When I'm Not Myself

by Deborah J. Wolf

  Macey coated Mel’s crotch with baby powder, then dipped the flat wooden stick, a tongue depressor, into the tub of purple wax and painted it on her pelvis, adjusting her legs and moving her body this way and that. Macey placed a long, thick white strip over the purple wax, told Mel to breathe in, and then out. They all leaned in, holding their breath in unison, when Macey ripped away the strip of paper. Mel winced, then relaxed, before she let out an audible growl.

  In her right hand, Macey proudly displayed the long white strip covered with the remnants of the purple wax and Mel’s thick, wiry dark pubic hair. “See!” She smiled proudly holding it up like a trophy.

  “Oh, my God, Mel, you have got to be kidding,” Leah said. “OH. MY. GOD. What in God’s name prompted you to try this heinous act of self-inflicted pain? Lord, that’s gotta hurt.” Leah was breathless. “I swear to God you have got to be insane.”

  “Oh, sweetie, that was nothing.” Macey laughed. “We’re just getting started.”

  The torture went on for another seven or eight minutes, this ritual of hot purple wax followed by thick strips that, with some effort, left Mel smooth and hairless. Occasionally Macey reached for her tweezers, bent in close to Mel’s crotch, and plucked a stubborn errant hair that she couldn’t seem to get with the wax. Macey moved Mel back and forth spreading her legs open, then closed, all the while talking her ear off. Macey knew Mel’s history; she’d heard all of her stories. They were comfortable in each other’s presence, perfectly at home with each other. Mel’s lifetime friends listened in as if they were eavesdropping, learning new things about their friend.

  Macey proclaimed victory on Mel’s manicured front side, her bush neat, tidy and compact. Cara, Leah, and Paige circled the area like vultures preying on their lunch. They cocked their heads in close until Mel lifted her pelvis and thrust it at them.

  “It looks like a Frito,” Leah proclaimed. “A scoop, actually. One of those Fritos Scoops that you could just pick up and dip something with. Who would have guessed that Mel’s crotch could look exactly like a snack food?”

  “What do you think, Car? Nice, huh?” Mel asked proudly, ignoring Leah’s comment and glancing down at her crotch, admiring Macey’s work.

  “Okay, ladies, step back. We’re far from done. C’mon, Mel. Flip,” Macey commanded. Mel rolled over, climbed up on her elbows and knees, doggy-style, her butt in the air, and only inches from Leah’s face.

  “Good Lord, Melanie,” Leah muttered. “What the hell are you doing now?”

  “What?” Mel glanced backward at the room. “I told you if you’re going to do this, you gotta go all the way.”

  “How much hair have you got back there, Mel? Is this really necessary?”

  “Have you ever seen what’s between your ass, Leah?”

  “I can assure you that I have not. But I can also tell you, from this vantage point, that Macey’s got her hands plenty full. Thanks for the flash.”

  “You’re welcome,” Mel answered her. “This is full Brazilian. Can’t wear a string bikini without it.”

  “The possibility that I might actually, at any point in time in the remainder of my life, wear a string bikini—or, for that matter, any kind of bikini at all—is absurd,” Cara said and shook with laughter. “What, exactly, is the purpose of this, Mel? For me, I mean? No one got this close to this part of my body when I was married. Who, in God’s name, am I trying to fool now? This is ridiculous.”

  Mel gripped the sides of the table as Macey ripped another strip from underneath her backside. Her body convulsed, then released and relaxed. “You never know, Cara,” Mel said. “You just never know.”

  “Okay, girlie,” Macey said finally, “you’re finished.”

  She sprinkled some baby powder on the areas she’d just waxed and Mel hopped off the table and stood in front of the three of them, long muscular legs, narrow hips. They formed a semicircle around her like football players in a huddle and stared at the work. Paige cocked her head to the side as if she had never seen anything like it and studied the area carefully. Finally, absently, she reached out to dare touch the tender skin that had turned an angry pink from the treatment but stopped short of actually making contact.

  “It’s just a masterpiece, isn’t it?” Mel held up her arms in victory.

