My Body(5)

“It’s kind of big,” he’d said, laughing. My mother scowled. “Don’t say that, John,” she whispered, her voice low and disapproving.





15.


My mother seems to hold the way my beauty is affirmed by the world like a mirror, reflecting back to her a measure of her own worth.

She says, “A friend of mine from college wrote on Facebook that he’d seen your recent magazine cover. He said, ‘No surprise Kathleen’s daughter is beautiful! But she’s not as gorgeous as you, Kathy. No one compares to you.’”

My mother loves to remind me of the time she’d been complaining about the way some women had treated her, and I, at the age of three, declared, “They’re just jealous, Mama!”

She recites this story as a charming testimonial to my sweet and perceptive nature at a young age. It wasn’t until I was older that it struck me: How had I already been introduced to the concept of competition between women before I had even learned to read? How had I understood so early that my remark would provide my mother some solace for the unkindness she experienced?





16.


I find other ways of constructing a mirror not unlike my mother’s. I study red-carpet and paparazzi images of myself online and in the camera roll on my phone, tapping the screen to zoom in on my face as I try to discern whether I am actually beautiful. I scroll Reddit, reading and weighing the comments in my thread, wondering if I am “overrated,” as one user notes, or in fact “one of the most beautiful women in the world,” as another says. I learn from one commentator who claims to have worked on the crew of a recent shoot of mine that I am “nothing special in person,” and from a different user that, after seeing me at a coffee shop around the corner from my apartment with my dog, she can say that I am “way prettier IRL. Better than in her pictures.”

I post Instagram photos that I think of as testaments to my beauty and then obsessively check the likes to see if the internet agrees. I collect this data more than I want to admit, trying to measure my allure as objectively and brutally as possible. I want to calculate my beauty to protect myself, to understand exactly how much power and lovability I have.





17.


I was lying in bed after sex with my first serious high school boyfriend when he began to tell me about the other girls he’d slept with. He described their bodies, their hair, what he liked about them, and I listened, feeling a sudden sense of panic. My stomach twisted. I began to sweat. What is wrong with me? I wondered. Why was my body responding this way to my boyfriend talking about other girls he’d found attractive?

As he went on, all the muscles in my lower abdomen and glutes clenched, and I knew that it was a matter of minutes before I’d have to run to the bathroom. He kept speaking, unaware of the way I’d curled into myself underneath the thin comforter. I started to shiver. He continued. “She … Her…” I nodded and asked questions, feigning indifference, knowing that I would later spend hours looking these girls up, watching them at school, collecting data on how we were the same and how we were different. I finally got up and rushed to the bathroom, scared that I would not be able to hold it in any longer. Although I knew that these girls from my boyfriend’s past, or his mention of them, was not an actual threat to my safety, my body reacted as if it was. I hated that he might ever have found anyone more attractive than me.





18.


Some of my mother’s memories are so visceral to me that I sometimes can’t remember if they are her experiences or my own—like the one where she went to the women’s restroom at a party in the early days of my parents’ courtship (as she would say). When my mother came out of the stall, my father’s ex-girlfriend was at the sink, washing her hands in front of a wide mirror. My mother stood next to her. “And I thought, well, there we are. So different. You know?” There they were: the two women of my father’s choosing. I imagine them, perfectly still, their arms loose at their sides and their faces blank. Maybe one of the faucets is still running. My mother is nearly a foot shorter than the blond woman my father once lived with. The pale skin of her broad shoulders and long torso shimmers. Her hair smells like salt water. My mother’s dark, curly hair frames her heart-shaped face, and the curves of her hips are silhouetted against the white tile of the bathroom. Both their faces are in shadow as they assess themselves and each other.





19.


My mother liked to tell me that she’d always wished for hair like mine.

“Like a sheet of satin,” she said, eyeing me while slipping her hand over the top of my head as I squirmed away.

“Don’t, Mom!” I snapped, instantly hating the sound of my voice as it pierced the air.

“I know, I know,” she sing-songed, “Now you’re a teenager who doesn’t want to be touched, but you’ll always be my baby.”

“I wanted hair like yours my whole life,” she said again, quietly, suddenly more serious. “I would iron my hair on an ironing board to make it straight like Jane Asher’s.” She stared off into nothing, contemplating an alternate life, a world in which the only difference was the texture of the hair on her head. (But what a difference that would be! I could imagine her saying.)