Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  “Dad,” said Kyle, trying to summon the words. “Dad…”

  “Do you hear what your husband is saying?” I interrupted, looking at Mom over her menu. I felt she should pay closer attention. How could a woman with so much junk in her trunk be oblivious of this ongoing worship of the ninety-pound woman?

  “What?” she said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  She always said that so convincingly, but I didn’t buy it.

  “I’m confident in myself,” she added, to further throw me off the trail.

  Confident? But according to every movie I’d ever rented and every actress Dad had ever loved, a woman needed to be under ten percent body fat. Which is why Kate and I had started eating only fat-free packaged foods. We carried fat-free dressing in our purses and ate cartons upon cartons of noncaloric frozen dietary desserts. According to Young Miss magazine, there was pure absolution right on the label: fat grams… 0. While I tore through three entire fat-free chocolate loaf cakes in mere minutes, licking the crumbs off of my plate and scraping the cardboard packaging with my front teeth, Mom calmly helped herself to a bowl of extra-creamy Häagen-Dazs.

  Mom was at peace with her body. Which shocked me, because puberty was beginning to reveal that I had a carbon copy of hers, especially the inherited lack of a waistline. Pants placed properly on our bodies—with comfort in mind—had but one name: Urkel. I tugged all day long at elastic waistbands, coaxing pants back down over my pelvis while hunks of my upper butt spilled over the sides, creating another amorphous thing to hide. Meanwhile Mom’s shorts rested at ease near her breasts, and she ambulated in what seemed like a cloud of pure comfort.

  I sighed, watching Sveltie the waitress bend to pour coffee, amazed at how her clothes lined up effortlessly with her torso.

  “She’s probably eaten like three grams of fat this entire week,” I pouted.

  “I like her hair,” said Dad. “She’s fluffed herself up.”

  Dad called it fluffing yourself up, as if all a woman needed to do was take a shower and point a blow dryer at her face, and voilà! Fluff, glorious fluff. The hills are alive with mounds of fluff.

  But fluff, when deployed upon my short, permed mullet looked more like puff. Less Debbie Reynolds and more Grandmas Gone Wild. It was more of a cry for help than a hairstyle.

  Nevertheless, I got up at the crack of dawn every day to follow my own rigid regime of hair fluffing. On the day of the class photo, fluff had to be ironclad. There was a tightrope of chance to walk between each stage of washing, conditioning, hair drying, and volumizing, or else the fluffing could fall, like a cake.

  At eight twenty-five a.m. Mom was out in the car, laying on the horn, while I begged the last nip of hair to please, please, for the love of God, fluff! Fluff, damn you!

  In line for class pictures, I waited my turn and practiced my nonsmile again. I was determined this year I would sneer like a model. No more goofy, crooked smiles on the mantel for me. No way. Not this year.

  “Smile,” said the cameraman of the masses, waiting.

  My face was unmoved.

  “Smile for me.” I looked deep into the camera, whispering with my eyes: No smiling.

  I had just watched another National Geographic special, titled The Science of Beauty. I tried to explain my cache of new factoids to the poor idiot photographer.

  “Did you know if you show a baby the picture of a supermodel,” I said, “the pleasure centers in its brain light up like a Christmas tree?”

  The photographer stared into his lens.

  “It’s called symmetry!” I laughed nervously. “Isn’t that neat? It means even if the model eats the baby as it crawls toward her, the baby will die happy because her face is, like, so frigging SYMMETRICAL.”

  “Honey,” he said, “I’ve got a long line, could you please…?”

  “See, I’m naturally asymmetrical,” I went on. “When I’m happy, I get crooked. I mean, I don’t know what happens, one side of my face just, like, seizes up. Last year? I tried to think happy thoughts and just sort of exude joy, so that my inner beauty would shine through… like this?”

  I flexed last year’s smile and there was a blinding flash.

  “But wait…” I said. “I was trying to explain… it didn’t work.”

  “Next.”

  Weeks later, a popular girl on the field hockey team delivered the photos to my homeroom, peeking at each one before she handed it over.

  “Wow,” she quipped to me, “nice hair.”

