Page 22 - WTP Vol.VII #2

It wasn’t like me to startle her, to catch her Elizabeth needed any version of admiration; he, in fact, disdains Taylor eyes in a wistful double take. all admiration versions. Still. He married me. A beau-
Oh.
My beautiful husband had rules. No starving yourself. No mooning after starving. No even thinking about having a baby if you are still secretly starving. Slowly, it had to be slowly, I listened. We had our son. A gor- geous child with gorgeous Latin features. I would spend hours just looking at my husband and our son, their beauty giving me such pleasure, because beauty is (we can’t deny it, I’ll never deny it) pleasure.
I’d had a harrowing decline into puberty. Crooked teeth. Product-resistant hair. No lessons in make-
up, and so no make-up, and after I’d quit ice skating (where the beauty deficit is a judged deficit) and joined the track team (where it is not), my thighs thickened to tree stumps—a problem I assiduously cured by starving myself into anorectic brittleness. I’d achieved eighty-five pounds by my sophomore year at college. One large apple a day, one sleeve of graham crackers, a run across the city, a marathon walk in the afternoon, jump-rope drills, and still: I’d stare into the mirror and not see beauty. Beauty refused me.
I started writing this essay on a train. The girl beside me held a suitcase sideways on her lap, not a big suitcase, more like a traveling kit, but still the word suitcase came to mind. When she popped the latch, pressed powdered color was revealed, sticky pencils, tubes, and eyelash curlers. She talked to me as she did her work—about how she’d taught herself eye lining tricks, about the fallacy of the season’s new colors, about all the reasons she rarely strayed from neutrals, about YouTube beauty tutorials.
What would it take? Why all the hungry sacrifices—the protein injuries to fingernails and hair follicles and bones, the harrowing distractions and the boy who tried to feed me green soup. Try this. Peas, I think it was, boiled in a pan on a hot plate that, for some rea- son, I remember propped up on the floor of his off-cam- pus room beside the books he had borrowed for so long from the library where we both worked that the books had achieved an outlaw status: nearly stolen.
She gave me the names of the colors. She gave me the names of the tutors.
Green soup? he’d said. But I just couldn’t.
I told her about the words I’d been scribbling into my book—these words, the ones that I am writing. I told her I’ve never completed an expert eye lining, that I rarely get it right with blush, that my lips are too thin for lipstick. I told her I was going to New York to meet a very beautiful friend I’d not yet met in person. She only knows my voice, I said, and that was all I said, be- cause it was early morning, after all, and the girl was young and I am not, and the train was doing just fine on its tracks, speeding us toward our destinations, and her eyeliner was on now, perfect. Her suitcase was closed. Her face ready.
Thin was the thing that I’d become, not beauty. Thin was how I floated down the hall of my first post-col- lege job. Thin was my defense against my poor fashion choices and my hair. Thin was, maybe, how the man who would become my husband noticed me, or maybe he noticed how I listened, or maybe how I loved how he drew better than anyone else ever could, or how
I boarded my second train. I watched the landscape go by, the ghost of my face reflected in the window, the window like a mirror once we entered the Penn Sta- tion tunnel. The train doors opened. I hurried up the many stairs, down the crowded streets, texting my friend, blind, the way I do, hoping not to be late, but
he sang, or how he walked, but to write that this way would be to suggest that the man I loved somehow needed aggressive admiration, desired it, and to sug- gest such a thing would be to lie on this page, because my husband never did, he never would, he never has
I was—my hair flying and dampening with the heat,
15
Fixing Beauty
You, she almost seemed to say.
Me. Her first-born daughter. A stranger. women, especially, have seen.
I’d pulled my tangled hair from my face. I’d worn some- Funny, that. How women have always made certain thing that fit. The boyish and impatient and actual in me that I’ve seen how they’ve seen the glare of the dispar- was not, in that moment, on display, and this was years ity. How they have sought to leverage it.
ago, when she was well and I was young into my career
and we’d met for lunch and my mother’s eyes said oh,
and it was temporary. Beauty, with me, always is.
tiful Salvadoran man with a not beautiful American woman. A life-long glare of a disparity that other
Beth KephaRt