Susan Tully: "Hair Apparent"	Back to Students Page
Spring 2007 Mothers Who Write Reading

 

I remember exactly where I was when it happened.  Like the Kennedy Assassination or the Challenger Explosion, sometimes something so significant happens that it causes you to lose your innocence.  And the moment will forever define you.  It was nearly fifteen years ago and I was riding in a car traveling westbound on Indian School Road.  I had just had lunch with my boss and we were returning to the hospital where we worked.  A day like any other day.  Sun was shining.  I hadn’t a care in the world.  As my boss chatted away, I blithely ran my hand along my cheek, sated and dreamy inside the warm car.   And suddenly, there it was.  My body stiffened with alertness.  I seized on it.  It appalled me.  At first I thought it couldn’t be, that I had to be mistaken.  But as the realization sunk in, I knew I would never be the same.  I had just discovered a long, wiry, coarse whisker growing out of the center of my right cheek.  My inner alarm went undetected by my boss, as I frantically clawed at it desperately trying to remove the horrid twine sprouting forth from my formerly soft face.  Gahd!  I groped at it, attempting in vain to wind it around my finger and pluck it loose, yet I couldn’t get a secure grasp.  Its tenacity mocked me and in that instant I was transformed from an innocent girl in her early twenties who had it mildly goin’ on… to a crotchety, bearded old lady destined to frighten young children with her cackle and hunch back.  Oh the horror of that day.   But that one measly hair was merely a hint at things to come.  I stand here before you, some 15 years later, a very hairy woman.  Oh sure, it may be blonde hair, but it now sprouts forth from places and spaces I never dreamt possible.  That lone ropey whisker on my cheek has been joined by a gaggle of friends.  And I now sport a veritable forest of fur on my chin that assures me I could easily outgrow Justin Timberlake in a goatee contest.  (Should the opportunity ever arise).   I had just made peace with my goatee and the painful plucking ritual I must now endure, when I began to notice my manly mustache.  It had never occurred to me that in my lifetime as a woman, I’d need to consider my ‘stache.  Suddenly I was sporting catlike whiskers around my mouth that needed daily attention to be groomed into place.  Plucking those babies is agony, so I’ve had to resort to the vile sulfuric chemical depilatory known as Nair.  The first time I Naired myself, though, I stared at the seemingly vast expanse between my nose and my upper lip looking as conspicuous as Tom Selleck when he shaved his robust mustache for some cheeseball Lifetime movie that no one (except me) watched.  My bare lip looked baldly bizarre. Now however, Face Nairing has become a regular ritual for me.  Once a month, in a clandestine ceremony, I slather the stinking white potion over strategic areas of my face in a distinctive pattern… staring into the mirror, as Colonel Sanders stares back at me:  all thick white eyebrows, handlebar mustache and white goatee… But after that magical 8 minutes I am transformed back into a young-ish woman who can hold her smooth chin high as she mingles in polite society, smelling only vaguely of rotten eggs.             And yet my follicular foibles no longer end with my face.  Now my freakish forearms have grown hairier by the year to the extent that my manliness is now rivaled only by Popeye’s nemesis, Bluto.  I decided I have only two options:  either go with it --and have my forearms robustly tattooed with anchors and such, or simply shave them Bruce Willis bald.  I decided that my forearm hair had to Die Hard: With a Vengeance. I actually did try waxing them.  Once.  I’m not even sure I want to describe that process to you.  Schmearing myself with the piping hot, most visciously viscous goo known to man; then gluing those muslin strips to my skin only to rip them off with excruciating force while stifling my screams so as not to scare the children.  The results were miserable.  Not only was I left with huge amounts of patchy stubble all over my arms, I also had to contend with weeks’ worth of huge red itchy bumps and welts that looked like some dire dermatological disease, far more conspicuous than my hairy forearms ever were.   As I have grown more hairy with age, I have had plan for all contingencies.  For instance, now I carry tweezers on my keychain so I have them with me wherever I go.  And in the event that say, I am felled by a falling palette of shaving cream while shopping for bulk razors at Costco -- and tragically enter a coma-- I have designated a Plucking Proxy—a close girlfriend who has agreed to come to the hospital with her Tweezermans and prune my chin so that my husband, in his grief, won’t mistake the sleeping me for a hairy-faced man… or Justin Timberlake… or a billy goat.   And in the event that unruly hair starts to spring forth from yet another place I’d never expect to find it… and I have to start trimming my ears or my nose hair…  or if the day comes when I have to start shaving yet another body part…at least my husband assures me that…  he’s got my back.