Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

I think about what it will look like. The tiny hairs I have plucked from under my chin are not light brown, but mahogany brown or translucent blond or light red. I wonder what they might combine to be.

There is a body-modification studio near my two favorite used-book stores. None of its signs ever attracted me: Tattoos. Piercing. Scarification. Branding. A new sign says Body Hair, and it did not at first attract me either. I thought of legs and chests and the busboy at the coffee shop who has grown his arm hair thick as an orangutan’s, and dyed it orange-red. He wears a bloodred tank top to show it off. I always look in my coffee cup for orange hairs, which are never there.

I stand at the history shelf in the store next to the body studio and flip open a book on Egypt to a drawing of Cleopatra, her Pharaoh’s beard, a proud ruler’s beard. It is not real. Not like mine. Like mine will be.

I stroke my chin.

Inside the studio are displays of jewelry, steel rings, and chains, simple and in intricate combinations, stapled to framed swaths of black canvas. I don’t know which parts of the body each piece is designed for. Perhaps a clever person can wear them anywhere. The woman behind the counter is talking to a young man. He is conservatively pierced, at least that I can see, two small silver hoops through one eyebrow. She has a pattern of scarification arching from the bridge of her nose across her temple, where it disappears in the wispy black hair over her left ear. I have lived in the city for six years now, and seen a thousand such alterations. It still looks odd to me.

“Yes?” she says, after the young man has written out a check and left.

“A beard,” I say. When she opened her mouth I could see a silver stud in her tongue.

“Yes, what style are you interested in?” She lisps, just a little, enough to remind me not to look at her mouth. I look at her scar, a curlicue like an edge of paisley. If she didn’t want me to look at it, she wouldn’t have had it put there.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll stimulate the follicles wherever you want it,” she says. Shtimulate. “You won’t have to trim it like some man would, since you’re starting out with nothing there at all. Where you don’t have it added, nothing will grow.” She gropes around under the counter and pulls out a small spiral-bound book, line drawings of strangely shaped sideburns, fringes of hair like necklaces, Dali moustaches: facial hair in patterns of tufts, in lines and curves, I have never imagined.

“I don’t know. Just a beard.”

“Think about it. You can call for an appointment.” She gives me a brochure, “Hair Growth and You.” “We haven’t had too many women yet for this. I think you should do it.”

“Would you?” I ask her.

“Oh no, that’s not me,” she says. She traces her forefinger in a curl down her right cheek and up to the corner of her mouth. “I’m going to mark myself here, as soon as I get the pattern drawn up exactly right. Hair would cover it up.”

Myshelf.

At home I read from the brochure to Lelana. She frowns but stops telling me to shut up after the third time. “ ‘Within two days of topical Hirexiden application and regular intake of the supplemental hormones, most clients will find unstimulated fine body hairs falling out and new, thick hair taking its place.’ ”

“Who writes those things?” she asks. She’s tried something new with her ear: four rings, three studs. I’m not used to seeing the diamond out of the bottom hole. She twists it, in its second position, between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s fast,” I say.

“It’s a drug,” she says. “Hormone. Thingie. Don’t you need a doctor?”

“There’s a doctor who prescribes it.” His name is stamped in the blank space on the back of the brochure. “Then the person at the studio who applies it is a registered nurse. She does the branding and scarification, too. It’s all very clean.”

“Oh great,” says Lelana. “Why are you doing this?”

The nurse has me sit back in a big old vinyl dentist’s chair. Over its fake leather maroon it has been spray painted with gold and silver swirls.

She wears rubber gloves and holds a thin cloth patch. It has been traced already with the shape of my beard: larger than a goatee, but trim, with a moustache. When I told the receptionist I wanted a beard, not something abstract, she tried to talk me into leaving a blank design, my initials or a geometric space, in the middle. That’s what the few fashionable bearded women are wearing, but I don’t want that.

The nurse takes a scissors and cuts carefully on the thin red ink lines until it looks like a construction paper beard a child would put on with a string. Then she peels the adhesive from the patch. With her gloves, it takes her two false starts to peel it. I have washed my face thoroughly and wiped an astringent over it; my chin tingles. My breath feels tight in my chest as I wait for her to drape the patch over my face. Her movements are precise and careful. Where the patch clings to my skin I feel a heat, building slowly. I don’t know if is the treatment or the excitement.

I have to wear the patch for twenty-four hours and go back to have things checked out. I have taken off work. I look at it in the mirror. It looks like a cheap Halloween costume. The patch is a light pink-tan color that looks like no one’s skin ever did. It is darker than my own skin, so that, if I squint and blur my vision, it almost looks like a pale beard. Or like something is wrong with my skin.

It stings coming off. The nurse holds a moist strip of paper up against my twinging cheek. She looks at it. It is blue.

“Good,” she says.

I have little white pills I’m supposed to take. In some way they direct testosterone to the follicles marked by the Hirexiden. They are so small they look like pills for a cat.

I swallow one with some orange juice and look in the mirror. My face looks the same as ever, but flushed, irritated, where the beard is supposed to come in. Makeup could smooth the color out, but the brochure says to clean the area gently and put no other products on it.

No one seems to look at me when I walk to the grocery store. I brush my fingers along the lower slopes of my cheeks. Has the peach fuzz fallen out, crowded out by more virile hairs? I can’t tell. My fingertips seem too sensitive, they seem to have caught the tingling of my reddened cheeks. I pull at my chin, then stop, hoping I haven’t disrupted anything.

I buy frozen burritos, pretzels, chocolate bars, and more orange juice. I think the checkout clerk is staring at me, too polite to say anything. I smile at him.

I wake Tuesday with a definite stubble on my chin. Lelana narrows her eyes at me when we pass in the bathroom hall. I put on mascara and a little more eyeshadow than I normally use and go to work.

Everyone in the office is pretty conservative in their grooming. They have seen facial hair in the high-fashion magazines and on MTV, but fancy, not like mine. Gaze after gaze glances off my chin without a word spoken. I spend most of the day on the phone trying to track down a lost report. The receiver pushes against the stubble. The people on the other end of the line don’t know it. I eat lunch outside, in the courtyard by the downtown sidewalks, watching pedestrians watching me, men almost frowning, women looking carefully bored.

Between bites, I rub the stubble with the back of my hand. If I kissed a man now he would be the one scratched, his cheeks as reddened as the back of my hand is reddened. Which of these men passing by would I kiss? They lower their eyes toward the sidewalk as they pass. I finish the sandwich I brought, two bags of chips, an apple, a banana, and a bottle of beer, watching the men go by.