Approval Junkie

by Faith Salie

  Other favorite games included Pillow Fort, which involved his surrounding me with walls of pillows on the bed so that I couldn’t move. (This became less and less fun as our cohabitation progressed and he often took to constructing a high-thread-count bulwark in between us so there was no chance of our touching in our sleep.) Then there was Try to Get Away, in which he would pin me down or detain me in some way—never painfully—and I’d have to use all my strength to attempt to move myself. He found this endlessly delightful and so did I, until it got tedious. Releasing myself was out of the question—he was so much stronger than I was—but I was supposed at least to try. If I just gave up, if I didn’t attempt the impossible, he was very disappointed and would declare, “You’re no fun.” Game over.

  We were exhausting to be around. I was told this on separate occasions by his mother and my brother. The public giddiness of how we chummed along created an uneasy spectacle for those who knew and loved us best, because they understood the fragility of our bon temps. I only understand how enervating our company must have been now that I’m in a relationship that’s literally unspectacular. Even when my now-husband John proposed to me, he didn’t kneel. If you were watching us get engaged in Rome’s Piazza Navona, you were probably thinking, That couple standing in front of the fountain sure likes to hug a lot.

  There’s a fancy name for what your beloved calls you: hypocorism. “Sweetie,” “Cupcake,” “Junebug,” “Eggroll” (which my friend Gideon calls his wife)—all those pet names are hypocoristic. And I don’t think you need a masters in psychology to figure that the nicknames you and yours call each other say something—probably a lot—about your relationship.

  My husband, John, calls me “baby.” Even though that’s a pretty ubiquitous hypocorism, it feels special to me, since no one else has ever called me that. I love it as long as I try not to remember how much Nick and Jessica used it on Newlyweds. And I will grant you that most hip-hop songs feature a gentleman protagonist calling a stranger “baby” in order to get in her pants, but my husband is a nice Jewish boy, and when he talks, he sounds like a sexier Alan Alda. So you can understand that his “baby” is earnest.

  John calls me “baby” so often that I can’t recall his ever calling me “Faith.” Even if we’re in public—say, in a store—and he needs to get my attention, he doesn’t say my name; he does this cute little bird whistle to call me. He’s made that whistle a million times, but it always transports me to Morocco. For our first New Year’s, we were staying in Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast. And the open air lobby was a palm-and-orange-tree-filled atrium, at the top of which stretched a huge star made out of strings of lights—the pentagram of Morocco. I was eating a lazy and indulgent breakfast in the sun, under the star. And among the birds chirping, an incessant call started to emerge. It was probably going on for about a minute before I looked up and saw my patient (then) boyfriend staring down at me, from nine floors up, peacefully smiling. So whenever I hear John’s inimitable bird call, even in the middle of Bloomingdale’s Home Goods, it feels wistfully intimate.

  “Baby” is also how he treats me: not in a diminishing way, but in a way that says you are mine; you are my responsibility; you have given me your heart, and I will take care of it, feed it, and keep it warm.

  He is unconscious of all this, of course. But I’ll take the constancy and lack of playfulness in this hypocorism over the exhausting psychic noogies of my old nicknames any day. Someone who calls you “baby” invites you to cry in his arms, not in the shower.

  During my divorce process with the wasband, he had to send me some mail. It was always addressed to “faith salie” in a smaller font than the address, with no caps, like I was e. e. cummings’s redheaded stepchild. And the return address had his name in all caps, sort of like this: “WAS BAND.” It reminded me of the screen saver he’d always had, for at least the decade I knew him, on each of his computers. Floating by, on a loop, were these words in big caps: “I WILL ALWAYS WIN.”

  He didn’t win when he married me. I didn’t make him happy, and I couldn’t make myself happy. My heart shrunk for a while there. I got little in the worst way.

  I’m a writer; I want to construct a narrative that explains why we fell apart. But I can’t, not neatly at least. I rather envy those people who have an uncomplicated breakup story—you catch your husband doing coke in a sex swing you never installed or his other wife calls to find out where he is. Or someone says, “I just don’t love you anymore.” That’s like a sharp knife cleanly cutting the relationship apart. My marriage was sawed gradually by a dull, serrated knife. And only in retrospect, with retelling, does the severance become sharper, not duller, because I can understand it better.

