The Bearded Lady

I do a decent amount to keep myself from looking like I’ve slept under a bridge, though being of Slavic descent brings it’s own set of difficulties. Along with my grandmother’s love for wild roses I have also inherited her moustache. Her moustache was a thing that even in the twilight years of her dementia she never forgot to shave. She had no idea who I was and her own identity was becoming foggy, yet even in her anonymity she was determined not to be the defined as the woman who died with a full beard. 

For years I was ashamed of my inheritance and kept very seriously on top of it. But I’ve gotten older and laxer, and while it still embarrasses me I often find myself out and about, the fine hairs on my upper lip showing plainly in my reflection in a shop window, I am much less likely to run home and do anything about it.

I can only assume that that the hair will soon fill in with the sort of ferocity that, if I’m not careful, will have me known behind my back as the girl with the moustache (which sounds like a terrible Stieg Larsson spin off)—if this has not happened already. It’s karma I think, for those afternoons that I took such glee in my mother’s own attempts to wax off her stubborn upper lip fuzz, as I sat in one corner of the salon nearly clapping. It was a “better you than me” mentality and one that has since come to bite me in the ass.

Some months ago a friend and esthetician leaned across the table that we’d eaten dinner together on just moments before, and stared at the general fuzz on my face. After a long moment of silence, she said suddenly, “I never noticed that you have a moustache.”

She had gone then to fetch something called a Q-stick, an implement of torture that is basically an oversized spring that you run across your face. It then rips the hairs out one by one, as if a tiny hand is slapping you repeatedly. Even now she sends me ads for deals on the things, as if I’d want not one but two of them.

We’d sat on her living room couch as she pulled hairs out of my face, barely containing a look of glee as I began to tear up. “This is my favorite thing about being an aesthetician,” she exclaimed, “I’m doing you a service, but you’re in so much pain right now that I can feel how much you want to hit me.” I had pondered then on how odd the relationships of women are sometimes.

Now when I visit my mother I count the things that we have in common: the olive skin tone, the fact that we cry all the time at nothing, and of course our respective moustaches. We both claim things like, “It doesn’t really come in the way it used to,” but on the beaches in the glinting sunlight it’s easy to see that this is untrue. In the harsh light of day, I have a 5 o’clock shadow and it’s only noon.

Now I just try and keep up with it, and I find it’s one of those things that the people around you will let you know about, like having your fly down in public. As if to hammer his point home, my partner leans in for a kiss and says, “moustache, moustache, moustache,” so quickly that the words all run together. And I begin to think that this may be the way that people around me tell me that they love me.

Outside a bakery. Love, glory and botox. Paris, France 2015