by Mara Altman
It felt good to know that I wasn’t alone, but it also bothered me to know that so many of us lived in such fear that our biological side would show. It was bad enough that we occasionally had to be seen in natural sunlight.
* * *
So on November 14, I began growing out my body hair. I contemplated growing the chin hairs, too, but I figured that I would probably incur some minor to medium psychological damage as a result. I wasn’t substantially practiced in the Zen arts of shrugging off contemptuous remarks.
Even a friend, Ali, warned me, “Don’t do it for your own mental health.” Ali and I have a lot in common. She’s so freaked out about her own hair that her husband doesn’t know she Nairs her face and bleaches her arms.
Her biggest fear is that when she has a baby, her husband will see her breastfeeding in daylight. “He’ll see my boobs and they are going to be so sore, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to pluck,” she said, “and does it bother your child if there are weird hairs there?”
Meanwhile, nothing really dramatic occurred as my hair grew in. It was sparser than I’d expected. My legs were not particularly hirsute, popping up with fine dark hair about a quarter- to a half-inch long. They looked the way a wood floor at a salon would look after a stylist had trimmed a balding man. The armpits, however, came in fuller. They developed a brown fuzz, which was surprisingly soft. Sometimes when I’d reach my arms upward, I’d think I’d spotted something—like a rodent—in the periphery, but then when I’d swing my head back to look, I’d remember that it had actually been my new armpit locks.
I felt some anxiety about going to yoga and the gym—where my legs and underarms were on display—wondering what people were going to think of me. But mostly I felt like a rebel. I wanted someone to say something and I wanted to defend my choice, but no one even seemed to look in my direction.
Only once did I see two girls laugh and point at my armpits. I was self-conscious about it, but I also felt a little relieved. All these years of hair angst haven’t been for nothing. People actually can be judgmental schmucks!
The absolute coolest thing—and it wasn’t actually that cool—was when I stood naked in front of a full-length mirror with my arms raised and noticed that, with the hair under my arms, it looked like I had two decoy vaginas. I suspected that, somehow, those were used to much advantage during our cavewoman days.
The empowerment that I’d hoped would come, though . . . it just didn’t.
A lot of the time I just felt hairy, and everything was a little worse for it:
The dishes are dirty . . . and I’m hairy.
Something is rotten in the fridge . . . and I’m hairy.
I have no money . . . and I’m hairy.
I felt like my body was morphing outside its jurisdiction—crisp lines were suddenly blurring. I was a coloring book and a little kid was coloring outside the markings. My eyebrows broke free from their usual shape and simultaneously were trying to visit my hairline and my nose. How did Frida do it?
To feel momentary relief, I’d visit the Hairtostay.com website, which called itself “The World’s ONLY Magazine for Lovers of Natural, Hairy Women.” It was part female-hair-fetish porn site and part positive hair treatise. You can do everything from have hairy phone sex to peruse articles such as the one titled “Are Hairy Legs a Deterrent to Crime?” It wasn’t to commiserate with other hairy women that I went there, though. I went to stare at ladies who were hairier than I was so that I could feel smooth for a change.
It was finally December—time for my family’s annual vacation together. This year we were going to Southeast Asia, land of the genetically hairless women. Right before we left, I bought a box of Sally Hansen prewaxed strips (that addiction had never evaporated) and ripped off my happy trail. That was the one hairy part of my anatomy that I just couldn’t take anymore. And once it was torn off, I actually felt like I could breathe deeper.
I was soon in Cambodia with my family. When we went to Angkor Wat, a temple complex from the twelfth century, I asked my tour guide, Vutta, how Cambodians felt about women and body hair.
“They don’t do anything to the hair,” he said. “Well, actually, they don’t really have the hair.”
“So no waxing or shaving?”
“Actually, the girls want to have light skin like you.”
“But if they get light skin, they will have the hair that comes along with it.”
“To be honest,” Vutta said, “the people here believe that a girl with the hair is lucky. She can get a better life. A better husband.”
“Really?” I said. That was the most hair-positive belief I’d heard, probably ever.
“But it’s not true,” he said. “They just believe it. We are so behind in our economy and society because people believe silly superstitions like that.”
“So it’s not lucky to have hair?”
“Not any more lucky than not having hair.”
“Oh.”
At this point, I began to think I was actually journeying backward.
* * *
On the final day, I got one of my legs threaded on the beach in Vietnam. I did it as an experiment. I’d never had threading on anything except my face before. Besides, the woman who did the threading had been chasing me for the past three days, pinching my hairy legs as I passed.
I sat down on a little platform that she had propped up in the sand, about five feet from the water. I was shielded from the sun by a big umbrella. The hair, by this time, was about a half-inch long. The woman wound the thread around her hand and put one part of the loop in her mouth. She twisted the thread and then bent down and started ripping out my hair. It felt like a pack of mice were sinking their jaws into my skin over and over again. I grabbed at the sheet covering the platform below me. I felt the sweat slide down my arm as I yelled “Ouch!” again and again and again.
