The Stripe

By Meredith Fein Lichtenberg

You are, of course, supposed to give a fuck about important things like voting and the environment and healthcare and your kids. But the thing, now, is that you’re simultaneously not supposed to give a fuck about lots of other things. Giving fucks takes a lot out of a person. You can’t afford to give them away pell mell or there’s no you left. We get this aspirational message:

Be the person who only gives fucks about the things you give fucks about.

Let your fucks tell the story of who you are.

Choose your fucks wisely.

Don’t be everyfuck.

Basically, adulthood is figuring out which fucks to give.

It’s just not always that simple. I don’t give a fuck about chaperoning school trips, cellulite, celebrities, cars, the wrinkles on my forehead, or people who judge my handbag and shoes. I do not even buy the seeds that would let me plant fucks on those topics. So those things never grow into fucks I might give.

I do have a bag of fuck seeds involving my hair, though. And when you have the seeds, no matter how ambivalently they came into your possession, you find yourself planting them, and then they sprout, and there you are, at harvest time, giving a fuck.

Maybe you have an opinion about whether hair is a worthy thing to give fucks about. Maybe you’re picturing gray hair. Or thin hair. Or too curly, or not curly enough. Or, if you know that I had cancer, you are, perhaps, thinking that women who’ve had chemotherapy can be sensitive about losing their hair. But nah, it’s not any of that. I’m not even talking about head hair. I’m talking about body hair.

Specifically the hair on my left breast.

•••

Fortunately, my husband was down with my hairy breast right away, because mammary depilation was the last thing I could deal with when it sprouted. He is good about hair in general, meaning not that he tolerates the fact that I am a hirsute gal, but rather he digs it, enjoys evidence of my mammal-hood, thinks it’s awesome that I am a beast. He occasionally pets my forearm hair for comfort.

I like that about him. I recommend picking a partner who’s into whatever kind of animal you are.

Let me clarify that he was also cool with my original hairy breast which, back in the day, meant that from time to time one or two stray hairs would appear around the areola, and they were brunette, like me, and since I am really farsighted, I couldn’t see them, so sometimes they didn’t get plucked instantly.

But that kind of hairy breast is nothing. It is the pee-wee T-ball league and I ended up in the World Series.

I say Hairy Breast v.1.0 was “nothing,” but looking back, it totally wasn’t nothing, which is why I plucked those fuckers when I did spot them. For American, white, cis, hetero women, hair that’s not on your head or in a perfectly arched brow or eyelash, is taboo. In my day job, as a lactation consultant, I examine breasts, and unlike the ones in magazines and movies, they come in all shapes and sizes and, yes, hairstyles. I have worked with mothers with more chest hair than my husband has. And yet, once, a colleague stated publicly that seeing one client’s hairy areola made her feel like vomiting, and another colleague agreed. I was floored by this squeamishness—these are otherwise body-positive clinicians. I had never heard any of them criticize any other aspect of a client’s body—yet hair got a big reaction. That’s what a taboo is.

Mammals grow hair. It facilitates thermoregulation; without it, we wouldn’t be able to cope with living in a range of weather conditions. The weather doesn’t affect only our scalp. Hair isn’t gross.

And yet, even writing this, I feel the urge to pluck out references to my own hair, and write, instead, a smooth commentary on American squeamishness that doesn’t portray me as ugly. I change “my” to “the” in the sentence above about stray hairs appearing around the areola. My areola. It’s a challenge not to give a fuck about a hair on your areola. It’s a challenge not to give a fuck that you just told the world about it.

•••

I didn’t need to be taught to rid myself of the hair we consider unbeautiful; the message was part of my culture, something I had memorized before I was even aware of it, like the lyrics to every Eagles song. Did Brooke Shields have hairy legs and pits when she got busy in the Blue Lagoon? No. She took care of that shit on the QT and didn’t make anyone look at it.

