"Your right one is perfect," she said. "But the left..."Her voice trailed off, filling in the space where words should be with the tkk, tkk, tkking of her tongue against her teeth.

The salon calls her an aesthetician.

I call her the waxer plucker.

"The left one's too thin," she said, the line between her own brows scrunching together. But since I'd told her it's always been that way and it's not likely to change, her only recourse, she decided, was to tilt my head back again and apply the sharp point of the tweezers to make the right brow match the left. As she alternated between the coolness of the tweezers and the warmth of the wax, I thought about how travel--whether it's in your own backyard or abroad--really works a number on you. Sometimes, you come to realize just how competent and capable you are as you face situations that call for skills you didn't know you had. Sometimes, you enjoy the temporary thrill of being the exotic other; rather ordinary in your own setting, you've become extraordinary and maybe even downright sexy. And sometimes, you realize you're somebody's version of sort of perfect.

But mostly not.

*

As the waxer plucker at the all Italian salon waxed and tweezed, waxed and tweezed, I thought about some of my experiences in China and Cuba. In 1997, I traveled to a rural coastal town in China with a group of women for a six week exchange at a women's college. Three members of our group were African American, and they struggled with the experience of being a strange sort of local celebrity. As we walked the streets, strangers would come up and stroke the skin on their arms, checking their own fingers to see if the color had rubbed off. They would pat the women's hair, an experience that I've come to realize is not uncommon, as my husband's own growing dredlocks are a magnet for curious strangers' hands. People would stop in the street to stare, would turn around and follow the women, and would, at times, group together around the women, as if the strength of their numbers made them more brave to approach. Two of the women had particular difficulty putting these experiences into perspective and actually returned to the US early, unable to cope with being temporary local oddities.

At the time, I couldn't understand their frustration, but now I do. The default greeting I receive upon stepping into my mother-in-law's home is, "Ay, como el tiempo te ha engordado!"-- "Oh, how time has made you fat!" The women of the family--and then, the women of the neighborhood--make the rounds, pinching my stomach, my hips, my ass, offering competing estimates of how many pounds I've gained since my last visit. "It's not the time that makes her fat," my rail-thin mother-in-law snapped, "it's Francisco's food!" On more than one occasion, I've left the house crying. The first time this happened, I ran to a hotel and made an outrageously expensive call to the US, where Francisco listened to me cry and rattle on about my weight. On my most recent visit, a neighbor I find particularly obnoxious observed in the middle of a street party that I have legs like "meaty hams," and by the way, when was I planning on settling down and having a baby? "Meaty hams?! Meaty hams?!" I muttered to myself for weeks afterward, the mere mention of Mercedes's name sending me into a rant about indiscretion and impropriety. 

We travel, apparently, to learn about our flaws. Francisco assures me that despite my uneven brows and my meaty hams, I'm still his sort of perfect.

Which is good. Because just the thought of all this was making me a little insecure!