  They say (and sing) the first cut is the deepest. I don’t think so. The cut that’s the deepest is the one with the guy you were crazy about. I’m not crazy about John. I’m sane about John. I’ve got scar tissue, and I’m not worried about his cutting me. I was crazy about my wasband. I pinned all my happiness on him. I made him my human Pinterest board.

  Maybe it’s enough to tell you that near the end of our relationship he was calling me “Salie,” and at the very end, before we stopped speaking altogether, I was “Faith.”

  And that howler monkey in Belize—the thing my wasband told me I sounded like? Its sound…it was the opposite of a petulant shriek. Its roar was huge, terrifying, guttural, deep, primal. It was fierce. It shook the jungle. It didn’t carp; it proclaimed itself.

  The howler monkey’s howl tells me one of these two things: either my wasband was wrong all along, and he didn’t know what a howler monkey really sounded like…or I’d been underestimating myself. I had no idea how powerful I really was.

  When I graduated from North Springs High School in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the Spartans, the most famous alumnus was one John Schneider, a.k.a. Bo Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard. More recent notable grads are Usher and Raven-Symoné, and you can decide for yourself who’s more famous based on your appreciation of R&B versus a bizarrely silent accent aigu. Of course, I myself am famous among certain circles, if you can make a circle out of three people. Those three would be my dad, my dad’s accountant, who kindly asks for updates on my career, and the one Star Trek überfan who possesses the collectible trading card featuring me as genetically enhanced mutant Serena Douglas.

  I can say this about all those NSHS celebrities who are way starrier than I: none of them was crowned Miss Aphrodite.

  Now that my old high school is a charter school, and we are in the twenty-first century, I’m pretty sure they’ve shut down the beauty and talent pageant that marked the highlight of my time as a Spartan. If you’re shocked that a public high school held a pageant for its girls every spring, then your people were probably on the chilly side in the War of Northern Aggression.

  Winning the pageant became a goal of mine early on during freshman year. My personal mandate to make straight As included an A for Aphrodite. Throughout high school, I was in classes with mostly the same people all day long. Shira Levine, Alfred Chang, Greg Kaplan—you get the picture: we were the honors students. As soon as the bell rang at the end of the day, I rushed away from school to activities that required character shoes and emphatically splayed fingers that a Philistine might deride as “jazz hands.” I was building a serious professional career in touring kids’ musicals, Six Flags over Georgia commercials, and public service announcements about recycling and just saying no. In other words, I didn’t get to participate much in Spartan extracurriculars. Lots of the other girls, with names like Kelli Crump and Romney Ramsey, were cheerleaders or on drill team, and they bonded at practice on the football field, which was officially called Thermopylae Stadium. (North Springs did not have a classics department, which might explain why our stadium was named after a battle in which the Spartans fought valiantly but were ultimately routed. Our school paper was The Oracle, the yearbook was The Phalanx, and my permed hair was Medusa.) Do most high schools have drill teams? I’m not s
ure, so in case you’ve never heard of one, just picture a bunch of cute long-haired girls in a flash mob with glow sticks and white go-go boots. The drill team danced to Devo’s “Whip It” and Ferris Bueller’s “Oh Yeah” while I was in downtown Atlanta singing Starlight Express tunes and neutered versions of Sondheim. I felt like no one at NSHS understood what I could really do—which was belt loudly and overemote. I needed to show them. I needed to be Miss Aphrodite.

  I knew just enough Greek mythology to know that Aphrodite was the goddess of beauty and love. Love, I wasn’t after. I had love—a family who loved me, a couple of boyfriends who’d loved me and gone on to college. As a freshperson, sophomore, and junior, I went on dates and to a couple of proms. By senior year, love could wait, because having a boyfriend seemed like a distraction from the goal at hand, which was beauty.

