Bearded Lady (Kindle Single)

by Mara Altman

  “Am I normal?”

  She said that I was, but I didn’t believe her.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “We’ve all got hair,” she said.

  I knew that we all had hair, but that wasn’t the question. I wanted to know where exactly I stood on the hairness scale, because that was becoming the problem. Ladies were ripping out their hair before I got a good look at it; therefore I was feeling like a beast among a hairless breed.

  She proceeded to rip out the hair that jumped the border — about a half an inch — but then she spotted the hair on my stomach. For quite a while, I’d had a light happy trail from my belly button downward; it was the inspiration for a nickname — Happy — that I’d acquired when at 15, I visited France. For a while, I’d considered the name cute.

  “You want me to get that, right?” she said, spreading the wax on it before I answered.

  “Why, is that not good?”

  Rip.

  “Well, you probably want to get rid of it,” she said, throwing my happy trail in the trash.

  And that’s how I learned that apparently happy trails don’t live up to their name.

  By the age of 20, I was finally coming to terms with the fact that no hair was considered good hair except for the hair on your head, eyelashes and eyebrows, and those only if they were in the right shape. Arm hair, it seemed, got a pass as well, even though it wasn’t any different-looking than leg hair, which was weird. But even toe hair had to go. I didn’t even know that I had toe hair, but then it turned out that I did, which was bad. I’d always remember that I forgot to get rid of it when I’d fold over my legs in yoga class and then I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from staring at it. You even had to go and grow there, huh? For the crotch, news of the Brazilian style — going completely bare — that would soon sweep the nation had not yet reached my ears. I still thought it was normal to keep your pubic hair. And though I trimmed a little off the sides every now and again, I was proud to have a bush. And I continued with the normal stuff — shaving, plucking and waxing. I also fell into a dependent relationship with Sally Hansen home wax strips — pre-waxed plastic in a rectangular shape. I just had to rub it between my palms to heat up the wax and then I could rip out my hair myself. The problem was I had issues with getting all the excess wax off, so by the end of the day, I’d end up with an accumulation of colorful fuzz and lint that made wherever I waxed look like my skin was growing patches of sweatshirt.

  When I went to Spain for my year abroad as a college junior, I got my legs waxed while being strapped vertically to a wall with a leather belt. It felt a bit vulnerable, but I didn’t question it as long as the wax did its job. I went to India in 2003, right after I graduated college, to work at a newspaper and got my entire face threaded. I said I wanted only the upper lip and eyebrows, but my threader, Smita, just kept going. She touched my cheeks, and said, “Face?” I shrugged. She took that as a signal to wind up her thread and tear out all the fuzz from my cheeks, chin and jowls.

  Paid professionals were always trying to get rid of more and more of my hair. It happened again when I went to a bikini waxing joint in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a few years later. I just wanted a little off the sides as the bush had been growing out for quite a while. When the waxer saw me — saw that part of me — she looked into my eyes with a fortune-teller’s boldness and shook her finger back and forth.

  “The man does not like dis,” she said. She put her fingers toward her tongue, pretending to pinch out hairs. “Plaaaa plaaaa,” she said. Then she got all dramatic, and faked a male choking episode.

  She slathered on the hot wax, and said calmly:

  “Very good dat you are here.”

  When we were done, she unzipped her pants to show me her bald pussy.

  “Look at it,” she said, “Look. No hair.”

  Then she tried to convince me to sign up for laser.

  “Plaa plaa,” she explained again as she zipped up her pants. “They do not like dat.”

  The only thing I really came to enjoy about hair removal was the inevitable ingrown. There is nothing and I mean it, nothing more fundamentally satisfying than extracting a hair that’s been growing in the wrong direction. Period. Call it my nurturing side.

  ***

  Little did I know the worst was yet to come.

  What happened next made me yearn for the days when a blonde mustache was my only problem. It happened when I was 23. I was about to start a one-year journalism master’s program at Columbia and was getting a facial at Mario Badescu Skin Care Salon on East 52nd Street in Manhattan. Everything was going well until the buxom Russian woman examining my face with a bright light rubbed my chin.