My mother got me a razor when I was nine. Other girls were open about shaving their legs. A girl named Jeannie authoritatively set forth the rules: “shaving,” first of all, meant calves and pits. Taking a razor to any other part of your body would cause you to become sown with the darkest, blackest, fastest growing, and embarrassing hair, instantly. Moreover, you were not to shave more than once a day, or the hair would start growing faster, and it would come in thick and black. “Like an ape,” she said. A girl named Amy concurred, intoning that even if you shaved 23 hours and 59 minutes later, it was dangerous. I absorbed this wisdom without question.

Knee hair was not mentioned, though I was dying to know how all the older girls’ knees were smooth.

It was also, by college, acceptable to mention depilation of your “bikini area” (which, then, meant removing hair that encroached out of bathing suit and into thigh crease, but leaving the triangle intact; Brazilian wasn’t a thing yet), but few dared mention the appearance and grooming methods for pesky hairs that grew on the big toe, side burn, or, god forbid, chin. I was forty before friends openly discussed facial hair removal.

Oh, I was aware of who had what. One friend had a blond beard that extended almost to her eye sockets. Another had nipple hair she obviously shaved, based on the thorny way it grew in. This one had butt hair. That one bleached her mustache, and it practically glowed. People were silently giving fucks, but none of it was discussed.

•••

I grew a stripe of hair that marched downwards from my navel, and, boy, did I give a fuck about that. Those mofos needed to be dealt with on the regular; as soon as I shaved them, they were returning. The Stripe showed if my t-shirt rode up. Worse, although I’d heard of “leg wax” and “bikini wax,” who even had hair on their belly? What even was that? And it was not a stray, like I’d occasionally get on nipple or toe, but a parade of coarse hair, marching down to my privates.

I thought about it, first, whenever I thought I might get sexy with someone. When low-rise pants became a thing, my first ten thoughts were, “Will The Stripe show?” Each of these thoughts bloomed full flower, in the field of fucks I was cultivating.

•••

Somewhere in the midst of learning to groom and prune, and to not discuss it, I also learned to be meta and loathe the hair-hating regime because it was misogynist and racist and generally problematic.

Some friends stopped shaving to protest The Patriarchy. They tended to be people whose ancestors came from Scandinavia. I hated hearing female hair described as disgusting, but I was in no-man’s-land: though I quietly admired the audacity of all those exuberant follicles, I was too hirsute to be normy. Yet, for removing hair regularly, I was not a good enough feminist.

I envied blond, smooth friends whose waxes lasted all summer. I envied “statement” hair that amounted to a soulful wisp of curled armpit fronds. One friend got everyone’s attention by outrageously leaving some stray, blond, pubes visible out her bathing suit, causing a collective frisson among every single one of our friends. But you had to be sharing a beach towel with her to see it. My unwaxed pubes would have been visible from the beach parking lot. They are voluminous enough that you could shoot me in the vulva and the bullet would probably bounce off. And it would be cool as fuck if I were a badass who pranced the beach in a red bikini and more upper thigh hair than your husband has, but that would not simply be making a feminist, mammalist statement. It would make my public persona about hair. Leaving it au natch—on my face, on my legs, under my arms—would be choosing to make my life about this issue in spoken and unspoken interactions. In job interviews, at parties, with strangers, at the grocery store, everywhere.

Could I do it? Could I stop giving fucks entirely about this and be the face, literally, of a different kind of beauty and sexuality than western white folks normally see? Could I push people through their discomfort to appreciate that mammals are hairy, and it’s hot?

Maybe.

Is it wrong to choose to pass when you can?

I don’t know.

But I didn’t choose to make my life a statement on this issue. I did the less brave thing: I keep some of the hair, enough to make a tame statement perhaps, but remove lots. In summary, I give fucks about normy body hair rules.

But I stopped being young, and with age comes a phenomenon known as The Law of Conservation of Fucks. This means that when you have a marriage and a career and kids and, as Zorba said, the “full catastrophe” of adult life, many things compete to be the fucks you give, and inevitably some fucks get neglected. I found, in time, that I spent less precious energy tending the hair-fuck-seeds. Hairs grew in unseemly locations and I made them go away, but often I didn’t give a full 100% of a fuck about it. Sometimes I barely gave half a fuck, and this was great progress.

