Devil in the Details

by Jennifer Traig

  These were not attractive habits. Less attractive still was the constant compulsion to pick my nose. I knew how bad it looked, but I just couldn’t keep my finger out of my nostril. “That’s our little miner,” my mother commented, when strangers looked on in horror. “We think she has a real future as a garbage picker. When she’s old enough we’re going to send her to Rio to teach those Brazilian street kids a thing or two.”

  My mother joked about it, but it bothered her, and she did what she could to get me to stop. “Digging for gold again, I see,” she would sigh, driving the car, as I looked out the window and rooted absently around in a nostril. “Well, you can pan that stream all you want, but it’s never going to pay off.”

  I ignored the flip comments, but the bribe got my attention. If I could keep my fingers holstered and my nose loaded for a month, my mother promised, I would get a ring and bracelet set. I was helpless before shiny, girly trinkets, and my mother won. Soon my finger was adorned with a tiny faux emerald that I had not, for once, harvested myself.

  My mother had discovered my Achilles’ heel, and it was a strappy open-toed little number. But I’d sold out too cheap. The ring and bracelet set was all I was going to get, and after the perfume compact, the make-up pipeline dried up, too. My mother did, however, permit me a purse and some low-heeled mules. I took to shuffling behind her on her errands, stuffing my pocket-book with anything that was free: brochures on high blood pressure, samples of hand lotion, Sweet’n Low packets, Kleenex, and aluminum ashtrays. “It’s like shopping with Great-Aunty Mee-Maw,” my mother muttered. Hardly, I thought. Great-aunties, at least, were allowed blush.

  I got nothing. I was really hoping for some frilly lingerie. Here, too, my mother was intractable. Exactly what is so disturbing about a four-year-old wearing a French-cut matching bra and panty set? I wanted to know. Once again I was forced to rely on my own resourcefulness. After I saw a picture of a flapper wearing a garter, I tried to fashion one for myself by putting a ponytail elastic around my thigh. It had a one-inch diameter. By the time my mother noticed what I’d done, my leg was maroon.

  One afternoon I found my mother crying in her bedroom. Her brother had died in a boating accident, and she had just received the telegram telling her his body had been found. I didn’t fully understand what had happened, but I knew I’d never seen her so upset. What could I say to help her put things in perspective, to remind her that the circle of life goes on? What I came up with was this: “Mom, when you die, can I have your bras?”

  I considered good foundation garments a matter of the most solemn importance, so it seemed an appropriate response. In retrospect, I think it was a little callous. In any case, it was ineffectual. Even if she did leave me the good Maidenforms, I knew it would be decades before I got my hands on them. My mother appeared to be in excellent health. And she was unlikely to hand them over in a burst of madcap exuberance. This was not a happy time. My mother’s father had died just a year before, her mother, ten years before that, making my mother an orphan at thirty-two. Across the street, Mrs. Foster was dying a slow and painful death from liver cancer that turned her eyes and skin a deep canary, and it was my mother’s unhappy volunteer project to give her daily sponge baths. Mrs. Foster died within a year, living just long enough to bury her two-year-old daughter, who died after consuming a bottle of her mother’s medication.

  I remember this as a dark, uneasy period, steeped in ‘70s earth tones that flattered none of us; we are a sallow family. The earth tones, I’m sure, contributed to our general malaise. And in a deeper way, those yellows and rusts came to represent the subdued, jaundiced time. This was our blue period, painted in sickly shades of ochre and carbuncle.

  At four, I didn’t fully understand everything that was going on, but the frailty of the body, I got. This I understood. Bodies could break. They broke all the time. They had to be controlled, groomed, tricked up with embellishments to hide their failings. They had to be painted and plucked. That’s all we had to protect us, these cosmetics and compulsions. All we could do was put some make-up on the bruise, count all our arm hairs, and move on. So I ticced and tapped and tweezed. You work with what you have.

