May 1
Maxine, Mayor of the Wig District
Not quite a story, but an exploration of an idea that struck me on a walk recently.
I met Maxine on my second day in Cobalt City. I stumbled into her three-story wig emporium in search of my cousin’s sock shop. Later I’d come to learn that she was known as the Mayor of the Wig District, claimed she was born in aisle three between the bobby pins and skull caps.
I had never seen so much hair in one place. Hair in bags. Hair hanging from ribbons. Hair styled on bodiless mannequin heads. Baskets of hair on the floor. A “loose strands” discount table that was reminiscent of my shower drain growing up with three older sisters and two moms.
“Toupees are upstairs,” she croaked over the top of the gray issue of the Cobalt Crusader she was reading. She raised an eyebrow. “We got a buy-one-get-one deal on blondes.” Posted on a stool behind a glass counter display filled with creams and combs and different colored netting, she wore a beehive wig reminiscent of Marge Simpson if she became a fairy godmother. Pale blue and silver strands piled elegantly atop her rather small head. A pair of red plastic cat-eye frames with no lenses in them sat on the bridge of her bumpy and bony nose. Dark kohl eyeliner was traced perfectly around each eye, an endless loop, smudged only at the outer corners. Maxine’s complexion was difficult to gauge. From twenty feet away I could see the velvety texture of cake powder floating out wrinkles and divots. This pale, almost sugar-like hue betrayed the sun-toughened bronze of her hands poking from the sleeves of her cotton candy-pink mohair sweater.
Maxine was timeless, at once a vestige of 1950s Americana blended with 1990s irony. The newspaper in her hands, the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, the shelves of faceless wigwearers behind her — she was a sight to behold.
I felt myself staring, struck by this scene. For a flash I forgot how I had ended up in her presence, forgot about the letter from Frankie.
Slowly her eyeballs rode an elevator from the bottom of page six to the top of my head. She peered over the top of her glassless spectacles. “Looking for something else, sir?”
I cleared my throat, shaking my mind of the dust and hair it had accumulated in the moments I’d been standing in her shop. “I, uh… Do you sell socks?”
As in slow motion, I watched her body tremble to life. It started with the staticky sound of the pages of her newspaper rattling against each other. The taut, pursed line of her mouth bled across her face, slowly revealing plump red lips that seemed stained by a cherry popsicle, and a set of what could only be described as pearly whites like chicklets individually placed in the puttylike pink of her gums. A phlegmy cough gave way to a cackle which grew into a belly laugh that sent her head, heavy with the weight of her wig, sliding back so far I worried the beehive might fall right off. As she roared in laughter, she put the newspaper down on the counter and began to rock forward and backward. I feared I had summoned a demon. I feared I was dreaming. I questioned what exactly the barmaid at Henry’s had soaked my cherry in before plopping it into the Manhattan I had savored just an hour before.
“Sorry, I …” My voice caught in my throat, and the sound of Cab Calloway’s crooning through the speakers suddenly amplified and echoed around me, all the while Maxine wailed from atop her stool.
I noticed myself slowly walking backward as though the Great Eye in the Sky had hit Rewind and was giving me a second chance. Maxine was starting to slow down, collecting herself, her eyes still clutched closed as her breathing deepened and she began to quiet down.
My back touched the door and I heard the bells attached to the top of the doorframe jingle.
“Oh, sweetie, I didn’t mean to scare ya!” Maxine’s voice was light, floated across the room beneath the foam drop ceiling tiles, most of which were stained with wet-looking mystery rings. I imagined clouds of hair spray aerosols hovering for decades, never dissipating and instead curing overhead to serve as a sort of insulation for the structure. “You new around here?”
She stood up and was making her way toward me from behind the counter. Maxine was tall and thin. Hunched on the stool she seemed a slight woman, but she had to have been at least six feet.
“Yeah, I’m, uh … I’m looking for Frankie.” I coughed, her perfume reaching me before she did. “He sells socks?” Maxine stopped abruptly, five paces from me.
“Honey, you’re on the wrong side’a town. Hosiery Row is up north in the high 30s. You’re on Lower 29th right now.” The tone in the shop shifted. The lights flickered and the music grew louder, more sinister. “Frankie don’t come down here anymore. Why don’t you move along?”