•••

I got breast cancer when I was forty-three.

I needed a mastectomy and learned there were a few ways to do a reconstruction. After much debate, I selected a procedure called the “stacked DIEP flap” where they transplant a fat pad from your belly to make a new boob. It isn’t at all a matter of vacuuming out belly fat and blowing it in upstairs like insulation in the attic; they actually remove a four by ten inch segment of your belly – the skin and, beneath it, the entire pad of fat with blood vessels. Then, using a microscope, they attach the veins and arteries to those in your chest wall and somehow fold it into a breast-ish shape and then sew it all into the place where they removed the breast. It’s a transplant, and the new breast is alive. It doesn’t have the everlasting-perkiness of the more common implant reconstruction, but it’s warm, and has some sensation. And, since it’s jiggly with fat, it looks more like the uncancerous breast to its right, which, at forty-three, did not look anything like a silicone boob job.

A week after the surgery, my sister asked to see the new breast, so I unveiled the thing. It was a thrilling piece of medical technology but not a beaut: swollen, nipple-less, and punctured in multiple places with surgical drains, covered by a four inch circular scar, and what looked like plastic-wrap sealing the wound. Across my abdomen, hip to hip, a twelve inch scar marked where the material had been harvested; my abdomen now stretched so tight it hurt to stand up straight. A new belly button had been “made,” higher than the original one.

My sister exclaimed at the talent of the surgeon and the miracle of modern surgery. They can make a belly button. They can make a breast. Shit is impressive.

Then she leaned in. “Um?” She said, tentatively, examining the new breast, “I think that’s some hair growing on it!”

I squinted down but even with glasses, my own breast is too close for my farsighted eye to see. I took a selfie. A breast-selfie. A brelfie.

I enlarged the photo and saw what she could see with her naked eye: a few short, wispy, black hairs, beginning to form a line across the breast.

The Stripe was coming back. Transplanted to my boob.

Welcome to Hairy Breast v.2.0.

•••

How had I not realized this would happen? I knew where the new breast material was coming from. I had shaved my legs and The Stripe the morning of the surgery. I simply hadn’t thought about it.

Additionally, the surgeon must have sewn the belly flap on sideways. The Stripe now pointed east to west. A path to paradise, destination: armpit.

“Fuck,” I said.

My sister pointed out that this was an excellent sign that the transplant was successful. If my body was growing hair, the new breast was truly alive.

What an excellent, supportive, scientific comment.

“Fuck,” I said again.

Because no matter how far you’ve come, a hair stripe across a boob is fucking Miracle-Gro for your unnecessary fuck-seed garden.

A month passed and the hair grew in, lush and dark and strong, just like before.

A hair stripe. Across my nipple-less boob. On top of cancer.

And I look terrible in horizontal stripes.

•••

I spent that summer and fall in chemotherapy, a particularly toxic cocktail that causes total body hair loss. I was told I’d be bare as a naked mole rat in twenty-one days. I became an artist of eyebrows. I learned to apply makeup to resemble eyelashes. My pubes dwindled until they looked like the remnant whiskers of a nonagenarian hermit. My lusciously hairy arms were almost bald. I had to remind myself that they were mine.

But not even Red Devil Chemo could defeat Hairy McBoob. The Stripe stayed in place, right across my new breast, through sixteen weeks of chemotherapy. And every single doctor and nurse who examined me commented on it, in case I needed reminders that it’s weird to have what looks like pubes growing in a line across your tata.

•••

Cancer treatment is a bitch. After they cut you apart and sew you together, they poison you for months and you’re still not even done: after chemo I needed radiation. Every day for six weeks I lay down in a giant machine that shot x-rays at my tit and pit to kill any remaining cancer that wasn’t sliced off or poisoned to death. It’s a drag. Fortunately, The Stripe pointed directly at the armpit that had housed the cancerous lymph nodes. I am sure that was very helpful for the radiation oncologist.

The irradiated area develops what looks like a big sunburn, and every hair follicle became red and inflamed, even the ones that didn’t have hair growing. It had been a long year. In place of a lovable and beloved breast, I now had a sunburned, red-polka-dotted, hairy, nipple-less orb.

