I like my hair.  I have a long curly mop of it.  It’s part of my Jewish/Irish/ Italian heritage that I am grateful for.  I used to flip my hair to flirt with boys, straighten it to look like everyone else in middle school, and shake it to the soundtrack of Hair, coincidentally my favorite musical.  “Hair, flow it, show it, long as I can grow it, my hair.”


As much as I love my hair though, no one prepared me for the moment it started growing on my face.  I had just turned forty and was pulling into my driveway when I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw it.  At first I thought it was a loose hair from one of my lovely locks, but no, it was a terrifying black thread attached to my chin.

And so I began to tweeze.

A lot.

When I confessed to my older friend my new habit of plucking hair in my car, she nodded with sage understanding. “I call them road hairs.  It’s like you step on the gas and they grow.”

“And the light in the car is so good” I nodded in agreement.

“You can see everything.”  My friend added ominously “Everything.”

A lovely family with three kids live next door.  Since our driveways are right next to each other we have often waved, exchanged niceties and even let our sons play together.  Then it stopped.  Maybe they got busy, but I can’t help but wonder if it was because they caught me tweezing in my driveway one too many times.

My addiction worsened.

  Once, after dropping off my son off, a cop pulled me over. I was terrified, my heart thumping in my chest.  “What did I do?”  The cop was an angry burly man in his late forties and as I rolled down my window, he asked me for my license and registration. 

 

“What did I do?”

“Talking on the cell phone”

“But I wasn’t!”

“What’s in your hand ma’am?”

I unfurled my hand to expose my pink tweezerman tweezers.

The cop laughed. Hard. It changed the whole landscape of his face.

“I know I shouldn’t do that,” I mumbled.

“No you shouldn’t,” he said trying to regain his composure. “I tell my wife that all the time, ” he said returning my license and registration.  “You have a good day.”

I promised myself I would stop, but every morning when I wake up there is more hair, as if the tooth fairy of my childhood transformed herself into an evil hair sprite magically sprouting black hair on my upper lip and chin while I sleep.

         My desperation led me to spend two thousand dollars for laser hair removal at a company on Staten Island called Barely There. The “business” was across from the Staten Island Mall where a staff of three angry Russian women worked.  After checking in, I would be brought to a room in the back and told to lie in a chair. A woman with streaky blonde hair and a white uniform would shine a light so bright it was as if she was trying to get a confession out of me.

“You have much hair,” she said rubbing a gloved hand across my lip.

She snapped off the light and rubbed a cold numbing cream across my lip and chin.

“STAY STEEL” she commanded, pressing a giant phallic plastic wand onto my face zapping me with it over and over  until my eyes watered and the room filled with the smell of burnt hair.

When I arrived for my fourth visit, Barely There was gone, abruptly closed with a scary looking legal paper on the door. I tried to get my money back, but I was told there was nothing I could do and so I went back to tweezing.

I now I keep tweezers in my car, both bathrooms, purses and in the TV room where I also keep my second favorite item:  a magnifying mirror with a light that simulates the daylight in my car.    My habit is worse than ever as I compulsively rubbed my chin searching for hairs I might have missed.  I even have an idea to design a necklace that can hold a tiny tweezer inside.  I could make a million.

Even my therapist notices.

“Why do you do that?”

“I’m looking for hair.”

Being close to my age, she at first laughs and then tilts her head.

“Shall we talk about that?”

I rant about the indignity of aging, how hard it is to grow old in a culture that seems to only revere people in their twenties. When I finally stop she stares for a long time.

“DIs that what you’re really angry about?” she asks.

“Yes. It is.” I insist. “I really hate having hair on my face.”   She sighs and opens up her I Pad.  I am surprised my session is already over until she looks up and says “I have a great laser guy in Manhattan….”