When I was fourteen, my father brought me back a bikini from a business trip to Paris; I wore it once, with the label dangling, so he could take a picture. He chuckled and said, “Well, Playboy likes them plump, I guess.” It was reversible, blue on one side, black on the other, and bared a small tangle of pubic hair on the inner thigh.
Perhaps that’s when I stopped going to the beach, to the pool. I didn’t bare myself in public till I weighed eighty-eight. By then, I’d had a bikini wax and was as bald as an egg. I used Nair on my armpits (rich foam, like whipped cream, but the smell of drains), I waxed my legs, I plucked my brows, I even shaved my arms.
Now, I’ve discovered electrolysis: the stinging prick, the tiny shock that kills the root, the burn that subsides, the pit where nothing ever grows again.
5
IT’S GOING TO BE a long night: Dr. Frog has gone, Ms. Squeak popped in to say good night on her way out, wearing a beige plastic raincoat (it’s raining? true, my window is teary). They’ve left me alone here, staring into the dark, afraid to close my eyes.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, for another chat,” he promised.
“What are you going to do, ask me about my unhappy childhood?”
“That might not be a bad idea,” he responded, humorless as ever.
Some people remember their childhoods. I pity them.
I remember something involving a ladder and a broken window when I was three, doctor. I remember the high hospital bed at nine, doctor, alone and afraid and bleeding from the throat. (Or was that much later? Or was it my own bedroom, and not blood after all?) I remember a man at the school bus stop, who asked me if I wanted to see how to clean a corroded car battery—a pan full of fizzy stuff, I recall—so I followed him trustingly to the darkest corner of an underground lot. And I remember Amanda Jane, after all these years, a fictional character like myself.
Everyone has a childhood friend. Why shouldn’t I have?
Let’s say we were inseparable, spending every minute of our summers together, sun-toasted, at the beach and the pool. In the winter, after school, we, let me see, staged elaborate dramas in her long, deserted dining room, awaiting our cues behind sage velvet curtains. Naturally she played all the supporting roles so that I could be the star (Sylvia Bubble, a movie queen, arrayed in her mother’s old pearls and silk slips).
When we tired of the theater, we concocted dream sagas for Barbie and Barbie—and later, Ken.
Barbie, you were so slender and firm, with a tiny, jointed waist that never spread. Your breasts pointed up and forward, perfectly symmetrical, unmarked by the rude red eye of a nipple, and your straight thighs met in a demure beige plastic Y, smooth, sealed, and uncleft. Your little feet were so beautifully arched, ballerinalike, that you had to stand on tiptoe all the time, and your clothes fitted perfectly, every day of the month. You had a permanent blue stripe painted above your almond eye, and your little mouth was puckered and painted like a persimmon. And you lived in an elegant black vanity case, shiny plastic that, to my eye at least, resembled patent leather, where you inhabited a modest cubicle (coffin-shaped, now that I think of it) surrounded by your sumptuous wardrobe.
The only part of you I didn’t really like, didn’t covet or caress, was your hair: a dry black puff, chin-length, disappointingly like the generic round do’s of everyone’s mother. I would have preferred pure silk, I think, down to the back of your knees, nut-colored or roan.
But it was your wardrobe that really mattered, Barbie, that collection of fantasies for which your hard little form was merely a pretext. They came alluringly displayed in flat, frontless boxes, each tiny garment spread-eagled under plastic, wisps of dreams promising a life of endless possibility: Garden Party, Scuba Diving, Mediterranean Cruise, Wedding Day. My favorite, I think, was Guinevere: a purple velvet robe, floor-length, with a full skirt blossoming from a fitted bodice. It was richly brocaded at hem and sleeve—the sleeves silk-lined and flared, like purple arums with a slender arm for a stamen—but the best part was the gold chain looped around the waist, as if for large heavy keys to secret doors.
I loved Garden Party, too: a ladylike gown, rose-sprigged and demure, with a gusset of lace in front and little white gloves on the side. In other moods, though, Cowgirl caught my fancy. Or did I prefer the black lamé gown, strapless, that clung like a skin to the ankles, where it erupted in a puff of tulle? Luckily, Barbie, you didn’t have to walk, because you couldn’t have; you had merely to pose, slinky and shimmering, on bejeweled black sandals, with a scrap of pink chiffon clutched in one hand.
