Monday, July 30, 2012

A Little Thin

I'm getting a little thin in the oddest of places. Not the hair on my head, though that is something half the women in my family have had to face--you know, the shiny pink scalp with only a few sparse tufts  poking out at irregular intervals. No, it's my Maggie Thatcher. And not where the rude tangle could use some pruning, but a quarter-sized patch, smack dab a little to the right of center. Now I'm a person who won't depilate. I can't even shave my thighs above halfway from the knee. Just gets too itchy and annoying a day or two later, and for what? If I wear a swimsuit in public, the fact that Maggie won't stay inside the elastic bits will not be the main reason people avert their eyes. The cellulite will scare them so badly they'll have closed their eyes before they get there. Wax? Don't make me laugh. Just watching the comedy/torture chamber procedure on various TV shows and movies (I particularly remember Evan Handler getting his back waxed on Sex and the City) made me shriek in sympathetic horror. For days afterward, the sight of a candle could terrify me. No, the old Maggie is purely the 1970s version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, just as radical Bostonian feminism has intended. But then along comes this age-induced (I assume) deforestation. Pearly pale, has never seen the sun. A clearing in the woods. Perhaps it is not baldness, per se, but merely a wearing off, a wearing down, like my formerly hirsute lower arms that are now hairless, thanks to miracle stretch fibers like Lycra. Or like my dad's calves worn smooth by decades of sock-wearing. But the only person who might notice this, besides myself, is not the most observant of men. He's always the last person to notice if I've gained weight. His objectification of me (and other women, no doubt) tends to the idealization end of the spectrum. We are all so beautiful to him. Whatever kind of goggles he's got on, I hope he won't be taking them off soon.

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