosts of my eyebrows, and for the first time in two weeks, I was relieved by what I saw. I let the sink run to send all my little hairs down the drain—it wasn’t my plumbing to worry about. I looked up into the mirror again and saw my mother’s face behind my right shoulder, her hair and makeup undone since the party. I flinched in surprise. She booked the connecting rooms for a reason, I guess.
 
“Mal,” she said, more exhausted than exasperated. “I just don’t understand.”
 
I didn’t respond right away. All night, she had beamed at my brother with pride. I looked into her eyes by way of the mirror and didn’t move. I didn’t even try to cover my chest.
 
“Understand what?” I finally asked.
 
I started crying then, even though I didn’t feel guilty or sad. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I hadn’t made myself dirty.
 
“I don’t understand why you do these things to yourself.”
 
I kept crying, a little softer, and she didn’t say anything more. She dried the mess I made around the sink with a towel and draped a cream-colored hotel robe around my bare body. The fabric and the bathroom light made me feel hot. She rubbed her hands into my shoulders as she walked me to the queen bed and guided me under the covers. I laid on my right side, looking at Ringo, who stayed perched on the chaise lounge, while my mother turned off the lights and got into bed behind me, wrapping her arms around my body and holding me secure. Maybe to comfort me or maybe, more likely, to ensure I wouldn’t disappear.
 
I woke up around 3 a.m. My mother was still in bed with me but had turned the other way, now deep in invincible sleep.
 
As I tried to close my eyes again, Ringo became agitated, walking around in circles on his chair and hissing. I sat up. Suddenly, he stopped his fussing and stared at me with stillness, his eyes bigger than I’d ever noticed before—green marbles nestled within wrinkly skin. Careful not to wake my mother, I stood, shed my bathrobe, and carried Ringo out onto the balcony, where a pool chair waited for us. I heard her snoring as I closed the sliding door behind us, reclined, and listened to the crickets. I felt warm under Ringo’s weight on my chest.
 
Now, we were both naked under the moon.
 
I looked into his eyes again. He was a beautiful creature, somewhere separate from all the human definitions I had known about. It was something intrinsic to him. He had no path toward happiness, no commitments. Just being alive was enough.
 
I tried not to blink and slowed my breathing as I stared into him. He held my gaze for minutes until my eyesight started to blur and the two of us felt like one pulsing unit. When my vision cleared, I saw myself, tired and pink, teary-eyed and distant from my body. In a new body, I felt the breeze of the night air on my bare skin and breathed in and out with ease.
 
Somehow, I had become beautiful.