  What high school girl doesn’t think about beauty? Girls are always volunteering for beauty jury duty, judging themselves and others. This pageant meant I was volunteering to be judged publicly. Unfortunately, like most teenage girls, I always thought I’d look better if I were thinner. But I didn’t obsess over it, because I was too busy figuring out whether cobalt blue eyeliner applied to the inner rim made my eyes look bigger or smaller and how tall I could build my hair. Until senior year.

  By my last year of high school, I had a new definition of beauty. For me, it was losing so much weight that people pointed and stared, that I could wear anything, that I was a fat-free product. Loveliness was being so skinny that I looked like a real dancer, a triple threat, even though my threat level was barely two and a half. It was the makeover I’d given myself. Probably anyone looking at me didn’t see beauty as much as bones, but I finally liked what I saw in the mirror—or, rather, what I didn’t see, all that flesh that I’d disappeared. I remember learning as a teenager that Michelangelo saw his statues inside marble and carved until he set them free. Just shy of my eighteenth birthday, I felt triumphant that I’d finally chiseled myself into an angular work of art. I wanted to put the art on display in the gym. But it took me four years until I got sculpted. And it took me four years to get that tiara.

  There was an unwritten rule that only a senior could snare the title. I knew I could compete as a freshman, but I understood I had to pay my dues. You had to get a club to sponsor you, so I always represented French Club. This wasn’t difficult since no one else in le club wanted to compete. But I preferred to think French Club recognized my je ne sais quoi, which I was about to unleash in the school gymnasium.

  Every Miss Aphro (as we called it) opened with a group dance number. It was usually some kind of ’60s ditty like “Do You Love Me?” to which we could all bop around. We were divided into three groups, according to our perceived dance talent. I was perceived to be of middling dance talent, which I felt put me at a distinct disadvantage. We were supposed to believe that it was all good fun and we weren’t being judged, but who’s that stupid? I wasn’t, which is why I rolled my eyes when I was always assigned to the literal group: I was one of the girls who had to stand there twisting and mashing invisible potatoes while the hipless girls got to jeté and tumble. Despite my remedial dance placement, I was very satisfied to place first runner-up in my first pageant. I chalk up my near win to two things: (1) my cobalt blue unitard and (2) my pandering answer during the interview portion.

  It’s hard to compete with cobalt spandex, but it’s easy to compete in it, my friends. Especially when you add bright red dance panties over it that keep giving you a wedgie while you earnestly sing “Nothing” from A Chorus Line. “Nothing” is a song for a Latina character named Morales, and I am the whitest person on earth, but I sang the shit out of that song. Which was easy to do, since if you’ve ever heard the song, it’s mostly kind of spoken. I let my shiny unitard do the real singing.

  The judges would pick five of us for the interview round. You could qualify to judge Miss Aphrodite if you did something like run a real estate company or predict the weather on a local station or hold the title of Mrs. Peachtree City 1983. Freshman year, I’d already decided that no matter what my interview question was, I would answer, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” That seemed to be clutch, especially in Atlanta in the ’80s when the city’s slogan was the catchy “Atlanta: The City Too Busy to Hate.” It just so happened that my answer lined up stunningly with my question, which was, “What person do you admire most and why?” Of course I did genuinely admire what I knew of MLK, but at that point in my life, the most truthful answer would probably have been “Molly Ringwald, because she is so awesome and then some.”

  You may be wondering about the talent offerings of my rivals. The competition was stiff. Stiff as in awkward and self-conscious. Just as Sparta was a city-state known for its military, not its arts, North Springs circa 1986–89 was not a high school known for its performers. There was no drama club, no spring musical. While Susan Woodworth always twirled a nonflaming baton, most of the young ladies vying for Miss Aphro chose to dance or sing. Song choices ranged from the best of Sheena Easton (sadly, not “Sugar Walls”) to Whitney Houston (interminable renditions of “The Greatest Love of All” with at least five key changes). Bitsy Rieland played it safe, lip-synching “How Lovely to Be a Woman” from Bye Bye Birdie. To stand out, you really had to be creative in your mediocrity. So Wendy Taratoot sang all of “The Rose” with one arm mysteriously behind her back until the very last note when she whipped out her hand to reveal that the whole time she’d been holding…a rose! Melissa Terrell sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and dedicated it to her father, a man who loved his wife faithfully but who also loved Hank Williams. Laura Djie came onstage dressed in jodhpurs, rolling a TV and VHS player behind her. For her talent, she hit play and treated the audience to a video of her riding her horse—and possibly breaking her hymen—to the “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.”

