The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

by Laurie Notaro

  And just to make sure that no guys try to slip in, the security factor of nudity will be strictly enforced in all female-only areas, as will pillow fighting and brushing each other’s hair.

  Hope you fellows have fun with your balls and putters.

  The Uhhhhhmazing Dr. Wells

  When I saw the infant black hair attempting to sprout on my chin, I have to admit I felt a little excited flip in my stomach.

  The time, I knew, was almost at hand. It was going to be nothing short of a massacre.

  Six weeks earlier, I had gone to see my dermatologist, Dr. Wells, after I had noticed a weird freckle on my arm and decided to get it checked out. While I was waiting for him in the examining room, I took a look at all the medical things on the walls—pictures of carcinomas and other kinds of skin cancers; diagrams of blackheads, regular old pimples, and boils; photos of acne, both before and after treatment. Then one poster caught my eye: it was an invitation to the wonderful world of laser hair removal, where traces of my Italian heritage and simian DNA could be eradicated with one pass of a concentrated light beam.

  I nearly gasped at the possibility and, from force of habit, touched my chin, which was almost always compulsively plucked, lest I ignore it for a week and allow my jawline to begin to resemble that of a Chinese emperor. I imagined it soft and whisker-free, never having to worry if a bristle had grown in overnight and flourished to its full three-inch potential, never having to attack a stubborn one with a wax strip enough times that it left me with a rug burn and the squatter hair still smack in the middle of it. I wanted the chin of a supermodel, or I wanted at least one of my chins to resemble a supermodel’s—it didn’t have to be all three of them.

  I remember when I found my first little piggy chin hair. I was sitting Mrs. Gaio’s senior-year high school English class, reading my part in Macbeth (I was ominously typecast as one of the witches), when I felt something pokey, yet flexible sticking out of my face, and I was so naïve and unspoiled that I actually thought it was a splinter. After class was over, I rushed to the bathroom to take a peek in the mirror and to my horror met the bane of my chin existence, which would taunt me for the next twenty-odd years. I was shocked when I saw that black sprout emerging from my skin. I actually recall my stomach becoming a cold pit of fear as I realized that the only explanation I could come up with was that I was a hermaphrodite, and that things would probably be getting much, much worse as other “parts” of me began to grow manly and I made the full transformation into a “shim.” For the rest of the day I wallowed in the sick feeling that at any moment my voice might change and my ovaries might drop, and I was terrified of what I might find when I took off my bra that night.

  See, because that is what happens when the fifth-grade PE teacher doesn’t give you all the details, just the pretty sales pitch, suggesting that having a menstrual cycle is like having a timeshare, and the rest of your life as a woman will be like a Dove commercial. Sure, the girls get the boilerplate lecture and filmstrip about how becoming a woman is so magical and beautiful and silky, when really, they should be telling you that your days of living maintenance-free are quickly drawing to a close and that in no time at all, you’ll be finding yourself clutching your abdomen in a Circle K in the dead of night with a churning uterus buying some super-absorbency tampons from a tweaker, having hot wax poured on places a gynecologist charges extra to go to, watching your boobs get flatter and longer, and waiting for your cookie to fall out, because yes, that can happen and I know because I asked. Give that thing enough of a workout and someday you’ll be in Africa, picking it up out of the dirt with a stick, knowing it isn’t a dream.

  But then again, maybe you can’t tell little girls things like that. Maybe you can’t have a filmstrip full of ladies with beards, gray pubic hair, and boobs that start to look like pita bread, and as a result of this willful ignorance, maybe believing you’re a hermaphrodite for a day is enough to terrorize anyone into understanding that a couple of goat hairs isn’t such a big deal and to stop crying. Because I can honestly say that if I found out as an eleven-year-old that things like Brazilian waxes and surgically trimming one’s labia would be not only done but societally encouraged in the not-so-distant future, chances are I would have lost the will to survive right then and there. I had enough problems just trying to remember to sit like a lady when wearing a skirt.

