Looking Back

by Joyce Maynard

  From the dubious lessons of TV I’d swallowed the old saw that seeing was believing (and even in seeing, you had to take things with a grain of salt. Studying the TV superman as he flew and the announcer read, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane …” I had my doubts, searching for the piano wires I’d found in Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, or evidence of trick photography. “He just lay down on a table, like he was flying,” we decided). But as for books, less real-life, even, than film—why should I trust their honesty? And if they weren’t honest and true to life, they were nothing. The improbability of Mr. Ed, the talking horse, was ten times greater than paperback biographies’ distorted picture of Wernher von Braun, of course, but because the shows were acted out by real actors and a real horse, they seemed more immediate and therefore (by sixties-logic) more trustworthy.

  Immediacy and newness were terribly important. That’s what I liked about my book club paperbacks and why, if I didn’t read them within the first week I got them, I never would; I liked new things—this year’s copyright marks, just out this month, if possible. We were raised without much feeling for history and oldness, and books, to many of us, were like fashions. Anything written before 1960 seemed hopelessly out of date. We had little patience for last year’s model (it isn’t totally unrelated that every September found me battling for a new car—bucket seats, a sunroof, a “fast-back”), and had no patience, as a rule, for anything predating us. As far as I was concerned, anyway, the world didn’t exist until November 5, 1953, when I was born.

  1966

  WHEN I THINK OF 1966, I see pink and orange stripes and wild purple Paisleys and black and white vibrating to make the head ache. We were too young for drugs (they hadn’t reached the junior high yet) but we didn’t need them. Our world was psychedelic, our clothes and our make-up and our jewelry and our hairstyles were trips in themselves. It was the year of the gimmick, and what mattered was being noticed, which meant being wild and bright and having the shortest skirt and the whitest Yardley Slicker lips and the dangliest earrings. (We all pierced our ears that year. You can tell the girls who became teen-agers in 1966—they’re the ones with not-quite healed over holes in their ears.) Seventeen that year was full of vinyl skirts, paper dresses, op and pop, Sassoon haircuts, Patty Duke flips and body painting. My own outfits would have glowed in the dark. I remember one, a poorboy top and mod Carnaby Street hat, a silver micro skirt and purple stockings. (Pantyhose hadn’t been invented yet; among our other distinctions, call us the last generation to wear garter belts. I recall an agonizing seventh-period math class in which, ten minutes before the bell rang, my front and back garters came simultaneously undone.)

  It was as if we’d just discovered color, and all the shiny, sterile things machines made possible for us. Now we cultivate the natural, homemade look, with earthy colors and frayed, lumpy macramé sashes that no one would mistake for store-bought. But back then we tried to look like spacemen, distorting natural forms. Nature wasn’t a vanishing treasure to us yet—it was a barrier to be overcome. The highest compliment, the ultimate adjective, was unreal.

  I NEVER REMEMBERED, IN May, as I counted the days till school got out, what summer vacation was really like. After the excitement of the first swim and walking barefoot and going for picnics on our bikes, it came to us (each year, as if we’d hit on some new discovery) that school, much as we hated it, gave form to our lives. What summertime was meant for, more than anything else, was growing up. Soaking up sun and eating carrots so you’d have long hair—lightened, if you dared, with a lemon—when school began again. Summertime was when the changes happened, and why the first day of school was so much fun, with everybody telling everybody else how different they looked—and it was true.

  Waiting for the changes to happen, though, was like watching corn grow. By August I would miss the tug of my leash and collar, with nothing, no commitments, to keep me from sleeping through the best hours of sunlight, rising late and eating soggy Cheerios by the TV set, glued there for hours (just one more program, I kept telling myself, still in pajamas) like an addict. After TV there might be waiting for the mail, then reading TV Guide—next week’s menus—and all the advertising circulars the discount stores sent out. (Sales on men’s underwear and clock radios I studied, rapt. I knew the retail price of everything, just as I came to know the stars of every TV show, the time it came on and the channel. My stores of useless summer information accumulated like algae in a swamp.) Often I’d look forward to rain—thunder storms especially—because it gave me an excuse to stay inside and make popcorn. Sometimes, when the sun was shining, I’d pull the blinds and feel guilty, or I’d rally to the weather, put on my bathing suit and bike to the town swimming pool, transplanted, in the space of half an hour, from stretched-out-on-the-couch to stretched-out-on-the-sand. Transistor radios were more in fashion then than now. (Now it is quiet we treasure. Back then it was little palm-sized boxes with wrist straps and earphones, held to the ears of teen-agers while they walked, as if without the sound of J. J. Jeffrey and his Solid Gold or Big Bud Ballou with this week’s Top Ten, breathing would be impossible.)

