For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories by Nathan Englander

burying her face in it. She is smelling for a past, sniffing out the woman’s shampoo and sweat, the staleness of cigarettes or the smoke that drifts down from some factory nearby. She breathes deep. She is onto a scent, a wind from a village, a mist of perfume.
    “They are paid top dollar,” Ruchama tells her.
    “Women with choices leave their hair to be swept off salon floors,” Tzippy says.
    “Maybe these women are more prudent.”
    “With such hair?” Tzippy waves the braid’s open end at Ruchama. “These are women who have to sell some part of themselves and this is where they begin. This one,” she says, sniffing again, “is on break at a bottling plant thinking of her lover. She sold her hair to pay his gambling debts and she wonders now where her hair is and where that bum has gone.”
    “My own life is depressing enough, Tzippy. Why must you make it like we’re scalping orphans?”
    “A teenage girl,” Tzippy says, “a girl with everything she needs. Only, there is a used scooter her parents won’t buy her and a boyfriend she lusts after who lives all the way on the other side of the lake.”
    “You’ve been reading novels again, Tzippy. Don’t tell me there isn’t a romance hidden under your bed.”
    The front room gets natural light from the windows that open onto the cellar well. The room is carpeted and painted and, in front of the long windows, there is a pair of comfortable chairs. There are stools and a counter, and on the counter mirrors—one standing on a silverplate base and an assortment of handmirrors that Ruchama has no real attachment to, though it is intended to appear to customers that she does.
    Ruchama finds it difficult to live up to the expectations of the room. She is more comfortable in the back with Tzippy on the cement, hair-strewn floor of the work space.
    Nava Klein is sitting on an overstuffed chair in front of the window. Tzippy sits on a stool, her feet resting on the crossbar. Ruchama stands; she looks better standing, her dress hanging loose off her chest, concealing. She has not sat down in front of Nava Klein in at least half-a-dozen years.
    The whole back wall is covered with framed photographs of wigs on Styrofoam heads. Nava is pointing to one. “Third in,” she says. “That’s got to be Aviva Sussman.” Ruchama’s work is so distinct, you can pick out half the neighborhood.
    “You can’t tell me that’s not Aviva’s hair.”
    “Please,” Tzippy says.
    Nava grimaces, turns her attention to Ruchama.
    “I saw your oldest,” she says. “A real beauty and such a rail. She reminds me of you when you were that age. You were striking, striking as a girl.” Nava sighs, signals with her head to Tzippy, as if she were not part of the adult conversation. “Only Tzippy stays the same, her hipbones pushing at the front of her skirt. The rest of us ragged old women have to hide behind our daughters’ good looks.”
    Nava shakes her head. “How do you do it, Tzippy? Where in Brooklyn is your fountain of youth?”
    Tzippy blushes. Ruchama wants to scream. Every compliment the woman gives releases a dandelion’s worth of barbed spores. Tzippy looks great because she is barren. Her figure has been spared because her womb has walls of stone. And Ruchama, she is a proud mother. Of course she is, with six wonderful children and a chin to show for each one.
    “I’ve an appointment a week from Thursday with Kendo of Kendo Keller’s,” Nava says. “He is going to advise me. Andthen, of course, he’ll style the wig. It’s not you, Tzippy. You’re a natural. A brilliant stylist. The best of the sheitel machers. But this isn’t exactly Madison Avenue. It’s only that I want a more contemporary look this year. So vain.”
    In the mirror that night, Ruchama takes her face off, rubbing hard, removing makeup, working at the base that catches like grit in the folds of her skin.
    She used to be the prettiest, prettier than Tzippy and Nava. They all three used to