by Mara Altman
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 take it off. 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.”
We talked a bit more, but it was that answer that really blew me away, though I wasn’t able to see the repercussions of that conversation until I was back in New York.
For the moment, I just thought it completely coincidental that on that evening, alone in my hotel room, I decided to shave off all the hair I’d grown for the past two months.
***
Last night — 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 13,300 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-machine 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, he was searching for errant follicles on my face.
Slowly, 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 in 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.
the end
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