  So, while delighted that I held my open houses during the nineties when going the extra mile in landscaping your private yard meant having used a brand-new razor and not in the current times when having a bleached anus would be listed in the “plus” column in the dating pool, I still had the chin hair to contend with, and when I saw the posters up in Dr. Wells’s office, I nearly squealed like the little piggy whose chin I had. I had been far too sensitive and embarrassed to seek out a proprietor of such services on my own, but here it was, as good as being delivered to me on a surgical steel platter. When Dr. Wells’s nurse came in to take my medical history, I jumped on the chance.

  “I want laser hair removal. I know I’m here for the weird freckle, but I want laser hair removal instead. Can we do it? Can we do it today?” I asked frantically.

  “Well,” the nurse said, laughing, “it doesn’t really work like that. We do the procedure on-site, but we have a technician who comes in once a month to operate the technical aspects of it, though Dr. Wells actually does the lasering. And…we currently have a long waiting list. It fills up pretty quickly. Where were you thinking of having it done—legs, bikini, breasts, anu—”

  “God no!” I spat. “No. I have no desire for the physical attributes of a fetus. Besides, this property has been sold for quite a while, so I’m only interested in public areas, like my chin.”

  “Well, let’s take a look,” she said as she swung a bright light over and scanned my chin. “Hmmm. You pluck, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “In that case, it wouldn’t be successful until the hair is grown out and visible, so I would say you could do your first session in about three months, and you can’t pluck up until then.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding,” I moaned, knowing that the whole deal was off. “Forget it. I can’t do that. I’d come back in three months looking like ZZ Top. I’d rather let my roots grow out than my circus-lady beard. I knew it was too good to be true.”

  “Now, wait,” the nurse advised me. “You can’t pluck because Dr. Wells needs to see the follicle he’s zapping. But you can shave. That would eliminate the length of the hair and keep the follicle intact.”

  Well, that would be delightful, I thought to myself. My biggest dream come true. I get to look at the mirror every day and shave my face like a boy on the cusp of manhood. Oh, good, maybe I’ll get some pungent BO, contract athlete’s foot, and stick a poster of Pamela Anderson behind my bedroom door, too, just to round out the picture.

  “All right, I’ll try to resist the urge,” I pledged. “But I’m telling you, this is undiluted, professional-strength Italian body hair. I could weave baskets out of it.”

  And just then, a horrible, tragic thing happened.

  The door swung open and in stepped Dr. Wells. The charming, bewitching, engaging, alluring Dr. Wells.

  “Hello there, Miss Notaro!” he said as he swept into the room and cheerfully shook my hand.

  Now, I wouldn’t say that Dr. Wells was going to put Brad Pitt on the unemployment line, not at all. But I would say that with his friendly demeanor, his impeccable graying temples, and his twinkling, almost impish eyes, I could have developed a nice little crush on him. Not in a marriage-threatening, “How could you, I trusted you” sort of way, but in the same way you develop a crush on a nubile young starlet, insist on renting all the movies in which your crush appears, and when you’re moving, your wife finds a Premiere magazine cover with the huge pumpkin-head face of the crush on it behind a bench in your office. I mean that kind of crush.

  But I decided to suppress my potential and as of yet undeveloped infatuation-like feelin
gs for Dr. Wells, because he was my doctor, and that would be inappropriate, plus I would not be surprised at all if he had simply bands of hirsute women clamoring after him and his warm, sparkly white smile and flawless skin. And perfectly graying temples.

  Perfectly.

  In addition, I knew that should I become even the slightest bit enamored of Dr. Wells, I would do something stupid and clumsy in front of him, thus changing his opinion of me forever and never allowing him to see the gentle, quiet, sad beauty that existed within me, encased in a tomb of prickly black splinters of chin hair that I had promised not to pluck.

  So I made my appointment for the laser removal at the front desk after I paid for the checkup for the weird freckle, which turned out to be nothing but a weird freckle, and I waited.

