The death-bed request had proven far harder to decline than an invitation to supper, Tupperware parties, or Rook games. Bix wrinkled her nose. Humid air and wet coats magnified the hospital’s usual disagreeable odors. Balancing on her cane outside Room 323, she considered whether to enter or if there might still be time to skedaddle.
That morning, Bix hadn’t recognized George’s brittle voice on the phone at first, even though it still sounded remarkably like it did at eighteen. “Sophie would like you to visit her in the hospital, Beatrice.”
Why for Pete’s sake? Why after this many decades?
“I’m afraid Sophie doesn’t have long.”
That explained it. Maybe the man-stealer finally wanted to apologize for what she’d done as a teenager, not that Bix was planning on doling out forgiveness anytime soon. She’d lugged the rugged carapace of resentment for so many years that shedding it now would require a pry bar. But perhaps Sophie wouldn’t even recognize her, and that might be best.
Fighting the urge to flee, Bix opened the door to an unsettling sight. A frail cockatoo with two unblinking bird eyes, simultaneously vigilant and vague, perched in a bed-nest of white sheets. Sparse tufts of white hair stood stalk straight above the bare scalp. The exotic avian didn’t resemble Sophie in the least, yet it had to be her. That chit of a nurse at the desk, entirely too young and perky for the gravity of her position, swore the room was correct. But on second thought, those were definitely Sophie’s striking cheekbones.
Bix removed her dripping spring jacket while cursing the hospital’s inadequate handicapped parking. Imagine making her hobble that far. Why had she even agreed to this fool’s errand on a nasty day? Now, where to begin? The catheter bag hanging off the bedrail throbbed mango. IV tubing curled from each twiggy arm, and wires webbed up from her chest.
“Hello, Sophie,” Bix said coarsely.
Sophie’s head tilted. From her throat came the kettle’s last sputter.
“It’s me, Bix, Beatrice Henry. Remember?” She used her maiden name. Bix briefly grasped Sophie’s left hand, then dropped it, shocked to see that their hands were practically carbon copies with brownish freckles, red dots, and crusts.
Shimmers suddenly lit Sophie’s blue, almost-white eyes. “Oh, Bix, sweetie,” she whispered. “You came.”
So much for the hasty escape. Mindful of her left hip, unreliable at the best of times, Bix lowered herself onto a stone-hard plastic chair. Sophie had made the request, so she should be the one to start talking, apologizing, justifying, or whatever.
But not a word came.
Bix sighed, searching for kindling. Generally, hospital food — bound to be unrecognizable, tasteless, or cold — was a safe topic. “So how are the meals here?”
Rivulets snaked the windows. A fluorescent-bulb buzz accompanied the occasional flicker. Bix tried again. “How are you finding the bed, Sophie? Comfy?” Stupid. Stupid question. Any idiot could see the blue-plastic rectangle had the shock absorption of a buckboard wagon.
For several minutes, the conversation stumbled without one word of apology for stealing the love of Bix’s life. George had been incredibly handsome, that was for sure. And not bad to this day. As girls, Bix and Sophie were inseparable, practically twins. No wonder they fell for the same guy in high school, fell for lush hair and dreamy brown eyes. Bix had taken a flying leap when the star hockey player asked her out, damn near made a goose of herself. On the second date, she’d pictured the engagement ring. On the third, she’d pictured their babies.
Betrayal by her best friend at seventeen had changed Bix, and not for the better. Okay, it was years ago so some might forget, but never Bix. Enough of this. If Sophie didn’t plan to set things straight, then by crackie, Bix had no intention of begging.
Better get home to the hot-water bottle and liniment. Bix was curious about the diagnosis though. Last year, during Charlie’s final months, Bix had been pestered. What kind of cancer? Where had it spread? Now, facing irregular heartbeats, her hip giving way, and dizziness she hadn’t mentioned to the kids, Bix finally understood the hunger for shared morbidity. She scooted closer. “So, Sophie, what do they say is the trouble? The diagnosis, I mean?”
Sophie blinked twice, then shook her head.
Probably the doctors had no idea. No doubt it happened more than they let on. Or else Sophie just didn’t want to say. Fair enough. Maybe at their age it was time to ditch the particulars and stop feeling cheated. They’d had their share of seasons.