  Teen-agers seemed more teen-age then. They all seemed older-looking and more on top of things. It isn’t true that the closer you get, the better things look. (I often think in TV jingle terms. My sentence rhythms come from Maybelline and Crest.) The closer I got to teen-age, the less grown up it seemed. Partly it was that college students came into their own during my teens (after years of isolationist scholarship, a sudden burst of relevance) so the action switched from us to them. It seemed unfair that I should have spent so long marking time, holding my place in line, sleeping (wake me up when I’ve grown up—that was my summer attitude) only to discover when finally I reached the ticket booth that no more seats were left or that, in fact, the concert had been canceled. A perpetual summer pre-teen, always on the brink, it seemed, I spent Junes, Julys and Augusts waiting for my bathing suit to fill out, for the time when I’d lie on a “Surf’s Up” towel, or one that read “Drive Slow—No Parking—Soft Shoulders Ahead,” rubbing suntan lotion into some lifeguard’s back while, more romantic than violins, his transistor pounded out the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.” Annette and Fabian, transistor radios and polka-dot bikinis, were gone by my first real teen-age summer. By then I dreamed of being college age and spent my summer as a babysitter, changing diapers.

  For a time, a longish time, it seemed to be a pattern in my life that the boys who liked me were not the ones I cared about. It was never the student council members and the sports stars who asked me to dance (the kinds of boys I wanted, more than to be with, to be seen with, boys whose acceptance of me would, I felt, make me acceptable). Instead, I had the impression, and a fairly elaborate one, that I was attracting a whole series of school misfits like me, boys whose own out-ness reminded me of mine. If they danced awkwardly—and they did—it was not the stiff, cool awkwardness of a basketball player who can’t afford to look too ballet-graceful, but the awkwardness of the boys who strike out in baseball and finish last, panting, in races. Looking back, it seems to me that my partners invariably danced with their mouths open. I can still see them loping across the dance floor to get me, presumably eager to lay sweaty palms on my organdy and velvet, bought for other, dryer hands.

  I hated them, these misfits, for how alike we were. Seeing them, I imagined how I must have looked. I criticized them most of all for their taste in girls. For anyone I liked to like me back would make me like him less. Their having chosen me only went to show what losers they were.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t have a pretty exalted opinion of myself—I did. The fact that I wasn’t wildly popular puzzled me for a long time. I decided that we weren’t seeing the same person—me, when I looked in the mirror, and the boys who said “Hey, did you get the license number of the tractor that ran over your face?” They convinced me finally that it must be so; if I wasn’t ugly, I was at least different, odd-looking, and that was maybe even worse. Mine was not the ki
nd of face that reminds people of faces on TV. And it was those smoothly smiling faces that were my models. My face impressed me not at all favorably, as untypical; I fell far short, I thought, of prettiness, and no amount of experimenting with clothes or hair styles or eyeshadow colors (each one just the barest fraction of a shade different from the last) could turn me into Gidget. I grew up—we all did—to value the consensus. (What sex is the baby rabbit? Let’s take a vote …) My eye is trained not to aesthetic absolutes but to the culturally accepted thing. (Are shaven legs and plucked eyebrows really more beautiful, or is it just the habit of seeing them that way which makes me think they are?) My taste is no longer my own—that much I know. I’m not a rider of bandwagons, quite, but, much as I try to disregard them, to think for myself, the opinions of other people matter to me. I liked the kind of faces I saw in magazines, the kind of boys who were well-liked by all, and while I didn’t torment the ones many people made fun of, secretly I thought less of them for having failed to win majority approval. I thought less of myself too, for my own lack of popularity with boys, and so I scorned the boys who failed to scorn me because they liked a face I didn’t like, myself.

  Why do looks matter so much?