  “You zchuld git reed of dis,” she said.

  How did she see them? I thought I was the only person who knew. She busted my years of self-denial. Toppled them. Crushed them into tiny shards. It’s like when you have big red volcanic pimple and you just convince yourself that you’re making it out to be a much bigger deal than it actually is and most likely no one notices it, but then some friend says, “Ouch, that looks like it must hurt.” And they are pointing at your big red volcanic pimple that no one is actually supposed to be able to see, so you say, “What must hurt?” and they say, “Your big red volcanic pimple.” And you cover your face with one hand and say, “Oh, you can see that?” And they say, “Well, it is a big red volcanic pimple.”

  So it was true.

  I had chin hairs that people could actually see.

  They were real.

  Like, actually there.

  Hairs growing out of my chin!

  I mean, I knew about them, of course, but I also didn’t. I believe my inability to recognize them as an entity — as a growing, living, real part of my body — stemmed from my self-preservation instinct. I’d even plucked them before, but I’d managed to convince myself immediately afterwards that I hadn’t. My chin was smooth, damn it!

  But now the jig was up. I started scanning my chin every morning for one of those evil hairs to re-appear. I began carrying tweezers and a mirror in my purse.

  I told no one of this new calamity. At least when I discovered my upper-lip hair, I knew that other women shared my shame. Upper-lip waxes were offered at salons. I’d never seen a chin wax mentioned anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask anyone about it, in case they told me they’d never heard of such a heinous thing.

  I started having these disturbing fantasies that totally freaked me out: I have a mental break and go to a loony bin, but there’s no one there to pluck me. When I envision Insane Mara, I’m more embarrassed about the stray hairs than the fact that I’ve completely lost my mind and am trying to make love to a trashcan.

  Or what about when I’m old? Old Mara’s hands are going to be so shaky from all the meds and her eyesight will be deficient, so there’s no way she’s going to be able to pluck with any kind of proficiency.

  Or maybe Old Mara has Alzheimer’s and her grandkids will come visit as she stares at a wall and thumbs the hem on her shirt. “Is grandma a he or a she?” they’d say. I’m more embarrassed for Alzheimer Mara’s hair than for the fact that she thinks her nephew is her husband.

  Or I get run over by a car on some New York street and I’m in a coma. My family rushes to Coma Mara’s bedside and they look at each other in shock, not because of my medical status, but because they realize I’m different than they thought I was. “Oh my!” Mom says. “Did any of you know Mara had a goatee?”

  I knew that there were many more important issues going on in the world and that my worrying about such an insignificant bodily matter was selfish and maybe even bordering on narcissistic, but I couldn’t help my feelings. I was irrational. Global Warming was spawning under my skin. Genocide was happening on my face.

  I finally had to talk to someone about it and it was during my winter break from Columbia that it finally burst forth.

  “Mom, I’ve got chin hair!”

  “But I don’t see it.”
r />   “It’s there,” I said.

  She came in closer.

  “Don’t come too close!”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause then you’ll see it!”

  She blamed it on my Dad’s side of the family, and never spoke of it again.

  I continued to pluck my way through my master’s program, and from then on kept my chin hairs to myself. But in the midst of all this, I began dating a guy. We were fooling around — nuzzling, hugging — one day in Central Park. Tenderly, he put his hand on my face. “I love the fuzz on your face,” he said. “It’s so soft.” He then made a downward stroking motion from my cheek all the way to my chin. That moment may have seemed romantic to him but it was the closest I’d ever come to shitting myself besides that one time I had dysentery and was stuck on a 12-hour bus ride from Dharmasla to Delhi.

  I turned in the other direction as quickly as possible and encouraged him to fondle my hoodie.

  I would never put myself in that position again:

  Natural sunlight.

  Bare face.

  Man at close range.

  ***

  After I graduated from Columbia, I moved to Bangkok for a job as a features writer at a Thai newspaper.

