4/23/2023
Wendy Goodman is an attorney returning to writing creatively after 25 years of writing legally. Wendy’s personal essays have been published in Hevria.com, The Ocotillo Review, Furious Gravity and From Whispers to Roars and her fiction by Two Sisters Writing & Publishing. With her flock in college, she is weaving an empty nest perched between her two favorite branches, Washington, D.C. and the New Jersey shore.
PJ Cencak had a career in healthcare and is a veteran of the US Air Force. She got hooked on writing when she lived in New York and was invited to be part of the “Writer’s Workshop” at the “Neighborhood Playhouse.” She finally took the plunge into committing to full time writing and is a student in the MFA in Creative Writing program at American University in Washington, DC.
Introduction to “The Toupee”
By PJ Cencak
The year is 1979, and we are taken to New Jersey and the open door into the family home where we meet the eight year old Wendy, her 18 year old sister, Sandy, lying on pleather couches watching television, and her parents. Wendy Goodman’s story, “The Toupee” is a beautifully written narrative piece in the first person of an eight year old girl. Using description and dialogue to propel the story Goodman does a masterful job of drawing the reader in immediately.
In the midst of the status quo, their father, who left for work in the morning without hair, now returns for the evening with a head of hair. Goodman uses light humor without judging her father but is honest about her feelings regarding the effect it has on her and those around her. Immediately the intrusion of the toupee is felt in the discord between her parents and the shouting match that ensues. Goodman’s amusing observation of the sudden and abrupt transition from no hair to hair and her mother’s severe reaction to the new toupee upon her husband’s head. The question of what happens when one person in a relationship changes things without consulting the other person it will affect is explored. You feel the tension between the parents and their rocky marriage through the argument. The toupee seems to be a new beginning for the 40 something father of five but the beginning of the end for the mother of the brood, putting a marriage that was on the rocks over the edge. Goodman touches on the sensitive themes of self-image, when what one sees in the mirror is not reflected in what is felt or wanted from within, and that which is lacking. A tender storytelling of the fragility of family relationships and the love between a daughter and father spanning four decades. Within this piece we are taken into the ups and downs of relationships between parents and children. How one person’s action within a group, in this case the family, can overflow into the others lives requiring evaluation and adjustments. The culprit of the disruption or the revelation of the chaos within the family is the introduction of a toupee. Who would have thought that a little thing like a toupee could cause so much tension? But it does and we see how things unfold as a result of it.
Goodman, a child of the 70’s, eight years old in 1979, takes the reader into her world of a Jewish family living in New Jersey. Her description of sitting on a white pleather couch and watching The Price is Right will take anyone who lived during those days right into that family room. I could hear the call phrase of the game show, “Come on Down”, to the contestants who were invited to play to win. A program that was an American television staple that still goes on today. This could have been anyone’s den of that time but within this scene of apparent normalcy, we get a glimpse into the family dynamics and complexities of adult relationships.
Her father’s search for who he is and who he would like to be is found in his toupee that disrupts her parents’ already rocky marriage. What was he revealing or what was he covering up? Or was this an act of both? This put her mother in a position of questioning what her husband was preparing for and what this would mean to her? He made a decision without any consultation with those it will affect and may come across as selfish. Now his daughter feels differently about him but not sure how to express it.
As a young girl, we see the shame and embarrassment she feels, as her father acts out his search for who he is by wearing the toupee. Both generations grappling with how to grow into their different stages of life. Her father exposing their troubles to the world, and she, trying to conceal her family life. Her secrets are exposed, no longer her own. A toupee is an indication that things are not normal and that’s all she wants. She denies the toupee by not acknowledging it. But how can she ignore it? It’s an obvious thing to one day be without hair and then the next day to have it. Her inner dialogue of magical thinking and trying to pretend that things are what she wishes: a head without a toupee, parents who didn’t argue or fight, and a family that is like everyone else’s.
So often people think that behind the closed doors of other houses lives perfection but there are secrets there too. As a young girl her only focus was on her own. Children are embarrassed by their parent’s behavior and parents shrink away from what their children do.
Unfortunately, the toupee never disappeared but rather demanded attention, keeping its place upon her father’s head. Thirty years later when the narrator is a mother and wife herself the toupee was still eliciting the question from her seven year old child, “Mom, you know grandpa Burt wears a wig, right?” The child’s curiosity is revealed in a simple question making sure his observation is in sync with reality or maybe feeling like he is the first one to make note of it. We see that ignoring something doesn’t make it go away, it just keeps it alive like the “elephant in the room,” so to speak.
We also see the author with the loss of her father, and the full pureness of loving someone for who they are, with or without their façade. When her father died the decision was made to remove the toupee. Her love for her father comes through when she shares about his funeral and wishing that they could have had an open casket to show him without his toupee. What made him feel like he had to change? What was he covering up or gaining from wearing it? Those words, if ever exchanged, are not shared and it makes me wonder how many things went unsaid. She liked him just the way he was and wished others could see the person she saw and loved.
Such a touching tribute to her father showing the tender love between a father and a daughter. The story concludes with her father’s funeral with the toupee removed, it was no longer needed in death, revealing what it covered for so many years. The author even questions the need for it in life. So many years between the man without the toupee and the one with it, she gently shares, “There in the casket, laid bare, his beautiful bald freckled head, the one I kissed, rubbed, and held on tightly to until I was eight.”
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Wendy Goodman is a lawyer by day with a passion for writing. In an interview with Grace and Gravity, she shares that she has been writing throughout her career but “wasn’t mining my soul.” She decided to sign up for a class at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland a few years ago which got her on the path of writing regularly. Being a lawyer has given her writing clarity. In the same interview, “I learned early on in my career that a legal brief has to be perfect in terms of language, grammar, and punctuation.” This has carried over into her craft of writing. Because her professional writing is so impersonal, she comes from a personal point of view in her creative writing. In her piece “How a Meeting with Philip Roth Brought Me Closer to My Father,” published by Hevria.com, an online publication, she shared the time she spent with her father. Her father lamented the fact that he didn’t have the friendship with his father that Philip Roth had with his and wondered what his life would have been like if he had. Reflecting on his relationship with his father he was missing what he had with his daughter sitting next to him as they drove home from the talk. She also failed to express her feelings leaving so many things that were close to the surface, unsaid and what could have been. Just as her father questioned that which went unsaid was also seen in “The Toupee,” when the narrator ignores the very thing that needs addressing.
Goodman has also had other pieces published, one about her mother, in “The Reynolds Pamphlet” by Ocotillo Review. She now is in a new stage of life, that of an empty nester and lives between the Washington, DC area and the New Jersey Shore. Still working as an attorney and continuing to share her personal view through her creative writing.
GRACE AND GRAVITY 