Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  No, I had to remove hair for basic schoolyard survival, or risk permanent exile to the farthest reaches of the lunch area. I dreaded the idea of being called “gross” again. During that time of major pubescent shifts, April made it her job to strain out confusion—a self-appointed quality-control officer on the San Marcos Junior High School playground, barking at any girl who failed to maintain her proper place on the feminine side of the distinct gender line.

  That meant no leg hair, ladies.

  For the remaining hours of that school day it had felt like forty million sniper eyes were laser-focused on my legs. Even the slightest pupil flicker bound in my direction caught my attention. The embarrassment was vaguely equivalent to having toilet paper hanging from your shoe, but not really. You can’t shake off leg hair. I know; I’ve tried that, too.

  So I locked the door to my bedroom and pulled out the lint-remover contraption. I flipped on the switch. It started buzzing. I lowered it to my calf, feeling equal measures of shame for having hair and for buzzing it off with a machine. I cringed as it made calf contact, expecting excruciating pain. But it really only tickled, asserting itself as a machine manipulated for the wrong purpose.

  Hair was not lint. I needed a plan B.

  I couldn’t steal a razor from my mom, like my girlfriends could from theirs, because she didn’t have any. Although my father used blue Bic disposables for his cheeks, the commercials made it quite clear that legs needed pink.

  After a week of wearing pants, I finally got the gall to ask my mom about shaving.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  To leave her ranks, I’d be a traitor. She’d be out a hairy compatriot. Me, her only daughter—her own flesh and blood—straying from the path.

  But. I. Couldn’t. Not. Do. It.

  I nodded.

  Mom bought me a disposable pink razor and some shaving cream and accompanied me to the master bathroom. She handed me the equipment and sat on the toilet seat, expectantly, as I planted my foot on the edge of the bathtub.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess you just slide it up your leg.”

  “You think that’s all you have to do?”

  “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.

&
nbsp; 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 just had to rub it between my palms to heat up the wax and then I could rip out my hair myself. The problem was that I had issues with getting all the excess wax off, so by the end of the day, I’d end up with an accumulation of colorful fuzz and lint that made wherever I waxed look like my skin was growing patches of sweatshirt.

  When I went to Spain for my year abroad as a college junior, I got my legs waxed while being strapped vertically to a wall with a leather belt. I felt a bit vulnerable, but I didn’t question it as long as the wax did its job.

  I went to India in 2003, the year I finished undergrad, to work at a newspaper, and got my entire face threaded. I said I wanted only the upper lip and eyebrows done, but Smita just kept going. She touched my cheeks and said, “Face?” I shrugged. She took that as a signal to wind up her thread and tear out all the fuzz from my cheeks, chin, and jowls.

  Paid professionals were always trying to get rid of more and more of my hair. It happened again when I went to a bikini-waxing joint in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a few years later. I just wanted a little off the sides, as the bush had been growing out for quite a while. When the waxer saw me—saw that part of me—she looked into my eyes with a fortune-teller’s boldness and shook her finger back and forth.

  “The man does not like dis,” she said. She put her fingers toward her tongue, pretending to pinch out hairs. “Plaaaa plaaaa,” she said. Then she got all dramatic and faked a male choking episode. She slathered on the hot wax and said calmly, “Very good dat you are here.”

  When we were done, she unzipped her pants to show me her bald pussy. “Look at it,” she said. “Look. No hair.” Then she tried to convince me to sign up for laser. “Plaa plaa,” she explained again as she zipped up her pants. “They do not like dat.”

  The only thing I really came to enjoy about hair removal was the inevitable ingrown. There is nothing—and I mean it, nothing—more fundamentally satisfying than extracting a hair that’s been growing in the wrong direction. Period. Call it my nurturing side.

  * * *

  Little did I know the worst was yet to come. What happened next made me yearn for the days when a blond mustache was my only problem.

  I was twenty-three. I was about to start a one-year journalism master’s program at Columbia and was getting a facial at Mario Badescu Skin Care salon on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan. Everything was going well until the buxom Russian woman examining my face with a bright light rubbed my chin.

  “You zchuld git reed of dis,” she said.

  How did she see them? I thought I was the only person who knew.

  She busted my years of self-denial. Toppled them. Crushed them into tiny shards. It’s like when you have a big red volcanic pimple and you just convince yourself that you’re making it out to be a much bigger deal than it actually is and most likely no one notices it, but then some friend says, “Ouch, that looks like it must hurt.” And they are pointing at your big red volcanic pimple that no one is actually supposed to be able to see, so you say, “What must hurt?” and they say, “Your big red volcanic pimple.” And you cover your face with one hand and say, “Oh, you can see that?” And they say, “Well, it is a big red volcanic pimple.”

