Ralf

Part III of Hair Practices

"A wig without bangs," Ralf said to me over the phone the first time I called him, "is like a miniskirt without underpants."

Raffaele Mollica — Ralf — has been making wigs in New York City for over forty-six years. He worked at Vidal Sassoon, at Helena Rubenstein. He made wigs for the most elite circles of New York and has a story about each of them. The only thing larger than Ralf's reputation is his personality. By the time he completed my custom hair piece, I had collected thirty pages of transcribed interviews.

I drove out to his studio in Queens, pulling in behind a tall metal gate he had already opened for me. Ralf was already outside waiting, looking every bit like his internet-famous photos: chin-length gray hair under a blue baseball cap that read Roma in white embroidery, a blue and white striped button-down, worn oversized khakis, drugstore readers tethered by a fabric strap at the bridge of his nose. His workshop is attached to his home — not the salon where he receives specialty clients, but a more intimate space, lined wall to wall with mannequin heads in various states of completion. Tall racks of flat metal trays, each holding hair samples from different sources in different countries, none of which Ralf would name.

It's a blend, he said, like wine or coffee. Not a single varietal.

I had asked him, over the phone, to make me something that looked like Anjelica Huston — specifically, Huston as the Grand High Witch in the 1990 film adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches. Dark, severe, a center of real gravity. That was when he made the comment about the bangs. In a wig, I had imagined, the bangs would always be perfect. They would never grow too long. They would hold their style like a photograph — possessing all the power of human hair, without the umbilical attachment to a living, breathing human.

The wig Ralf made me was 100% human hair. Dark espresso brown, thick shining strands, straight but with what he called a bend — meaning it would need some styling, would move with some life. He sat me in a wooden chair in front of a large mirror and began to examine my newly shaved head, running his hands over my scalp with the matter-of-fact tenderness of someone who has done this thousands of times.

He sent me home with the finished piece with instructions to spend time with it. Play with it, he said. Try it on. Get accustomed to the fit. Come back for a trim.

I spent the next three weeks putting it on and taking it off — sitting at my bathroom mirror, inhabiting this other version of myself, then removing her. It was not like the halo, which was made from my own hair and carried some residual sense of continuity. This was something else. More like borrowing someone else's identity than activating a buried part of my own. I wore it to certain appointments, to certain rooms that required a specific legibility. I noticed the shift in how I was received — the recalibration in other people's faces, the way the room reorganized itself around the presence of that particular kind of hair.

I thought of Rivki, on the corner of Bedford and Broadway: I have never known any other way. I have nothing to compare it to. Not resignation. A choice made through devotion, until the choice itself dissolved into simply being.

I do not know if I will ever reach that. The wig still itches at the edges. I am still aware of it, the slight displacement of something on my head that is not mine. But I have come to understand what it was protecting — not just warmth, not just appearance, but the right to control what the world knows about what happened to your body. To walk into a room and decide, on a given day, how much of the story is visible.

That negotiation, it turns out, is one I had been making long before I was sick. I had simply never had to make it consciously before.