  I do not know a single girl who’s really satisfied with how she looks. Some toss their hair and smooth their skirts and stride like models, and I’ll start out envying them and mentally exchanging faces or shapes or hair color, but then I’ll watch them looking at other girls as they stride by tossing their hair, and I’ll see, in the faces I admired, the same sizing-up look that’s on mine (how much does she weigh? Does she color her hair? Curl her eyelashes?) and realize that not one of us feels really safe. I study my reflection in every full-length mirror and window and shiny toaster I pass (less from sheer vanity, I think, than from insecurity, a dissatisfaction about the way I look) and when I do examine myself, I almost always see, reflected next to me, another insecure, dissatisfied girl doing the same thing. We put on our mirror expressions and glance hurriedly—sidelong, out of guilt—jumping a little when discovered, bent over the sink in a department store ladies’ room, miming before the mirror. What we do before mirrors is an intensely private act. We are examining and repairing the illusions we’re attempting to maintain (that we don’t care about our looks, that how we look when we look good is just a lucky accident) and to be caught in mid-repair destroys the illusion. Like bald men discovered with their toupees off, women viewed early in the morning or at work before a mirror feel they can never regain, in the eyes of those who see them—before—the image of how they look after.

  Why do we feel like unwelcome strangers in our own skins? I change clothes half a dozen times a day when I feel at my worst, leaving pools of discarded costumes on the floor, arranging myself in Outfit Number Nine, until, at last, I’m reasonably pleased with how I look and then, catching my image in a window two hours later, I find my shakily assembled image has disappeared—I must change again. I long for a face that I can count on; I’d like to have eyes that are never puffy, a skin that’s uniformly olive (not sallow, never sallow), hair that bounces and emerges from convertibles and bike rides looking artfully tousled instead of just plain lousy. It isn’t necessarily beauty I covet, but dependable attractiveness, a face I can catch off guard and be happy at the sight of.

  When I talk about it, all this must sound like a casebook neurosis, but I think it’s too commonplace to be labeled an abnormality. It’s our culture that has put a premium on good looks—all the clothes designers and hairdressers and department store buyers and magazine editors, all aware, at least subconsciously, that we—women—will suddenly and at long last escape the tyranny of fashions on the very day we wholeheartedly like the way we look. While constantly creating more products to help us reach that point, they have managed to keep it always slightly beyond us. Just getting to a state of fashionable attractiveness is hard enough because fashions change so quickly. Staying there is impossible. A newer, better model is always around the corner—built-in obsolescence—so that, no sooner do we buy a pair of suede hotpants, satisfying one season’s requirements, than another more pressing need is created (a patchwork skirt, an Argyle vest …). Our insecurity is what the beauty industry depends on and encourages—the constant, one-step-behind limbo we live in where each purchase, each haircut, each diet is undertaken in the hopes that it will bring us to some stable point where we can look in the mirror and smile. Sometimes, of course, we do. Never for very long. Pretty soon someone even better-looking passes by on the street, or on the TV screen or in a magazine, and the quest is on again.

  Early on, magazines brought out the worst in me—greed and jealousy, wild competition. In Seventeen the clothes and make-up and the hairstyles fascinated me, but what really held me to the page was the models. In Vogue and Glamour they are anonymous, so the envy is at least targetless, generalized. But Seventeen models were, like the characters in monthly serials, old friends and sometimes enemies. We knew their names, their beauty problems (“Lucy’s skin is oily, so she scrubs nightly with astringent soap and steams her face for that extra zing …”), their dieting secrets, their special touches. (Colleen would be “an individualist” one month, with a flower painted on her cheek or a tiny gold bracelet around the ankle. Next month we’d all be sporting ankle chains and cheek flowers.) What we remembered from the ads they posed in was not the brand of clothes they wore but what the girls who wore them looked like. I’d notice when a model had gained weight or when her stock seemed to be going down, when she was no longer one of the girls the magazine was on a first-name basis with, and—secretly, of course—these failures pleased me. Perhaps that’s what the magazines depend on—our bitchiness and envy and our less-than-entirely joyful reaction to New York-style model beauty. We buy the magazines, study the models, to study the competition. Then if we like the way they look and, most important, feel envy, maybe we’ll buy their outfits too.

