Losing It (28 page)

The instructions inside the box listed five easy steps to achieving “a bare, sexy look.” Step one was to thickly smooth the depilatory creme onto areas with unwanted hair. Bob squirted creme on his right calf, the one he’d begun shaving, and spread it out with his fingers – it had a sharp, chemical smell – then squirted more and spread it until most of his leg was white and gluey, and a great deal of the tube was empty. He should have bought several packages, he realized. Step two told him to wait four to five minutes and test a small area by removing the creme with the foam puff to see if the hair came off. He didn’t have a watch, so he counted seconds. His skin felt tingly, alive, and he started to get erect when he thought about what he was doing – preparing his legs to step into silk stockings. Then he heard Julia say, “Matthew!
Oh!”
in a frantic tone of voice that in her current mood could mean anything: that he’d fallen out of bed and his arm was hanging lifeless out of its socket, or that he’d simply woken up and asked for a bit of nubby.

“Bob, are you going to be long?” she asked, exasperated. She was calling from somewhere upstairs. He didn’t answer, continued to count in his head. “Because I could really use some help,” she said. The subtext was that if he didn’t drop everything and come right away then she was going to be in a horrid mood for days. But he couldn’t drop what he was doing. He didn’t call out and she didn’t say anything more.

He counted to three hundred, then gently took the heart-shaped foam, wetted it and wiped away a bit of his leg hair. It came off like loose dirt, leaving the skin beneath smooth and pale. He rinsed the puff in the bath and took off some more hair. After several minutes of wiping and rinsing, most of his leg was bare. It looked strangely white and naked and much smaller, without the far, but still not particularly female. It was not shapely or strong, but lumpish, with underlying stringy muscles and gnarly knees and his feet were still hopelessly enormous and bony. He felt an initial sense of frustration and disappointment, and he looked at the SilkenSkin box as, he felt, so many women must review it after the operation. Why couldn’t I be curvy and voluptuous like her, he wondered, and not simply naked-looking, like a plucked chicken? Because now his leg was pimpling, like chicken skin, and turning red, and then his eyes skipped down to Step Five which said in bold letters: “Some individuals may experience skin-rash or similar negative reactions. Before initially proceeding make sure to test a small area of skin. If rash, discoloration, abrasion, irritation, blistering, or allergic reaction occurs, wash affected area gently but thoroughly with lukewarm water. Do not soap. If condition persists, consult physician.”

Bob quickly sat in the bath and splashed water on his leg. Some of the old loose hair floating on the bathwater was now restuck to his skin, as if mocking him. He pulled the plug and watched the water drain sluggishly through the hair. He pulled a bunch of it away from the drain with his fingers but it was replaced immediately by more. He had difficulty getting it off his fingers: the only way seemed to be to wash his hand in the water, but that left the hair heading back for the drain. He got out of the bath, dripping, his bottom half newly coated now in his own discarded fur, and reached for some toilet paper, which
he wet and used to wipe clean his hand and part of his leg. But that was slow too, and the hair didn’t stick to the toilet paper but drifted off. Now there were little curly black hairs on the floor and the walls, on the sides of the toilet, on the bath mat, crawling up the shower curtain. He freed the drain once more and wiped his hand, put the wet wad of toilet paper into the toilet. Hair on the tiles and the washcloths, loose hair sticking to his body, hair in the sink when he hadn’t even been close to it. Hair on the ceiling and the windowsill and on the curtains.

Bob let the bathwater hairs go down the drain, used his fingers to force them past the little steel guard. His shorn leg was covered in stinging, itchy red dots now. Water helped for the instant it was on, but the discomfort only seemed to increase afterwards.

“Bob. Please!
What
is going on in there?” Julia called through the door.

“I’ll just be out in a bit,” he said calmly. “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine.” He took a rag from the tiny utility cupboard underneath the sink, wet it, and began wiping around the tub. In a minute he had a wet, hairy rag that itself could not be easily cleaned. He tried picking the hairs off and putting them in the toilet for flushing, but that was tedious. Julia seemed to be camped out on the other side of the door. He could hear her seething.

“I was hoping you could be of some help,” she said with angry exactness.

“In a
minute
, I said,” he snapped back. He threw the rag in the toilet and flushed. It spun round and round doubtfully, then just before he reached his hand in to retrieve it the toilet swallowed it successfully. There were no more rags, so he used more wads of wet toilet paper. He wiped the tub and the curtains, the walls and floors, the shelf where Julia kept the
shampoo and conditioner, her facial scrub and bath beads. He wiped behind the toilet and he picked off individual hairs that had become stuck to the mirror, and he flushed down wad after hairy wad. He wasn’t aware of when she went away, but at some point he realized she was no longer there. He looked ridiculous with one leg shaved and the other not, and he reasoned that Julia was going to be angry with him whether or not he spent the extra time. So he sat on the edge of the tub and ran the water and slowly, carefully soaped and shaved his other leg, pausing to clean off his razor straight under the tap rather than dealing with another tub full of hair. He soaped and shaved his thighs and then his stomach, his chest and neck and shoulders and arms. He didn’t know how to deal with the hair on his back. He tried reaching around behind him, cleared a few patches on his shoulder blades and on the back of his ribs. But he couldn’t get it all. He inserted a new set of blades to shave under his arms. That was nerve-wracking, but he was less tender than he expected, and the milky whiteness of his newborn skin made him feel suddenly female and desirable. When he lifted his arm and looked in the mirror, there he was, remade. He was flabby enough to have small breasts anyway, and the hairlessness was transforming, felt for the moment like the most delectable costume he’d ever tried on.

If I lost some weight, he thought, if I went to the gym every day, and was careful about my food …

He hadn’t left the top of his chest curly. He’d thought about it, but it was hard to resist the momentum of the moment.