  Hard to take it all in at first, but my huge, overfluffed bangs were like a massive brown squirrel that had curled up near my eyes and died. The swirling blue backdrop loomed like a pastel nightmare over my squinting eyes and drooping lip. It was like I’d just come to after being slapped upside my head with the ugly stick. It was a campy version of The Scream.

  I took the proofs into a stall to vomit on them but had no luck with my stubborn gag reflex. I knew what guys did—they flipped through the yearbook like it was the SI swimsuit issue: smoking hot on page 12, they’d say. Nice tits page 27. Then, for me: Dude—this chick needs a BAG over her head, page 43.

  I got in the car and handed the photos to Mom.

  “Adorable,” she said.

  I kicked off my pointy flats and discovered my feet were now shaped like pointy flats.

  “I don’t want to be adorable,” I said. “I’m so hideous!”

  My mom dropped the pictures in her lap, peeved. “Honestly, why would you say something like that?”

  “Because it’s the truth. Look.” I pulled out the dizzying stream of wallets, a million horrific little heads, all of them mine.

  “I can’t believe I spent all that money on braces and you won’t even show your teeth,” she said, holding up a monstrous 8 × 10. “What a waste.”

  She put the car in Drive and shook her head.

  “Be glad you have teeth. What if you were in a wheelchair? What about people who have burns all over their faces, and arms missing?”

  I rolled my eyes, which meant, duh, I practically already had no face and two stumps. There was nothing to feel lucky about.

  If I looked like the varsity field hockey captain, I knew, then I’d have something to be thankful for. If I had a swarm of jocks begging to check me for ticks, I’d get grateful in a damn sure hurry.

  “I’m ugly,” I announced, crying.

  “You look cute!” she said, a trace of panic in her voice. “Honestly, I don’t know why you make such a big deal!”

  But that’s what middle school was all about. Everything was a big deal, and the biggest deal of all was where you sat at lunch.

  I sat at a table with Mallory, Lisa, and Margaret, and a new girl named Joann. A few feet to the left, invisible barbed wire marked off our dork demographic. I knew why Margaret and Lisa and I were here, but Joann—why Joann? She had really good clothes and two BMWs in her three-car garage at home. She’d even named them, like Bev and Bernie Beamer or something. She had everything you’d need to be popular in Avon but possessed some nameless quality that had cost her the winning ticket. Maybe she shrank a little when people looked at her. Maybe it was because she’d never learned how to be an asshole. Whatever it was, the gods of Avon had deemed her defective, so she sat with us.

  On the other side of the razor wire were tables packed with girls trying to lay claim to Ashley and Ellie and the twins, Christy and Carrie. A few popular guys sat with them, the laces in their oversize Nikes dragging on the floor behind them like peacock feathers. Occasionally one of them would reel an arm back and pelt our table with hard candies. Then they’d hunker down and laugh.

  “Oh, my God,” said Joann, ducking a butterscotch. “Who did that?”

  I knew exactly who did it. I was aware of every movement at every table in every quadrant at any given moment. But the best defense was to not notice the offense, even if it hit you in the head. Plus, I hated confrontation. It was easier to burn with unrequited hatred. I ate my chicken patty and watched them,
taking mental field notes about life in the green zone. What was it like to be so safe? What did they talk about? I couldn’t hear a single word, but I knew. I could taste on my tongue every little inside joke they whispered into the shiny shanks of their long hair. It was not unlike the residue of my reconstituted poultry by-product.

  Ten minutes before the bell, these girls moved as one, like a flock of birds at the watering hole, panicked by an unseen cue.

  “Wait for me, Ashley!” the girls called, struggling to stay together.

  “Ellie! Wait!”

  “Everybody WAIT!”

  And then, scattered trash and silence. The barometric pressure dropped a degree, the atmosphere stabilizing.

  “Hel-lo,” Joann sang next to me. “You’re not even listening to me.”

  “What?” I tuned back in. “I’m just spaced out today.”