  And it succeeded; things improved. Family members and neighbors stopped dying. The earth tones of the ‘70s gave way to the purples and teals of the ‘80s. We began to feel happy and safe. When things got better my compulsions waned, but my interest in make-up did not. By age eight I was making my own cosmetic preparations, all of them consisting of nothing but my own saliva. I licked my lips constantly to impart a moist, glossy sheen. I wet my eyelashes to mimic mascara, my brows to approximate brow pencil. My face was continually basted in my own spit. It left my skin chapped and the upholstery soiled, but what could I do? I was forced to turn to the resources of my own body. Failing blush, I chewed my cheeks raw sucking in and biting down to create the impression of cheekbones.

  “What’s with that face?” my mother asked.

  Speaking would have required me to release the clamp I had on my cheeks, so I responded by arching a brow and mimicking a face I’d seen Cybill Shepherd make.

  “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but that’s not a face you want to make at your mother. Cut it out.”

  Finally my mother broke down. She agreed to let me have some cosmetics as long as she didn’t have to pay for them and I promised not to wear them outside. I spent my allowance on maraschino-bright used lipsticks I found at garage sales. “Doesn’t look septic to me!” she announced cheerfully, unworried that the expiration date was twenty years past. When I was nine she thought me old enough for her own cast-off cosmetics and happily handed over her tangerine lipsticks and magenta eye shadow. “Look at you!” she exclaimed the first time I came to dinner made up like a showgirl in shades of flame-retardant Vegas carpet. “I think that’s a special look just for tonight, okay?”

  The next day my eyes and mouth were ringed with an angry rash, but I was undaunted. I was allergic to expired cosmetics, apparently, but that didn’t mean I had to go without. I could make my own all-natural products. I promptly concocted a signature scent from beheaded marigolds pickled in dishwashing liquid and my mother’s Jean Nate. It was a mixed success. I liked the scent just fine, but at dinner that night my father demanded to know who smelled like compost, and the bee stings dotting my face made the culprit easy to track down.

  Still, I was not discouraged. My next creation was an all-purpose preparation I called “Beauty Sauce.” It was a blend of lotion, bubble bath, shampoo, conditioner, solid perfume, beer, and pancake syrup, mixed together in a peanut butter jar. It immediately thickened and grew mold. At a loss, I hid it under the bathroom sink, where it remained until I went to college.

  Shortly after that experiment my affection for cosmetics soured, too. Adolescence began, and my relationship with cosmetics, like my relationships with good humor and common sense, became an on-again, off-again affair. I had never expected this, but there it was. Now that I was finally old enough to wear make-up outside the house, I found that I didn’t want to. Sometimes I couldn’t because the scrupulosity forbade it; other times, because good taste did. I was in junior high now, but I was very short, and the least bit of make-up made me look like a pageant baby.

  My sister had no such reservations. By now she, too, had discovered make-up, and her typical preteen bungling of the medium did little to reignite my interest. She favored attention-getting colors and circled her features in liner, making her face look like it had undergone a particularly thorough copyedit. She came to the breakfast table furry with powder and foundation, not managing to even get a lipstick print on her juice glass before my parents marched her back upstairs to tone it down. When they slept in on weekends, she snuck out with a full face on, the application so heavy-handed that even strangers were moved to offer advice.

  “My niece has your coloring, and we found that fawn eye shadow suits her much better than the navy blue you’ve got on there,” a saleslady told her. “Some p
eople think you have to choose between a bright blusher and a bright lipstick, and experience has taught us that’s a good rule to follow.”

  The same saleslady scanned my washed-out features and asked if I was sick, but I figured too little was better than too much. I was having none of this. It was tacky and immodest. It was idolatrous and treyf. Later I would meet yeshiva girls and learn that even drag queens don’t wear as much mascara, but at the time I thought cosmetics were unkosher. Lip balm, soap, shampoo, deodorant: all these things were out. The multipurpose saliva I had relied on as an eight-year-old was out, too. Who knew where my mouth had been?

  But then the scrupulosity would subside, the skies would clear, and I’d find myself ankle-deep in a paraffin bath. The energy I put into inspecting the carpets during my scrupulous periods went into pore wrangling during my sane ones. I spent my babysitting money on Ten-O-Six and department store moisturizers. I formed friendships with the offspring of Amway sales reps, helping myself to the free samples of night cream they kept around the house.