  Cara crinkled her brow and shook her head as if she was trying to talk herself out of it one last time before she finally said, “What the hell do I have to lose? Okay, I’m game.” She unbuttoned and unzipped the condemned jeans and flung them carelessly on the one chair—empty and abandoned—in the corner of the room. When she turned around to whip off her panties, Mel was staring at her crotch. Speechless.

  “God, Cara. Je-sus.”

  “What?” Cara turned quickly, self-consciously. She looked herself over and studied her midsection in the mirror, running her hands over her belly. Immediately she felt unveiled, on display. “Now what’s wrong?”

  “Those, those . . . God, those underPANTS.” Mel tsk-tsked, shaking her head, her arms crossed over her chest. The crease in her forehead deepened and she rocked with dismay. She had seen underpants like those before, cotton briefs that rode across the hips and cut the stomach in half. She just didn’t expect to find them on her best friend. Honestly, the woman had lost all sense of anything sexy, romantic, even fashionable and efficient. No wonder she suffered from visible panty lines. No wonder her asshole husband had switched her out for a younger version. Mel had set eyes on Barbie only once, but she imagined the woman did not own a pair of underPANTS.

  For a minute the room was quiet, save the hum of the small fan in the corner that rotated.

  Cara stood with her hands on her hips. “What?”

  Leah, Paige, even Macey all stood staring at her, trying, without success, to hide their laughter.

  Leah cracked first. A snort escaped her, unanticipated and obnoxious, and forced her to catch her breath. She covered her mouth with her hand and turned her back to them, her wide shoulders shook up and down with laughter.

  Paige tried to suppress a giggle, but it finally caught her in tiny bubbly hiccups until she was doubled over. She apologized once, then twice and finally a third time. “I’m so sorry, Cara, I don’t know what came over me . . .”

  “Fine.” Cara ripped off the panties and flung them slingshot style at Mel. Mel ducked and they landed in the corner, forlorn, turned inside out. “Just fine. Friends? You people say you are my friends? Uh-huh. We’ll see. Make fun of my panties, will you? I’ll show you.”

  “UnderPANTS!” they all cried in unison, while Cara hiked herself up on the table.

  “C’mere, Cara. Just ignore them.” Macey’s soothing voice guided her to lie on the table while she adjusted the overhead light so it shined on Cara’s crotch. The snickering finally started to die down but Mel went on about lecturing her.

  “You can’t wear low-cut jeans with those, those high-waisted, ladies underpants. You just can’t, Cara. My grandmother used to wear those things. I’m adding a trip to Victoria’s Secret, too. God, pathetic. Just pathetic. What size are they? XXL? Honestly! They’ve lost their elastic, as if that was a selling point in the first place. They practically hang down to your knees and they sag.” Melanie picked up the cursed underpants from the pile they lay in, holding them up for everyone in the room to see. “For sweet sake, Cara, you are a fortysomething single woman and you are walking around in those underpants. You simply can’t be afraid to spend a little money on yourself. You deserve it, Cara. You can treat yourself to something that might actually make you feel just a smidge sexier.”

  “I told you, Mel, I can’t wear those damn jeans. Period. So it won’t matter, anyway. But fine, you want to buy me some slutty little black piece of butt floss that is supposed to do the job those hardworking panties do, well that’s just fine. Worthless, but fine.”

  “Okay, Cara,” Macey interrupted. “You ready to do this?”

  “Macey, you see the unbelievable support I’m getting from my so-calle
d friends? I don’t know how more ready I could get. Could I get some of those gumballs?”

  “Oh, sorry, of course.” Macey handed her the canister and Cara took two, chomping on them until the sugar seeped into her teeth and ran down the back of her throat. She reclined on the table, her head supported by a thick, stiff pillow, and sighed deeply. She didn’t know what she had gotten herself into now. What in the world was she doing here? She looked from one friend to another, poised and waiting on her.

  “Melanie, come over here and make yourself useful. I need something to hold on to,” Cara ordered and Mel appeared at the end of the table, quite near Cara’s right ear and lent her hands. Cara gripped them tightly, her palms sweaty. Upside down, she glared at Melanie in jest.

  “Okay, Cara, ready? Deep breath in and let it out, and . . .”

  “HOLY SHIT!”

  “OH.”

  “MY.”

  “GOD.”

