I would look down at my legs whenever she did that. First there were my feet, small, with pale toes, shod in my favorite pair of rubber slippers with red straps. Then there were my calves, straight and shapeless. There were my knees too, dark from kneeling on the floor while I played, scratched from the pebbles and asphalt on the street outside. Farther up were my thighs. If I bent down, with my head hanging upside down, I could see right through the space between them. Throughout this length of foot, calf, knee and thigh, was an expanse of dark, brown down. I was balbon.
There were many things I could do with the hair on my legs. I could brush them with my palm and make them all face in one direction. I could get my Mommy’s tweezers and pluck a few strands until my skin began to sting. When I bathed I could lather soap on my legs and make white, sudsy swirls of hair. Mostly though, I was just a kid with hairy, dirty-looking legs. And I didn’t like it.
Iwould get scared at night. Looking at the moon through my bedroom window, I was afraid my yaya’s words would come true. I waited, expecting the hair on my body to grow long and stiff. I waited for my ears to peak and point, for my nails to grow into sharp claws. It never happened. And I would be relieved, just until the next night.
Growing up, my mother assured me that all that hair was normal. In fact she would say, "Some people think that the hair on our bodies look good, they find it beautiful."
I would ask her, "Am I like Daddy? Isn’t he balbon too?"
My mother would shake her head, "Actually, for a man, your Daddy has very little hair on his body." And then she would remind me to not pay attention to my yaya or to anyone who told me I looked like a child-werewolf or child-monkey or any other animal with lots of body hair and that I was a beautiful child, even with those legs. I believed my mother, until I was about 14.
With the rest of my body slowly growing out to look like a young woman’s, my legs still looked like they were a boy’s. If I really wanted to look like a young woman, I had to get rid of all that hair.
At 15, a week before my prom, I announced to my family that I was going to shave my legs. They understood. My Mother had almost no body hair and my sister had the lightest, finest hair on her legs, you could hardly see them. And so, picking a blue, single- blade razor from my Dad’s stock of multi-colored shavers, I began to shave my legs for the first time.
Since then, I have had to shave my legs at least once a week, if I want them to look like a real woman’s legs. I’ve tried shavers especially for ladies, shavers from hotel rooms, double-blade razors, even men’s triple-blade shavers. I’ve tried minty, fresh shaving cream made for men’s faces, shaving cream for women’s legs, conditioner, shampoo and once when I was in a hurry, a dry shave (which hurt a lot and made my skin red for hours).
When I get a job, one of the first things I will spend on is permanent hair removal, "to remove unwanted hair permanently!" But right now, I just shave – once a week, twice a month, when I plan to wear a short skirt, or sometimes not at all.
I let the hair on my legs grow for more than a month once. As I looked down at my slipper-shod feet, curved calves, still-dark knees and ample thighs, I saw that I was balbon, again. I shaved right away. I couldn’t stand the shower of black (no longer dark brown) hair on my legs. I shaved thoroughly, as close to my skin as possible, almost dulling the double-bladed razor. I made sure my legs looked like hair never grew on them, like I was never in my life told, by someone, anyone, that I was going to be a child-werewolf, a child-monkey or any other hairy animal.