  In retrospect, not the best idea in the world for a hairy Western five-footer with budding self-esteem issues.

  Thai people, as it turns out, aren’t hairy. They don’t have any hair except on their heads. They seemed like magical people to me with all their hairlessness, like they lived in some kind of fairy tale world. I kept looking for hair, scanned crowds for it to reassure myself that I was normal. Maybe I was overreacting — at this point I’m pretty sure I had some form of body hair dimorphic disorder — but I often felt like if I stopped plucking, I’d be able to grow more impressive facial hair than most Thai men. That thought made me feel so unsexy that it’s hard to properly explain.

  That’s when I decided to try “permanent reduction” methods for the first time. It was 2005 when I finally signed up for laser. Once a month, I went to a Bangkok hospital called, I swear, Bumrungrad. I’d lay on a gurney in a brightly lit room. All blank white walls, slightly yellowed by time. The doctor came in with gloves, goggles and a mask on over his face. A nurse would cover my eyes with darkened goggles and swab jelly on my skin. A doctor would then spend about ten minutes zapping my face with something that looked like the suction side of a Hoover. I had to fold my tongue over my upper front teeth so that when they did my upper lip, I wouldn’t feel the pain of the laser reaching my gums or whiff the slight smell of melting enamel. After, they’d give me icepacks for my red face, which emitted so much heat that my cheek, if placed on a woman’s abdomen, could probably help relieve menstrual cramps.

  It couldn’t have been very healthy, but I wasn’t thinking about that then. I had one goal in mind: Complete eradication. I’d go home, riding on the back of a motorcycle taxi and stay home for the night, until the swelling had receded.

  I should have realized that there was a problem. I’ve always been kind of cheap. For example, I won’t pay ten bucks for a sandwich that would give me nutrition and probably pleasure — six is my top price — but I could somehow rationalize spending $1,000 for someone to fry my face.

  On my last visit, they elevated the laser a bit too high. It burned my upper lip. I still have the scar. It’s about the size of a raindrop. When I’m cold, it turns white. When people ask where I got the scar, I tell them:

  “One time I was making soup — some sort of bean stew — and it was boiling so wildly that it splattered me. ... Yeah, just like that, third-degree burn. Crazy, right?”

  Yeah, right.

  It was embarrassing to admit that I made myself look worse by trying to look better. It still is.

  Even right now.

  Yep, still embarrassing.

  But not only was I embarrassed, I also felt ashamed. I was back to being that kid poised with the lint remover over my leg — feeling equal shame for having hair as I felt for getting rid of it. Why couldn’t I just be okay with who I was? Why was I spending so much money and time hiding myself?

  But if you thought I’d stop it with the laser after realizing all that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely.

  ***

  Two years later, back in New York in the middle of my second laser treatment, I began to consider the possibility of a medical problem. I felt like I was fighting a rare battle — but I wasn’t sure because theoretically, if other women were like me, it would be a battle fought alone and behind closed doors. If other women were waging it, I wouldn’t know. But then again, could any of them have so many wanton whiskers? This couldn’t be what was supposed to be happening to a woman’s body.

  So, I went to my OB-GYN for a follicular assessment and possible intervention.

  Unfortunately, she had some bad news for me: I was normal. She explained that there are three common reasons for unusual quantities of hair on women. They either have polycystic ovaries or hormone imbalances, or they were simply born into hairy genes. “Many Eastern Europeans have a lot of dark thick hair,” my doctor said. I could have sworn that she was examining my chin as she spoke. A waxer once told me that she knows what she’s about to deal with before people even take off their pants; the eyebrows reveal everything. Why couldn’t my doc just check out my eyes then?

  “But it’s got to be something else,” I pleaded. I’d recently contemplated the possibility that I’d hit early menopause — there had been some hot flashes, I’m pretty sure — and I’d never given up that early idea that I might be part man. I speculated now that my nuts just hadn’t descended yet. “I’ve got hair even on my …”

  But I couldn’t tell a medical professional about the nipple hair. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d plucked that morning especially for her.