A wedding photo sat on the bedside stand. Seeing Sophie and George so youthful and blissful smarted like Dettol on a skinned knee. Obviously Sophie didn’t have the guts or the strength to carve the meat of the past. Bix should escape.
Just then a stout tattooed girl with a boy’s brush cut and work boots clattered a supper tray on the table and departed. No, here’s your supper, Ma’am, or enjoy your meal, Ma’am, or kiss my ass. Typical. Young people these days.
Sophie forlornly regarded two lidded containers a good three feet away. Bix turned toward the door hoping for the arrival of George or a nurse or an aide, but she heard only giggles from the nurse’s station and Tomboy’s leather boots thumping the hall.
Feeling obliged, well, trapped really, Bix shoved herself to her feet. She wheeled the table closer to Sophie and opened the containers. The largest held cloudy yellow broth with flotsam on top, a summery pond ringed with scum. The other contained custard or tapioca or one of those odious high-protein-calorie-vitamin concoctions they’d force-fed to Charlie.
As Bix leaned beside the bed, Sophie gamely tackled her soup lookalike. But her trembling hand jumped the first spoonful onto her gown.
From an institutional box, Bix grabbed a clump of tissues, blotting Sophie’s left chest. “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” she said. But something felt utterly unfine. That area was alarmingly flat, seemingly breastless. Sophie winced at the pressure, then stoutly attempted to spoon more broth. Same result.
“Shall I?” Bix asked, although she was reluctant to undertake the intimate task. The occasional exchange of greeting cards and halfhearted chats at Women’s Institute conventions barely made them acquaintances. Yet the prospect of being useful again felt rather warming. Bix would tell her daughter about her generosity in feeding the man-stealer. Doris, always critical, would surely praise her this once.
Bix spooned the cooling yellow slime toward Sophie’s chalky gums. Damn it. Bix’s hands were jittery too. Another reminder they were the same age. This feeding business would be much more tortoise than hare.
Suddenly Sophie’s oversized head twisted atop her spindly neck. “Remember? We celebrated all our birthdays together.”
Bix nodded, recalling little girls crowding the old kitchen table. “We wore those party hats folded from newspapers. Our mums always baked yellow cake with boiled frosting…”
“And strawberry jam,” Sophie grunted, then coughed, pausing for breath as she clutched her left ribcage. “We were mighty lucky to get cake when the pickings were slim. Back then we thought poor was normal.”
Bix chuckled an actual honest-to-goodness laugh. “Because poor was normal.” Somehow Bix felt nostalgic for those days, even for third-hand dresses and ugly brown T-straps with rotting soles. “Our clothes might’ve been resurrected from rags, but our mothers always saw they were clean, starched, and pressed.”
“Indeed.” Sophie smiled.
Upper Brighton, a two-mile stretch of woodlots and farms along the east bank of the St. John River, barely merited its own name, but it hadn’t been a bad place to grow up. They’d done everything together — skipped rope, played hopscotch and paper dolls, learned to knit, bake, and crochet. Thank the lucky stars that a polio limp kept Dad home from WWII, and Sophie’s dad was exempted too, probably for some unmentionable ailment such as a rupture or piles.
Sophie pushed away the small bowl and looked toward Bix. “Oh, dear me, remember your hair?”
Of course Bix remembered. How could she ever forget that snowy afternoon when she was nine?
* * *
On his way to the blackboard, Billy skidded to a stop beside Bix’s desk. “Whoa, Mr. Wiley,” the school bully blurted into the hushed one-room schoolhouse. “This Henry girl’s prit’near as bald as you.”
Laughter erupted. Bix bowed her head, yearning to dissolve like a sugar cube in a cup of King Cole tea. Was it true? Wait, girls didn’t go bald, did they? But her fingers did detect a suspicious bare patch.
At the first stroke of the afternoon bell, Bix sprinted home, snotting and gasping. No playing. No stopping at Sophie’s.
“Come, come, sweetheart.” Mum plopped Bix on a stool by the wood stove and pulled off her galoshes, mittens, and coat. But when she reached for the blue pompom hat, Bix maintained a death grip. Hands on hips, Mum said, “Beatrice June Henry, what in blazes is going on?” Mum meant business by saying Beatrice, serious business by saying blazes, which meant the H word.