  The one to beat was Stacy Walker. But I didn’t want to beat her, because she was one of my very best friends. Plus she was a grade above me, so I magnanimously wanted her to wait to win until I was a junior so she could then crown me when I was a senior. Stacy was—and is—one of the world’s best dancers. She ended up touring around the world with Michael Jackson and becoming one of his choreographers. Stacy could kick her leg up so high that her heel went behind her head, but she only used this power onstage, not in backseats with boys.

  Sophomore year was a wash. I didn’t even get to the interview round. I sang a plaintive song about wanting to be a lion tamer in a salmon-colored leotardy dress with rhinestones all over it. Here’s a pageant tip: never choose your song from a forgettable 1970s Broadway musical that starred Doug Henning. I was so disturbed at the judges’ blindness to my sparkly talent that I went home right after the pageant and ate a whole Domino’s pizza with my boyfriend Brenden.

  Not only did I get my groove back by junior year, but I got back, too. I was big. Big boobs, big butt, big hair. I was sixteen and had given up soccer and taken up cheese fries, now that I had my license and could drive to the mall. I’d eaten a lot more pizzas since the last pageant. But I had a kind of Delta Burke thing going on—I worked it in a navy blue dress that was half sequins and the other half tiers of chiffon. I upped my game and sang a Liza Minnelli song called “City Lights”—I didn’t just sing it; I sold it in the direction of the local meteorologist as if to declare, “That’s Liza with a ‘Z,’ fucker!!” I sailed through the interview round without even relying on slain African American icons and tied for first runner-up with Stacy Walker’s younger sister Tiffany. Tiffany danced, too, and was somehow even skinnier and more flexible than Stacy. Tiff’s secret weapon was to down a whole package of Fun Dip—which is basically Pixie Sticks in a pouch—right before going onstage. Obviously there was some crazy-awesome dance DNA in the Walker blood even though Tiffany was adopted from Korea. Stacy was finally a senior and therefore rightfully crowned Miss Aphrodite after her elastic hamstrings brought The Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter” to life.

  By senior
year, the stakes were at least as high as my hair. And my hair was so lofty that it refused to be confined by the borders of my senior photo and was therefore cut off at the top. This was my final chance for what I saw as closure on my high school career. The cherry on top of a crown on top of my curls.

  I was ready to leave North Springs, but not without leaving my mark. On a date, I wouldn’t go farther than second base, but I was on a macro trajectory out of that school, that town, that South. I didn’t understand why all the kids around me wanted to stay close to home. Saving money on tuition by going to a state school is one thing, but driving a brand-new Iroc Z with UGA decals was another. I fantasized about lacing up L.L.Bean duck boots to trudge through stuff called “snow” as I walked across some two-hundred-year-old courtyard to a class called “Gender, Empire, and the Politics of Appearance.” I was headed (in my mind) to study theater at an Ivy League School. And while I was so eager to leave it all behind, I also wanted to wear a sash and tiara for the departure on my Grand Tour. I’ve never been too cool for school.

  So I was hungry for that title. I was hungry for everything—being named valedictorian, acceptance to Yale, and food. Since the fall of senior year, I’d lost forty-five pounds. I’d spent the summer at a precollege musical theater program staring loathingly at myself in dance classes taught by the likes of Billy Porter, who would go on to win a Tony for Kinky Boots. I returned home as resolute as Rocky, except with a high-cut leotard for aerobics instead of a hoodie for stadium stair-climbing. I lived on raw fruit and vegetables and a Blow Pop I allowed myself to suck and chew while I completed all my AP homework for five hours every night. I honored the Sabbath by consuming two fruit-flavored Mentos every Sunday morning. And although my daughter and nieces will read this someday, and I really ought to present myself as a dangerous cautionary tale from an after-school special, I must confess that I already felt like a winner even before I vied for the title that final time.