Amanda Jane had a Barbie, too—exactly the same as mine, except blond, like her—and we spent a couple of years in passionate involvement, inventing elaborate scenarios that would allow two miniature plastic women to change clothes as often as possible. Just as our interest was beginning to wane, someone gave Manda a Ken doll, and we knew just what to do: sniggering and giggling feverishly in the long grass out by the vegetable patch, we divested Ken of his dinner jacket and brought out Barbie, bare-assed, to be laid on the ground. Supine, her plastic arms pointed straight up, like the pugilist position of someone who has died in a fire, but we maneuvered Ken between them and carefully aligned his blank plastic place with hers. Then, at a loss, we glanced at each other, and Manda pushed me over, playfully, from my squatting position, and I chased her around the garden, both of us screaming and chortling wildly and wrestling like boys when we finally met, our contorted embrace echoing Barbie and Ken’s.
I came to know her body as well as mine: its toasty-golden odor, the vaccination mark on her long thigh, her flat brown belly, the navel that popped out a little, where mine curved in. She was lanky and lean and stayed that way: puberty merely lengthened her, adding demure breasts and a ladylike curve to the haunch. Meanwhile, I mutated overnight into a pimply, potbellied, pendulous-breasted sow: as if offended by the sight of me, Amanda Jane left for boarding school.
Enough. Some kind of wave surges through me and I sit up and switch on the light, looking around for something to look at myself in (because in the dark, alone, how can you be sure where you are?).
I need a mirror. If I had one, I could take out my make-up (if I had that) and create a face, turn this featureless balloon into something that looks like someone. I could inscribe a self: paint on a porcelain skin, pencil in some eyes, brush contour into these cheeks, blend three colors to make a mouth.
The very shape of the human head is a result of evolutionary changes associated with eating: the jaws and the teeth became smaller, as did the brow ridges of the skull, and an increasingly large brain gave humans a superior ability to process information, much of it originally having to do with the availability of food and the best ways to obtain it.
How long it took to learn, though—how many hours in front of the mirror, how many magazines with shaded diagrams of where and how to paint according to the shape of your face: round, square, oval—but what shape was a heart?
Bulbous, with tubes sticking out.
The tubes.
Think about something else.
Fat little tubes of eye gloss; fragrant, sticky pots of lip color. Cyanotic pink. Menstrual red.
That’s all over now. I discovered how to make it stop. It was mainly the smell I couldn’t stand, the sweet, meaty smell of menstruation.
What crime had I committed, to be punished every month?
In other cultures, they wrap you up and suspend you in a hammock, between earth and sky, until the seepage stops.
Two A.M.
2:07 on my digital watch, the biggest, ugliest, clumsiest black plastic one I could find, because it makes my wrist look so delicate by comparison.
2:13 A.M.
Will I ever be able to sleep through the night again?
I awakened to the sound of a key fumbling in the front door downstairs, then a creak as it swung open and a muffled bang, followed by an exclamation of pain. I could tell by the darkness that it was late, very late; my mother was going to be furious.
Anxiously, I lay straining to hear their bedroom door open, her voice questioning at first, then rising, sharper and faster. There’d been a lot of that lately: middle-of-the-night mumbling, rumbling, doors slamming.
But I heard nothing, though I lay there with my whole body tensed into an ear. Then a creak on the stair, barely audible: I realized that he was creeping up the stairs on tiptoe, since I heard not the usual singsong squeak but a different timbre—tentative, hushed. I pretended to be asleep as I heard the footsteps coming over the thick bedroom carpet; I could smell the whiskey before I could even make out the shape, a denser dark. He sat heavily on the bed and whispered my name. I did a mediocre imitation of waking up.
“Just came to kiss you good night.”
The whiskey smell was stronger now, sickening in its smoky sweetness; an uncharacteristically high-pitched giggle seemed trapped somewhere at the back of his throat.
“How’s my girl?” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, sloppily, giggling.
“Where’ve you been, Dad?”
