Hair Today

If William Shakespeare was right and Cleopatra’s true genius was her "infinite variety," that great lady’s got nothing on me. Like a lot of gals, I’m as varicolored as a calico cat. Although I’ve made the costly commitment to live my life as a blonde, the natural color of the hair on my head is medium brown with a lot of red in it, my eyebrows are light brown, my eyelashes and the hair on my arms is blonde, but the hair on my legs (and, increasingly it seems, my toes) is fast moving toward black.

My friend Celeste is a beautiful, natural auburn-toned redhead who has strawberry-blonde pubic hair and underarm hair, and thick, dark brown hair on her legs. And I’ll never forget a woman I once met in a locker room who had the straightest, palest blonde hair–like a young Catherine Deneuve–on her head, her forearms and on her legs; but her bikini area, which that day was decidedly ungroomed, was as thick and as black as a Labrador Retriever’s fur.

Awed by the stylish contrast, I said, "Wow, your bush must drive men crazy."

She replied, "I guess. I know getting it to stay inside my underwear drives me crazy!"

I could relate. Like most women, I’ve bleached, waxed and shaved. I’ve tried electrolysis, depilatories and laser treatments. Yet, every month it comes back–sometimes lighter, but ever determined. It once annoyed me to no end, but lately I’ve been less adamant about keeping up my usually rigorous hair-removal schedule, much to my newlywed husband’s chagrin. I’m sure he thinks the fuzz is proof of the onset of some sort of post-honeymoon sloth, the relaxation of grooming rules now that we are fully ensconced in each other’s day-to-day lives.

But that’s not the case at all. I still put on concealer for our Sunday morning breakfasts. I still hide from him in the bathroom with a face masque and plastic conditioning bag on my head. I’m no longer as determined about hair removal because I’ve come to view its presence differently. I have come to understand that the reason it keeps coming back is not because I am a lazy, super-hirsute freak. I’m a healthy woman in the prime of life, and I came to that understanding in part because of my mother’s failed nine-year struggle with cancer.

My mother, Della, was first diagnosed with breast cancer in late 1993 and was later diagnosed with metastatic cancer–it had moved to her lungs–after five years of remission. During the course of her treatment, she had many surgeries and was part of many, many clinical drug trials involving countless rounds of chemotherapy, including the highly toxic Adriamycin, which makes all your hair fall out seemingly overnight. She also had three massive doses of chemo–Carboplatin, Cytoxan and Thiotepa–during a bone marrow and stem-cell transplant, and later took the drugs Taxol, Taxotere, and Xeloda, which is chemotherapy in pill form. When those drugs stopped working, she tried a weekly dose of intravenously administered Gemzar, and finally Novantrone.

As a clinical pharmacist in a small hospital in New Jersey, my mother had the knowledge of and access to new cancer drugs. She also had faith in Western medicine’s potential to cure her. She’d even mix her own bags of chemo before going upstairs to the oncology ward for her treatment (the sang-froid of which once inspired friends to utter, "Your mom–what a badass!").

Chemo works by attacking all of the body’s cells, healthy and sick, destroying them randomly and without prejudice. Everything superfluous begins to disappear, including what the traumatized body once registered as hair, even the useful, protective eyelashes and filtering hairs inside the nose, the ones that make up the eyebrows and mons veneris. My mother lost and regrew her hair at least three times and its texture became permanently altered.

The bitter irony of chemotherapy is that a lot of women lose all their hair except for the hair on their legs, so that many have to find the energy to shave it, an added indignity to all the pain, nausea and exhaustion brought by the drugs. But my mom had so many drugs pumped into her over the years that eventually all the hair under her arms disappeared and on her legs it virtually stopped growing. I noticed this when we were napping together one afternoon after one of her rounds of chemotherapy.

"Hey, don’t you have to shave your legs anymore?"

"Well, it’s baby-fine now, so I’d say I have to shave about twice a year."

"I’m sorry to say this, Della, but that fucking rules."

My mother just stared at me, not so much because I used profanity, but because my comment implied the absence or presence of leg hair had any real importance in her life, or in anyone’s life. And she said, as if explaining illness to a little child, "My body is under siege, so it has to keep all the good stuff inside to fight the cancer, and everything on the outside surface has had to fall away."

Washing the dishes at my parents’ house later that afternoon, I remembered one of my day camp counselors, Sibby, a practitioner of yoga and feminism, an eater of organic produce who was studying herbal medicine. She didn’t have stubble on her legs–it was more like real fur, supple and deliberate, like some smoothed-down dark herb in her organic garden. She didn’t shave and didn’t care who knew it.

One day, a camper asked Sibby for permission to run back to the changing rooms to adjust an ill-fitting pair of underwear because it was rubbing her the wrong way. Sibby let her go, then joyfully explained that one day we’d have copious amounts of hair "down there" to keep that from happening. She told us not to ever shave it because it was part of "nature’s bounty."

Later, we cracked up about that. A philosophical debate on the aesthetics of body hair followed, featuring such phrases as "oh, ick," "her legs look yucky," and "nature’s bounty is gross." That summer day came rushing back to me when Della mentioned to me that the loss of her pubic hair was sorely felt, both physically and psychologically, though mostly the former. She questioned the intelligence of the deliberate removal of one’s pubic hair, as she knew all too well the discomfort its absence could bring. Wherever she is today, I’m sure Sibby, too, is incredulous of reports of the popularity of the Brazilian, let alone the Sphinx.

The last time the topic of body hair came up was also in summertime, last July, a few days before Della died, though at the time we did not know she had so few days to live. She was extremely thin and so ill we always went straight for dessert to try to get her to eat. Still, more than one bite of the sweetest, silkiest flan was almost more than she could stand. Yet we held it up to her for a bite, like all well-meaning but desperate family members the world over do, employing the magical thinking that encouraging food digestion must stave off death.

It was a scorchingly hot day and she was in her bed wearing only a light-blue bed sheet fashioned into a toga, covering her from her chest to the top of her thighs. I asked her if she ever thought she’d come to a point in her life that she wouldn’t want to eat dessert. She sighed, and said that as a young woman she often wished that she was both very thin and that she’d never have to bother with shaving her legs or under her arms.

"So just be careful what you wish for, because it might come true," my mom said, not with the sarcasm people use when uttering that saying, but with a kind of neutral tone and weak laugh that accompanies an overwhelming sense of loss, infusing sorrow into everything.

I think of my mother constantly these days, the sad and weak state she was in as she was dying. All the "good stuff" she’d spoken of on the outside was long gone, most of the good stuff on the inside used up by the barrage of chemotherapy that devastated her immune system and by the slow creep of cancer turned fleet-robber of breath. Used up also was her faith in modern medicine. The knowledge she had always used so triumphantly to help heal patients and family members could no longer serve her. There were no more drug choices left.

These days I still try to look at my hair and know that it’s proof that I’m doing fine. I don’t hear the voice that says, "You’re as hairy as a mongrel." I hear the one that says, "You’re so damn healthy your body constantly thrusts unneeded keratin and protein fibers up and out of your skin." I think of my mother’s long, tough struggle and feel some muted form of defiance. I hear the voice that says, "Here is the proof, you silly female, that you’re alive."