  Cara took a deep breath, her toes curling at the other end of the table. She let out the breath slowly, counting in her head and waiting for the sharp pain to subside.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” she repeated over and over again, panting, then laughing hysterically as if gripped by a bad case of the giggles, as if she had taken her first hit of pot, her first swig of a beer. “You have got to be kidding. Come on, Mel, you have got to be kidding me.”

  “Bravo,” Mel exclaimed. “Excellent! That was the worst part, Cara, trust me, it gets better from here.”

  “Good, Cara, good. I know how much that hurts, but way to go,” Macey encouraged.

  “Better? It gets better from here? You people are insane. You must be fucking kidding me. You do this for pleasure, Mel? Good Lord that hurt.” Before Macey could get another layer of purple wax on her, she sat up and examined the area that Macey just ripped the strip from. Little red bumps stood out against a patch of hairless skin as if someone had taken a lawn mower and run through the first section of a yard.

  Leah and Paige moved in. Cara turned on her right hip so they could get a better look, proud all at once of her accomplishment. They nodded their agreement; suddenly Cara felt a surge of independence, the feeling of having accomplished something she never thought she would have done. As silly as it sounded, it gave her a feeling of power, of truly conquering something.

  Leah took one step back, crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head in disbelief. “No way you’ll get me up there. Don’t even ask,” Leah assured Mel, just in case she was considering encouraging her to climb up on the table next.

  “What do you do now, Leah? You know, to take care of the area down there?” Macey asked her curiously, the tongue depressor with purple wax poised in her hand ready to go at Cara again.

  Cara settled back on the table and took Mel’s hands again, gripped them even more tightly this time.

  “I shave. Same thing I’ve done all my life. Seems to be working just fine for me.”

  Macey refocused her attention on the mission at hand, but Mel shook her head back and forth, annoyed. “It’s so archaic, Leah. Every day, you gotta shave that. And what do you do underneath? How do you get all that?”

  “First of all, Melanie, there is no reason I have to shave every day. And for your information, I don’t. And furthermore, I don’t worry about what’s under there, if you must know. It doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue for me.”

  “But what about the beach, the pool? You’re always at the club. What do you do at the club?”

  “I don’t give a crap. If anyone is staring at that part of this body for that long, well something’s just really wrong about that, that’s all I gotta say. It just doesn’t happen that way anymore,” Leah answered her firmly, dismissing her immediately. “And before you go asking me about my feet, I don’t get a pedicure in the winter, either.”

  Macey gave Cara no warning for the next rip; she went at it with a vengeance. Cara took turns alternating between holding her breath and clenching her teeth just before she anticipated Macey would pull off the next strip. Finally, Macey proclaimed her done on the front by saying, “I don’t know, Mel, maybe we just ought to go with the bikini wax this time and break her in slowly. A Brazilian might be a little over-the-top for her first visit.”

  “What? What do you mean?” Cara asked, a high pitch escaping the back of her throat somewhere. “Not do the back?”

  Macey rested her hand on Cara’s shoulder and rubbed it back and forth gently. “You’re a total trooper, Cara, you’ve done really well this time, but . . .”

  “But nothing. I’m doing this. The whole thing. I’ve come this far; you can’t just leave me hanging here. Besides, it’s not that bad,” she reasoned, shaking her head. Instantly she flipped over, butt up in the air.

  “You heard her, Macey, have at it,” Mel said, pride seeping into her voice. She might not be able to convince Leah or Paige, but she’d gotten to Cara. The transformation had begun.

  Poised on her hands and knees, Cara’s butt was eye level with everyone in the room. Macey said from behind, “Okay, Cara, you gotta arch your back a little more.”

  Cara followed Macey’s instructions and curved her back like a frightened cat.

  “No, not that way, the other way. Drop your chest toward the table and really stick it out there, Cara.”

  “Good God,” Cara said to Mel, shaking her head. “Honestly.”

  Mel smiled; satisfied.

  The San Francisco Centre was hot and crowded. In Victoria’s Secret, Mel convinced Cara to purchase eight pairs of thong underwear in enough colors to light up her lingerie drawer: purple, lime green, red, white with little cherries, two black, and two beige. On Nordstrom’s fifth floor Mel insisted Cara try on a pair of Seven jeans.

