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.