“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 as an aggressive border control agent, getting rid of undocumented pubic immigrants. When she entered with the wax strips, I smiled awkwardly and asked the question that I’d be asking for the rest of my life in any and every hair-removal situation.
“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 hairy 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 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 at fifteen. 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 aren’t as happy as they sound.
By the age of twenty, 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 didn’t look any different from leg hair, which is 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 my torso over my legs in yoga, and then I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from staring at it.
For the crotch, news of the Brazilian style—going completely bare—that would soon sweep the USA had not yet reached my ears. I still thought it was normal to keep all the pubic hair except for the bits that peeked out from my bathing suit. 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—prewaxed plastic in a rectangular shape. I