  “I don’t think you have PCOS,” she said. “Other symptoms are weight gain and acne, but if it’d make you feel better we can do some tests and maybe some blood work on your hormone levels.”

  She extracted some of my blood and scheduled me for an ultrasound. That actually got me a tiny bit excited. It’d be kind of awesome if something was medically wrong. I’d be officially diagnosed and on my way to a cure. I could stop going crazy.

  But the ultrasound revealed nothing wrong with my ovaries — no cysts. There weren’t even any hidden male gonads.

  When my OB-GYN got back to me about the blood tests, she said that all my hormone levels were normal.

  “Normal? Are you sure?”

  “Totally normal.”

  So my doctor was telling me it’s normal to be a hairy beast. I was relieved, terrified and 27 years old.

  ***

  I couldn’t quit the laser. In total, I continued treatments for two more years at a place called American Laser, on Broadway near 22nd Street in Manhattan. In the waiting room, they had magazines like People and OK! in a pile. I think they put them there for a reason; they wanted me to look at Kim Kardashian’s pore-less and follicle-free face and get turned on about having my body blasted with a machine I didn’t understand in the slightest.

  I dislike those magazines and think of them as vapid and a waste of time, but that’s only because I can get sucked into them for hours and I always end up feeling guilty about my desire to know how many hours a day Angelina leaves her kids with the nanny instead of using that time to start understanding the crumbling economy. So I’d get into the laser treatment room, conjure the hair-free cover girl, and tell the laser lady to put the damn thing on the highest they could without causing my face permanent damage.

  “It’s going to hurt,” she’d say.

  “I don’t care,” I’d say.

  “Tell me if it’s too high.”

  “It’s not high enough!”

  Hair brought out a little bit of psycho in me. I never acted like that anywhere else except for maybe when I’m baking. I get really bossy when I’m baking.

  The American Laser office was in the s
ame building as a casting agency. Sometimes on the elevator ride up, I’d pretend to mouth some scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire and reapply ChapStick in the mirror, so no one would suspect that I was actually lasering.

  No, silly, I’m not hairy. I’m an actress.

  I also kept it from the guy, Dave, who I’d started dating in 2008. I would throw away the laser appointment cards so that he couldn’t find them and instead use code — “lunch with Leslie” or just an exclamation point — when I wrote down the appointment time in my calendar.

  When I moved in with him in 2010, a whole new challenge emerged. Close quarters put my secret in jeopardy. I carried on my depilatory duties like a covert Navy Seal operation. I had extra razors and tweezers in my gym bag, purse and hidden in bathroom corners. Mixed Martial Arts fights were my saving grace. Dave would be attached to the couch for hours at a time, watching hairless men grapple each other, while my stainless steel Mr. Tweezerman and I got it on in the bathroom. If Dave asked what I was doing in there for so long, I’d tell him I was picking at pimples or that the milk in my coffee was working its way through my intestines. That usually shut him up.

  I just couldn’t tell Dave about the hair. It would have rendered me faulty, almost broken, like driving off with a lemon from the used-car showroom. But I also yearned for him to know and accept me as I was. I know it doesn’t help our relationship when we cuddle and the only thing I can think about is how to position myself in a way that if a stray hair broke free, he would be the least likely to see it. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t even be writing this if we weren’t already engaged. Publicly divulging my hairiness during my dating years would have ruined my ratings on JDate and match.com. You can’t sell a car by pointing out the jagged, deep dent on the driver’s side.

  I hate that I feel that way, but there it is.

  And as long as I’m talking about things I hate — this is a little off the point, but you know what always kills me? It kills me when girls compliment my eyebrows, because in the aughts, eyebrows with girth came back into fashion. “Wow, they’re so nice and thick. I wish I had those,” friends would say. The compliments are always by women who are fair-skinned and light-haired. I’ve never had a thick-browed lady say one thing about my eyebrows. You know why? Because we know the behind-the-scenes story. If any of those light-haired ladies knew what those two caterpillar-shaped suckers actually meant, they’d back away from the situation with their hands up.