“Working late.” And he kissed me again, leaning over me so that his loose, rough suit jacket brushed my face, his bristles sandpapery and harsh, unlike the clean-shaven, soap-smelling cheek I pecked good-bye every morning. “How’s my girl?” he repeated, folding back the sheet from my shoulders. I lay rigid, hoping for a voice from downstairs: “Mi-chael?”
“How’s my girl?” he repeated, giggling again.
“Dad . . .” I said.
“Just came to kiss you good night,” and he leaned unsteadily over, kissing me again where the neck begins.
“Dad . . .” I repeated, a chill coming over me. “Dad, it’s cold.”
He giggled again, and I felt the gooseflesh creeping down to the back of my thighs.
Just then, the mantel clock downstairs chimed three times. It seemed to cleave the fog around him and, as if retrieved from a trance, he pulled the sheet back over my shoulder, got awkwardly to his feet, and, with a final pat, crept out, knocking his shin on the antique rocking horse.
3:27 A.M.
I can’t stay here alone anymore, pacing, throwing myself down on the cold floor for another set of sit-ups, pacing some more, throwing myself on the bed for a second before leaping up to prowl, to peer through the glass (diamond mesh, like chicken wire: am I a chicken, then, to be cooped up?). Some effervescent emptiness is fizzing inside me, beginning just under the sternum, swirling through the lungs, mounting dizzily to the brain, its tiny bubbles popping and scrambling, its silent hiss drowning out all thought. If there were any food in this cell, I would be driven to cram it in, to quell this fizzy panic (let the corrosion remain, let the connectors stay encrusted).
3:54 A.M.
I ring the bell next to my bed, expecting an immediate, anxious response. Instead, after four long minutes (I could have been dying all this time, a tiny hand spitefully squeezing my heart), the night nurse, a large, leisurely-looking black woman, puts her head in the door.
“Ye-ah?”
“I could have been dying,” I say.
“What’s the problem, miss?”
“It’s lucky for you that I wasn’t.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I want some water.”
She looks at the covered carafe next to my bed. “You got water, gal.”
“It’s dead,” I say. “Don’t you see those bubbles?”
“Looks like water to me, ma’am.”
“It’s dead,” I say.
She doesn’t react, just purses her lips.
“I don’t drink dead water. Bring me a glass of fresh water.”
She folds her fat, glossy forearms over her belly and looks at me, eyebrows raised, head tilted to one side. “Yes, ma’am,” she says. I know she’s not going to do anything. Now I wish I’d waited for Squeaky, at six-thirty.
A wan gray light begins to delineate my cage, etching dark diamonds against the pane. The rain seems to have stopped, but what difference does that make to me?
There was a jeweler’s bill that came to the wrong address: home instead of the office. Muffled voices behind the closed bedroom door (her high, whining tone, rising and falling like a dentist’s drill; his low, placating rumble), then doors slamming later that night, many nights. But dinner was served punctually on the stroke of seven, soup from a silver tureen.
There was no way of knowing whom to believe, so I decided not to believe her. But I also had another, parallel line of reasoning: she was mistaken, and, even if she wasn’t, he was justified—look at her, a mountain of blubber, her body irredeemably ruined by two children, a double purple gash across the blancmange of her belly.
Your husband, I am sure, would like to have you attractive, lean, and pleasant.
Through closed doors, from aborted conversations, from hushed, tearful calls to her friend Miriam, I picked up a few phrases: jeweler’s bill, plane ticket. So it was someone airborne, diamond-bedecked: who could blame him? Someone slender, spangled, poised for flight.
Trapped in her private padded cell, my mother could never have bared her body to a strange man. Once I overheard her and Miriam, another large, unhappy housewife, snickering over the éclairs at tea.
“But can you imagine—actually taking off your girdle?”
“And standing there, with all your rolls?”
A researcher asked women what three words they like most to hear. Instead of the expected answer—“I love you”—the consensus was “You’ve lost weight.”
Something was happening to me. Standing in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom every morning, I drew my nightgown tightly across my chest, grasping it behind so that it clung to the bumps in front. Yes, they were growing bigger, my hips, my waist, my breasts. Past the bee sting stage now, they were bandaged by a stretchy white training bra: training them to be well behaved in public, to make their point but to know their place.