•••

Cancer treatment fucks with your mind and your body. It makes you ask big questions about life and death, but also the ones about who you are. I’ve been crazy healthy all my life. Was I still me if I was sick? Without a left breast? With chronic arm pain from the surgery? I had always arranged my schedule around exercise but now I could no longer even manage yoga. I was sometimes so mentally foggy that even the adrenaline of working couldn’t keep me focused. Was I still me without even my mind?

What, at base, made me ‘me’? Who was this person with scars and no eyebrows, with bare arms and wispy pubes, with a numb, red, polka-dotted, nipple-less boob and no functional memory?

Weeks passed. I barely thought of normal life. I was often asleep right after dinner. Possibilities receded. I was only the basic shape of me, drained of hue.

And somewhere in there, in the colorless trudge through cancer treatment, day after day of being blitzed by radiation, I found I just didn’t care about The Stripe. I didn’t feel proud of it; I didn’t feel like hiding it. I thought only about finishing my motherfucking radiation and being with my family, and I just didn’t give a single fuck about anything else.

My unnecessary fuck seeds were irradiated into oblivion.

•••

Months passed. Many of the months were terrible. After the primary cancer treatment ended, I was overwhelmed with awareness that what I’d been through had been really hard. Once I held a head of broccoli in the grocery store and thought, “I let them take my breast,” and the truth was so potent and so horrifying that I couldn’t move, and stood, immobile, for several minutes. There were days I cried until I started vomiting.

Eventually, I began to come back to myself. The sunburn subsided. One day, in early spring, I noticed that the hair on my breast was gone. (I confirmed with multiple brelfies.) I don’t know when it happened. The follicles, it seems, were destroyed by the radiation. Even now, long after the rest of my body re-sprouted, the new breast remains as smooth as a cue ball.

I don’t want The Stripe back. But I give a fuck that it’s gone.

•••

MEREDITH FEIN LICHTENBERG lives in New York City where she is a prenatal and parenting educator and a board-certified lactation consultant. Her writing has appeared in Full Grown People’s first anthology, as well as The Washington Post, Brain, Child, Kveller, Paste, and elsewhere, and she can be found online at www.amotherisborn.com.

In the Chair; Change, Change, Change

surprised doll — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Marcia Aldrich

A friend who I hadn’t seen in about a decade visited last weekend. Pat has been a Change Artist in her professional life, taking on and then shedding many careers, and now in her current job she gives workshops on Change Management, a subject she has mastered and I have flunked.

This week when I learned that two walnut trees, fixtures in my back yard, must be cut down because they’re touching wires, I almost cried. Over breakfast, she quoted Toffler from Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21^st Century will not be those who cannot read or write. The illiterate of the 21^st Century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” I nodded along—this assessment sounded like good advice for more than just professional development. But part of me resisted—I’m recalcitrant, someone who instinctually resists guidance and the newest packaged wisdom about what’s good for me. What did it mean to learn, unlearn, and relearn? I seem to be the sort of person who needs to learn again what I already know, not something new as in for the first time, as much as learning something again. Does that qualify as relearning?

I imagine you shaking your head as my friend Pat did and saying, that’s a sad thing. And you might be right, but our discussion made me think about a recent experience in which I needed to learn what I thought I knew.

•••

I had thought at this stage in my life when I’ve made such progress overcoming my unruly impulses that I would never have this experience again. At the very least, I’d make new mistakes, live through fresh disasters, but I wouldn’t repeat the old disasters like a pack donkey who takes one trail and one trail only even though it’s rocky as hell. The disaster I am referring to is none other than a train wreck of a haircut.

Early in life, they were engineered by my mother, and then later, they were self-inflicted and these are the worst kind—don’t you think?—the kind you can’t blame on anyone else but yourself. You can’t point the finger at your mother; you can only point the finger at yourself and wonder what came over you, what secret currents were fermenting in your little brain that erupted when you took your seat in some hairdresser’s chair and instructed them to do something radical to your hair. Perhaps you would dismiss changes in hair as style and not substance, but I would disagree. Hair matters; when a woman wants a change in her life, she often starts with her hair.

