STEALING BEAUTY
“I woke up like this / I woke up like this” - Beyonce
There were certain things Eva had long denied herself or been denied, things that had caused her much aggravation and heartache until she began, slowly at first and then all at once, to realize that with few exceptions they were in fact things that she could acquire. Part of this was the simple cluelessness of adolescence. How many girls spend hours, years, lamenting their shiny foreheads and overgrown eyebrows, their ragged fingernails and birthmarked collarbones? How magical and frightening it is to discover the mutability of these body parts that betray us, to learn that without fail they can be waxed, bleached, tinted, powdered, glossed, colored, whitened, threaded, exercised, dieted, straightened, curled, thinned, thickened, and beaten into submission. How much it is like looking over a cliff into a great abyss, especially if one came of age with a mother whose idea of beauty is to wash her long hair with peppermint and olive oil, to plait it when it is dry and to don a clean white shirt. How daunting, in the face of this comeliness found in simply honoring the whims of nature, to tackle the gains to be had in denying them. How difficult to find the line, and then to resist crossing it.
One of Eva’s earliest memories, which cannot of course be a memory at all, is of looking at her hands and being shocked to find that already they are crossed with lines and wrinkles, that they have crossed over from the dimpled soft perfection of an infant’s to the veined claws of a true human, tendons and knuckles showing through the taut skin. In her memory which is not a memory, Eva recalls learning that she could travel back in time, or that at least her hands could, to start anew, to be again the pure unblemished versions of themselves.
From the moment Eva grew teeth she began to bite her nails, and worse, the cuticles and tender skin surrounding them. Biting, picking, squeezing, peeling, pinching, scratching, popping, tearing: these were Eva’s problems in the places where the landscape of her skin was interrupted by barrier or abnormality. She developed curious tics. They included:
The habit of rolling her bottom lip outward so that her inner lip was exposed and her outer lip touched her chin. Roll, suck back, flip in, repeat.
The habit of blinking profusely at a rate approximately 5x the normal, increasing to 10x when her allergies were acting up or anytime she was spoken to.
The habit of rolling one shoulder back, and then the other, but then the other one again and always ending on that first one, so that she developed very pronounced trapezius muscles with the left shoulder being even more pronounced than the right.
The need to do everything evenly, so that if she had an itch on one arm, she would need to scratch the other arm in the same place with the same intensity, duration and pressure, even if there was no itch.
The belief that her feet could feel whether they were walking on a crack or on a sidewalk square, even through her socks and shoes, and the need for both feet to feel the same number of sidewalk cracks. In Philadelphia, the sidewalk squares were spaced such that her gait went square-square-crack (right foot) square-square-crack (left foot) ad infinitum.
etc.
When Eva was ten or so, her brother told her to stop biting her nails because boys wouldn’t like it. She was in the early stages of learning the myriad things about her body which boys would not like, but was years yet from learning what she could do about any of them.
The process was slow, and painful, and two steps forward one step back. The harsh soreness in her mouth while bands of metal wrenched her teeth into soldier-straight lines. The jaw-clenching pain of hairs being torn out by the follicle all over her face, every two weeks. The feeling of foundation like house paint on top of her skin, around her eyes, sinking into her pores. Learning to touch the wet, fragile surface of her eyeball with a rough fingertip, settling a more functional clear circle on top of her own. The crusty scab as a burn on her ear from a straight iron healed. The first bikini wax, oh, god, humiliation and agony comparable perhaps only to childbirth. Nicks from shaving. Ingrown hairs. High heels. The burn of bleach on her scalp, close to the skin.
As Eva grew these pains became routine, expected, even enjoyed. How predictable, then, that she would challenge herself more, try to whittle herself further. Ascetic days of only vegetable broth and sliced cucumber. Gag-inducing trays of bitter paste fitted over her dull bone-colored teeth. Modern girdles. Self-determination. And all along the required casualness, the hair-flip half smile, the nothingness of what she’d accomplished. In trying not to stand too tall, Eva became a walking shrug.
All this was nothing compared to the other girls, she noted always and incessantly. She didn’t carve up her face or learn how to contour her cheekbones with different shades of cream and powder. She didn’t go to spin class. She let her hair air-dry most days. She did not buy “Fat Girl Slim” cellulite-blasting lotion for her thighs. She left her Clarisonic to languish in a drawer. She wore cotton underpants. She wasn’t trying very hard at all.
Years later, sitting in a gown with the consistency of a cocktail napkin on a cold metal slab, Eva heard a doctor say to her the cells in your body have turned against you. She smiled. She wasn’t surprised. She’d seen it coming all along.