  I left lunch with Joann but veered off toward the bathroom. I had to. In the hallway, the slightest glance my way felt like it burned. I could hear people whispering about me, about my hair or my belt or my shoes, picking me apart like vultures. Their opinions amplified into a quiet roar in my head that stilled only in the heart of the bathroom, where I could hide, where I could reupholster my face and reshape the collapsing architecture of my hair. Without constant maintenance and monitoring, punishment and control, how could I possibly handle fifth period? Or sixth? Or seventh? Or the rest of my life?

  I looked back at Joann and said nothing.

  She sighed.

  “You just went in there five minutes ago! Come on, you look fine.”

  You look fine. Please. If I looked fine, people would be killing themselves over me. And, I wouldn’t have to glue my pretty back together with hairspray every seventy-three seconds.

  “Just gotta pee real quick,” I lied.

  “Yeah, right,” said Joann, walking off.

  Why couldn’t I just be normal, eat lunch, go to class, smile and giggle, rinse and repeat. My life had been like that once. People had looked right at me, right dead in my face, and I’d been able to look right back without feeling terrified. How had I done that? I couldn’t remember anymore. My face had changed so much. It was changing every second. I had to control its complete unraveling, or else… what? I’d go up in flames. I’d go extinct. And forever remain the butt of every inside joke.

  I pushed open the heavy swinging door and went in, the air muggy with the dueling odors of shit and soap. There were girls standing by the sink, so I sauntered into a stall and closed the door. I stood inside, listening to them washing their hands and ripping paper towels. I flushed once or twice to prove that I was attending to bodily functions. But I was really just standing there.

  When the last person left and the bathroom was finally quiet, I emerged and went to work like a spy, setting out my arsenal of tools: lipsticks, concealer, travel-size curling iron, and the big gun, a can of Mega Hold. Ironic, since my goal was to give the impression that I didn’t use hair spray. My goal was to look like Ashley, like I just rolled out of bed in the morning and tucked it behind my ear and—poof—natural beauty. The cover of Seventeen, the mannequin at the mall with only whites for eyes, hard and permanently flawless and worthy of pedestals and spotlights. But I had no natural beauty, so I squared up with the mirror and readied myself for the wave of disgust. Then I held my breath, tweaked and realigned, sprayed and prayed, doing my best to zero in on the unfixable problem.

  I prayed a lot about my mirror issue. I felt a little better when I was done praying, but nothing much changed. After all, it wasn’t God’s fault. He was on my side but it wasn’t like He could step in and give me a new head. God was good for healing sicknesses, for protecting you from enemies and bringing Joy to the World. Understandably, sorting out why I was so hideous was way below His pay grade.

  Still it was kind of ironic how God, who was supposed to see only our hearts, ironically chose only the comeliest maidens for the Bible’s best supporting roles. You couldn’t just be virtuous. You had to have towering breasts, alabaster skin, and a temple so bodacious that all of Israel would want to beget with you.

  A random girl walked into the bathroom, startling my trance.

  “You,” she marveled, giving my array of weapons the once-over, “are always in here.”

  How did she know? I tried so hard to stay so invisible, to be so careful, and still. People knew I was always in here. Ugh. I scraped everything back into my book bag and pretended that I was done—even though I had barely begun. I pretended to be looking for something. Where is that, um, folder for art? Yeah, I need that folder. Hmm, must be in here somewhere. I could feel her looking at me, waiting. She smelled my fear.

  “You are always in here,” she said again. What made her think that pointing out my behavior would make me do it less? Yes, I was always going to be in here looking at myself, but that didn’t mean she got to watch me do it. I bent over to rummage deeper into my book bag, up to my neck in my Trapper Keeper, looking for a hole to China.

  By the time she gave up and left I was thirteen minutes late for Spanish, and my bangs were tall enough to receive messages from space. I hurried down the empty hall and slipped into the back of the classroom, keeping my head as low as possible. The teacher marked me late. But I waited twenty minutes, got a bathroom pass, and tried it all over again.

  Maybe it was the shape of my head. The shape of my head went with nothing. It wasn’t a diamond or a pear or an oval like the head chart in Seventeen. It was a sprouting potato.

  As if on cue, two boys near my locker started examining me.