And so it was that I found myself in Sunshine’s chair in front of the big mirror that doesn’t reflect back to you who you’d like to be, but who you are. And yes, the woman who cuts my hair is named Sunshine. It isn’t her birth name. She gave herself that name when she came of age and was charting a very different course for her life than the one she had barely survived. She’s been cutting my hair for fifteen years. We’ve been adventurous, we’ve tried out some cuts and colors that weren’t as becoming as we had hoped; sometimes I’ve left feeling a tad deflated but mostly I’ve been struck that Sunshine saw just what I had been wanting to go forward. Until this last time, I’ve never gotten into my car and slumped over the steering wheel wondering if I could go on, wondering whether I had the will to turn the ignition on and ease my car back into the flow of traffic.

How was I going to return to work and face my coworkers and students who are gifted panelists on the runway of life’s mistakes? How, later in the evening, if I survived the afternoon, would I face my neighbors? I saw my day, post haircut, stretched out before me in one long extravaganza of shame.

Until that noon in Sunshine’s chair, I had medium length hair—a long, loose updated shag that tended towards the messy and wild. As a dedicated swimmer, I tend not to comb my hair after my swim and instead tousle it on the run. I don’t want to be one of those women who swim for thirty minutes and then spend sixty minutes fixing their hair and make-up before they emerge from the locker room. As Raymond Carver advised—get in and get out fast. Like him, I don’t like to linger or fuss. In the days running up to my appointment, my hair felt increasingly heavy. By the time the day arrived, the feeling of gravity was killing me.

When I plopped into the barbershop chair, its cracked leather cushion sighed. I found myself grabbing bunches of my hair and saying to Sunshine in a slightly accusatory manner, Look at this unruly mess! And indeed, when I pulled my hair this way and that, scrunching it up and away from my scalp, I did make a wild spectacle of myself. It is one thing to look stylishly disheveled and another to look like a banshee. I was trending towards the banshee. I had entered Studio 107 planning to ask for my usual, a trim. I wasn’t thinking, let’s do a radical, mind-blowing cut. I was going to make a modest proposal. What was unleashed when I settled into the chair? Little did I realize something larger was motivating my agitation and that I was pursuing my own winding path.

Here’s the thing about the relationship between hairdresser and hair possessor: the power between them is unequal. And the chair, even if you are sitting in it, belongs to the hairdresser. It is hers; she just allows you to sit in it temporarily. I know all this and usually I proceed with caution, if not trepidation. Yesterday, if I had paused and collected myself, I would have realized that my comments coupled with my gestures gave Sunshine a clear opening to interpret what she thought were my real desires. And that’s what she did. She believed my antics were saying I don’t just want my usual trim; I want you to hack the hair from my head like a mother fucker. And Sunshine, being the bold person that she is, did just that. It was quick and dirty and I hardly knew what happened. Did I mention that most of Sunshine’s skin, except for her face, is covered with a tattoo of many colors? Her hair is never the same color or style from appointment to appointment. It doesn’t resemble hair you see on the street or in the work place. It is elaborately constructed of a design that can’t be repeated. Therefore, I do not look to Sunshine for a restrained approach to hair.

Still the question remains—why didn’t I stop her? Having unleashed the fury in her, why didn’t I reach up and grab her arm, the one with the sensational scissors, or open my mouth and say, Wait! Why did I sit passively and mutely in the chair, chunks of my hair drifting down over my face and arms and floating onto the parquet floor? Did I want Sunshine to think I still had risky behavior running in my veins? Did I secretly want Sunshine to do what I lacked the nerve to do myself? Sometimes we forget and must be reminded of this fact: hairdressers are powerful. They are among the most powerful women in the world and other women live in fear of them and place their happiness in their hands. Yesterday I cared more about what Sunshine thought of me than I cared about my hair. A challenge had been laid down, and I’d better see it through.

