forty million sniper eyes were laser-focused on my legs. Even the slightest pupil flicker bound in my direction caught my attention. The embarrassment was vaguely equivalent to having toilet paper hanging from your shoe, but not really. You can’t shake off leg hair. I know; I’ve tried that, too.
So I locked the door to my bedroom and pulled out the lint-remover contraption. I flipped on the switch. It started buzzing. I lowered it to my calf, feeling equal measures of shame for having hair and for buzzing it off with a machine. I cringed as it made calf contact, expecting excruciating pain. But it really only tickled, asserting itself as a machine manipulated for the wrong purpose.
Hair was not lint. I needed a plan B.
I couldn’t steal a razor from my mom, like my girlfriends could from theirs, because she didn’t have any. Although my father used blue Bic disposables for his cheeks, the commercials made it quite clear that legs needed pink.
After a week of wearing pants, I finally got the gall to ask my mom about shaving.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
To leave her ranks, I’d be a traitor. She’d be out a hairy compatriot. Me, her only daughter—her own flesh and blood—straying from the path.
But. I. Couldn’t. Not. Do. It.
I nodded.
Mom bought me a disposable pink razor and some shaving cream and accompanied me to the master bathroom. She handed me the equipment and sat on the toilet seat, expectantly, as I planted my foot on the edge of the bathtub.
“Now what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess you just slide it up your leg.”
“You think that’s all you have to do?”
“Try it,” she said.
Clearly, she was clueless.
“Like this?” I said, moving the razor over my shin.
The razor left an empty path in its wake. Look, Ma—no hair!
I could now return to the schoolyard and show April my shiny, glamorous new gams.
By sophomore year, I was finally getting on track. Much to my pleasure, my pubes had sprouted. I’d look at them in the shower and think, I made those! I remained in hair heaven for two entire anxiety-free years. If I’d have known that they’d be the only two years of relative hair peace I’d ever experience, I would have taken time to appreciate them more, maybe made a documentary. I was riding high, experiencing my first boyfriends. I discovered that boy pubes looked a lot like girl pubes.
Did I mention that I had pubes? I had pubes! We all had pubes!
But then, all of a sudden—late in my junior year of high school—an assemblage of keratin and protein had conspired beneath my skin to march out of a large number of tiny holes. And not just holes hidden where no one could see them. They were on my upper lip!
I’d noticed these little hairs on my upper lip before, but I’d ignored them—they were little blond wispy nothings. But now they were getting a little darker and a bit longer. If I caught myself in the right light in my bedroom, I could see a vague resemblance to Tom Selleck.
How in the fucking shitball motherfucking hell did I get a mustache?
Only males had mustaches. I was not a male. Or was I?
I remembered that my mom had this stuff called Jolen, in a small turquoise box with white lettering. When I was younger, I used to watch her work its magic. She would mix some powder with cream. The substance would get fluffy and bubbly—the astringent compound burning our nostrils. She would spread the yogurt-like goop on her upper lip and wait ten or so minutes before washing it off. Underneath the bleach, the hair would get so light that it was practically invisible.
At the time, I wasn’t able to see the apparent hypocrisy. If my mom was so liberal and wanted to stay “all natural,” then why would she lighten her upper-lip hair?
That was a question I would be able to ask only later.
For now, I took that turquoise box from her cabinet. I decided that news of my mustache would be known only to my closest friends, Shannon and Natasha—one a blond Caucasian and the other Cambodian, both of whom grew very fine and small amounts of hair (and the latter of whom is so hairless that waxers, over the years, have often felt guilty charging her full price for any one service; looking back, I should have had a hairy Italian girlfriend or two).
Shannon and Natasha bleached with me. With the white goop swabbed thickly on our upper lips, we looked like we were starring in a road production of “Got Milk?” We turned it into a ritual. While the bleach did its work—tingling and then slowly building up to a stinging sensation—we turned off all the lights so that my bug-shaped glow-in-the-dark stickers would burn green, and sat in a circle, singing aloud to the Cranberries.
In your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie …
After I washed off the mixture, I felt relieved.
That hair, as far as I was concerned, became invisible. I just had to keep up the ritual every two to three weeks.
I was all set.
Until I met Gustavo.
How many people had noticed my “blond mustache” and didn’t tell me? I tried to recall different boyfriends and situations. I’d kissed plenty of boys by then. Had they gotten mustache burn from my face? Is that why Sam didn’t ask me on that second date? Or Jonathan? Or Bill? Is that why that cashier at Vons, the grocery store, was looking at me strangely when I bought razors for my legs? How did I not realize that with my olive skin tone, bleaching my hairs until they were practically white might create a situation on my face?
Gustavo was the first man to ever mention my body hair, but I had collected enough data to make me pretty sure that men were, as a gender, opposed to it.
A few years before, I was listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew talking to this complete jerk on the radio show Loveline. The caller was complaining about his girlfriend’s nipple hair. He said he found it nasty and couldn’t get turned on when he saw the little strands. He was thinking of breaking up with her. I was shocked to learn that women got nipple hair—and thrilled to check and discover that I’d been mercifully spared that fate—but now, three years later, as I stood in horror after spotting my very own first nipple hair, I knew I faced certain rejection from any man who encountered this new deformity.
I was beginning to understand that there was a very small window of what was “acceptable” and I had ventured beyond it. It wasn’t long after the Gustavo Fiasco that I noticed, while staring down at my bikini area, that my pubic hair had been marching, steadily and without heed, down my legs as if it could practice homesteader rights on the rest of my body.
I was now nineteen years old, and it was time for my first visit to a bikini waxer, whom I came to think of