She leaned over me, and each time I said “Ouch,” she said, “No ouch later, later beautiful.”
I was amazed that the same hairless aesthetic prevailed on the other side of the world.
I quit after half of one leg. I couldn’t handle the pain. A razor seemed so much more humane. I was also having trouble letting go of the hair. I hadn’t come to an understanding with my body hair yet. That is, I still didn’t really like it. I felt guilty for favoring my leg without the hair, being so thrilled with how smooth it looked—that is, until I sat down and spoke to my mother. I’d been putting it off, but it was time, since it was our last day of the trip. She would be going back to California, and I would be heading back to New York.
My mom and dad were sitting on wooden chaise lounges on the beach. Mom was in sunglasses, a hat, and a bathing suit, comfortably showing off her legs and pits. They weren’t as intense as I remembered them. I don’t think an astronaut would be able to see them from space, which is how I used to feel when she’d pick me up after school, waving for me to come over with her tank top on.
I sat down beside her, crossing my hairless leg under the hairy other one. “So, were you guys bummed when I started shaving?”
“I wasn’t that happy about it,” said my dad. “Natural is better, but it’s your business. I just thought it might be a problem for you later, get you on the wrong track.”
“Which track?” I asked.
“Well, you cut your hair and they branch and then you cut it again and they branch.”
“Are you thinking about pruning trees?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s how I see it.”
I’d always assumed that my mom didn’t shave because of her radical self-acceptance—and I yearned to be like that, to accept myself in my all-natural state—but we never really had a conversation about it before, and here she elaborated.
“I got into the politics,” she said. “I also read a lot of Zen and Buddhist texts, and it really felt like accepting who I was was more important to me than looking a certain way for society.”
As she said that, something clicked for me that
hadn’t before. The Jolen!
“Well, if you’re so Zen and comfortable with yourself, then why do you wax your upper lip hair?” Her Jolen bleach habit, by this time, had turned into a wax habit.
She paused to think about it for a moment. She started and then stopped. Then started again. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I wax my upper lip, and I think my face looks better when I do. It’s probably that it worked into my cosmetic feeling about myself, so I guess I can’t claim to be this Zen person who would flaunt all.”
I’m pretty sure it was at that moment that my perspective began to shift, but I wouldn’t realize it until I was back in New York. For the moment, I just thought it completely coincidental that on the evening I had that conversation with my mom, alone in my hotel room, I decided to shave off all the hair I’d grown for the past two months.
* * *
Weeks after we got back from Southeast Asia, I was sitting on the sofa with Dave in our East Village apartment. I hadn’t done laser for nine months. I’d just finished writing the 14,000 or so words you just read. I put a sofa pillow in my lap and inched toward the corner of the couch. I stared at him until he looked away from a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit rerun, the one where some guy has a fetish for recording people urinating in public bathrooms and accidentally witnesses a pedophilic sex crime.
Maybe I could have waited for better timing.
Or maybe, maybe, it was the perfect time.
“What?” Dave said, noticing that I was focused on him, not on Detective Stabler’s interrogation.
“I want you to know that I have chin hairs,” I said.
He smiled slightly, cocked his head to the side, and returned his focus to the fetishist.
“I’m serious. I do.”
Dave looked over at me now, searching his mind for the appropriate thing to say, but I didn’t give him a chance to respond.
I told him in rapid-fire narrative the whole story of my hair fixation as fast as the man in the old Micro Machines commercials—the doctor, the laser, the morning pluckings, the purse tweezers, and how when he looked at me in a certain way, I feared that he wasn’t actually looking at me, that he was searching for errant follicles on my face.
Slowly, Dave began to lean forward. Closer. And closer. Still closer.
“What?” I pleaded. “What?”
Dave didn’t say anything. Suddenly he was only inches away; he could see every pore on my face, every hair on my body. His big, soft brown eyes loomed over me like microscopes.
I wiggled in fear of being found out.
Then he slapped me lightly on the cheek. “Get it together,” Dave said. “It’s just hair.”
Good point.
We leaned into each other, arms and lives forever intertwined, and turned back to the television set.
2
Some Nits, Picked
It all started the day before my birthday. Now that I was married, my in-laws wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate my turning one year older. We went to a nearby Italian restaurant called Supper. My husband’s brother and his wife joined us with their two kids, Alana and Adam. The place was lit in that wonderful New York way where you can barely make out who is sitting next to you. I could mistake a Pilates ball decorated with a beard and curly hair for my husband. You have to use sonar to find the bread basket. It’s the best atmosphere for pimples.
After dinner, we walked several blocks to get ice cream at a place called OddFellows where they hand-press their own waffle cones. The smell—sweet and delicate—is exactly how I imagine the scent of Betty Crocker’s armpits.
I do not often interact with kids; they scare me because they’ll look at you and say things like “Why is your nose crooked?” or they will smile, stare straight into your soul, and then say something creepy like “You’re going to be dead.”
