ever cut it. Maybe a deep conditioning once a week, though, because it’s kind of dry. Let’s wax your eyebrows .
There was a moment of quiet where we each came to terms with the realities. Then we got busy. She helped me bleach my mustache with some stuff we stole out of her sister’s vanity. It stank and stung.
We bought a home waxing kit at the drugstore, little plastic tub of brown wax you melted in a saucepan of boiling water. I accidentally gave her a tiny second-degree burn on her nose and took more off the left side, but she looked way, way better anyway.
We went on pretending to be friends through high school. She got good grades, went to a good college, became doting auntie to the legions of children sired by her sister and the wrestler. Looks like she’s planning a wedding now, pretty into it. ( Cannot wait to be Mrs. Jason Fishman!!!! ) Professional engagement photos, assload of makeup. What the fucking hell has happened to her eyebrows? They’re entirely gone, drawn on. Her poor eyebrows.
It was Arlene—my father’s one-time high school girlfriend and blink-of-an-eye soul mate—who took pity on me and carted me to an electrolysis salon, the dermatologist, and her fancy-pants gynecologist, appalled I hadn’t yet seen one.
Norman , I heard through the wall, they’re supposed to go when they start menstruating!
Do you think she’s, ah . . . do you think she is?
Norman, the trash in the bathroom reeks.
I didn’t know , he told her.
I had been menstruating since just before my mother finally sailed off and away.
I’d gone around the corner to the drugstore alone, hands shaking, to get pads. There was a hospice nurse living with us. I’d wrap each pad, once used, in half a roll of toilet paper, stuff it way down into the trash can the nurse used for all the hospice detritus.
You didn’t know!? Norm, she wears a double D.
I guess I . . . didn’t know.
Arlene led me into a hushed, gray-toned waiting room on the bottom floor of a townhouse in the East Sixties and pinched my arm, leaned over, whispered Jackie O goes here. This was meant to be soothing, I guess.
Without much fanfare the good doctor introduced me to a speculum, mauled my tender lopsided titties, and hesitated for not even a second to put me on the Pill, citing “irregularity.” A truly dumb-ass thing to do to a wonky motherless fourteen-year-old with big lopsided tits and a mustache, still years away from the faintest hint of possibility of sexual intercourse.
The good news, he told me, was that since I’d be on the Pill anyway I was eligible for the miraculous new acne medication! It worked wonders, he said, referring me to a dermatologist. Oh, but it was also “strongly recommended” that the acne medication be taken alongside an antidepressant, since it was known to cause/exacerbate “mild-to-severe” depression/psychosis. So not the best idea, because ever since the excellent ninth-grade English teacher had assigned us Muriel Rukeyser’s “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” the line “When I was fourteen I had dreams of suicide” had been replaying like a mental rosary I worked my way around. I rehearsed the ways I could do it. Pills, wrists, subway leap, roof leap, gun, noose, bridge leap, oven. Only our oven was electric and there were no guns anywhere I knew of.
Thusly medicated I gained forty pounds, never again stood on a subway platform without the detailed flash of my body under a train, and have very little concrete memory of those years.
But my skin did clear right up.
There was Sweet Sixteen after Sweet Sixteen. Dresses from a store in the Village called Neo-Romantic. There were the uptight girls who acted all smart and detached, the mean, stupid ones who made everyone’s lives hell. Girls with big ol’ tits, their fates decided. Girls whose parents signed off on surgery to have said tits removed, replaced with appropriately demure ones.
I did have this one friend Rachel—an okay one, I
There was a moment of quiet where we each came to terms with the realities. Then we got busy. She helped me bleach my mustache with some stuff we stole out of her sister’s vanity. It stank and stung.
We bought a home waxing kit at the drugstore, little plastic tub of brown wax you melted in a saucepan of boiling water. I accidentally gave her a tiny second-degree burn on her nose and took more off the left side, but she looked way, way better anyway.
We went on pretending to be friends through high school. She got good grades, went to a good college, became doting auntie to the legions of children sired by her sister and the wrestler. Looks like she’s planning a wedding now, pretty into it. ( Cannot wait to be Mrs. Jason Fishman!!!! ) Professional engagement photos, assload of makeup. What the fucking hell has happened to her eyebrows? They’re entirely gone, drawn on. Her poor eyebrows.
It was Arlene—my father’s one-time high school girlfriend and blink-of-an-eye soul mate—who took pity on me and carted me to an electrolysis salon, the dermatologist, and her fancy-pants gynecologist, appalled I hadn’t yet seen one.
Norman , I heard through the wall, they’re supposed to go when they start menstruating!
Do you think she’s, ah . . . do you think she is?
Norman, the trash in the bathroom reeks.
I didn’t know , he told her.
I had been menstruating since just before my mother finally sailed off and away.
I’d gone around the corner to the drugstore alone, hands shaking, to get pads. There was a hospice nurse living with us. I’d wrap each pad, once used, in half a roll of toilet paper, stuff it way down into the trash can the nurse used for all the hospice detritus.
You didn’t know!? Norm, she wears a double D.
I guess I . . . didn’t know.
Arlene led me into a hushed, gray-toned waiting room on the bottom floor of a townhouse in the East Sixties and pinched my arm, leaned over, whispered Jackie O goes here. This was meant to be soothing, I guess.
Without much fanfare the good doctor introduced me to a speculum, mauled my tender lopsided titties, and hesitated for not even a second to put me on the Pill, citing “irregularity.” A truly dumb-ass thing to do to a wonky motherless fourteen-year-old with big lopsided tits and a mustache, still years away from the faintest hint of possibility of sexual intercourse.
The good news, he told me, was that since I’d be on the Pill anyway I was eligible for the miraculous new acne medication! It worked wonders, he said, referring me to a dermatologist. Oh, but it was also “strongly recommended” that the acne medication be taken alongside an antidepressant, since it was known to cause/exacerbate “mild-to-severe” depression/psychosis. So not the best idea, because ever since the excellent ninth-grade English teacher had assigned us Muriel Rukeyser’s “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” the line “When I was fourteen I had dreams of suicide” had been replaying like a mental rosary I worked my way around. I rehearsed the ways I could do it. Pills, wrists, subway leap, roof leap, gun, noose, bridge leap, oven. Only our oven was electric and there were no guns anywhere I knew of.
Thusly medicated I gained forty pounds, never again stood on a subway platform without the detailed flash of my body under a train, and have very little concrete memory of those years.
But my skin did clear right up.
There was Sweet Sixteen after Sweet Sixteen. Dresses from a store in the Village called Neo-Romantic. There were the uptight girls who acted all smart and detached, the mean, stupid ones who made everyone’s lives hell. Girls with big ol’ tits, their fates decided. Girls whose parents signed off on surgery to have said tits removed, replaced with appropriately demure ones.
I did have this one friend Rachel—an okay one, I
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