Bearded Lady (3 page)

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 12-hour bus ride from Dharmasla 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 I graduated from Columbia, 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, scanned 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 dimorphic 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 went to a Bangkok hospital called, I swear, Bumrungrad. I’d lay on a gurney in a brightly lit room. All blank white walls, slightly yellowed by time. The doctor came 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. A 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.

It couldn’t have been very healthy, but I wasn’t thinking about that then. I had one goal in mind: Complete eradication. I’d go home, riding on the back of a motorcycle taxi and stay home for the night, until the swelling had receded.

I should have realized that there was a problem. I’ve always been kind of cheap. For example, I won’t pay ten bucks for a sandwich that would give me nutrition and probably pleasure — six is my top price — but I could somehow rationalize spending $1,000 for someone to fry my face.

On my last visit, they elevated the laser a bit too high. It burned my upper lip. I still have the scar. It’s about the size of a raindrop. When I’m cold, it turns white. When people ask where I got the scar, I tell them:

“One time I was making soup — some sort of bean stew — and it was boiling so wildly that it splattered me. ... Yeah, just like that, third-degree burn. Crazy, right?”

Yeah, right.

It was embarrassing to admit that I made myself look worse by trying to look better. It still is.

Even right now.

Yep, still embarrassing.

But not only was I embarrassed, I also felt ashamed. I was back to being that kid poised with the lint remover over my leg — feeling equal shame for having hair as I felt for getting rid of it. Why couldn’t I just be okay with who I was? Why was I spending so much money and time hiding myself?

But if you thought I’d stop it with the laser after realizing all that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely.

***

Two years later, back in New York in the middle of my second laser treatment, I began to consider the possibility of a medical problem. I felt like I was fighting a rare battle — but I wasn’t sure because theoretically, if other women were like me, it would be a battle fought alone and behind closed doors. If other women were waging it, I wouldn’t know. But then again, could any of them have so many wanton whiskers? This couldn’t be what was supposed to be happening to a woman’s body.

So, I went to my OB-GYN for a follicular assessment and possible intervention.

Unfortunately, she had some bad news for me: I was normal. She explained that there are three common reasons for unusual quantities of hair on women. They either have polycystic ovaries or hormone imbalances, or they were simply born into hairy genes. “Many Eastern Europeans have a lot of dark thick hair,” my doctor said. I could have sworn that she was examining my chin as she spoke. A waxer once told me that she knows what she’s about to deal with before people even take off their pants; the eyebrows reveal everything. Why couldn’t my doc just check out my eyes then?

“But it’s got to be something else,” I pleaded. I’d recently contemplated the possibility that I’d hit early menopause — there had been some hot flashes, I’m pretty sure — and I’d never given up that early idea that I might be part man. I speculated now that my nuts just hadn’t descended yet. “I’ve got hair even on my …”

But I couldn’t tell a medical professional about the nipple hair. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d plucked that morning especially for her.

“I don’t think you have PCOS,” she said. “Other symptoms are weight gain and acne, but if it’d make you feel better we can do some tests and maybe some blood work on your hormone levels.”

She extracted some of my blood and scheduled me for an ultrasound. That actually got me a tiny bit excited. It’d be kind of awesome if something was medically wrong. I’d be officially diagnosed and on my way to a cure. I could stop going crazy.

But the ultrasound revealed nothing wrong with my ovaries — no cysts. There weren’t even any hidden male gonads.

When my OB-GYN got back to me about the blood tests, she said that all my hormone levels were normal.

“Normal? Are you sure?”

“Totally normal.”

So my doctor was telling me it’s normal to be a hairy beast. I was relieved, terrified and 27 years old.

***

I couldn’t quit the laser. In total, I continued treatments for two more years at a place called American Laser, on Broadway near 22nd
 
Street in Manhattan. In the waiting room, they had magazines like People and OK! in a pile. I think they put them there for a reason; they wanted me to look at Kim Kardashian’s pore-less and follicle-free face and get turned on about having my body blasted with a machine I didn’t understand in the slightest.

I dislike those magazines and think of them as vapid and a waste of time, but that’s only because I can get sucked into them for hours and I always end up feeling guilty about my desire to know how many hours a day Angelina leaves her kids with the nanny instead of using that time to start understanding the crumbling economy. So I’d get into the laser treatment room, conjure the hair-free cover girl, and tell the laser lady to put the damn thing on the highest they could without causing my face permanent damage.

“It’s going to hurt,” she’d say.

“I don’t care,” I’d say.

“Tell me if it’s too high.”

“It’s not high enough!”

Hair brought out a little bit of psycho in me. I never acted like that anywhere else except for maybe when I’m baking. I get really bossy when I’m baking.

