Beauty

I grow up watching my older brother and my father spend countless hours together in the garage: working on cars, fixing broken appliances, and toying with electrical gadgets. As the younger son I naturally gravitate toward their greasy, clanking realm. One day my father hands me a wrench and points to a bolt under the car that he wants removed. The bolt seems stuck, so I yank with all my might and end up stripping the threads. Furious, my father snatches the wrench out of my hands and shouts, “You idiot!” My older brother, silently looking on, later demonstrates the correct technique. He also warns me to watch out for when Dad “comes to a boil.”

It is the first in a series of fix-it disasters for me. I am eventually denied access to my father’s masculine territory. I find solace in shooting baskets on a neighbor’s hoop and become immersed in sports, joining as many teams as I can. My father rarely attends my games or offers an encouraging word. If my team has a big win, he makes sure to remind me that someday I am going to have to learn what goes on underneath the hood of a car, but I ignore him.

After leaving home, I avoid dependence on cars and technology and adopt a hippie lifestyle. My dad becomes almost a phantom to me, and we have only terse interactions. If it weren’t for Mom, we’d barely connect at all.

Then I fall in love, get married, have a kid, and buy a house. Suddenly I live in secret fear of anything breaking down: The check engine light sends shivers down my spine. A leaky roof causes me to panic. When our washing machine starts spewing water all over the floor one day, my wife gives me a What are we going to do now? look. I call about repairs, but the salesman quotes me an astronomical amount, then suggests it’s probably better just to purchase a new washer.

Dejected, I remember one bit of fatherly advice that slipped through: “If something is broken, take a look at it, study it — you might be able to figure it out and fix it yourself for nothing.” So, feeling completely clueless, I tip the washer up and start unscrewing bolts and detaching hoses. I find a plastic spinning mechanism that has a small crack in it. Sure enough, when I pour water through, it leaks. I grab my surfboard-repair kit and apply resin to the crack.

The following day, after the resin has hardened, I plop the spinner back into place and start up the washer. As the water rushes in, I whisper a prayer.

I’ve seen some beautiful sights in my day — Yosemite’s Half Dome rock formation, double rainbows, the birth of my son. But when I bend down to look under the churning machine and see not a single drop of water, it immediately joins the ranks of the most beautiful.

Paul Grafton
Morro Bay, California

Throughout my life beauty has been both my nemesis and my best friend. From a young age (too young) I experienced lust in men’s eyes and veiled dislike in women’s.

Now that my fortieth birthday is looming, my appearance has become an obsession. In my mind age and beauty do not coexist. Aging is the end of beauty, sexuality, power. Every time I pass a mirror, all I see is the imperfections the years have wrought: the slackening skin, the graying hair, the drooping breasts.

As I sit writing in a cafe, I glance up and see a young woman settle in across from me. Her skin is dewy and luminescent, her face unlined. Now I am the one with veiled dislike in her eyes. Embarrassed by my jealousy, I pull my compact from my cavernous bag, flip it open, and apply the lip gloss I use religiously to give my desiccated lips the illusion of youth. I smooth the hair at my temples, where gray strands proliferate.

This morning I stood before my vanity assessing my nakedness. I did not like what I saw. Only four years ago my body was like a ripe fruit at the peak of season, and now it is deflating alarmingly, folding in on itself. I looked down and expected to see a puddle of juices pooling at my feet.

I know that the consequence of my youthful vanity will be the horror of watching my beauty disintegrate. Perhaps I could endure that better if I had children and could watch beauty blossom anew in them. But I don’t.

B.C.
Chicago, Illinois

The year my family moved across the country, I was a miserable fifteen-year-old with bad posture and social anxiety. It had taken me five years to make friends in Ohio. All I knew about Oregon was that it rained all the time and I would be friendless again.

My grandparents drove my brother and me to the West Coast, making a holiday of the trip, with stops at national parks and landmarks. I sat slumped in the back seat, feeling sicker with every passing mile.

On the last day we were winding up a steep mountain road on the east side of Oregon’s Mount Hood. Out the window I saw a wide blue sky over tall evergreens with a rocky stream gurgling below. Grandpa pulled onto the gravel shoulder. “There’s no sense letting all this beauty go to waste,” he said.

He was right. The view was breathtaking. My brother and I took off our shoes and waded in the stream while Grandma and Grandpa sat on the bank and took pictures.

I won’t say the experience melted the knot of fear in my gut, or that my life turned miraculously graceful, but over the years the wisdom of my grandfather’s no-nonsense approach to beauty has awakened me to many moments I might otherwise have missed.

Janet Lockhart
Salem, Oregon

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