  “ ‘Jeans for all Mankind,’ ” Cara whined, reading the label on the pants. “All mankind except this one. It’s the cruelest tagline I’ve ever heard. It’s like, If these don’t fit you, baby, there ain’t no hope.”

  Cara rested her weight on one hip while Mel pulled pair after pair of jeans off the rack and held them up to her friend’s waist. She put a few back, then literally dragged Cara along the rack until she found what she was looking for. She wouldn’t risk Cara’s escape; Mel was determined.

  “What size are you these days, anyway, Cara?”

  “I don’t know. Eight, maybe,” Cara answered her. “But it’s in all the wrong places, though, Mel. I’m telling you. Don’t expect any of these to fit me like the way you think they’re supposed to.”

  Mel put up a hand to silence her, and grabbed one more, an indigo pair. In all, they had a dozen pair, the hangers tangled and dangling from Mel’s left arm. A sales associate met them halfway to the dressing room and unloaded the haul in one swift swoop.

  “Put us in the bigger room in the back,” Mel said to the woman, smiling.

  Cara whipped off the condemned jeans, the underpants right behind them. She reached in the small pink shopping bag from Victoria’s Secret and pulled out the red thong underwear Mel had convinced her to buy, despite her loud protests. She yanked off the tags with one swift pull and, just before she was about to put them on, stopped when she heard Mel say, “Ladies, I ask you, is that not a work of art?”

  Mel motioned toward Cara’s crotch until she stopped and modeled her new wax, the area still raw and pink, but perfectly shaped, perfect in every way. They were all crowded into the dressing room, Paige huddled on the little chair and Leah on the floor. No one dared miss the modeling of the new jeans, they were all curious to play witness to the next stage in Cara’s transformation.

  “Don’t worry, Cara, you’re always a little sensitive the first day, but by tomorrow, you aren’t going to believe how great it looks. And how great it feels.”

  Through the mirror they all stared at her. “It does look great, doesn’t it? Okay, Mel, you win. It wasn’t that bad and I feel like a whole new woman.” Cara pulled on the thong underwear, adjusting the thin G-string backward and forward, yanking at
it until she could find a way to make it work. She circled the dressing room as if something was creeping up her ass because, as it happened there was. “Oh, shit, these things are so uncomfortable I can hardly stand it.”

  Mel ignored her and answered her smugly. “Now, put on those jeans so I can gloat a little more, would you? I swear, Cara, one of these days you are going to learn to trust me. One of these days.”

  Cara chose the last pair of jeans that Mel had picked up. On the hanger they looked shameless, but the material was soft and inviting. Cara put them on, sliding in her right foot first, then her left, and pulling them up.

  “They feel all wrong,” she said when they stopped just above her hip bones, nearly five inches below her navel. But they looked fabulous. Not just good, but great, in every sense of the word. She buttoned, then zipped them easily and stood as far back from the mirror as she could get. She couldn’t believe they fit. Oh, sure, they were long—much, much too long; they would need to be hemmed before she could wear them, but by God, they fit!

  “Whoa, baby, stand back.” Leah whistled.

  Mel shook her head in a when-will-you-start-believing-me, I-told-you-so sort of way. She forced Cara to turn around twice, then bend over, and then bend down. She told her to put on the slim fitted T-shirt that barely covered her midsection and a new belt that she had chosen and watched as Cara studied herself in the mirror.

  “I don’t know, Mel, I just don’t know if I can pull it off.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know if you can pull it off? Are you crazy? You look fantastic. Jesus, Cara, look at yourself.”

  It took Cara a few minutes to become familiar with her own image in the mirror as if she was studying someone she didn’t know, someone she was just meeting for the first time. She didn’t feel anything like herself; she wondered who she was pretending to be. But then something happened. Most definitely, something happened. Some sort of something took over and lent her a bit of the confidence she’d lost, the confidence that left the day Jack packed his bags and moved out. Some part of her—a part that he’d left stranded the day she watched him back the car out and pull away—began to ease its way back into her soul, into her body. She stood in front of the mirror with her hands buried in the back pockets of the jeans, barefoot and cracking her toes on the worn carpet in the dressing room. She couldn’t believe the reflection, the person she had become. She wondered where the woman she was had gone, where she was hiding.