“I’m going bald … bald as a coot. Billy Cook says so.”
“Honey, boys like to tease. That means he likes you.” Mum smiled. “Now, off with the hat.”
With trepidation and a faint swelling of hope, Bix surrendered her scalp to her mother’s wisdom.
“What’s that?” Mum gasped.
If her own mother, who successfully cleaned and salved wounds and nursed folks through flu, fevers, and quinsy, didn’t recognize this, then Bix was doomed.
While Mum quickstepped to the recessed pantry under the stairs, the baby sat across the kitchen table in his highchair, happily thumbing porridge through loads of cornsilky hair. Not a single bald spot. Returning with a brown glass bottle, Mum sniffed before dispensing a dessert spoon brimming with oily tonic.
Despite the smell, despite the taste, Bix gratefully, desperately swallowed.
The next morning Bix’s finger still traced the smooth patch. The tonic had failed, so no school for her. As a practical, plain woman with little patience for vanity or truancy, Mum recited a ditty about sticks, stones, and bones and shipped her to school.
* * *
“Remember how that sadistic Mr. Wiley refused to let you wear your hat in school?” Sophie croaked. “He loved torturing kids.”
Bix remembered, all right, still resentful that Mum, usually her most loyal champion, had simply accepted this as the teacher’s prerogative. The subsequent teasing was ceaseless. “Mr. Wiley was a far bigger bully than Billy Cook. Billy didn’t know better.”
* * *
Every evening Mum applied plasters and poultices to the crown of Bix’s head, but the circular ice-skating rink grew ever larger. Bix despaired for her future. Sophie and the other girls were filling hope chests with crocheted doilies and embroidered pillowcases, but not Bix. A bald spinster and laughingstock, that’s what Beatrice June Henry would be.
One morning, Bix sniffed, “I’m too sick to go to school.” It wasn’t exactly a fib. She was burning up, fevered with envy of her classmates’ thick locks and painless days.
“No, Beatrice, you’re going.” Mum held no truck with jigging school, but she softened. From a bottom dresser drawer, she produced a slightly frayed, paisley handkerchief. “You can wear this. Leave Mr. Wiley to me.”
Surely not Dad’s old bandana he used for swiping sweat and grease and honking his dust-cakes. Yet this was her only hope. Mum folded the cotton square diagonally, then placed the long edge across Bix’s forehead before tying the tails at the nape of her neck, forming a triangle flap. In the mirror, Bix almost looked fetching. A miracle. A snot cloth was much better than nothing.
That April morning she skipped to school, lighthearted for the first time in months. But when she stepped on the playground, the children invented new names: Heidi the Orphan, Miss Snot Rag, and The Little Dutch Girl. No better than Egghead and Coot.
At noon, Bix ran behind the girls’ outhouse, crying among the stringy remains of last year’s wild cucumber vines as Billy and the boys taunted. Then Sophie appeared. For a fine-boned child, Sophie possessed a particular menace. She let loose a fox holler. Brandishing a maple branch, she charged the lads. “You ho-gags git before I clobber you.”
The boys scattered.
The following morning, Bix couldn’t stomach fried eggs on toast even with perfectly matched egg and bread pieces. One loyal best friend just wasn’t solace enough.
Trudging the mudpuddled path, Bix contemplated hiding all day among the alder bushes or behind Ginson’s chicken shed, and for one black moment she even considered flinging herself into the icy-mud river. But somehow she stuck to the path. When eventually she shuffled into her friend’s dooryard, Bix stutter-stopped. Sophie was wearing a red-and-white polka-dotted cotton bandana, tied exactly like hers.
“Come on, Bix, we’re matching Little Dutch Girls today.” Sophie tee-heed. She slung her arm through her friend’s. “Just let those boys try to rattle our cans.”
Sophie’s matching bandana immediately halved Bix’s burden and ballooned her spirits. For the next nine months, Sophie remained faithfully kerchiefed until fuzzy brown fur filled Bix’s scalp. A simple but noble gift.