My mother said I was “developing.”
Into what? If only I had recognized the danger then, if only I had nipped this burgeoning in the bud. But somehow I had confidence that this body, transforming itself, would end up looking less like me and more like them, other bodies. If it didn’t, there were measures, I knew, that I could take. One could always take measures, to measure up.
I studied the magazines.
When it comes to being beautiful, half the fun is learning how.
Keep yourself in check.
Be Some Body.
Get frequent trims.
Stand tall, glance down. If you see your navel, you need tummy firming.
You can look flat-chested without a brassiere and still have a sizable bust that doesn’t project.
If you’re insecure about applying false eyelashes, practice.
I followed all the instructions, took all the measures, every one—painting, plucking, powdering, steaming, soaking, shaving, spraying, scenting, smoothing, straightening, oiling, creaming, curling, coloring, conditioning, toning, tanning, bleaching, blackening, moisturizing, abrading, exfoliating—but still failed to transform myself. Even the make-up I so laboriously applied ended up askew, like the lapsed color in the Sunday funnies.
Remeasure, reweigh. Try harder.
The tip-tops of your thighs: are they wide and fleshy (a typical female tendency)? They were. My mother told me that was the way I was “built.” I wanted to be rebuilt. I wanted to wear miniskirts over long golden legs.
Do thigh-reducing exercises diligently to solidify them— there’s still time for tightening up.
Eat sleek.
A sleek one-piecer is the answer to some of the common flaws and figure problems that can beset a girl: superfluous hair, a scar in the wrong place, blemishes, a midriff that’s too maxi, a navel you’re not proud of. Mine was a tight, involuted knot; Amanda Jane’s popped softly out, like the tip of a tongue.
Experiment—strive for perfection.
Ask yourself: am I mature enough for the discomforts of surgery? For a recedi
ng chin. For a jutting jaw. For breasts, big and little. I put socks in my brassiere, then took them out. They only made things worse.
Will a new nose make you happier?
Or is it time to banish that untimely bulge?
Keep the refrigerator well stocked with bunny food—for that frantic hunger that sets in after school. Fill a scooped-out tomato with cottage cheese. You lose!
Notice that clear-cut lines divide angel cake into slim slices for girls, big slices for boys. And make drinks diet-sly by sipping, sipping. It’s ladylike, too!
Those three o’clock hunger pangs hitting you hard? Worried about stuffing yourself at supper? It’s the “fat time of day,” when you’re starving, and your appetite is telling you to overeat. You’re as hungry as a bear.
Resist temptation!
You may be brighter than you think. I had won a scholarship to the Deerborne Academy, an elite school for young ladies of academic bent—for bent young ladies, for bending them. They all had thick, well-cut hair, slim ankles, smoked salmon sandwiches for lunch, which they picked apart and didn’t eat.
Be Some Body.
Can you enjoy college in the fall—or start work—if you’re overweight? You can, but it’s hard, say authorities. They point out that the slender, supple girls are the ones most likely to achieve more in classrooms and offices.
Don’t Forget Mother’s Day!
• Do the dishes.
• Polish silver.
• (Watch nails.)
• Smile a lot!
Everything she did exasperated me, especially the way she occupied space, her squat frame hauling its huge belly and behind around like a life sentence. And I, increasingly sullen and self-absorbed, unable to pass any reflective surface without a shameless, anxious consultation, jarred equally on her. In my hormonal fug, I could spend hours stretched out on the chaise on the patio, one arm across my dreaming face. Recognizing my languor, unable to endure it, she would call me inside, sharply, to unpack the groceries, to pick my clothes off the floor, to go down to the store: “Immediately!”
Sometimes, I succeeded in provoking her into a frenzy. Once she walloped me in the face, but the bruise disappointed me, so I touched it up with purple eye shadow before school the next day. Nobody noticed. Then she hit me smack on the back of the thigh with a tennis shoe; surprised, I stumbled, and she grabbed my arm, pinching the skin, dragging me, half kneeling, screaming and gasping across the floor, the rug burning my skin, screaming and gasping, burning, lunging.
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