“Stop by the dollar store and get me some of those disposable razors, will you?” My brother’s request surprised me because of the three razors that kept leaping from the ledge in his shower. “They’re pulling like someone was shaving her legs with them,” he said. I looked at him in astonishment — a wasted gesture since he never saw it — and then let my mind grind on what he said: Did he really think that the gnarly wires that sprout from a man’s face were more easily bladed than the wee wisps on a woman’s legs?
Now, it must be said, here: when it comes to hair, I am lacking in some areas. When I hear someone say, “the hair stood up on my arms,” I cannot relate to the sensation. I have no hair on my arms, chest, none on my legs, and very little on my face. I cannot grow a beard, but should I choose, a mustache will sprout and send tendrils down to my chin, where hairs will gather beneath my lip, but will not pass goatee. When I was a senior in high school, I lovingly cultivated what I imagined to be a great soup-strainer on my upper lip, in anticipation of my high school pictures; I was shocked to find that the photographer’s flash had eliminated my ‘stache.
My razor-poor brother has also inherited the family hairlessness. Though his dome outgrew his hair at an early age, his chest is slick, his legs shine and his arms sport no fringe. Even his knuckles lack the crawling bug early-warning-system of hairs. Of the four boys who carried the mantle of “Woods,” only one had anything more than a whisper of facial hair. And my sister recently confirmed what I had suspected: she has never had to shave her legs. We Woods’ don’t hair.
So, anyway: Hairless me married a hairless woman and we had — what became evident in her later years — a hairless daughter. When this daughter was in the process of delivering my first grandchild, she became a delivery room sensation when a nurse discovered that she had no hair on her legs. “C’mere!” my daughter claims the nurse cried out to other staff. The nurse placed her face against my daughter’s leg, and encouraged other nurses to do the same. My daughter was like, “Uh…any time you guys want to get your faces off my legs, I’m in a pushing mood.” My second daughter, from my second marriage, also has no hair, though her brother has the hairy legs of a Wookiee.
Peter and Gordon’s song, “Lady Godiva” touts the value of hair, especially long hair. Her hair, “hangin’ down around her knees,” and “hiding all the lady’s charms,” provided the lady with a cloak unavailable to the Woods family, and not just because of its blondness. (There are no recorded instances of blondes in the Woods clan, though the possibility has always been there.) Even during the rebellious 60s, when great Afros sprung from African-American (and others) heads, I had to wait six months for a respectable growth, which was, by the way, as soft as eiderdown. As soft as — well — my brother’s facial hair.
I know that some men have to shave from eyebrow to belly-button and some women choose to manually remove the fuzz from their shins, but I set my brother straight about the idea that a woman dulls a razor faster than a man; besides, he has almost to hair to scratch away, anyway. I really don’t want to “hair” his complaints about a dull razor.