‘It was wickedly painful. And transformative’: a tribute to all the women who ever waxed my back

It was my post-college girlfriend who introduced me to Avital. She was seeing Avital herself. From my apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I took the F train down to Midwood in south Brooklyn and walked past rows of low-slung homes until I reached hers. I used the below-ground entrance, as I’d been told.

Avital herself answered the door. (Most of the names here have been changed.) She wore sneakers, a below-the-knee skirt and a wig. She kept her right hand out of the way so I wouldn’t try to shake it. Behind her was a suburban-style basement converted into a kind of doctor’s office, with a treatment room off the main hallway. Inside, I removed my shirt and sat on a medical table laid with exam-table paper.

When Avital came in, she rubbed a numbing cream all over my shoulders and back. I tried to relax. I was here for a treatment. There was no other circumstance under which an Orthodox Jewish woman could be alone in the same room with me, let alone touching my body.

Avital wrapped my chest in clingfilm so the cream wouldn’t rub off, and sent me to wander the neighbourhood for 40 minutes while it did its work. To make things extra weird, I walked from eastern Midwood, dominated by religious Jews, to western Midwood, dominated by ex-Soviet immigrants, like my family. I stopped in front of my grandfather’s apartment building. He thought religious people were nuts, but otherwise he was as traditional as Avital, and he would have been mortified – terrified – to learn his grandson was getting his body hair lasered off by an Orthodox Jewish woman a 15-minute walk from his home.

Easy for him: his body was as smooth as a grape. I took after my father, whose line passes down no hair on the head and too much everywhere else. At the steam baths, people said, “There goes the Bear.” They said it affectionately, and he was never self-conscious about it. But I felt desperately ashamed of the inheritance.

The Soviet Union was full of men like my father. (Women, too.) But our new homeland seemed to venerate grooming – of hair, of scent, even of touch. My parents had given up persecuted but predictable lives as Soviet Jews for my sake. As I saw it, I had to do things the American way so Americans would give me the things – opportunities, privilege, power – that would make their sacrifice right. Of course, no job interviewer had asked me to prove that I was a member of the Hairless American Masonry. But that’s not the way young brains traumatised by immigration think. The confusing thing was that Americans also venerated a mantra that could only make Soviets laugh: “Be yourself.” How were you supposed to reconcile these things?

I looked ruefully at my grandfather’s windows and went back to Avital’s. My chest felt slick with the cream, the clingfilm, sweat. I was afraid to touch my skin for fear it was numb. I also wanted it to be numb – lasering really hurts. Avital tried to reassure me. Then she took out her laser and zapped me like an insect, my hair evaporating somewhere behind me.

It was wickedly painful. And transformative. As the promise of Manhattan’s steel-needled skyline appeared in the scratched windows of the subway car, I rose out of myself alongside the view. How could being false to oneself feel so good? I felt five pounds lighter, stripped down, awake. The lasering literally tore off a layer of me, giving hope that something more functional would emerge in its place.

I saw Avital for two years. Once, by accident, she put on too much numbing cream and I began to hallucinate while I took my constitutional. She and her husband ushered me into the basement shower and plied me with water until I came to. That wasn’t fun. And in general the procedures really hurt and were very expensive, and it was all compounded by my embarrassment at caring about this at all.

But my visits to Avital also meant that I got to take 40-minute walks for which my life never had time. That I got to talk to an Orthodox woman whose husband was her subordinate downstairs and her superior upstairs, where she was also mother to multiple children. It wasn’t because I was shirtless that we felt compelled to talk candidly – we actually tried to ignore that part. It was because it was thrillingly strange, I think, to be in such closeness with someone we couldn’t see again until the next session.

Confusingly, my rebirth took place in a neighbourhood infused with memories from my childhood and all the associated anxiety of being new and trying to fit in. Here, my bed was in the living room and at night I woud barricade it with the kitchen dining chairs, a misplaced fantasy of an existential room of my own. Here, finally having been invited to a pickup football game by the cool kids, I showed up wearing my nicest pants only to realise they had a huge hole over the ass. I watched that game from the sidelines, after all.

Since leaving the area, I had succeeded in Mission: America – I had attended Princeton and now worked at the New Yorker, the premier literary magazine in America. But I felt wildly out of place at both, and to travel to Midwood was to go back to a place where people spoke bluntly; used their lumpy, glorious bodies as well as their minds; where even the intellectuals sometimes cleaned floors and drove taxicabs; and all of us still ate food, such as fried whiting in a carrot sauce, I never dared heat up in the shared kitchen at the office. It was awful, and it was sublime. (Many years later, when I took a job as a line cook, a fellow ex-Princetonian said, “I admire your self-confidence in taking a working-class job. I’m too insecure to do that.”)

