My mom stood at the stove, stirring the sugar, lemon, and water in a pan. She called it “le sucre” in French and “halawa” in Arabic. In English we called it “the sugar.” It was how Lebanese women took care of their unwanted body hair, a skill passed down from mother to daughter for generations.
The windows steamed, and the kitchen, wallpapered in large brown and white flowers, smelled like candy. My mouth watered. After removing her rings, bracelet, and watch, and placing them onto the windowsill, my mother poured the mixture onto the counter. It had a honey-like texture, golden brown, too hot to touch.
Within seconds it hardened slightly to the feel of peanut butter. The shape of an amoeba. She scooped up a piece with a butter knife; the knife slid right into the creamy mass. Then she worked the piece with her fingers, alternating from hand to hand because it was so hot. It hadn’t taken shape yet; timing was everything; you couldn’t look away from it.
After a minute, it became paler and thicker, easier to handle but still warm. My mother gathered more and more of it with the knife onto her fingers and shaped it into a mound the size of an apricot and the color of cake batter. She shouted out to my father, “Leon-ne, on fait le halawa.”
I closed both doors to the kitchen. I was 12 or maybe 13; my wavy hair fell to my shoulders. Although I had seen my mother do this countless times with her cousins, I had never experienced it or been included in this ritual. This day, however, I was the main event. “Get undressed,” my mother said.
A few minutes later, I stood in my bare feet, underwear, and camisole, watching her. I had a downy fur on my legs that my mom saw it was time to remove. “Put your leg here,” she said.
I stretched my foot up onto a wooden chair that had a tightly woven straw seat. My mother applied the still warm piece to my shin and spread it thinly down my leg, pushing it slowly with her thumb. The sugar was now whitish and shiny. It pulled at the hairs, and I squealed. “Stay still,” she said.
Next she picked up an edge, and, with a sudden movement that sounded like masking tape being ripped from a cardboard box, she pulled it up and away. I stared, shocked at the pain and then transfixed by the smoothness of my exposed leg, a clean path, with hair on both sides of it. My mom showed me the sugar in her hand, and I examined the hair and the roots that looked like tiny balls. I pressed my palm onto my shin to stop the pain, getting my hand sticky.
My mother worked quickly until all the hair and their little roots were in the sugar. Some parts, like my ankle, were more sensitive than others. My shrieks made my mother laugh. “Ma,” I said, “stop.” “One second,” she said. She deftly patted the stray pieces of oat-colored sugar that dotted my leg with a larger piece and removed them. One leg was hairless.
She gave me the sugar to use on my other leg. It wasn’t nearly as sticky as before, but it still did the job. “When you do it yourself, it doesn’t hurt,” she told me. She was right.
My mom took off her silk dress and, in her bra and underwear, took some of my sugar. At 50, she had an hourglass figure with olive skin. She pinned her dark hair away from her face. She hardly had a wrinkle. We were both seated on the wooden chairs, a seat between us where we put our feet, her red toenails inches from mine. She worked on her own shin and calf with such attention and focus, her glasses sliding down her nose. I noticed that I had much more hair than she did, and mine was darker.
I attempted to place the sugar onto my knees. It was almost impossible to maneuver, like when my friend and I tried to smear tar onto the ground in the schoolyard without getting her white dress dirty. It got in between my fingers, and my hands looked webbed. “This is too hard,” I said. My mother had to disentangle it in swift movements, like removing gum, and make it into a manageable ball again. “Like this,” she said and demonstrated on her leg. When the sugar got stuck on the skin of my knees, my mom leaned over from her own leg to mine and took it off with a dexterous push and pulling motion. We were so close that I could smell her perfume, the products in her hair, her breath of coffee and cigarettes.
Afterwards, when I had no more hair, she took a half lemon and rubbed it on my legs. This stung. She plucked a few strays with a tweezer. Everything was sticky: the tiled floor, the counters, the round table, the chairs. “Oof,” my mom said, and we both ran upstairs to shower.
Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, Metonym Journal, and Smoky Blue Literary Arts Magazine. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. All her published stories can be found on Leslie's Substack.