My Body(3)

“It is true,” I respond matter-of-factly. I mean it.





3.


My mother is classically beautiful: she has wide-set green eyes, a tiny, elegant nose, a small frame, and, as she would say, an hourglass figure. Throughout her life she has been likened to Elizabeth Taylor, a comparison I agree with. People of a certain generation used to tell her that she looked like a young Vivien Leigh. Both National Velvet and Gone with the Wind were films my parents owned and kept in a small VHS collection next to their bed. As a child I watched these films countless times, feeling as if I was getting a glimpse of a younger version of my mother, immersed in a world of Southern belles. Vivien Leigh would bring her chin down to side-eye Clark Gable and I’d think of my mother’s tales of adoring boys standing on the lawn below her bedroom window in high school. I’d imagine the silky texture of her homecoming-queen sash and the weight of the sparkling crown she wore in her yearbook pictures.





4.


There is a wooden bureau in my parents’ living room that holds their silverware and china. Framed pictures, souvenirs from their travels, and a few of my father’s smaller sculptural works sit on top of it. Guests are always drawn to one of the frames, containing two circular images playfully angled toward each other. On the right is a black-and-white elementary school picture of my mother, her hair in short pigtails. On the left is a photo of me at around the same age, a black headband sweeping my hair away from my face. Two little girls smiling widely. If it weren’t for the texture of the old photograph and the year printed in the bottom right-hand corner of my mother’s picture, one might think these images are of the same child. “Who is who?” guests ask.





5.


My fine hair always had a tendency to tangle. When I was a child, my mother used a detangler spray and a comb after bathtime to brush out the knots. The tugging stung my scalp, and my neck would ache from holding my head up for her. I hated the process. I’d fix on the bottle of detangler covered in pictures of sea animals and stare at the smiling orange seahorse and chubby blue whale as tears streamed down my face. The smell of the sweet spray made my mouth water. Feeling her comb dig into my scalp, I’d yell out in misery, “Don’t!”

The house I grew up in didn’t have ceilings, only stunted walls that stopped short of the roof, so my cries would fill the entire space. Hearing my howling, my father would start singing from the other room, “Hair wars, nothing but hair wars,” to the tune of the Star Wars theme song.





6.


I was not raised in any religion, and talk of God was not a part of my childhood. I’ve never prayed much, but I do remember that as a young girl I prayed for beauty. I’d lie in bed, squeeze my eyes shut, and concentrate so hard I broke out in a sweat underneath the covers. I believed that for God to take you seriously, you had to make your mind as blank as possible and then focus on the expanding spots of light behind your eyelids and think only of the one thing you desperately wished for.

“I want to be the most beautiful,” I’d repeat over and over again in my head, my heart in my throat. Eventually, when I could no longer resist the other thoughts drifting into my mind, I’d fall asleep, hoping that God would be impressed enough by my meditation to answer my prayer.





7.


My mother’s father, Ely, was a stern and serious man. He was born in 1912 and came through Ellis Island from a small shtetl in what was then Poland and is now Belarus. A talented pianist, he graduated from Juilliard at the age of fifteen and went on to become a chemist and to father three daughters and a son. He told my mother that it was inappropriate for her to just say thank you when people told her she was beautiful. He didn’t feel she had accomplished anything.

“What have you done?” he would ask. “Nothing. You’ve done nothing.”





8.


I knew from a young age that I hadn’t done anything to earn my beauty, just as my grandfather had pointed out to my mother. Was it, then, that my beauty was a thing my mother had given to me? I sensed at times that she felt entitled to it in some way, like a piece of bequeathed jewelry, one that was once hers, one that she’d lived with her entire life. It had been passed down to me heavy with all the tragedies and victories she had experienced with it.





9.


“Wear whatever you want, Ems,” my mother would always tell me. “Don’t worry about other people.” She wanted me to be free of shame, to be able to embrace the way I looked and whatever opportunities it presented.

At thirteen, I was sent home from a formal dance because the chaperones deemed my dress too sexy. My mother had bought it with me. It was baby blue and made of a stretchy lace material that clung to my newly developed breasts and hips. When I came out of the dressing room, unsure of myself, she stood up and hugged me.

“You look absolutely lovely,” she said, smiling warmly.

“It’s not too sexy?” I asked.

“Not at all. You have a beautiful figure.” My mother never wanted me to think that my body or my beauty was too much. “If people have an issue with it, that’s their problem,” she’d say.

When she picked me up from the dance, I was in tears, humiliated and confused. She tucked my hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. Those people could go fuck themselves, she said. She made a special dinner and let me watch a dumb movie while I ate. Later, with my permission, she wrote a fierce letter of complaint.