Pain flashed where the hair had been. A screaming hole I closed my eyes to slip inside. I wanted it. A womanly ritual, the hurting, my ability to stand it. One I might complain about with girlfriends, like period cramps, all of us in on the same unspoken joke, the suffering required by a certain sort of body. I thought of my mother, the vacation we took from Houston to LA two summers before. Orange light in our Hollywood hotel room and her body, squatting and squirming from the bathroom in a new cerulean one-piece. “Five decades of bathing suits and I still can’t figure out where everything’s supposed to go,” she said. “What do you think?” She turned a circle, cocked a hip, the blue suit shone and the waxist wrenched the final strip, returning me to the room.

“Baby,” the waxist said, “you like?” I opened my eyes and craned my neck to see a swath of pubic hair, smaller than a thumbprint. It stunned me, my own skin, infantile and pink; the coarse brown “landing strip” seemed somehow indecisive.

“Maybe just take it all?” I said. The waxist nodded, returned to her pot, globbed blue over the remainder. She fanned, then pulled. “What you think now?”

“What do you think?” my mother had repeated that night in Hollywood, when it was just us two in the orange light, assessing her new bathing suit. And I had been a mean girl.

“Uh, you need a wax,” I said, trying out a new voice.

Her face flushed. “Well, obviously,” she said. I buried myself in my phone. She disappeared into the bathroom, emerged in a towel. Later, while brushing my teeth, I spotted curlicued black hairs crowding the blades of her razor like weeds pushing through the shutters of a boarded-up house and felt angry in a way that made me want to be even meaner. I was harsh but she was clueless. How was she still such a little girl? Why was it my job to explain bikini lines and makeup application, lessons of womanhood her own mother died too young to impart? I learned them from YouTube, Instagram, and though my mother said she wanted instruction too, she never stuck with the rituals I prescribed. Contouring and gua sha massage, retinol and ten-step serum routines, all abandoned, as if she thought learning to care for herself would rob her own mom of the chance to rise from the dead and teach her.

“Baby?” The waxist wanted answers.

“Okay,” I said.

She puffed cold powder onto my crotch. “Baby,” she said, “You go now.”