Feminine wiles

Livia (the new Brazilian nanny) turned to me, with a hint of the same incredulity in her voice that I heard a few days ago in the matter of the toys, and asked didn’t little 1-yr old Mabel have any hair accessories?

(This being a discussion in Portuguese, it didn’t go quite so smoothly as that. I, not yet being well-versed in the vocabulary of baby girl hair accessories, wasn’t familiar with some of the lingo, so it took a few go-rounds before all became clear.)

“You know, decorations, bows, accessories for her hair?” My weak-kneed objections--But she doesn’t really have that much hair, tee-hee- and surely she’d yank them out in seconds--were quickly dismissed. Valentina, the 1.5 yr old of her former employer, she said pointedly, had a whole box of them.

Mabel's father, to make matters worse, had dressed her that morning in her slick red stretch t-shirt with the big Ferrari logo on front, and had selected a pair of salmon pink shorts to complete the outfit. His reasoning, he said later, was that he figured Livia being Livia would want to see her in something girlie, so he thought the pink shorts would do the trick. So it came as no surprise, really, that Livia had taken pity on the poor girl before heading out to the playlot and had changed her into a girlie little number--or as frilly as it comes in her drawer--and had wrapped a hair band around the largest swatch of hair she could scrape together on the top of her head. It was sticking straight up, with a little curl at the end.

Livia is doing her best with some pretty rough raw material. We were trying to decide the other day why we stick out like such sore thumbs on the Sao Paulo street, since if there's anywhere in Brazil where we should blend in, it's here. (Granted, the White Sox T's don't help.) There's some German strain in the gene pool around here, so it's not uncommon to see tow-haired kids at the playground, scruffy blond sailor types on the street, and green-eyed women. Add the huge Asian population, and it's a pretty diverse mix.

After my husband observed the other day that, well, Brazilian women are just somehow more feminine, I started to look more carefully as I lumbered around the neighborhood to see what I might yet be missing. Pedicure? check. Tight pants? check. Frilly tank top? check. Hoop earrings? check. But somehow the final package is still not quite, um, feminine. As I hauled a big pot and four bags of potting soil past the doormen in 100 degree heat the other day (herb garden deeluxe), I could have sworn I heard a grunt. Brings me back to the time in Rio when some drunk guy in Copacabana asked me if I was a transvestite. Oh, honey, you must be joking--the trannies are much more feminine. So, good luck to you, Mabel. If your genetic material is true to course, you'll be doing deadlifts with bags of potting soil in no time.