I constantly judge if I want to have kids depending on the kids I observe around me. When I think of the kid in Jerry Maguire, the one who has glasses and that adorable case of asthma, I want to get pregnant immediately. But when I see real human kids who aren’t reading off a script in a romantic comedy, I usually want to tie my tubes.
My mom, who wants nothing more than for me to proliferate her genes, knows this about me and gets very concerned if there are kids around us who are misbehaving. She will say, “It’s different when they are your own.” In the past year, she has grown even more sensitive to crying babies than I am. Once, we were at the grocery store looking at Triscuits and she said, “You know, it’s different when they are your own.”
“Well, we can buy them,” I said. “They’re on sale for $2.95.”
She cocked her head sideways, and it was only then that I noticed the distant wails from the dairy aisle.
But on this particular evening, things were different. The kids and I ordered the same flavor of ice cream—sprinkles. This made us feel bonded. Alana linked her arm through mine as Adam hooked onto my other arm. They did not look up and say, “You have hairy nostrils.” Instead they smiled and giggled as we walked in tandem. They yelled, “Let’s walk faster! Faster!” We powered forward, weaving around the crowds, leaving all the other adults behind.
It was one of those rare moments when I thought, I could do this: I could have kids.
After ice cream, everyone headed back to our apartment for a final cohesive farewell. When the kids entered, they wanted to sit on my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. This was not a hand-me-down. This was my first and only real piece of adult furniture. And I went big. Again, in case you missed it, we’re talking about an aqua-colored velvet sofa chair.
I finally understood why my mom got so upset when people called her first luxury car—a LeBaron convertible—beige. “It’s actually champagne,” she’d correct them.
Every piece of furniture I had before this piece—it was so elegant that it certainly qualified as a “piece”—was inherited from the street, and the only other sofa in our house was a little maroon number that I’d guess was about fifteen years old and probably hosting the plague.
The new sofa chair felt all the more precious because we almost lost it before it made it into our apartment. In the spacious furniture store, the chair had looked tiny, like an ottoman for gerbils, but after lugging it up two flights of stairs, the deliverymen found that it wouldn’t fit through our doorway.
“Fucking shit,” shouted one.
The other one wiped sweat from his brow. “Jesus Christ. This again.”
Apparently, it’s not uncommon for people’s furniture fantasies to be much bigger than their apartments.
“Did you even measure it?” asked the deliveryman who most looked like he wanted to break my face.
“Yes,” I said. I left out the “with my mind” part.
I’m usually great at spatial stuff. I can look at a pot full of leftover soup and then select Tupperware to match the amount to perfection. It is one of my greatest gifts.
Johnny, the super in our building, eventually saved the day by taking off our front door, giving us a critical extra two inches. To put our door back on, he then charged us sixty dollars. I got upset with him for price gouging, but then I remembered that time he retrieved a hairball the size of a llama out of my shower drain and that reminded me that he should be given the Medal of Honor and be added to Mount Rushmore.
I mention all this only to explain that on the fateful night that the children arrived, I had been experiencing inappropriately strong protective and possessive impulses toward my chair. Ever since the chair was delivered several days earlier, I’d had trouble sharing it with even my husband. It seemed unwise to have something so fluffy and pristine touched by too many asses. What I once viewed as abominable—the plastic sofa cover—I now thought of as a brave and courageous choice made by grannies the world over. What a beautiful ancient practice!
So when the kids walked in and wanted to plant their butts on my chair, I felt a lot of resistance, but we’d also just returned from such a lovely evening toget
her. I had been so engrossed by our jaunt back to the apartment—they were so fun—that I’d barely even noticed New York City’s classic eau de parfum, a bouquet of rotting rat corpse melded with stale urine, which was constantly brewing on our corner.
Also, and most compelling of all, my husband was giving me his famous and highly effective death stare. The only thing that was missing was a red laser beam shooting out from each of his pupils. He could see it in my face, in my posture, that I didn’t want our niece and nephew to sit in my new chair, and he did not approve of that inclination.
Reluctantly, I gave the kids permission to sit down.
They sat for a moment—scooted around—but then they quickly became bored. Part of me was relieved that they exited the chair without defiling it while the other part of me was offended that they got over the revelatory seating so fast. I sat down in their stead while they returned to the living room rug, where they dismembered Mr. Potato Head.
We said goodnight and then my in-laws left.
* * *
The next day was my actual birthday. It is the one day out of the year that I have profoundly unreasonable expectations for how I should be treated. Logically, I believe it is a gift to be on this planet and we should all spend the day of our birth picking up litter, but something comes over me and I become a complete beast. I feel terrible for my loved ones. By evening, my husband is usually calling me the Birthday Maranster (Mara + monster = Maranster). I even get upset at inanimate objects. Red traffic lights piss me off. Do they not realize that on this day many years ago I came out my mother’s womb and therefore, in my presence, they should turn green?
I don’t know how I came to feel so entitled. The only thing my parents did for my birthday was let me choose what we were having for dinner. I always picked poached sole over steamed rice with a splash of Knorr instant hollandaise sauce. Besides that, it was business as usual.