Middlesex

I am back to my old ways. To my solitary walks through Victoria park. To my Romeo y Julietas, my Davidoff Grand Crus. To my embassy receptions, my Philharmonie concerts, my nightly rounds at the Felsenkeller. It’s my favorite time of year, fall. The slight chill to the air, quickening the brain, and all the schoolkid, school-year memories attached to autumn. You don’t get the bright leaves here in Europe the way you do in New England. The leaves smolder but never catch flame. It’s still warm enough to bicycle. Last night I rode from Schöneberg to Orianenburgstrasse in Mitte. I met a friend for a drink. Leaving, riding through the streets, I was hailed by the intergalactic streetwalkers. In their Manga suits, their moon boots, they tossed their teased doll’s hair and called, Hallo hallo. Maybe they would be just the thing for me. Remunerated to tolerate most anything. Shocked by nothing. And yet, as I pedaled past their lineup, their Strich, my feelings toward them were not a man’s. I was aware of a good girl’s reproachfulness and disdain, along with a perceptible, physical empathy. As they shifted their hips, hooking me with their darkly painted eyes, my mind filled not with images of what I might do with them, but with what it must be like for them, night after night, hour after hour, to have to do it. The Huren themselves didn’t look too closely at me. They saw my silk scarf, my Zegna pants, my gleaming shoes. They saw the money in my wallet. Hallo, they called. Hallo. Hallo.

* * *

It was fall then, too, the fall of 1973. I was only a few months from turning fourteen. And one Sunday after church Sophie Sassoon whispered in my ear, “Hon? You’re getting just the tiniest bit of a mustache. Have your mother bring you by the shop. I’ll take care of it for you.”

A mustache? Was it true? Like Mrs. Drexel? I hurried to the bathroom to see. Mrs. Tsilouras was reapplying lipstick, but as soon as she left I put my face up to the mirror. Not a full-fledged mustache: only a few darkish hairs above my upper lip. This wasn’t as surprising as it may seem. In fact, I’d been expecting it.

Like the Sun Belt or the Bible Belt, there exists, on this multifarious earth of ours, a Hair Belt. It begins in southern Spain, congruent with Moorish influence. It extends over the dark-eyed regions of Italy, almost all of Greece, and absolutely all of Turkey. It dips south to include Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. Continuing on (and darkening in color as maps do to indicate ocean depth) it blankets Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, before lightening gradually in India. After that, except for a single dot representing the Ainu in Japan, the Hair Belt ends.

Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair! Sing of depilatory creams and tweezers! Of bleach and beeswax! Sing how the unsightly black fuzz, like the Persian legions of Darius, sweeps over the Achaean mainland of girls barely into their teens! No, Calliope was not surprised by the appearance of a shadow above her upper lip. My Aunt Zo, my mother, Sourmelina, and even my cousin Cleo all suffered from hair growing where they didn’t want it to. When I close my eyes and summon the fond smells of childhood, do I smell gingerbread baking or the pine-fresh scent of Christmas trees? Not primarily. The aroma that fills, as it were, the nostrils of my memory is the sulfurous, protein-dissolving fetor of Nair.

I see my mother, with her feet in the tub, waiting for the bubbling, stinging foam to work. I see Sourmelina, heating up a tin of wax on the stove. The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself.

I told my mother to make an appointment for me at Sophie Sassoon’s beauty parlor at the Eastland Mall.