  When I saw the inklings that the first new chinny chin chin hair had arrived, I have to admit, I felt the flush of excitement. The time was almost at hand. The plan was falling into place. So I waited three months, kept my razor in the shower hidden under a wash puff lest my husband see it, since I’m pretty damn near positive Kate Winslet doesn’t lather up and slide a blade across her face of questionable gender every day like a drag queen. By the time the three months was up and dots of tiny black sprouts had arrived on my chin en force, I entered the shower every morning looking like a Sharpie had attacked me during the night. My husband nicely refrained from pointing out that it was in my best interest as a werewolf to avoid full moons and crucifixes.

  Then, just as Dr. Wells’s business card that was held by a magnet to my refrigerator door told me, the day arrived for my laser hair-removal beautification to begin. I showed up on time, and the nurse took me back into a room that had a large stainless steel machine in it next to what looked like a dentist’s chair.

  Then the door opened and there he was, the curiously amazing Dr. Wells, who took one look at me with those magic man eyes and said, “Miss Notaro, how are you doing today?”

  I was already at a disadvantage, aware that when I’m in a reclining position looking up, my neck fat has a tendency to arrange itself in a singular, arching tube, much like the neck of a walrus or sea lion. Knowing I didn’t look my best, despite my meticulous application of newly purchased eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick, I attempted to deliver a demure smile to Dr. Wells, successfully refraining from being smitten at the same time.

  “Hmmmm, let’s take a look,” he said as he bent down and examined the area in question. “Oh, I’ll have no problem seeing those! I can see you’ve let them grow out for a while, so thank you!”

  If “a while” means less than the time between sunrise and sunset, then so be it, I thought to myself as I nodded. Apparently, I sprout hair faster than John Travolta after a long weekend trip to the “spa.”

  “Now I’m going to place these on your eyes to protect them from the laser, and I’m going to apply some conducting gel over the area,” he informed me, putting little yellow suntan-booth goggles on my face. “When I begin the procedure, it will feel like little pins, like acupuncture. Little pinches. After the laser pulses, you’ll feel a cooling sensation in the same spot. Are you ready?”

  Then someone spackled some very chilly gel basically everywhere from my eyes down, and I braced myself for the first pinch, because when medical professionals tell you that something is going to “pinch,” what they really mean is “This is going to feel like I made a shiv out of a rusty can and am going to ram it mercilessly into your kidney. So just relax.”

  I heard the whirr of the machine and braced myself for the pain of what I imagined would be like having a jumper cable touch my jaw, but surprisingly, it was relatively benign. It felt like a little, tiny jab with a pin, and I was amazed at how little it actually did hurt; right after the jab, I felt a very cold sensation. This whole laser thing was a breeze!

  “Miss Notaro,” I heard Dr. Wells say as gently as he could, “I know you are in here for the chin area, but I’m noticing substantial growth on the upper lip, and since we’re already in process, we might as well tackle that too.”

  I wanted to gasp I was so embarrassed. I mean, having a little chin growth is one thing, but I had no idea I had a goatee going on. And apparently it was not merely “going on” but was substantial. Not peach fuzz, not one or two stray hairs, but the foundation for a handlebar sort of extremity. With a little bit of wax and some sculpting, who knew what I was capable of? I could hire myself out to fire stations and simply stand on the banks of a flash flood, rescuing people who rushed by in the torrent with merely a toss of my head. And poor Dr. Wells, who I’m sure thought his one-thirty appointment was to laser a woman and not Burt Reynolds, had no idea that he was going to need a rideable lawn mower to tackle the effects of my hormones.

  Where is the miracle of spontaneous combustion when you need it? I thought to myself, and then suddenly, my breath was gone. Just gone. I was completely out of air, like something had quickly stolen it right out of me, like I was suffocating.

  “UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH,” I heard myself emit quite loudly as my lungs desperately and in a panic tried to suck in a breath.

  Oh my God, what was that? I asked myself.

