Hair

It's bad to sit across the table from Mom in a restaurant, because while waiting for our food I happen to be in her line of sight and thus an easy targer for her random thoughts.

Yesterday at Perkins she told me about an apparently wondrous cream to put on your arms to make the hair lighter or finer or something. (I've heard of "shave minimizing" lotion for your legs and actually have some. I don't know how well it works because I don't think I remember to use it regularly enough, but at the very least it moisturizes and smells good.) She says I need it. She says her friend Karen uses it. She says her hair has always been light and so it's not a big deal, the implication being that I'm not so lucky.

I try to get her to tell me why hair is so bad in the first place. I barely succumb to leg-shaving myself. I think it's stupid, but I lack the necessary conviction to buck the trend and not shave; my compromise is to engage my powerful forces of apathy and shave sporadically. Mom thought I was saying I didn't shave my legs anymore. I wanted to yell, "I was arguing abstractly!" but actually said, "I shaved yesterday." She is satisfied by the answer and doesn't seem to notice my belligerence towards the whole topic.

"Sharon didn't for a while," she says. Sharon is her little sister. She's also done other things of which my mother does not approve, like join the Army, marry an African American--still referred to as "Negro" in my family--have kids with him, and try LSD. She's easily my favorite on that side of the family, but not for any of those reasons. "And believe me, Holly, it was gross." I don't believe her. "Then she got real picky about it, and was about her girls too. They had to shave their arms."

The idea of shaving one's arms is bizarre, but apparently happened all the time, before the wondrous cream. Mom introduced the notion by saying some girl she'd grown up with did it. She didn't like that, "Then it grows in all coarse like a beard." (No kidding, Mom. Like the hair on my legs. All prickly.) She assured me repeatedly that she wouldn't ask me to do that. I'd already refused. She said she didn't believe in it. I found that even more confusing. People believe in God, equality, socialism, the death penalty, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, but believing in THE PROPER METHOD FOR ARM HAIR REMOVAL?

My arms aren't even that hairy! Even if they were, I probably wouldn't care. I am irrationally angry at the very idea, even without shaving.

I watched Jenn nonchalantly get her eyebrows waxed once. (Waxing, naturally, also seems insane to me--as does most of the other masochism females practice in the name of beauty.) I couldn't completely hide my incredulity at the whole process. I've had my eyebrowns plucked, once. Erin did it, for Katie's wedding. I put my glasses back on, with the frames that sit in front of my eyebrows, and didn't notice any difference. But Erin and Jenn, who were preening me that day, were happy.

Watching Jenn and talking about this stuff, she told me I should have mine waxed. I laughed, humorlessly. She said my eyebrows really bother Erin. I almost laughed at that, but it made me mad, too. Erin has nothing better to do than think about my eyebrows? I'm not the girlie-girl she is, with the pencil-thin eyebrows and all that time spent on hair and makeup even though it doesn't cause any great change in her appearance. And I'm the crazy one? Besides, I think Jenn was saying that my eyebrows bother her, anyway, and just blaming it on someone else. She does that.

I think everybody should leave me and my hair alone.