He took a last wad of toilet paper and carefully began a final wipe-up. There were still quite a few stray hairs. On the doorknob, even, on the funny ceramic knobs at the base of the toilet, behind the faucet and in the medicine cabinet, and still more on the mirror. He wasn’t going to get them all. But he got
as many as he could and when he ran out of toilet paper the bathroom was pretty clean, as far as he could tell. The toilet was a bit over-full, but he flushed anyway. Wads of toilet paper circled sluggishly, but finally went down. He washed his hands and spread skin creme all over himself – the full tube of SilkenSkin Finishing Creme, and then quite a bit of Julia’s vitamin E skin lotion. Even his red and itchy leg felt soothed. Then he stood blushing and elated, looking quite thin already without all that hair.

23

J
ulia sat in silent fury propped up in bed. She had a book open on her lap and the reading light was on. She’d put on the flannel pyjamas that Bob hated and she was looking at the page without having any of the words register. Matthew was asleep. Her mother was in bed, at least for the time being, and quiet, with the door closed. Apparently Bob was finally through in the bathroom. He’d been in there for hours, it seemed, mysteriously mucking about. She didn’t know what he was up to and he wouldn’t explain. He’d been hiding from Matthew and her mother all day, hadn’t helped one iota. She could hear him coming up the stairs. One heavy foot after another. Loud enough to wake the baby. When he walked through the bedroom door she put her head down and read. She was feeling too angry to speak first.

But he didn’t speak either. He walked into the bathroom and closed the door and she thought, My God, what now? But she heard the sounds of running water, brushing teeth. Then he peed for twenty, thirty, fifty seconds, a loud, long stream. He’d flushed the downstairs toilet dozens of times. Why did he need to pee so badly now? She could hear him flush this
toilet twice, then a third time, and it sounded tired, as if it was broken. When he walked out she immediately looked back down at her book.

He pulled open a drawer, took out his pyjamas, didn’t look at her. Then he walked to the door and said, lightly, as he was leaving, “I have terrible gas. I don’t want to bother you. I’ll sleep downstairs tonight.” And he gently closed the door.

Bad gas? She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t smelled him. She listened now to his heavy feet descending the stairs, heard him rummage in the main-floor linen closet then tread into his office and close the door. The house settled uneasily, unbelievably into silence. So that was it? A few muttered words of explanation, not a glance in her direction?

She was fuming but she wouldn’t go down and give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose her temper. Yet she couldn’t sleep either, not like this, so she decided to do something useful, something that would hurt him rather effectively, in a completely different way. She’d sort through her clothes, gather together for donation everything that she had no hope of fitting into again.

She opened her closet and immediately found a beautiful linen skirt that no longer easily zipped up the back – she didn’t even have to try it on. The mauve suede pants that Bob had misguidedly bought her just weeks after she’d given birth, and a size too small at that – gone. And the formerly form-fitting green velvet Christmas dress that Bob used to salivate over. But she hadn’t worn it for two years now so out with it. She was in no mood for mercy.

Back to the drawers to root out those ridiculous bits of lingerie Bob kept buying for her. There was the pretty, skin-coloured satin camisole she could no longer pull over her shoulders, and various issues of thong underwear that became
uncomfortable within seconds of donning them, an assortment of lacy bras too small to contemplate, and bodysuits that made her sweat and feel self-conscious. She hated to think how much money he’d sunk into these items, had never had the courage to just dump them before. But now was a good time.

Where was the purple silk slip? It was Bob’s absolute favourite, but it had never fit properly. She knew exactly where it ought to have been, but it wasn’t there. She hadn’t worn it in ages, it wasn’t in the laundry. Where was it?

There were so many things she wasn’t going to wear again. The more she looked, the more she found: T-shirts that were too small, or too milky; torn pantyhose; a wide-style belt that fit none of her remaining pants; the spandex tights that she used to go running in, but that showed too much of her belly now (not that she could ever imagine going running again, in her present state of maternal incarceration, joined at the hip to Matthew). Silk scarves, sweaters that needed airing. This time she pulled nearly everything out of her drawers.

Then she stopped, looked around, suddenly conscious of the absurdity of what she was doing. And just as suddenly as she had started, she left the drawers and piles as they were and turned out the light, climbed into bed. She clamped her eyes shut, willed herself to relax. In strained stillness she wondered what she was going to do, was intensely conscious that she didn’t know; she felt as if she were outside herself, watching. Would she go downstairs and give him the royal shit he deserved? Or just continue to lie here in the relative peace, though overwound, ready to explode?

Julia thought of her parents and their bitter, dark nights, her mother’s voice shattering all peace, her father angrily silent, responsive as stone, while Julia listened in the black of supposed sleep. When they fought it was usually over her father’s
drinking. He wasn’t a raging, uncontrolled drunk, but a steady, purposeful imbiber who, as the years passed, slowly gave himself over to a dulled, deadened evening state, who in later life tended to push aside those things that might distract him, that would spoil the solitude of his drinking. It became a matter of resentful, eventually silent resignation for her mother. But when Julia was young, when the pattern was just beginning to establish itself, there were awful fights. Julia remembered a lamp smashing, and little Alex rushing to the stairs to peer through the banister down into the murk of the living room. Julia had urged him back.

“No, don’t worry, it’s all right,” she’d said, and it was – in the morning the debris had already been cleaned, the broken lamp was safely in the garbage and another one had been brought up from the basement to replace it.

Was tonight about Bob’s drinking? Julia wondered. She recognized some of the signs from her father. He had his bottles in certain places; no day passed when he didn’t drink. But somehow he always seemed to know when he was over the line. But what else would he have been doing in the bathroom for so long, and why did he feel he needed to hide? Then again, she hadn’t smelled a thing, and she usually could.