Unable to ask Avital directly about her relationship with her husband, I asked her about Miriam, my girlfriend. Miriam was from a Modern Orthodox Jewish family – the Modern part signifies a greater integration with the secular world. But even this liberalisation left us far apart. My maternal grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and I, too, had felt my share of violent antisemitism before I left the country, aged nine. But we were thoroughly secular.

With Miriam, I tried fasting on Yom Kippur, attending synagogue, even eating kosher. We had other connections – we were both journalists, we had the same ethical values. But I couldn’t help feeling false in my attempts at observance, and Miriam couldn’t bear a partner who couldn’t share this part of her life. Others, too: I fantasised about the American west, which felt freer and less formed, and she idolised New York.

Perhaps it was unfair to put the question to Avital, who also lasered Miriam, but I put it: what else could Miriam and I try? Looking away, Avital said, “Maybe you’ve tried everything there is to try.” For all the boundary-crossing we did in that room, I hadn’t expected such directness. I hadn’t considered that there might be no way to save something so promising.

It was many years before I understood that Avital was giving me a great gift – the gift of candour. Candour is the mark of true intimacy, and candour is risky – I was a little afraid of asking Avital’s opinion after that.

* * *

I didn’t have to – Miriam learned that waxing was less expensive than lasering and we bid Avital a bittersweet farewell. We made our way to Shira, on the Upper West Side. Shira was a divorced Israeli woman with a shy, ailing son. A daughter of Yemenite immigrants, she was as secular as I was and I joked to Miriam that at least in the depilation department, the pendulum had swung toward my view of the world.

Shira was a true artist of the trade – though waxing was even more painful than lasering, she was done before I had finished my first story. But I wanted to keep telling it, and listening to hers – she told me about her divorce, her worries that it had made her son reticent, her dreams of moving to Florida. She was a warm and attractive woman, with a dash of Israeli abrasiveness, so, with her permission, I tried to find her a partner.

It was during the Shira era that, after eight years, Miriam finally broke up with me. Shira heard about it a lot, and never made me feel self-indulgent. But she was as direct as Avital: Miriam and I didn’t belong together.

Not a lot of people get waxed more often than they need to, but during those years I did. Shira was politically conservative, and I wasn’t, but it never got in the way of our, yes, friendship. We commiserated about dating in New York – it was even harder for her, a woman in her late 40s. We laughed until we snorted about that time I ate a bowl of my aunt’s garlicky roasted peppers right before a date and radiated garlic out of my pores in the sweltering heat of the bar. My date kept asking why the bar smelled so strongly of garlic when they didn’t have a food menu. Shira’s stories were less funny – men stood her up; they made disrespectful demands; they intended to tell her who she could be.

Perhaps because I was less at pains to avoid even the intimation of bodily contact that I had with Avital, I allowed myself to consider Shira as a physical being. It seems impossible not to when a hand of the opposite gender is dripping hot wax on your body and then soothing the depilated spot with a touch of her latex glove, her waistline inches from your nose. Avital had been slim, almost gaunt; Shira was full-bodied, with dyed corkscrew curls and a neat pedicure – from my vantage point, belly-down on her exam table, it was the only part of her I could see.

This country, every country, is full of Shiras – nail technicians, masseuses, hairdressers, waxers. Many of us are grateful to them, but how many of us wonder where they go for touch, for their shearing and renewal? Shira waxed herself, which felt like a bittersweet metaphor for her life.

I saw Shira for nearly a decade, enough time to publish my first novel, meet the woman I married, have my first child, and for Shira to get a real-estate licence and watch her son grow up to become more self-possessed. One of the first things I did after meeting Jessica, my wife, was to bring her to Shira’s house for dinner – Shira taught me how to make the poached fish of her ancestors. Jessica (her real name) comes from Wasps who don’t touch, but she hugged Shira as soon as she came in. As we were leaving, Shira said, with an affectionate eye roll, “Looks like you finally did it.” The moment felt right, and I gave her a hug.

* * *

I left Shira only because we left New York during Covid. The years that followed were as unstable in the waxing realm as in every other: I had waxers in Miami Beach; Bellingham, Washington; and, finally, Missoula, Montana, where I was teaching in a literary programme. Montana is a physical place – people hike and hunt, work in manual trades – but it’s not a place of the body. In New York, the sultriness steams off the sidewalk and people are forever fixing themselves and touching each other. In Montana, people dressed to conceal, and interacted without much physical contact. Surreally, it felt more transgressive to undress in Heather’s waxing studio in Missoula than in Avital’s in Brooklyn.