  “UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH,” I heard myself gasp again. It was the same sound you’d expect to hear if, say, you’d been partaking of a Tootsie Pop and it unexpectedly became disengaged from its stick body, rolled down your throat like a bowling ball, and then got lodged there. Like a plug. The sound you would make if that happened was the precise sound I was making, minus the Tootsie.

  Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!

  The sound of the machine quickly stopped as Dr. Wells pulled off my yellow goggles.

  “Miss Notaro, are you all right?” he asked, seeming very concerned.

  “Well, I—that thing, I don’t know what it is because I can’t see it, but the cold thing is sucking the air out of my nose,” I replied, trying to explain, because it was. Every time that little vacuum thing got close to a nostril, it felt as if I was drowning and couldn’t get enough air.

  “That’s impossible,” the gentle doctor explained. “It’s blowing cold air out, not sucking air in. Are you in any pain?”

  “No, not at all, I’m fine,” I tried to reassure him. “I’m fine. You can keep going. I’ll try to hold my breath.”

  Then, as soon as the machine turned back on, I felt a pinprick, the cold, and “UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH,” I gasped involuntarily, deep and raspy, as the sensation I felt was remarkably similar to the one I felt when I was ten, wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, and would repeatedly run across our yard and attempt to do a front flip but like the spaz I was would land flat on my back with the wind knocked right out of my lungs on a pool raft I was using for a mat. I would lie there, gasping for breath, as my mother looked out the sliding glass doors, yelling, “You’re an idiot, you know! Gymnasts don’t have legs that touch in the middle!” and then I’d get up and run across the yard again toward the pool raft.

  “UUUUUUHHHHHHHH,” I heard myself bellow again, like a water buffalo calling for her calf.

  The machine shut off again.

  “Miss Notaro, I don’t want to continue if this is causing you discomfort,” Dr. Wells said frankly.

  This time I took the goggles off, trying very hard not to imagine myself with my facial hair poking up out of the shiny gel that was smeared all over my face like a glazed donut, gasping uncontrollably like a halfwit writhing on a river raft in the dirt and doing it all wearing tiny yellow goggles.

  “Really, I’m okay,” I said again. “Maybe it’s the shock of it being so cold that it’s just a reflex, but I am completely fine and we have a mustache to conquer. Please pay no attention to it. Please.”

  Honestly, I couldn’t believe that I was the only person in the history of mankind to act like I was getting strangled while being lasered for a biker mustache, but I knew all too well that now I was going to become “a story.” I was going to be the story that Dr. Wells would tell his wife when he got home that night, the story that the
machine technician would tell his co-workers and that the nurse would warn him of the afternoon of my next appointment. I was going to be remembered at this doctor’s office, and let me tell you, I’ve worked in a doctor’s office, they see a lot of people each day, and that includes a standard, expected percentage of nuts. The “stories” I remember from my doctor’s office days are the lady who called and said she couldn’t find her contact lens in her eye and was convinced it had worked its way out of the eye socket and lodged itself in her brain; the man who called and said he thought he had put eyedrops in his eyes, but it turned out to be Super Glue; and the man who entered the office dressed in a filthy sheet, a crown of ocotillo thorns and sandals, then raised his arms and declared that he was Saint Peter Christ, and I just might have believed part of his story had he not smelled quite so much like residual urine and tooth decay. That’s what you experience when you work at a doctor’s office; it just comes with the territory. So I know that if you’re remembered, that means that you were coloring so far outside the normal freak lines that you get placed in a special category, reserved for the…special. In fact, I knew that by the time I left the office, I was already going to have a name.

  The Heave Ho.

  The Pant-y Waste. H.R. Huff and Puff.

  I took the deepest breath I possibly could and held it.

  The machine began to whir again.

  “UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH.”

  “UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH.”

  “UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH.”

  Finally, when Dr. Wells turned off the machine for good and pronounced the session completed, he slapped both of his hands onto his legs and said, “Well, see you in six weeks, Miss Notaro.”

  Then he handed me a paper towel to wipe the gel off, got up, and left the room without looking at me once.