  “Holy shit,” one of them said to his friend. “Look, dude. Look at her from the side.”

  “Oh, yeah, weird. Pop-out eyes.”

  “Gross.”

  I stood still and said nothing, waiting to see what else they would find. Then I raced to the janitor’s closet to examine my profile.

  Oh, no. I completely overlooked that whole side of my eyes. They bulge? They bulge!

  In the next class I snagged the seat against the farthest wall and hid behind my hand. How long, I wondered, had people been recoiling at my bulging eyeballs? There was no telling. How was I going to deploy my camouflage while still seeming casual? Maybe I could just constantly massage my temples, or rub my head, while using the rest of my hand as a veil, so no one would see my face.

  That worked for a little while. Until I was in gym, running sprints.

  “What’s wrong with you?” girls asked through the tunnel of my cupped hands.

  “Oh,” I said, covering my face. “I have a headache.”

  Gym was the biggest low of the day. The hair destruction caused by bodily movement was unreal and almost always irreversible.

  In the crowded locker room, I reluctantly brought out my Mega Hold, the holy mist. It was so stinky that in close quarters the other girls clawed at their throats, dropping and rolling in the toxic cloud. It was probably tested on animals, sprayed in the clamped eyes of defenseless bunnies, then scented with the pulped pituitary juices of their dead bodies. But I had no choice; it was the only hair goo that came in a four-ounce size and could fit discreetly in my book bag. Ignoring the comments, I held my bangs just the way I wanted them to stay forever and ever, amen, and crop-dusted my shoulders.

  I left the locker room with my head down as low as it could possibly get on my neck, since I couldn’t shield my pop-out eyes while also lugging my backpack, my portable makeup and hair studio, and my plastic sack for my gym clothes, which was weathered and sporting holes and needed be to supported from the bottom. That night I would painstakingly reinforce it with Scotch tape, since it was the only proof that my family had once purchased something from the Gap. Last year.

  I veered off into the empty Home Ec room to pull out my compact, but it was too dark to see. So I held it out in front of me as I walked down the hall, pretending there was something in my eye, so I could monitor the effects of changing light and humidity. Oh, my God, I was even uglier than I was ten minute
s earlier. I was hemorrhaging ugly.

  In math, the teacher marked me late and told me this was the fifth time and it was going to cost me a detention. Marinating in concealed panic, I took my seat in the middle row, my back inches from desks occupied by the Twins.

  To my immediate right sat a boy who’d scraped I LOVE CHRISTY on his forearm in what looked like his own blood. That same boy had hocked a loogie in my hair last fall. I had come home crying about it, and Kyle had said, “Trust me, he probably likes you.”

  “And the boy who taped KICK ME to my back and called me shit for brains?” I had asked him.

  “Yeah, he probably likes you too.”

  “At what point do they tattoo your name in their skin with a paper clip?”

  “That’s just stupid.”

  “Do they secretly hate the girls they pretend to like?”

  Cornered, Kyle had turned to strategy. “Okay, next time he says something, ask him if he thinks it’s cool to pick on a girl.”

  I agreed, but what I really needed was for Kyle to accompany me to every single class, wearing his varsity basketball jersey. That would shut them up.

  Immediately after I took my seat in math class I realized with horror that I could still smell the deadly Mega Hold. If only I’d taken one more lap up and down the hallway to let it evaporate. The room was so hot and humid that the odor could not be missed, it was like stale, sweet formaldehyde. The twin hyenas behind me sniffed the air.

  “What is that?”

  “Oh, my God, that totally reeks.”

  Dry, dry, dry, I prayed. Please God, let it dry.

  “Hey,” said the I LOVE CHRISTY boy. He was talking to me. I stared deeply at problem 122 on page 43. He poked my shoulder with his pen. I turned, prickling, to see that he had pulled his shirt over his nose.

  “Is that like perfume? Or did you forget to wipe your ass?”

  A twin hushed him with a little slap on his shoulder. More of a caress, really. Then she and her sister retreated behind their identical folders for an identical laugh.

  “Oh, my God, Jeremy! You are so mean!” They giggled.