You Are Not Pretty

AGE EIGHT

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING I tear open the biggest present under the tree to find a life-size plastic bust of a woman staring back at me through a thin layer of cellophane, her wide eyes a deep sapphire blue, her full and slightly parted lips as pink as bubble gum, her shiny blond hair falling to her shoulders. She comes with a tool kit of accessories — hairbrush, barrettes, curlers, makeup, earrings — and she is just what I wanted. No instructions are included, but none are necessary. This is the game of beauty, and I am already learning to play it.

My family lives in a Southern California neighborhood that winds along the ocean, and I have recently begun noticing our neighbors down the street: tan, silky-haired women who lounge in their front yard in bikinis, the lower half of their bodies wrapped in bright-colored sarongs, their oiled skin catching the sunlight. Once, my mother sent me to their house to borrow a cup of flour. I knocked on their door, which opened to release a sweet and pungent smoke that tickled my nose. In the dimly lit living room the women sat with their long legs tucked beneath them on the floor or stretched out like cats on a ratty couch. Their laughter washed over me like a waterfall that I wanted to stand beneath with my eyes closed. These women are magical creatures, mermaids, sirens. With my skinned knees and sagging tube socks, I can’t imagine someday turning into one of them any more than I can imagine turning into one of the sleek seals that lounge on the reef near where I play in the waves.

My mother works a similar magic on nights when we have a baby sitter. Leaning over the cluttered formica counter in the bathroom, she rubs lotion into her skin until the light dances off it. The scent of sugar-dipped flowers lingers in the air like a spell after she has kissed my sister and me goodbye. Our father’s eyes shine as he reaches for her waist; my sister and I wrap ourselves around her legs, trying to make her linger just one minute more. Even the baby sitter swivels her head to look as my parents disappear out the door. Once they have gone, I sit cross-legged on the floor, in shorts and a t-shirt that smells like sweat and fresh-cut grass, racing my plastic horses across the clipped meadow of the carpet.

LATER ON CHRISTMAS MORNING my older sister and I sit stiffly in the back seat of our car, wearing holiday dresses. Between us our baby sister reclines in her car seat, her tiny limbs flailing in a sea of pink cotton. The air inside the car is thick with shampoo, after-shave, and anxiety. We’re on our way to see our grandparents, and visits to their home are always a formal occasion.

After half an hour on the freeway, we take an offramp that leads past strip malls and developments whose entrances bear Spanish names. Then we turn into my grandparents’ retirement community, where carefully pruned shrubs stand like close-shaven sentries at precise intervals along the sidewalks. There are no other cars — just a lone golf cart whispering down the street, its driver clad from head to toe in crisp whites that match his hair. In this strange neighborhood our parents seem to grow younger right before our eyes — their skin more radiant, their steps lighter. Before we get out of the car, my father tucks his shirt into his slacks, and my mother checks her face in the mirror.

The square of hard ground in front of my grandparents’ home is seemingly designed to repel children. Cactuses defend barren patches of dirt bordered by rocks of various shades of brown, sorted neatly by color. Boxy shrubs, manicured into prickly cubes, line the clean-swept walkway to the front porch, where my father lifts a brass knocker and lets it fall heavily against the door.

My grandmother answers, her eyebrows drawn so far up her forehead that she looks more stunned than pleased to see us. Her cheek twitches slightly, as if she has been smiling too long for a camera. She wears white polyester slacks, a starched shirt, and a shiny gold belt cinched tight around her waist. She takes a step back and clasps her bony hands together as if she’s just discovered a present on her doorstep, and though my patent-leather sandals pinch my feet, I spin on my toes the way a ballerina does to show her my red Christmas dress with the tiny ruffles on the shoulders, like vestigial wings.

“Look how pretty you are!” she exclaims, and the wave of pride I feel makes me briefly forget the pain in my toes.

Their home is neat and bland. Plush carpet, still showing the fresh tracks of a vacuum, muffles our footsteps, and shuttered blinds filter the sun to a weak glow. A duck theme unifies the color-coordinated décor: in the bedroom ducks in a green marsh take flight above a green bedspread; in the living room ducks soar into a blue sky above a pale-blue couch that cradles pillows with more ducks embroidered on them. My sister and I pull the arm covers off the couch and place them on our heads, pretending we are nuns with blue habits, and our grandmother wrinkles her nose at us.

“Oh, you little monkeys!” she says, snatching them from our heads and smoothing them back into place on the armrests, where they belong.

The grown-ups pour themselves gin and tonics, the ice in their cocktail glasses clinking like bells, and make their way down the hall to the living room, where my grandparents’ neighbors sit beside the fireplace. John plays his guitar, and his wife, Lyle, sings Christmas carols off-key while the rest of us mumble the words. I wish I could be as bold as she is and not worry how my voice sounds or whether I’m in tune.