When the hacking was over, we both looked in the mirror at my head. It was something to behold. Even Sunshine seemed taken aback by her handiwork. My hair, what there was of it, was now remarkably close to my very angular head, and it seemed at cross purposes, some sections twisting up, some twisting down. It made a statement that I was a woman who wasn’t afraid to have my face come before others directly with little formulation, like a short poem without any adornment. At the time I didn’t know whether I wanted to make that statement or not. It seemed not. Weakly she pronounced it a success: “I like it,” she said. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Back in the car, after I managed to lift my head off the steering wheel, I thought about wigs. I wanted one. But then it didn’t seem like me to cover up my mistakes. Following up a mistake with another mistake was not a good practice. Better to live with the results—isn’t that what I had learned from past mistakes?

I got through the afternoon’s work related events without comment and that was a bad sign. I obviously had something radical done to my hair and if it had turned out well, people would have mentioned it, wouldn’t they? I had two meetings with female graduate students and I did not attend to what they were saying because I was so preoccupied by their not saying anything about my hair. I was sure they were thinking, who does she think she is? Jean Seberg in Breathless or Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby? Though both these students were too young to know that Jean Seberg in Breathless was iconic of a certain kind of female waif popular during my era—the role Michelle Williams is now playing. When I was in high school I wore my hair as short as Mia Farrow. These were the days of a female counter-revolution in style when Twiggy and Mia and Jean were all the rage and symbolized a breezy and sexy independence with their boy cuts. Like them, back then, I was a stem of a girl with long legs and long neck, and the short hair worked. Now it would appear that I needed reminding Jean Seberg is dead and we study Breathless in film classes. Even Mia Farrow and Twiggy are no longer waif-like and neither keep their hair short, and if they did, we’d think they were foolishly reclaiming their long gone youth. We’d only be reminded of what they once were and aren’t now. But here I am with my cropped hair.

I slunk out of the Wanderer’s Tea House where I had met my students and felt myself lucky that I didn’t run into anyone I knew on my way to the car. But that evening on an unusually warm spring-like day, I knew that my neighbors would emerge from their winter lairs with their dogs and flock to the street. After dinner on the walk with the dogs, it was as I had feared—many neighbors were out and about. On the curve before our house, we ran into John Beck and the first words out of his mouth were, “I like what you’ve done to your hair.”

I almost blurted out—“You mean my removal of it?” Trying but failing to make light of my chagrin, I told him the sad saga of how I had made a mistake.

“Nonsense,” he said, “It makes you look perky.” Which he considered a good thing, something uttered to cheer me up. Unfortunately I could only think of the bitter irony that now after my mother had died and could no longer see me, I had finally realized her ideal vision of me. She had always wished for me to be bouncy and perky like a ball that you can throw against the wall and it comes back to you.

Before I could move on, another neighbor, Lyle, came by with his dog and again immediately launched into comments about my hair, as if there was no other subject. He really liked the change or alternatively he had quickly ascertained that I was feeling low about it and decided it was his job to buoy up my spirits.

Either way, it was interesting that two unaccompanied men sailed forth into the breach of my hair disaster with spirit and bravado. My own husband joined their ranks to form a trio of positive appraisal. I didn’t trust them one little bit. I thought the earlier female silence was much more likely to be an honest assessment. Still it gave me pause—they seemed unlikely cheerleaders. Or perhaps their cheerfulness reflects the relative lack of importance they place in hair. After all, my husband spends not one iota of his time thinking about his hair. And John Beck doesn’t have any. Only women can be counted on to understand the complications of hair, I thought.

A few days have passed since what I call the epic cut, and I’m coming to realize that the trio of men may have seen something I couldn’t. Maybe my new hair suits me or suits something I wanted but was struggling to articulate. Maybe this is what I wanted and it’s taken a few days to catch up with my hair as has so often been the case in the past. I’ve found to my surprise that I don’t shriek when I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I’m getting to like my new old self—she seems less armored, less covered, and reminds me that being alive is not a well-behaved kind of affair. When I run my fingers along the back of my neck I’m not entirely surprised to find that my hair is growing back just as Sunshine said it would.

•••

MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays. She has just completed a collection of essays, The Art of Being Born. Her website is marciaaldrich.com.