I told Charlie, the blue-haired lady working at Toll Road House of Wigs in South Bend, that I wanted something old-fashioned, something like this. I held up a snapshot of Flannery O’Connor. She wrinkled her nose.
“Why on earth?” she said.
I told her I liked the retro look.
She took the picture from my hand and twirled a finger in her coiled hair. “You got a note from your old lady?”
“I’m not getting it for her,” I said.
She pushed the photo across the chipped Formica counter. “You a cross-dresser or something?” she said.
“Do you know Jesus?” I said.
She looked at me. “Who doesn’t?”
“You know how he’s both God and human?” I said. “I’m like that, except it’s Flannery who’s incarnated in me.”
She shook her head but didn’t say anything. Maybe I revealed my hand too soon, and maybe I freaked her out, but I looked her in the eye and pushed the picture toward her.
She squinted. “Fine,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
When she went into the back room, I leaned back in my chair and exhaled. What if my congregation found out? I told myself that they were probably more open-minded than I perceived them to be, that they had a pretty sharp acumen when it came to social justice issues, so why would this be a problem? I didn’t think they’d ever see me dressed like Flannery anyway.
Charlie came back carrying three boxes that matched the color of her hair. “These were the closest I could find,” she said.
I opened one box and knew right away that it was wrong—the hair was too red and didn’t have that outward fling that Flannery’s had. I shut the lid and pushed it away.
Charlie lit a cigarette, took a big drag, and told me that she had a feeling I wouldn’t like that one. Could you still smoke here, I wondered? The smoke spiraled from her nose while she talked.
“Well how about this one,” she said, opening the next box, which had a fine layer of dust on it. She pulled out the wig. “This one’s really nice, old-fashioned just like you want. The part’s even right.”
I took it from her. The ends flipped up nicely, just like Flannery’s, and the part was graceful. The color was a little off, perhaps, but who would notice? It was a definite O’Connor hair style.
Charlie pushed her cigarette deep into her full ashtray and asked me if I’d like to try it on.
I was going to say, no, I’m fine thank you, but then I realized I had no wig experience at all, so I agreed. She led me into a back room and sat me in front of a cracked mirror. I watched her through the mirror while she worked on me, pulling the hair from my forehead and attaching it with a barrette to the hair on the top of my head. It hurt like hell, and there seemed to be a delay in the mirror: what I seeing wasn’t matching up with what I was feeling. I wondered if Charlie ever noticed this. She tucked the rest of my hair, then slid the wig on. She took a couple of steps back and examined me.
“Move it to the right,” she said.
I complied.
“No, your right.”
I adjusted it, then she came over and tried to run her fingers through my new hair, to freshen it up a bit, she said, but told me a pick would work better than her fat fingers. I studied myself in the mirror. With some tweaking the wig would work. I told her that I’d take it.
She raised one eyebrow. “You don’t want to see the other one?”
“This one will work,” I said.
She pulled the wig off and took out all the clips from my hair. While she packed it back in the box she asked me what I did.
“I’m a preacher,” I said.
She lit another cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully. “This country’s going to hell in a handbasket,” she said finally.
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t like she thought, that she didn’t understand, that some things are complicated. But, really, at that point even I wasn’t clear why I was doing this, so I simply blurted, “I’m St. Flannery.”
“Well,” she said, “that doesn’t mean your wig is free.”
Chad Gusler’s work has appeared in Relief, The Dirty Napkin, and The Other Journal, and he recently had a story published in the anthology Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyr’s Mirror. A graduate of Seattle Pacific’s M.F.A. program, he lives in Virginia and is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University.