  So it was true. I had chin hairs that people could actually see. They were real. Like, actually there.

  Hairs growing out of my chin!

  I mean, I knew about them, of course, but I also didn’t. I believe my inability to recognize them as an entity—as a growing, living, real part of my body—stemmed from my self-preservation instinct. I’d even plucked them before, but I’d managed to convince myself immediately afterward that I hadn’t. My chin was smooth, dammit!

  But now the jig was up. I started scanning my chin every morning for one of those evil hairs to reappear. I began carrying tweezers and a mirror in my purse.

  I told no one of this new calamity. At least when I discovered my upper-lip hair, I knew that other women shared my shame. Upper-lip waxes were offered at salons. I’d never seen a chin wax mentioned anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask anyone about it, in case they told me they’d never heard of such a heinous thing.

  I started having these disturbing fantasies that totally freaked me out: I have a mental break and go to a loony bin, but there’s no one there to pluck me. When I envision Insane Mara, I’m more embarrassed about the stray hairs than I am about the fact that I’ve completely lost my mind and am trying to make love to a trash can.

  Or what about when I’m old? Old Mara’s hands are going to be so shaky from all the meds and her eyesight will be deficient, so there’s no way she’s going to be able to pluck with any kind of proficiency.

  Or maybe Old Mara has Alzheimer’s and her grandkids will come visit as she stares at a wall and thumbs the hem on her shirt. “Is Grandma a he or a she?” they’ll say. I’m more embarrassed for Alzheimer Mara’s hair than for the fact that she thinks her nephew is her husband.

  Or I get run over by a car on some New York street and I’m in a coma. My family rushes to Coma Mara’s bedside and they look at one another in shock, not because of my medical status, but because they realize I’m different from what they thought I was. “Oh my!” Mom says. “Did any of you know Mara had a goatee?”

  I knew that there were many more important issues going on in the world and that my worrying about such an insignificant bodily matter was selfish and maybe even bordering on narcissistic, but I couldn’t help my feelings. I was irrational. Global warming was spawning under my skin. Genocide was happening on my face.

  I finally had to talk to someone about it, and it was during my winter break from Columbia that it finally burst forth.

  “Mom, I’ve got chin hair!”

  “But I don’t see it.”

  “It’s there,” I said.

  She came in closer.

  “Don’t come too close!”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause then you’ll see it!”

  She blamed it on my dad’s side of the family and never spoke of it again.

  I continued to pluck my way through my master’s program, and from then on kept my chin hairs to myself. But in the midst of all this, I began dating a guy. We were fooling around—nuzzling, hugging—one day in Central Park. Tenderly, he put his hand on my face. “I love the fuzz on your
face,” he said. “It’s so soft.” He then made a downward stroking motion from my cheek all the way to my chin. That moment may have seemed romantic to him, but it was the closest I’d ever come to shitting myself besides that one time I had dysentery and was stuck on a twelve-hour bus ride from Dharamsala to Delhi. I turned in the other direction as quickly as possible and encouraged him to fondle my hoodie.

  I would never put myself in that position again:

  Natural sunlight.

  Bare face.

  Man at close range.

  * * *

  After attending grad school, I moved to Bangkok for a job as a features writer at a Thai newspaper.

  In retrospect, not the best idea in the world for a hairy Western five-footer with budding self-esteem issues.

  Thai people, as it turns out, aren’t hairy. They don’t have any hair except on their heads. They seemed like magical people to me with all their hairlessness, like they lived in some kind of fairy-tale world. I kept looking for hair, scanning crowds for it to reassure myself that I was normal. Maybe I was overreacting—at this point I’m pretty sure I had some form of body-hair dysmorphic disorder—but I often felt like if I stopped plucking, I’d be able to grow more impressive facial hair than most Thai men. That thought made me feel so unsexy that it’s hard to properly explain.

  That’s when I decided to try “permanent reduction” methods for the first time. It was 2005 when I finally signed up for laser. Once a month, I would go to a Bangkok hospital called, I swear, Bumrungrad. I’d lie on a gurney in a brightly lit room. All blank white walls, slightly yellowed by time. A doctor would come in with gloves, goggles, and a mask on over his face. A nurse would cover my eyes with darkened goggles and swab jelly on my skin. The doctor would then spend about ten minutes zapping my face with something that looked like the suction side of a Hoover. I had to fold my tongue over my upper front teeth so that when they did my upper lip, I wouldn’t feel the pain of the laser reaching my gums or whiff the slight smell of melting enamel. After, they’d give me icepacks for my red face, which emitted so much heat that my cheek, if placed on a woman’s abdomen, could probably help relieve menstrual cramps.