If the colors of the room were blue and green rather than gold and scarlet, I might have relaxed. They are soothing colors, but reds and yellows are exciting, it says in How to Sleep and Rest Better, a 1937 manual in the community's small library, whose blue cover attests to its psychologist author's belief that readers can free themselves from the day's worries, with soothing colors, in order to succumb to a blissful unconsciousness. It is important, the manual claims, to calm down in the evening, to prepare for sleep as you would for any other activity, to slow down thinking, forget serious or exciting things, to make the mind blank. The moron, the author says, does not have to make his mind a blank before going to bed since it is blank day and night. Mental patients are given hot baths and hydrotherapy to calm them, but the manual says people should have sufficient control to calm down at will, they should be superior to their environment, but anyway color schemes should be carefully administered, the author says. To relax the body for sleep, the poor sleeper must develop a different mental attitude, to regard sleep as a peaceful sanctuary, when a person sets aside all worries, resentments, and fears, and learns to relax, but a person must be relaxed about learning itself, otherwise the body will become a taut, keyed-up machine. There is something called "progressive relaxation" in which with each successive minute the sleeper relaxes more. Truly beautiful women, the author says, know the secrets of relaxation and beauty naps. I am waiting for forgetfulness.
For years, I shaved my legs, then decided to have them waxed, and now there is barely any hair on them. The woman who first ripped hair from my legs was born in Mexico, and appeared, when I met her, healthy and without problems, while she served me in a spacious salon, where I, along with other women, was catered to adequately and sometimes courteously or lavishly. Every two months I visited the salon, until one day the Mexican woman, whose skin was several shades darker than my own and oily, asked me if I would come instead to her apartment, so she could keep the entire fee, and where, I discovered, she lived with her husband, her son, and her father. Her daughter had left home, and there was enmity between them. Her husband, who'd hurt his back doing factory labor, was usually at home, staring out of the window, a wide, leather belt around his waist and lower back for support. I rarely saw her son, since when I was having my legs waxed, she set me on his bed in his bedroom. But I have my legs waxed now by the Polish woman, who has degrees and certificates in several of the cosmetic arts displayed prominently on the semi-transparent plastic wall of the small room in which she also waxes legs, for which a license is required, and I can't remember all the reasons why I didn't want, after a while, to return to the apartment of the other and first leg waxer, to whom I thought I should have been loyal but wasn't.
The Polish woman has almost no hair on her body, or hardly any that's visible, except for light blond fuzz above her upper lip, so fair as to be negligible, though she might wax her lip and legs weekly, but now little grows back, which is what happens when hair's waxed from the body repeatedly and diligently, it dies, except the most stubborn kind, which on my body is at the outer sides of my ankles, where cold probably most affects or touches it. But it is at my throat and neck that I feel cold most, and I have never had hair there, and the neck is also, next to the nipples, a place that, when kissed, licked, sucked, or, in most ways, touched, arouses me most quickly, and none of these parts, so quick to arousal, have hair on them. I don't remember my nipples ever feeling cold. Hair is of little functional value to people, but hair does alter appearance, its amount, its curl, its thickness, its fineness, and hair products for men and women multiply dizzyingly on drugstore shelves. Male-pattern baldness, though, is especially curious, since it's common to some extent to all men, even those who live in extremely cold climates, where it would seem necessary for protection. But human hair must be primarily for sexual attraction, and only second to indicate illness, since hair loss in men and loss and hirsutism in women are controlled by the steroid sex hormones; an abnormal appearance may also be a symptom of diseases produced by vitamin deficiencies-protein starvation, inadequate iron, or reactions to cytotoxic drugs, for instance, those used in chemotherapy. The Polish woman probably waxes her underarms, which sickens me, since waxing in tender areas, like the upper, inner thigh near the pubis, is painful, but the underarm must be worse, yet the Polish woman does it, as do many other women whose bodies I've noticed at the beach, where men and women, driven by hormones, desire, and social mores, cluster and expose themselves to the dangerous rays of the sun and to each other; women also, in changing rooms in stores, undress, and the exposed underarm, though hairless, is somewhat darker in hue than the rest of the skin of the body, as if indelibly stained or dyed.
The woman who first waxed my legs had much more hair on her body than the polish woman, though she also waxed often, but still the pores on her arms and legs, even her upper lip, were bigger and from them short black hairs, stubble, sprang vigorously from her oily, olive flesh. Regular shaving incites a hair follicle in its determination to thrive, so because I started the practice before I should have, the way my friends did, and I might need to wear stockings, tougher hair raised itself immediately through the pores of my sensitive skin, making my legs rough to the touch and irritants to each other. Soon rashes colored the areas around the short hairs, livid pink circles, and also some of the hairs turned inward, with small bubbles of flesh forming over them, in which the hair continued to grow and which, like a pimple, had to be squeezed, to release the fugitive hair follicle. Folliculitis is the inflammation of the hair follicle, and, as a girl, I enjoyed the outbreak of one or two. Hair is sometimes used to make art objects, woven into cloth, or braided into bracelets, and in 19th century America it was common to keep locks of hair of loved ones, dead and alive, when women also wore hair lockets that hung from a velvet ribbon about the neck. I found some hairs from my dead father's comb, but I don't remember where I put them, they were very few, not an ample, coiled lock that might have represented him, but only a sample of his DNA, predictive threads, the body's oracle.
It's easy to imagine the pain of having your underarms waxed, but I can't imagine and never want to, because it would be very much worse, being a captive, hooded and locked in a hot or cold room, since suffocation is terrible, and asthmatics must understand the experience of being hooded without wearing a hood, or people with chronic eczema, who are imprisoned in their skins, condemned to scratching their itchy flesh until it bleeds, requiring some to be strapped down and disenabled from clawing the disturbed flesh off their bodies. Photographs of hooded prisoners cause me to gag; I immediately experience a loss of oxygen and inhibition of movement in horrible empathy, which is another reason I don't read the newspaper, the way the young married man does, at breakfast, but wait until a more appropriate time, not accompanied by food, just as when I read Naked Lunch, whose characters inhabited airless hovels and sought veins into which they could inject themselves, their blood squirting onto walls or dirty sheets. William Burroughs must have been transfixed by injecting himself, by the act of fixing itself, by the blood of his own body and others, so I needed to be selective about the novel's place in my day. Burroughs loved cats and Colette, too, she was one of his favorite writers, and to her the cat was a talisman and companion, but I don't imagine Colette or Burroughs wore images of animals on their shirts or coats, though they might have been tempted to buy a souvenir of an adorable cat, as I have been but didn't, aware that it portends a slide into a vat of sentimentality. Colette was photographed with her cat and her dog, she loved cats and dogs but not her daughter, and she didn't go to her mother's funeral, though she wrote about her mother, Sido, as if she would have thrown herself onto her coffin during the funeral and buried herself, too. Burroughs was afraid to die, like my father but not my mother. Some say it's simpler to love cats or dogs than mothers, or it can be more rewarding.