I’m highly suspicious of this whole concept. It seems a little platitudinous to me, like “Pride comes before a fall” or “If you want to find Mr. Right, stop looking.” Or worse, the kind of neurologic that might be disseminated by evil lady-journalists who thinks Fifty Shades of Grey made its millions via womens’ innate desire to crawl on the ground. And what does that mean, anyway, linked to memory? Nothing’s not memory and mostly everything is linked.
And this style, especially that whackass last sentence, is a lot less quippy than a normal blog post but David tried so many things with his art so I want to try new things with my art, too. And last night Patrick said don’t worry about being funny because to be honest your blog doesn’t tend to be that funny. Then he swore and said I’m sorry, that was out of bounds.
The day I started drafting this post, I remembered a smell that linked back very immediately to a memory of my Indiana bathroom. At first I thought it was the smell of “Fancy Aftershave in a Weird Glass Bottle, Weirdly Stored in the Downstairs Bathroom despite the fact I’m Pretty Sure My Dad Shaved Upstairs.” But it was a little worse than that smell, and the memory had a little more to do with me, and then I placed it as Nair.
Nair is a wet white lotion that you smooth over your crotch in a circular motion to make the buried hair come loose from its follicles. The texture’s exactly what you’re thinking, but creamier and not as sticky. It smells a little worse than aftershave.
I used Nair for the first time the summer I was 14 and required to wear a one-piece bathing suit for my job as a YMCA camp counselor. At first I wore black basketball shorts over the one-piece bathing suit, but I felt confident that everyone (accurately) interpreted this wardrobe decision as a public declaration of my pubic hair’s overwhelming victory over my bikini line. I didn’t really want to remove my pubic hair, but there seemed to be no way of bewitching everybody into forgetting about it, and I was too afraid of nicking my labia to shave it off. Now I wear bathing suits with little skirts. Stores don’t sell many suits like that, just so you know.
After you smooth the lotion over you pubic hair, you have to wait 5 to 7 minutes and more like 10 if you’re Jewish. You might want to spend this time sitting on the ridge of the bathtub with the door locked, hoping the three other residents of your household have forgotten you’re in there, forgotten there even is a downstairs bathroom, forgotten that there exists a fourteen year-old woman in their family. Then you wipe the lotion off with a washcloth and hope the hair comes off, too.
More-like-ten minutes is a long time to sit, naked from the waist down, on the ridge of a bathtub. I’m grateful for my adolescence, but Nair nights were always made up of bad minutes. There was nothing to look at except my liquidy thighs, the pelvic tops of which were covered in depilatory cream, the fat rolling downward in every direction. Sometimes I would imagine freezing the fat off in a sort of miniature MRI machine or sucking it out with a soda straw. More often, I thought of cutting it off with a knife, picturing a solid slice of redness, more like melon than meat. Very rarely, I pictured scooping my thighs away bit by bit with a perfectly hemispheric spoon. Sometimes I really scared myself. I knew that cutting the fat off with a knife would be totally possible if I ever set the time aside. My school instructors and the mothers of my friends have consistently described me as a hugely capable young girl.
After wiping the detached hairs from the tops of my thighs, I comforted myself by masturbating to one of my own original teen-aged fantasies, in which a man used his mouth to sip my tits off of my body bit by bit, as though they were made of cold sherbet. I liked thinking about being so smooth I could be slowly drunk up. But I didn’t know how to make myself cum so after getting bored with that activity I ate food. I don’t use Nair any more, but I still use this tactic. When I spend entire day-times thinking about my thighs, I get home and bake dessert and eat it all night. I eat copiously and conspicuously, and then no one suspects that I’m the sort of woman who thinks about the size of her thighs all day. This way, I protect my image as a woman who radiates steely resolve and formidable ego despite not being beautiful. I am very vain, in this sense.
You might be thinking, well, Roz. This whole thing is both A) way too long and B) pretty good evidence for smell being connected to memory.
But what I’m saying is, I didn’t REALLY smell Nair last Thursday, I just remembered the smell, so is that really smell conjuring a memory? It sounds a lot more like memory conjuring a sense. Which happens just as much with the other senses, maybe even more so.
Then again, remembering other senses sometimes leaves more questions than answers. The same way smells come over me when I’m not really inhaling anything, songs can come to me when I’m not listening to music. And sometimes only partially, and in ways that aren’t identifiable, the way I’ll remember just a lick of a pop song and ask Eliya, What is that, that goes like this, just these four tones in the middle somewhere? And it’s very hard to place.
Roz, To The Occasion. 