The American Laser office was in the same building as a casting agency. Sometimes on the elevator ride up, I’d pretend to mouth some scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire and reapply ChapStick in the mirror, so no one would suspect that I was actually lasering.

No, silly, I’m not hairy. I’m an actress.

I also kept it from the guy, Dave, who I’d started dating in 2008. I would throw away the laser appointment cards so that he couldn’t find them and instead use code — “lunch with Leslie” or just an exclamation point — when I wrote down the appointment time in my calendar.

When I moved in with him in 2010, a whole new challenge emerged. Close quarters put my secret in jeopardy. I carried on my depilatory duties like a covert Navy Seal operation. I had extra razors and tweezers in my gym bag, purse and hidden in bathroom corners. Mixed Martial Arts fights were my saving grace. Dave would be attached to the couch for hours at a time, watching hairless men grapple each other, while my stainless steel Mr. Tweezerman and I got it on in the bathroom. If Dave asked what I was doing in there for so long, I’d tell him I was picking at pimples or that the milk in my coffee was working its way through my intestines. That usually shut him up.

I just couldn’t tell Dave about the hair. It would have rendered me faulty, almost broken, like driving off with a lemon from the used-car showroom. But I also yearned for him to know and accept me as I was. I know it doesn’t help our relationship when we cuddle and the only thing I can think about is how to position myself in a way that if a stray hair broke free, he would be the least likely to see it. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t even be writing this if we weren’t already engaged. Publicly divulging my hairiness during my dating years would have ruined my ratings on JDate and match.com. You can’t sell a car by pointing out the jagged, deep dent on the driver’s side.

I hate that I feel that way, but there it is.

And as long as I’m talking about things I hate — this is a little off the point, but you know what always kills me? It kills me when girls compliment my eyebrows, because in the aughts, eyebrows with girth came back into fashion. “Wow, they’re so nice and thick. I wish I had those,” friends would say. The compliments are always by women who are fair-skinned and light-haired. I’ve never had a thick-browed lady say one thing about my eyebrows. You know why? Because we know the behind-the-scenes story. If any of those light-haired ladies knew what those two caterpillar-shaped suckers actually meant, they’d back away from the situation with their hands up.

Anyway, I kept up the laser treatments until about six months ago. After my last appointment, I asked to speak to the office manager.

“It didn’t work,” I said.

I wanted my chin as hairless as a piece of polished granite or my money back. Even though I knew the truth — that while laser can be very good for dark hair — pubic, armpit, man beard, — as it targets the melanin in the follicle, it has a much harder time getting rid of fine and lighter hair like the gang of strays I had on my face.

“Well, the face is a very stubborn place,” the office manager said. “We always tell all our clients that. If you want, we can sign you up for another treatment.”

“Why should I sign up for another treatment when it didn’t work after two and a half years?”

“The face is a very stubborn place,” she reiterated.

“If it’s stubborn, why should I do more laser?”

“It takes time,” she said. “The face is stubborn.”

I stared at her. Then she giggled.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

She straightened her posture and relaxed her mouth.

“This is not funny,” I said, raising my voice. “I’m. Still. Hairy!”

I got up and walked out without finishing the conversation. I left that place knowing that I couldn’t go back, but kind of wishing I could lock myself in one of their treatment rooms and shoot the laser at my face until the SWAT team came and ejected me.

Sick. I know that I was sick, but I didn’t know of any other way to become comfortable with myself besides burning my skin off with a weapon.

***

So over the months since the doctor’s appointment and my last laser session, I was in a hair purgatory, not knowing my next move. Instead of just going moment to moment, working to eradicate each hair as it surfaced — though I did that, too — I began thinking more about this odd irony: To be a complete woman, I felt as though I had to get rid of a part of myself. But why? Why does there have to be all this shame and angst about something that’s a natural part of being woman? The pressure to be hairless has driven me to feel like I have to hide something from my fiancé, to spend thousands of dollars, to even feel less worthy than my female peers. For years I’ve been pretending that I don’t have something that I quite clearly have. That takes a lot of energy.

I like getting answers to questions, so I pretended to be an objective reporter and called up Allure Magazine. I asked to speak with the beauty editor, Heather Muir. To be honest, I disliked Heather before I even spoke to her. I disliked her because of what she represented, and also because her name conjured up the image of downy soft blonde hair on her thighs, the sort one doesn’t even have to shave. Also, even if I might follow some beauty customs set forth by magazines like Muir’s, I’m generally opposed to people imposing their subjective view on millions of women. I’m not usually into the Nazi analogies, but if the boot fits... It’s because of people like Muir that I’ve put myself through so much pain removing my hair over the past 15 years that if I experienced it all at once, it would likely be lethal.