* * *
Bix looked at the tangled tubes, the sparse room, and her frail friend. She couldn’t recall ever saying thank you to Sophie. During the war years, solidarity and loyalty were so common that folks didn’t always articulate gratitude. Nevertheless, considering Bix’s family called her the Manners Police for haranguing her adult children about etiquette, and corralling reluctant grandchildren to write thank-you notes, she had to cringe at her oversight.
No doubt Sophie had realized how grateful Bix felt, but that was a feeble excuse. After all, they both now faced the same vital statistics. More of their acquaintances, friends, and relations were pickled and brined below deck than were fresh living flesh.
“Look, Sophie, I’m sorry I didn’t…”
At the same moment Sophie murmured, “Bix.” Her spindly neck struggled to hold up her head. “I want you to know…”
Bix nodded. “You first.”
“No, you.”
Silence penetrated the mint green walls and the yellowing suspended ceiling. Rain slithered the window panes. Bix shifted in the ridiculously uncomfortable chair, trying to ease the throbbing in her left hip. Again, she glanced at the wedding photo. Dating George had been ecstatic, a whirling few weeks, but once his eye snagged Sophie on their double date at the bowling alley, there was no going back. George later apologized with a shrug, “You know how it is.” But Bix did not know. How could her best friend betray her? How could George sacrifice their happiness, their future, their children? Surely he’d dreamed of them too.
The month after graduation, Sophie and George wed on a glorious day while Bix sulked in her bedroom, scissoring every picture of her best friend who’d had the gall to ask her to be maid of honor.
With the faintest of raspy breaths, Sophie’s head bobbed. She was so frail, really just bird bones in a sack. Suddenly Bix tasted chokecherries. A feeling zigged through her like heat lightning. Unbelievable that she’d harbored such a bitter grudge for so long, that she’d grasped fleeting fantasies over true friendship. Because in the end, Charlie had made a fine husband, if a little boring. He might not have matched George’s looks or success, but he’d been a faithful mate and excellent father. In fact, Bix should’ve been much more grateful when she had him, because surviving without Charlie was no picnic.
Staccato flickers of light glimmered off Sophie’s sparse hair, the down of milkweed, softer than actual down. She was the bald one now while Bix carried a head of thick pewter hair, frizzed from the rain. Sophie’s near-baldness queerly elongated her forehead, shrinking her eye sockets, molding her skull into an alien bowling ball.
Bix hoisted herself from the chair with the aid of her cane. Rummaging the bedside drawer, she found a fine-toothed black comb. She combed Sophie’s fragile tangles as tenderly as she’d done for her newborns. As she worked, Bix murmured, “Thank you, Sophie, thank you, my friend.” Then she spied a flash of purple in the back of the drawer, a silk scarf printed with wild violets. While picking fiddleheads, the girls had always gathered bouquets of violets. Bix stroked the square of sleek silk, then folded it diagonally. Carefully placing the scarf across Sophie’s forehead, she tied it in the back with a flat knot that wouldn’t gouge.
With a light pat on the crown of Sophie’s head, she said, “I’ll be going now and let you rest.”
Sophie gasped, clawing her fingertips through the sheets. “Not yet, please, Bix.”
Bix shook her head and turned away with an odd empty feeling. The hot resentments had evaporated, but she wasn’t quite sure what else remained. She pulled on her jacket, grabbed her cane off the back of the chair, and shoved her hand in her pocket to check for keys. She felt something damp, her New Brunswick tartan scarf she’d worn on the way in. Her last gift from Charlie.
Despite the deepening ache in her left hip which would wreak holy havoc later on, despite the chill at the base of her spine and the muscle spasms, despite the first pang of hunger, Bix plunked back down on the hard plastic chair. She pulled out her damp, wrinkled scarf and folded it corner to corner. Slowly, she tied it over her gray curls, making a triangular flap at the back, placing the knot at the base of her neck.
Across the room, their reflections wavered in the dark window beyond. They were girls again. Matching bandana girls.
Angela Joynes (she/her) is a disabled Canadian writer now living in Tennessee. She holds a BA, MD, and a Certificate in Creative Writing. Words in The Ilanot Review, Westchester Review, South 85, Susurrus, Hot Flash Literary, Fictive Dream, Raw Lit, Ellipsis Zine, among others. Nominated for Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. X@angela_joynes @angelajoynes.bsky.social