Free Bearded Lady by Mara Altman Page A

to let my hair down? Not my head hair, but my arm pit hair, my facial hair, my leg hair, that little happy trail. And is that even what I want? You love me for who I am, right?
    So why do I want to be somebody else?
     
    ***
     
    I was in my 8th grade physical education class in suburban San Diego when I learned that there was a really bad kind of body hair to have. And that I had it.
    It began with a group of girls, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Our uniforms — maroon drawstring shorts and a grey T-shirt, not that I recall every single solitary detail of that day — revealed our different stages of development. My shirt had ALTMAN written out in black permanent marker just under the peeling, screen-printed figure of our mascot — a crusader. Again, you just kind of remember these things.
    While the PE teacher went off to grab soccer balls, we just sat there doing nothing, while the sun beat down on us. To pass the time, I was contentedly grabbing one fistful of grass after another, and then ripping it out. Grass. Out. Grass. Out. Repeat ad what felt like infinitum. Finally one of the girls, April, got up and put her hands on her hips. She looked me up and down, but mostly down. She then took a jump back and flung her arms in the air.
    “Ewww, you don’t shave?” April shrieked. “That’s SO gross!”
    I let go of the grip of grass I had in my hand. They fell to the ground, like so many hairs.
    They looked at my legs. I felt like Sissy Spacek at the end of “Carrie.” The hairs sparkled in the sun like beads of blood. Under that withering Southern California sun, they wouldn’t stop making a spectacle of themselves.
    Other girl legs were splayed about me. It was the dawning of a new era as my eyes scanned them, pair after pair: Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. And then, finally, back to my furry gams, announcing themselves so brightly that they were probably inadvertently transmitting SOS signals to airplanes.
    I’d known that women shaved, obviously. At least it had been absorbed by my subconscious. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was supposed to join the tradition. I was one of them — a girl — and I had to act accordingly, or be shunned like a leper. My hair apparently represented a possible contagion.
    As my fur was inspected by the nearby contingent, a warm rouge attacked the back of my neck and then snuck hotly around to my cheeks. I could pull my legs into my chest and then stretch my shirt over them. I could run away. I could pretend I didn’t hear April and hope that she disappeared. I grabbed another handful of grass and pulled it out, wishing that at that moment each and every one of my leg hairs could be reallocated with such ease.
    I was already a little behind. Wait, make that really behind. I was roughly a foot shorter than the average 8th grader and had not yet developed a sense of fashion, unless “fashion” could be described as five different colors of sweat pants. When I was 12, my Mom asked me if I wanted jeans and I declined for practical reasons. “They are too stiff and cold in the morning,” I explained. Going shopping was out of the question. I didn’t fit into anything in the juniors section so I had to go to the kids’ sizes, where all they offered were variations on flower-print shirts and polka-dotted socks with lace.
    Another issue was that I’d practiced gymnastics competitively for the past eight years, and as a result what had developed was not my breasts, but my thighs. There was a group of guys who, when they spotted me at recess, would shout, “It’s muscle girl. Flex!” Those were not the bulges I wanted them to notice.
    I couldn’t navigate my developmental abyss with conventional tools. So when I got home that day, I dug through The Everything Drawer in the kitchen. It’s the one with the odds and ends like tape, expired Tylenol, three Band-Aids, a granola bar, a couple of tacks and a light bulb. I found the perfect