Welcome to Ruby on Tuesdays. A newsletter that’ll serve no particular purpose except for maybe your entertainment.
The most significant thing I learned over winter break is that I am now growing hair on my feet. Not my toes -- my toes, I can handle -- but my feet. If I brought this up in casual conversation, you would probably be all polite and say something to the effect of, “No of course not, I barely even notice it’s there,” which means yes, you see it, yes, it exists, but no, you would’ve never said a single thing if I didn’t bring up the reason why I now spend approximately 70 seconds longer in the shower shaving it off myself.
As a Middle Eastern woman, I am keenly aware that excessive body hair comes with the territory, just like the smelly food and the grandmothers who won’t get off your back about why you’re not married yet. My female relatives spend years in the bathroom trying to de-Yeti themselves. In fact, one morning when I was 9 or 10, I noticed that my mother had disappeared for a while, and when I asked my dad where she went, his response was, “Probably in the bathroom.” My mom once told me that when she was younger, she had a mustache forming above her top lip that was so pronounced that her own mother was too embarrassed to talk to her about it, so a friend’s mom had to be the one to direct her to the tweezers aisle at the pharmacy. That’s a big thing in the Middle East: no one wants to tell you anything about How To Be A Functioning Woman In Society, they expect you to somehow have it all figured out on your own.
Genetically speaking, I come from a very long line of non-sharers. My grandma never gave my mom a sex talk and thus, my mom never gave me sex talk, but I attended public schools that gave weekly PowerPoint presentations that included a cucumber and a grapefruit and so I put everything together, literally. And then, when my left boob was growing faster than my right boob, I had nowhere to turn except to The Care and Keeping of You, an American Girl book made specifically for girls whose mothers were afraid of the S-word and the V-word and the P-word and even the B-word -- Butt. For some reason my mom really doesn’t like the word “butt.” If she has to say it, she uses the Turkish word -- popo -- which I feel like is almost worse.
So when my dad -- who, by the way, doesn’t like the word “butt” either; he uses the Yiddish word: tuchus -- and I would go to Barnes and Noble, I waited until he was safely sequestered away in the biography section, take an issue of Teen Beat magazine, cover The Care and Keeping of You in it, flip to the end to see if my question was in the FAQ section, and make a note of the answer for my own safekeeping. But anyway. The hair. This is about my hair.
Oh the hair. We have hair on our chins and hair on our knuckles and hair on our upper lips and hair surrounding our nipples like it’s a Christmas wreath. We have unibrows that we need to take care of and, yes, now every Palm Beach Priscilla says to me that I have “such beautiful dark, thick eyebrows,” but imagine being a seventh grader who looked like Frida Kahlo. A Palm Beach Priscilla, by the way, is a woman who lives in Palm Beach County and is tall and skinny and usually blonde and is probably like 20 to 90 years younger than her husband and says things like, “Oh I have to go get my green smoothie after spin class,” and then drinks it with a metal straw in a fully plastic cup, which I find very silly. Their husbands are old and meandering men with great jobs and huge endowments. In high school, a friend of mine was an offspring of one of these couples, and told me that her dad was “really old,” to which I responded, “Nah, it’s okay. My dad’s old too.” She then proceeded to pull up a photo of her dad in his senior year of high school, revealing that the year her father graduated was the year that my father was born.
But about my eyebrows -- or rather, eyebrow -- in the early 2000s when it was trendy to have super skinny eyebrows, I plucked mine so thin that I looked surprised for an entire month. Makeup may help a lot of things but it certainly does not help the excessive hair on your face; there is no BB creme for the little spikes that protrude from your chin like icicles, and believe me, I’ve looked.
My body hair journey began sometime before I turned eleven. One morning before school, I noticed that there were undesired hairs growing under my arms that hadn’t been there before. Horrified, the next day I snuck a pair of scissors into the bathroom with me and attempted to slice off the little hairs, which, as you might imagine, didn’t work at all. As the weeks went on, I kept my arms squeezed to my sides and internally categorized myself right alongside one of the original sapiens; yet simultaneously, I realized that I never saw any grown women with underarm hair, so I assumed that by time you turned, like, 40, or something, it all magically disappeared with menopause.
The summer before seventh grade, I was wearing gym shorts and watching a movie with my cousin Hannah. She peered over at my legs, which, at that point, would envy King Kong’s, and yelled out to my mom, “Hey Aunt Ira! When are you going to let Ruby start shaving her legs?” My face went hot; I was so embarrassed -- this was worse than when I accidentally almost burnt down the school cafeteria because I kept popcorn in the microwave for too long.
After Hannah left that summer, my mom ordered wax online from a special Turkish store. She warmed it up in the microwave until it was approximately the temperature of the sun, locked us in her bathroom together, threw it on my legs, and ripped it off, ignoring any and all screaming I was doing. We were there for what felt like an eternity; when I came out of the bathroom, I’m pretty sure I looked like post-presidency Obama.
“There you go,” she said, clearly very proud of herself. “It’ll last a month!”
And from that day on, I understood why my mom has spent half of her life in the bathroom.