  It’s not true of just me, I think, but of nearly every sixties-bred girl, that no matter how bright or scholarly or talented or generally contented with her life she may be, she’ll have some hidden weakness when it comes to models and modeling. To be loved for nothing but our looks, to make a living simply out of being, to be graceful and sweatless, cool and fashionable and most of all, looked at by other girls and envied—that is the hidden dream. The world is full of teen-age girls who long to model—short, plump, acne-scarred Seventeen readers who balance books on their heads behind closed doors or vamp in front of three-way mirrors, mouth slightly open, stomach forward, slouching, Twiggy style, toes in, knees knocking. Whatever our official goals, whatever we write on college applications, whatever we tell our parents that we plan to be when we grow up, the dream of modeling remains.

  I went once to an agency, naively answering a want ad in the paper (“Glamorous modeling career?”). I was sixteen then, and my relatives had always told me “you could be a model.” As soon as I arrived at the agency I saw I’d made a mistake, of course—all glass and chrome, with glossy pictures on all sides and deep shag rugs and a beautiful secretary (if she hadn’t even made it as a model …) with one of the English, Carnaby Street accents that were so fashionable then. I had my interview anyway—a humiliating examination that made me feel ashamed of my presumptuousness to think, for even a moment, that I could be a model. I sensed, worse than contempt, my bell-bottomed, blue-booted interviewer’s amusement. The agency’s gambit was clear then—I’d pay them for a charm course and a set of photographs and for the privilege of being managed by them. I’d gone from employee to employer, with dazzling suddenness—asked to pay for their services as aging women hire gigolos.

  So I abandoned my short-lived modeling career. I feel resentment still, flipping through fashion magazines, although I buy them all and never miss an issue. Love-hate is what it amounts to, I guess, and a little self-flagellation. My comfort lies in the knowledge that fashion models, like fashions, go out of style. The crop I grew up with has almost turned over—
Vogue models live forever, sometimes, but Seventeen cover girls go on to modeling nurse’s uniforms and pantsuits in Sears catalogues. I know their faces and their wig collections well—Terry and Cheryl, from my earliest days, then Lucy and Colleen, Twiggy, of course, Mona and Cybill. I wait in mean, small-minded anticipation for their mid-twenties. I haven’t really conquered my envy, I’ve only passed it on from one set of smooth faces to another. All of which is a pretty sad and unliberated commentary on female nature (or, more likely, on our conditioning).

  I can’t quite bring myself to throw out my back issues of Seventeen magazine—every copy, since 1965, so worn sometimes, especially the fat August issues, full of back-to-school fashions and back-to-school hopes that This Year Will Be Different; beauty make-overs, exercises, tips for shiny teeth (rub them with Vaseline). I should want to be rid of them; they are what enslaved me to the conventions of fashion, what made me miserable about how I looked. Their pages were always full of clothes I couldn’t afford and helpful hints that never really worked. (Talcum powder on the eyelashes—to make them look thicker—was gilding for a lily, not a dandelion.) Cucumbers over the eyes, lemon in the hair, face exercises to be done watching TV—I tried them all, rushing to the mirror when the miracle operations had been performed, expecting changes and finding only cucumber seeds stuck to my cheek and sticky, lemon-smelling hair no lighter than before.

  My nights, from fifth grade through the ninth, were spent not so much sleeping as waiting for my hair to curl. I slept on plastic rollers and metal clips, in pincurls that left my hair squared off like wire, in hair nets and hairsprays and setting gels and conditioning oils, propped up on three pillows because the curlers hurt so much, or with my head turban-wrapped in toilet paper. I went through half a roll a night. Every morning I’d wake up with dark circles left under my eyes from a troubled half-sleep spent dreaming strange, curler-induced nightmares. I’d run to the mirror, when I woke, to unveil myself, never prepared—not even after all the other failed mornings when my efforts yielded only limp strands (or —worse—tight, greasy ringlets that would not come out) for a new disaster. Then I’d rip off the curls I’d stuck, with Scotch tape, to my face, arranging my hair so the red splotches left on my cheeks from the tape wouldn’t show, and tease my hair, when teasing was still done, so the back of my skull looked enormous. It amazes me now to think that all those ugly styles I wore looked good to me back then. Will what I’m wearing now seem just as strange ten years from now, I wonder?