Kate

Good essays are supposed to address everyone. Let’s let him write a bad one, something to seem like a personal address to a particular someone out there he hasn’t seen for quite a long time. This is after all Women’s Month. And when he thinks of women’s lib he thinks always of his old friend Kate. He dreamed of her last night.

He wonders why.

Nobody says “women’s lib” anymore. It is an archaic term for millennials who would rather say, “feminist.” And, of course, women’s lib is not equal to feminism.

Women’s libbers burned their bras and grew their armpit hair. And yes, Kate had the longest and most elegant armpit hair he ever saw in what had been, in the mid-1970s, his entire young life.

Oh no! He exaggerates. He did not actually see them burn their bras. He only saw how they did not wear it unless their wardrobe absolutely required it by way of fashion, which was not often. He is using the pronoun they because Kate was not alone. She had a friend named Laure, who was her best friend. And so it was Kate and Laure. Kate and Laure, all the time.

And then, there was he, who, until he met Kate and Laure, knew women’s lib only from his sisters who never claimed to be women’s libbers. Kate and Laure never claimed to be women’s libbers either. He knew this only by the fact they wore no bra and grew their armpit hair.

He had a particular relationship with the armpit hair.

They bothered people. Some men, especially, felt the need to ridicule them. As if the act of showing them women’s armpit hair was an affront to their masculinity, an infringement even, on territory they saw as purely their own; which territory they had marked symbolically, piss on post, as it were.

Thus, on many occasions while he walked with Kate and Laure, he found himself feeling quite a bit funny. Some men could simply not help looking and making some derisive comment. The comments more often than not had to do with buying razor blades. Many times, a particular word was used. The word: bolbol, which, as you might know is the word in Binisaya specifically referring to pubic hair.

Which word, Kate could understand really more by intuition than anything else, since she was a British national, native of Hong Kong, who spoke two forms of Chinese, a heavily accented English, but no Binisaya unless by way of terse cursing.

And he was a peace-loving flower child of the times. He had no appetite whatsoever for street fighting. And when in the wake of derision Kate would stop in her tracks to confront her detractor, the thought of the possibility of a fight always crossed his mind. Bisaya that he was, he grew up on a value of perpetual preparedness to die for “his” woman.

To this day, he thanks his God it never came to that.

Kate had an accent you could not believe, and a high-pitched voice which came straight out of the Chinese movies popular at that time. And then she would go into a verbal tirade which had the immediate effect of stunning and confusing her enemies. The only result ever to come out of these confrontations was for the offending male to run away as quickly as possible from her; as it were, tail between legs.

She told him never to fear for her on these occasions for she had taken many courses of self-defense while growing up as a child in Hong Kong. He doubted not; but thankfully, never once did he have to watch her demonstrate this prowess. Even so, he warned her repeatedly how fighting was, unfortunately, not one of his many talents. Perhaps he might also have wondered secretly if things would not be for the better if only she shaved herself. But if he ever did think this, never once did he express it even by way of the most casual comment.

The way he remembers them, her armpit hair was of her body, beautiful as it was. And her body was her business. And the only legitimate question really was whether he could live with them or not. As it turned out, He remembers them whenever he remembers Kate. He remembers the odd wonder of them. And yes, how much he loves the memory of them, and the way they segued seamlessly into the rest of her. Them being the things about Kate he remembers before all else.