  On weekends I turned the kitchen into my own personal day spa, making messy, complicated treatments from the family’s lunch fixings. “This is so unsanitary,” my mother complained when I took up residence in the breakfast nook, my hair coated with salad ingredients, my feet propped up on the table for a strawberry scrub. “My sugar bowl is not your personal supply of cleansing grains,” she sighed. “My tea is not your steam treatment.” She went on some more, but her pleas were muffled by the terry cloth tent over my head.

  My family could scoff all they liked. I believed in what I was doing. My faith in a beauty regime was so absolute at these times that I thought there was nothing a good makeover couldn’t cure. When I was in eighth grade my best friend and I decided that a new look was all one particularly unpopular classmate needed. We invited her over to my house for a day of spa treatments. “This is a onetime thing, Lorene,” we told her. “We’re not going to be best friends after this or anything. But we think we can help you.”

  The memory shames me now, but at the time I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with the idea. Here was a way to combine my two hobbies, beauty and good works. I’d found my cause. If this went well, I would become a door-to-door missionary for Avon and dedicate my weekends to doing pro bono work for the acne-scarred.

  In spite of my insensitive invitation, Lorene graciously accepted. It went downhill from there. She had scoliosis, but we treated her as though she were uncommonly retarded.

  “Here’s a product called ‘a-strin-gent,”’ I explained slowly as we sat by the pool, the patio table covered with beauty supplies. “And here’s how you use it.” I mimed a swipe over my T-zone with a cotton ball. “I’m sure this seems very complicated and foreign to you right now, but you’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

  Lorene’s posture may have been impaired, but her manners, certainly, were much better than mine. Resisting the urge to remind me that she was in all my honors classes, she cheerfully replied that she’d gotten the hang of it some years ago and already used it twice a day.

  I was puzzled. If she was already using a toner, why wasn’t she more popular?

  “Next you’ll want to ‘ex-fo-li-ate,’ with a gentle scrub like this apricot kernel paste.”

  Lorene informed us that her dermatologist had told her to avoid exfoliants – she had a dermatologist? – but said she’d defer to our advanced knowledge.

  Next we gave a presentation on choosing figure-flattering clothes and the importance of a healthy diet. After that, we enjoyed a break over fruit plates and iced tea. Finally we did her hair and painted her flushed, overstimulated face with a coat of make-up.

  “That looks nice,” she agreed when we held a mirror up to her face. “Vogue says that blondes like me really can’t get away with burgundy eye shadow, but look at that, you proved them wrong. Thank you so much for all you taught me today. I’ll be sure to incorporate your tips into my routine.”

  Monday arrived and nothing changed. She was wearing lip gloss, but she was tortured as usual by the slack-jawed preteen Pol Pots who shared our homeroom. How was this possible? We had exfoliated! We had toned! We had made over! Why was she still unpopular? I felt like a jerk and winced with embarrassment every time I saw her. In high school I was relieved when we were in few of the same classes. I avoided her in the halls, and we never spoke of the incident again.

  After that spa day I wasn’t the same. If anyone got a makeover, it was me. I’d become a non-believer. Beauty treatments lost their magic; make-up, its appeal. Now I rarely wear anything more than root beer lip gloss, and then only because I secretly like to eat it. My hair-care routine is limited to weekly brushings and bi-annual self-administered haircuts. Several years ago I was hired to write a series of beauty features for teenagers, and my friends were baffled. “Have your editors ever seen you?” they demanded. “Do they know you wash your hair with bar soap?”

  That my campaign to change Lorene’s life might fail had never occurred to me. Until then I had had complete trust in the power of cosmetics to transform and repair. Everyone does, deep down. In my twenties I liked to hang out at the CVS in Harvard Square, watching our country’s premier students use their massive brainpower to spend forty-five minutes picking out a conditioner, all of them convinced that the right formula had the power to make their lives perfect and whole.

  But I understood. That’s what this was, the cosmetics and the compulsions, all of it an attempt to be perfect, to live a perfect life in which nobody died or had bad skin. Sometimes conditioner was the key and sometimes compulsions were. They were both variations on a theme.

