Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Read Free Book Online Page B

sapiens
come with such variety? In the animal kingdom, you don’t see frizzy horses or kinky monkeys. You don’t see straight-haired poodles or lanky-haired sheep. Was our species given bigger brains so we could worry about our hair? Hello, Darwin? Why us? Why me?
    Sometimes I think of asking Kazu to bleach my hair Marilyn blond, then convincing Igor to cut it short enough to spike like Laurie Anderson’s. I’d use enough glop to keep the spikes impervious and never think about my hair again. But I’m a coward. That said, please do not feel sorry for me. I’ve almost learned to live with it. And if I didn’t fret about my hair, something else would take its place. I believe we are born with a cup of affliction and it is our destiny to keep that cup filled at all times. If something terrible happens, I forget about my hair. When my parents got sick, my hair was a nonissue. But here I am, an orphan now, back to worrying about my hair. Not that frizzy doesn’t have an upside. On an airplane, I never have to ask for a pillow. In winter, my hair traps so much body heat I rarely need a hat. Caught in the rain, I look
better
as my hair flattens. Best of all, my toddler grandsons love it. They squeal and pat it and lose their hands in it. If there’s anything better than Jack, Sam, and Miles patting my hair and laughing, tell me. You can’t, can you.

And Be Sure to Tell Your Mother
    ALEX KUCZYNSKI
    M y tribe is a hairless one. Two years ago, when I spit into a plastic vial and sent my saliva to 23andMe to have my genetic history mapped, one of the traits that came back—apart from being, oddly, closely related to Dr. Oz—was the following: “You are from people with the least amount of body hair on earth.” There was a map and an arrow pointing to a dot, somewhere between northern Europe and Scandinavia, and it basically said: You are here, and hairless. So when I grew pubic hair—probably sometime around eighteen years old—it was not a big deal. I never thought of grooming or plucking or shaving or bleaching; it seemed unnecessary and there wasn’t very much to work with anyway. I also didn’t own a bikini or have sex until my twenties—I know:
Freak!—
so there was no point.
    When I was twenty-four, this changed. I found myself in Istanbul, in a hammam, at the suggestion of my friend Verkin. In the domed steam room, the attendants scrubbed me raw, massaged me, flayed me with scented tree branches, and anointed me. Then the
tellak
—the one who scrubs and flays and greases you up—took me by the hand to a private room off to the side and started asking pleasant questions in Turkish. She seemed encouraging, so I nodded affirmatively, even though the only phrases I understood in Turkish at the time were “cherry juice,” “Where is the toilet?” and “Enough with the rugs already.”
    With an athletic abruptness, she flipped my legs over my head and started applying some sort of honeyed mixture to the hair of my pubic region. Within minutes, helpless to stop but cautiously willing, I was bare as a baby. Verkin wandered in to check on me. I lay on the marble slab, supine, stunned, stripped, feeling like a simultaneously pornographic and infantilized female version of the Lamentation of Christ.
    â€œ
Çok güzel
,” Verkin said in Turkish to the attendant, who smiled brightly at the praise of her work.
Very beautiful
. I will never forget those words. I associate them with shock and vulnerability—and chafing. I arrived back in the hotel, and my boyfriend remarked that I looked like an enormous eight-year-old, and we continued on our journey, which had started in the ecstatic hedonism of the Greek islands, through Turkey and on into the bound and covered-up monasticism of Syria, where I wore long sleeves, a long skirt, and a head scarf that covered my face. Underneath, my skin was naked, no hair below my eyebrows