It’s the curse of every person with multiple identities – if I felt hopelessly secular around Avital and American around Shira, I felt ethnic and east coast-ish around Heather. But we were bound by other things: we were contemporaries; had started over in different American places; she was embarking on a new relationship, as I had. These experiences had left her with a humility I revere in people – a sign of wisdom and strength. She told me about her sons, and I told her she was the first regular waxer I’d found without Miriam.

There was one subject from which I stayed away: Montana. If there’s one thing on which even politically unalike Montanans agree, it’s that it’s the last best place, as the local phrase has it. I had been dreaming about it for decades. To have found a teaching job there felt like grace after nearly 20 years of hard survival as a writer.

Montana was magnificent: calm, affordable, an easy place to raise children. But it was also earnest and plainspoken, and Jessica and I couldn’t shake a vicious longing for the ferment – the knowing wit, the irreverence, the hustle – of a large city like the one that had raised us. I knew the answer to the question in our minds. It had been given to me by Avital and Shira all those years ago: sometimes, even the perfect thing isn’t right. It was a bitter understanding: for decades, I had sought a way out of New York. When it finally came, I was too much of a New Yorker to make it there. But is that the same thing as home?

The last time I saw Heather, only I knew it was the last time. Could the word “betrayal” apply to a relationship as “casual” as a waxer’s with a client, the term mine always used for me, no matter how close we became? Just then, the unequivocal answer seemed to be yes.

I told her we were leaving. I added, truthfully, that her studio was one of the few places where the interpersonal disconnect didn’t apply. It takes a great deal of emotional maturity to acknowledge someone else’s views without pretending they’re your own, and that is the parting gift Heather gave me. “You’re not the first bright light this town has lost,” she said. It’s one of the most generous things anyone has ever said to me.

* * *

That summer, I gave up my job and we drove 2,500 miles “back to where I came from”, as I’d been told to do so often by my no-mercy classmates in Brooklyn. I called Miriam, who had become a dear friend, and told her she’d been right about New York. “I wish I hadn’t been,” she said. “But it’ll be so good to have you near.”

My family settled in rural New Jersey. Jessica and I joke that it’s the “Montana of New Jersey”, an otherwise liberal state – our county went for Trump, and the smokestacks and highway exits most people associate with New Jersey couldn’t feel more remote here. It’s painfully pretty, and empty, and as plainspoken as an in-your-face place like New Jersey gets. Go figure.

Related: ‘I stopped trying to control my body’: the women who gave up grooming in 2020

Even before we’d settled in, I found myself a waxer. I was born 7,000 kilometers away, and Erin has never been on a plane. She lives paycheck to paycheck; I have a retirement investment account. We both love country music, but only I love it a little ironically. Still, by this point, it takes effort not to give her a hug every time I come into her fluorescent-lit office at the local European Wax Center. I know when she is getting married, how much she paid for the DJ, what the cake will look like.

Even if the script feels familiar – even if, over the last 20 years, Erin and her predecessors have provided a singular companionship during the anonymity of life in New York and then the instability of so many moves – the script always changes. The other day, I looked in the mirror and, like a delayed reaction dislodging from the autopilot of a too-busy life, I saw something I never thought I would: the hair on my body had thinned out so much that I wasn’t sure I needed my forthcoming appointment. Either that, or I’d finally become comfortable with myself as I was.

I was stunned. I had dreamed of this moment for decades. How many times had I stood in front of the mirror, squinting and scrutinising? How many times had I thought twice before taking off my shirt at the pool, in the locker room, on the beach, in the bedroom? How hard had I worked to keep my eastern European peasant body in shape, to make up for the fact that it had so much hair? How hard had I worked, in therapy and beyond, to become OK with myself?

I still don’t like New Jersey; I feel at home in America less than ever; writing as a profession never gets simpler. However, at some point over the last decade, the dream – The Mission – morphed from achievement to serenity, to aligning with my circumstances instead of overpowering them. I am as far away from serenity as I’ve ever been. But I think I’m dreaming about the right thing now. In front of that mirror, I felt like my body was rewarding me for it. It was telling me: Keep going.

Who knows what I’ll do next time it’s time for a wax – it still hurts, it still costs a lot – but I kept my appointment with Erin. She told me she can’t go grocery shopping with her fiance because he’s an impulse shopper. I told her what I’d felt in front of that mirror.

Boris Fishman’s new novel, The Unwanted, will be published in the US in March.