The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [74]
It is said that monkeys are drawn instinctively to hair. The pleasure that the touch of hair affords them is such that they seek it from any source, the dead as well as the living, strangers as well as their own kind. Any hairy object, animate or inanimate, may form the subject of their investigations. The pleasure is the pleasure of the fingers. The specific life of the hand begins with grooming.
Her entire life Isolde had had a horror of hair. Everyone in her family knew this. A hair on the sink, on the table, not to mention on the food. When she had been little and came across a hair in an unexpected place, she would start to cry. Sometimes she would even cry for a long time. To avoid these scenarios, her family would whisk any loose hairs away as soon as they appeared.
One day, Juana came over as Isolde was working on someone’s feet. “We’re going to have to teach you to wax,” she said. Isolde’s face must have betrayed something. “The way we work here is that we all know how to do everything,” Juana said. But still she didn’t press Isolde right away.
The next few nights, lying in bed, Isolde thought about hairs, meshes of them, creeping, crawling over everything. Dark or pale, white blond against pink skin or reddening at the roots. Hairs that had been dyed and were growing out white. Patches of flesh overgrown with hairs. She felt suffocated, pictured hair growing inside her throat, like a thicket, prickly, blocking the whole passage, encroaching on her tongue.
While before she’d avoided even looking at the activities in the beauty parlor that had to do with hair, now she began to pay quiet attention. She knew she had to conquer this fear of hair. She began sweeping up the hair left on the floor after a cut. She’d been amazed that the other women could eat their lunches in this place so full of hair. She’d always step outside to eat herself, sitting on the bench right by the front door. One day, she made herself eat inside with them. She had to learn to be around hair.
That same af ternoon, Juana asked her to wash a woman’s hair before a cut. It gave Isolde goose bumps, but she managed it. Soon afterward, Vera said one morning when Isolde arrived, “Today I’m going to teach you how to wax.”A few hours later, a young woman came in. She had tawny skin and hair almost the same color. “Come on,” Vera said, waving her hand at Isolde with an impish smile. Isolde went into the little back room with Vera and the woman. Vera explained how to heat and stir the wax. She let Isolde stir, waiting for the moment when the wax was liquified but not transparent. Vera spread wax on the woman’s leg and then tapped it with a wooden spatula. Once it was hard, but not too dry, she tore it off. The woman cried out. Her skin was left rosy and uncannily smooth.
The mechanics of waxing were not foreign to Isolde. She did know, after all, how to wax herself. But she still wasn’t prepared for the first client she had, a dark-haired woman with lots of hair, not only on her legs and in her armpits, but everywhere, even on the fleshy curves of her butt. She had never seen so much hair on a woman in her life.
Isolde plunged in. Unlike the first woman, who had cried out, this woman was used to the treatment. She made little grunts, nothing more, as the hair was ripped out. Isolde was sweating, she kept working. Whichever way the woman turned, there seemed to be more hair. Vera checked in on her every ten minutes.
Finally, once it was over and the woman had left, Isolde sat down, flushed and exhausted. Juana brought out a bottle of champagne. “To celebrate your first waxing,” she said.
Over time, Isolde actually began to find the waxing satisfying. It even felt like a way for her to actively engage her lifelong horror of hair. Through actions of her own, she could confront and conquer it. She delighted in the smooth, clean surface of the skin afterward. The wonder of the wax, the hairs suddenly all gone.
It was also