Coe Review

While waiting for it to bake, Darla falls into his chair and takes up the
remote. TV wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the damn programming
disrupting the otherwise nice flow of advertisements. She flips for the food
commercials and then by accident lands on a late night news show about
Winnie, a woman diagnosed with Trichotillomania.
Trichotillomania is a nervous disorder that prompts the person to pull
out their hair. It started for Winnie in the fourth grade with her eyelashes
and eyebrows but quickly progressed to hair in other places, so that by the
sixth grade she said she had cancer to avoid getting teased. Today she wears a
wig. Coincidentally, Jim, Winnie's husband, is also bald, though from natural
processes, Darla assumes.
The final straw, Winnie says to the interviewer, and here she stops to
clear a tear from the edge of her eye as the camera cuts to Jim reaching out
for Winnie's hand and then cuts back to the startling bare dome of Winnie's
head. She continues after a long and somewhat dramatic pause. I was at a
tradeshow. I'm an elementary school teacher. I remember it clearly. The Paper
Moon Tradeshow in Portland. A huge show at the Double Tree. Booths for
arts and crafts, software and other stuff. You know, ideas for the classroom.
And her story goes that somehow a baby screech owl from the zoo booth gets
loose from its leather strap and takes Winnie's wig into the upper regions of
the convention center, flying straight through the large paper moon.
I knew I had to go public after that, Winnie says.
But why didn't you just stop? the interviewer says.
Well, the strange thing, Winnie says, is that it's become almost soothing
to pull my hair out.
And not just hair, Jim says and laughs. The camera cuts quick to him,
then back to Winnie.
That's right. Winnie giggles. If truth be told, I ruin rugs. It's silly perhaps
but also somehow liberating.
Most mornings Darla can be found scratching out the day's agenda on
her favorite stationery. Across the bottom of each page a gray kitten chases a
colored ball of yarn, one paw reaching for the trailing string. On subsequent
pages the yarn changes from red to yellow to blue and back to red, and so
on. Darla loves kittens. She's starting to hate cats. The morning after burning
her second pot-pie while Winnie wept: blue yarn. Hmmm, she says, though
there's no real connection, her daily life never as lucid as those nights when
she eats.
She scribbles a quick grocery list and heads for Us Foods, a supermarket
near their home. The checkout lady is in her late twenties and pregnant. Says
on her name-tag:
S. Asher Sund 81