Kathleen Rooney - For You, for You I am Trilling These Songs

for Martin

T HE INTENSIVE BRAZILIAN Portuguese class I took at the Boston Language Institute has been a godsend so far. But, perhaps understandably, my lessons have left me lacking the lexicon necessary to convey, in so many words, Hi, my sister and I would like you to cover our sensitive and never-before depilated pubic regions and butts with molten hot wax and then rip out all the hairs. Yes, please, all of them. Thanks!

Too bad, really, because this is precisely what wed like to have done. We are in Paranagu, a medium-sized, totally untouristed port city dozens of kilometers south of So Paulo, andhaving been here now almost a monthweve figured, When in Brazil, why not get a Brazilian wax?

We are hoping desperately that nobody notices us, sunny mid-morning in this dingy beauty parlor off a cobbled side street. We are the grandnieces of Dom Alfredo Novak, the Catholic bishop, and since few foreigners visitespecially not Americans, especially not Americans related to major and belovd religious leaderswe are minor celebrities in this town. The other day at a pastry shop, an impeccably coiffed middle-aged woman helped us make proper change to pay for a sticky bun. We didnt think much of it until that night over dinner, when our uncle told us she was the mayors wife, and that she had called him up to tell him about our encounter. She thought we seemed like such fine young ladies.

We are not being particularly ladylike now. We have resorted, sheepishly at first, and then quite shamelessly, to nonverbal communication, expressing ourselves through a series of hip-height gestures, making emphatic Vs with both hands over our pants, giant arrows pointing, Here, down here.

Weve spent too much time anticipating thisand too much time looking for a place to have it doneto fail to make ourselves understood. Wed been thinking of just going to the salon in our hotel, but it, like so many things in Paranagu, is inexplicably closed. So we went out walking, hunting for a place, and chose this one based on its nameA Raposa, and the stylized fox on its graying awning. Foxy, yes, thats what we want to be.

Beth goes first. I feel like a criminal whose accomplice has just gone off to the gallows without her. I sit flipping nervously through a magazine, the majority of which I cant even read. She comes out not even fifteen minutes later, a naughty smile on her face, and wishes me good luck. I cant describe it, she says as the stocky woman in charge of intimate waxing leads me back.

The waxing room could scarcely be more sordid and I love it for that. Part of the fantasy is that this is sneaky; this is secret. Nobody but Beth and I know where we are. The mattress looks filthy beneath the crackly white paper, and tiny hairswhich I hope are just Bethsdust the floor: curly little commas, twisty little question marks. The woman commands me to take off my pants and lay down and I do. The entire episode has the atmosphere of an illicit medical procedure.

A window looks out onto some bleak concrete stairs, stairs which I pray no one will use for the next few minutes or theyll get an eyeful. The windows have no screens, no glass, and the air that rushes in smells smoky mostly, and sometimes salty, sometimes sulphury, blowing across the bay. Beyond the stairs? A fence, the kind of fence weve seen everywhere in Brazil, lined with broken bottles, like stained glass in the sunlight, and atop that, silvery corkscrews of sadistic razor wire.

Im beginning to think this is an appropriate view, looking as it does the way the pain feels: jagged and shreddy and, I swear, multi-colored. I can barely believe weve chosen to do this willingly. The woman just looks grimly to her work, laughing occasionally when I wince after a particularly ferocious yank. Calma, calma. Be still, she says, but never Desculpe, excuse me, Im sorry. Why would she be sorry? Im getting what Im paying for.

She is brusque, efficient, but chattering away. The pain is dizzying and I hardly care about following the conversation. At one point near the end, after a really vicious rip, she holds up the white cloth strip, covered with dark, coarse hairs that until seconds ago had been attached to me, and says with some amusement, some disgust, Muito coubertor! Very covered! Yes, I say, I know. Very coveredthats the whole issue.

Its over in fifteen minutes flat, and then Im alone again, left to gingerly put my pants back on. When I join Beth out front at the archaic cash register, the woman charges us five reais apiece, the equivalent of about three U.S. dollars. We cannot believe our outrageous good fortune; the cheapness of the procedure helps take out even more of the sting, which is already subsiding.

We are now completelycompletely!clean of hair down there, but we feel pleasantly dirty, mostly because what weve done will remain our secret. Weve done something that our uncle and the nuns would be scandalized by. (Well, most of them, aside from Sister Ketty, who went to college in Italy, and who used to race motocrosswe suspect shes fairly worldly.) This is something we are certain they would think nice girls dont do. Something with a whiff of prostituio about it, a word we heard when the nuns drove us by the notorious motel, Casa Notorna, on our way to help weigh the babies and feed the children in one of Paranagus most abysmal slums.

For a second, this makes us feel bad. We are so rich. And we have just spent our moneya small amount, but still, big enough for hereon a somewhat silly indulgence. We try not to walk funny. We look at each other and giggle. When we get back to the Hotel Camboa, we take turns going into the bathroom and checking our newly bare skin in the mirror. We call our fiancs, who will be joining us here soon to get married, and laugh. Weve been so good this whole month, and now weve just been slightly bad.

Later that day, our uncle will escort us down to the waterfront, down to the docks where we will catch a small boat to Ilha do Mel, a beautiful and car-less island off the coast. There, in air fresher than any weve ever smelled, we will haul our hairless butts up the steep stairs to the lighthouse and look down at the mist-shrouded sea. We will hike with our new friend, an old friend of our uncles, Dona Branca, out to Fortaleza, the fort built in 1770 to protect the Bay of Paranagu from foreign ships. We will look so good, so cute in our sandals, bikini tops, and pants, but it will be a little too chilly to wear bathing suits only. We will wish it werent the off-season so we could really get bare and enjoy the fact that no hair would ever show.

On one of our hikes along a beach covered with more sand dollars than weve ever seen, I will tell Beth the story of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin on his wedding night, and she will indulge me and listen to the whole thing.

Evidently, although hed spent his early adulthood up to the age of twenty-eight gazing on flawless nudes by Titian, Veronese, and other Venetian greats, hed never once laid eyes on the naked body of an actual woman. When the time came for him to do the deed with Effie Gray, he was so horrified by the sight of his new brides body that he just couldnt do it. Needless to say, poor Effie felt awful, and explained in a letter to her father over six years later that Ruskin had been reluctant to divulge his true reason for not making me his Wife until very late in the proceedings. As she put it, the problem was that he had imagined that women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the evening of April 10th.