I have brought my Christmas present with me, and later I prop her blond bust on the kitchen table and lay out her accessories like surgical tools. Her face is flawless, pink and symmetrical, but her glossy hair falls limp against her cheeks, just like mine. I begin to French-braid it, but the shiny strands slip through my chubby fingers. So I tease her hair into a rat’s nest instead, combing it so roughly that strands snap. I apply purple eye shadow, then blue, a rainbow bruise over each eye. The doll stares right through me with a bright, vacant smile. No matter what I do, she appears the same: her face as perfect as an empty canvas, and just as boring to look at. She doesn’t even have a body, so I can’t dream up any fantastic adventures for her. It’s not yet lunchtime, and this Christmas present has already disappointed me.

AGE TEN

IT’S A LATE-FALL AFTERNOON, and I am walking home from school with my eyes on the sidewalk in worry. This morning a boy I didn’t know followed me off the bus and nervously handed me a ball of colored tissue paper: a present for my older sister, he explained. All day I kept it in the pocket of my jeans, but now it is gone. Perhaps I lost it when I hung upside down on the monkey bars, or maybe in the bathroom stall, where I carefully unfolded the wrapping, lifted out the shiny ring with the plastic purple flower, and tried it on my own finger. Now I’m wondering what to tell my sister. I’m also thinking of that boy: the way his voice trembled as he called after me, the way his face flushed and the words tumbled from his mouth as he pressed the ring into my palm. What strange power did my sister possess to affect him that way?

Ahead of me, shuffling so slowly she appears to be standing still, is a short, round woman in a mottled brown sweater, weighed down with overflowing shopping bags. Her back is hunched and round like a turtle’s shell, and when she turns at the sound of my footsteps, I see her face is weathered, leathery, and half retracted into the scarf looped around her neck. She smiles and gestures for me to come closer. I take a few hesitant steps toward her. She smells musky, like an animal. Her smile stretches across her bony face, and her eyes burn with a strange intensity, a sign of prophecy or mental illness or both.

“So lovely. So beautiful,” she mumbles, more to herself than to me, squinting at my face as if it were a piece of art.

That’s when I know for sure she is crazy. I have recently cut my own hair with my mother’s sewing scissors, and my bangs fall in a jagged line across my forehead. My front teeth are coming in off kilter, giving me a lopsided smile. My cheeks are too chubby, and when I purse my lips together, it only makes them look rounder. My sweaty t-shirt drifts upward to reveal my pudgy tummy, and my big sister’s hand-me-down jeans slip in the other direction. When I look in the mirror, I am exasperated by everything I see.

The woman raises one crooked finger toward the sun. “One day soon,” she says, “you will look up into the sky, and I will be one of those stars, shining down on you.”

She cranes her neck upward and drops her heavy shopping bags onto the sidewalk, as if she were about to float away. In all the fairy tales I have read, solitary old women are always evil characters, but when she looks back to me, her hooded eyes flash with kindness. She casts such a spell over me that I follow her finger straight up into that blue emptiness, and though the sun is high and bright, I think I can almost see a star winking at me from an impossible distance.

Then she picks up her bags and, without saying goodbye, waddles slowly away, like a turtle digging into the shifting sand, finding its way back to the sea.

AGE THIRTEEN

IN NINTH GRADE alliances are made and broken without warning in the hallways of school, and there is an unspoken dress code I have been unable to crack. One day my best friend’s face is scrubbed clean, her hair pulled into a ponytail; the next her eyes are darkly lined, her hair framing her face in perfectly feathered waves. When I comment on these changes, she rolls her eyes and stares past me as if I haven’t spoken.

At home the air is becoming heavy and hard to breathe, and the rooms seem to be shrinking. I used to return from school to find my mother in the kitchen, poring over cookbooks and preparing elaborate dinners. She’d offer me a snack and ask about my day as she ladled homemade sauce over a casserole dish or tied string around filets of beef. But this year I return from school to find her hunched over a textbook at the dining-room table, her brow furrowed with concentration. She barely lifts her head when I walk through the door. She’s begun taking classes at the local community college — so dinner comes late and meals are simpler, which makes my father angry. In bed at night I listen to their loud, circuitous arguments: my father’s voice laced with contempt; my mother’s pleading and tearful, like a child’s. In the morning she seems to have aged, her eyes puffy and red, deep creases carved into her forehead, her lips a tight line. The fragile beauty of her face appears to be draining away as rapidly as the beer that disappears from the refrigerator.

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