  Obsessive-compulsive disorders foster a strange relationship with one’s body. You’re constantly coming after it with tweezers and anti-bacterials. It is part enemy, part endless pastime. It is always giving you something to do and to dominate.

  Mine kept me plenty busy. My body was unpredictable, and most of my compulsions – picking, dieting, washing – were an attempt to exert control over this thing I couldn’t trust. I had no faith in it at all. It flushed and stumbled and refused to do my bidding. Where were the prominent cheekbones I had tried so hard to coax out? Where were the long tapered fingers? The shapely legs? What was this large mole doing on my forehead? Why the big yellow teeth?

  I could not trust that my body would do what I wanted. I was grateful for the involuntary bodily processes that didn’t require my input, but I didn’t trust those, either, as I secretly believed that I could, accidentally and against my will, make my heart stop beating with my scarily potent mental powers.

  Bodies break. Cosmetics could only do so much, and then it seemed they could do nothing at all. It was useless, all of it, nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Makeup could guarantee you an attractive open-casket funeral, maybe, but it couldn’t bring the corpse back to life. It couldn’t stop you from dying in the first place.

  Why do we call bodies temples? They’re a mess. My body was just a disaster. Everything was wrong, and new wrongs sprung up all the time: stray hairs, warts, broken veins, all signs, surely, that something was very screwed up, that I was sick, and worse than that, too short to model.

  Once, when I was thirteen, I woke up and I couldn’t smile. This is not allegory. I woke up one day and found that half of my face was paralyzed. It was the strangest thing. The right side curved up in a grin when I asked it to, but the left wouldn’t move. At first my parents thought I was faking. Several lopsided grins later they were convinced, if amused. “Oh, do it again,” they urged. “Hoo. That is one funny expression.”

  After I indulged their requests to demonstrate my frown and my surprised look, they took me to a doctor. It turned out to be nothing too serious; I had Bell’s palsy was all. It’s a fairly benign paralysis of the facial nerves caused, in my case, by a cold. A month or so later it went away on its own and I could smile again, if you gave me something to smile about. But it was weird and unsettling while it lasted. Roseanne Barr h
ad the same thing when she was a child, and it inspired her Jewish family to convert temporarily to Mormonism. I could see how it could scare you into doing something like that. I could see how disease could shake your faith.

  We were at war, my body and I, and all these years later we still haven’t signed a truce. Perhaps it’s because my body failed me so spectacularly so many times before, when the connections in my brain went haywire, when my face froze, when my bones poked out and my skin turned funny colors. The scrupulosity and anorexia eventually went away, but the profound hypochondria remained. I call my father every week with new diagnoses: I am pretty sure there are blood clots in my legs; I think my pancreas has stopped working; this mole is suspicious; these crow’s feet are cancerous. It is a fact that I got my father to spend an entire Thanksgiving weekend on the phone with the Centers for Disease Control when I became convinced that I had contracted German measles and then passed it on to a pregnant friend (it was a rash). My brain works more or less as it’s supposed to these days, but this part, the psychosomatic part, never got fixed.

  But I am trying. I am trying very hard to trust my body, even when it twitches and throbs, when it develops new and unflattering properties like skin tags and varicose veins.

  I am trying. And I believe I have a good plan. Nothing, I think, would restore my faith like some plastic work. Cosmetics weren’t the answer, but I’m hopeful that cosmetic surgery might be. I’ve been browsing, window-shopping, testing the waters with my HMO.

  It’s a good idea, I think. And when I gaze upon creation through doe-like eyes, offering praise through full, shapely lips, I know my faith will be restored. It will be complete. It will be perfect.

  INTERSTITIAL

  BEAUTY TIPS FOR FASTIDIOUS GIRLS

  Brows and Lashes

  Nature has hardwired us to find symmetry beautiful. Parity and pretty even sound alike. They’re practically the same word! So ask yourself: are your brows and lashes perfectly even? Probably not! Go ahead and count them. Count again, just to be sure. Then get out those tweezers and fix that inequality. Count again. Even yet? Okay, tweeze some more. Keep going until you’re satisfied. And remember, it’s better to err on the side of excess – they’ll always grow back!