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By Root 266 0

Through Belarusian contacts of her brother, she had gotten a job as a prep cook in a kitchen. She went each day to help the cook, chopping vegetables, sometimes washing dishes. She always dressed well. There was no other option. In Belarus, when you went out in public you always dressed well, a skirt, stockings, a blouse or sweater, nice shoes. To work in the kitchen, she’d put on an apron. It was a restaurant where they put on shows in the evening. It stayed open all night. She would leave in the morning hours. During the daytime, she began working in houses, cleaning and ironing. She worked in twelve houses a week. Eventually, she stopped working at the restaurant. She earned more in the houses and the hours were better, allowing her to spend more time with her children. After several years of this, she began training in the beauty trade, which she preferred to both.

“When I got here, I promised myself not to suffer in this country. I had suffered so much. Okay, anything else? Bikini line?”

I grimaced. “I don’t know.”

When she smiled, she looked like a chipmunk. “It’s nice,” she said. “For your boyfriend.” There was a blank where those words stood, but I didn’t say that.

Oh, well, what the hell, I thought, since I seem to be trying everything else.

“Okay.” By now I knew the drill. I took off my underwear.

She looked. “You never did this before?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t looking where she was. Already dreading it.

“How much do you want removed?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How much are you supposed to?”

“You can take off everything or a little on the sides. Here, look.” I sat up and looked with her, the two of us staring matter-of-factly between my legs. “Or you can just leave a little strip here. That’s what I do.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s do the little strip.”

She gobbed the wax on, then pulled. The pain here was what I’d felt earlier with the legs, only magnified at least a dozen times, dizzying. At first I couldn’t believe it. I certainly couldn’t speak. The skin afterward was pink and tingling. It also felt weird having a woman’s hands moving so matter-of-factly over my private parts.

We were quiet for a while.

When she finished, there was, indeed, just a little strip. “Okay, take that off too,” I said. Vera laughed.

Afterward, Vera held up the hand mirror. “Look at that,” she said. I sat up and looked. It was a new sight, pink and gray, the curving folds all visible. Vera doused the whole area with powder.

I walked back across the bridge to the bus stop on the other side. I passed a boy, who glanced at me sideways. Then a woman in her fifties did a double take. Passing under the jacaranda, the translucent violet bells littering the ground, leaving the branches bare, I felt sure everyone knew.

twelve

The guy who had kissed her at the party, Diego, had entered Isolde’s brainstream. “I can’t stop thinking about him,” she told me. “I actually wrote to him the other day when I was sitting in the locutorio. I looked up his name on a group invitation and sent him an e-mail.”

“What did you say?”

She shrugged. “I invited him to meet for coffee or a drink sometime. He didn’t write back right away. Then this morning he did. I’ll forward you the e-mail. You can tell me what you think.”

She actually did send me the e-mail. Avoiding her question, full of prance and seduction, a male ruffling his feathers, it opened:

“This world was once a fluid haze of light,

Till toward the centre set the starry tides,

And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast

The planets: then the monster, then the man.”

Isolde looked up the quote online. It was from Tennyson’s “The Princess.” So he thinks of me as a princess? she thought. She pressed for a meeting. Diego wrote back another ornate e-mail, then silence, then at her urging, finally relented. “It felt like that,” she said. He suggested they meet at a bar downtown. In inimitable detail, as only Isolde could, she told me what had happened.

Diego arrived a bit late, swaggering in his long leather coat, which he obviously thought was very cool. He had faint