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Authors: Jennifer Traig

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One afternoon I found my mother crying in her bedroom. Her
brother had died in a boating accident, and she had just received
the telegram telling her his body had been found. I didn’t fully
understand what had happened, but I knew I’d never seen her so
upset. What could I say to help her put things in perspective, to
remind her that the circle of life goes on? What I came up with was
this: “Mom, when you die, can I have your bras?”

I considered good foundation garments a matter of the most
solemn importance, so it seemed an appropriate response. In
retrospect, I think it was a little callous. In any case, it was
ineffectual. Even if she did leave me the good Maidenforms, I knew
it would be decades before I got my hands on them. My mother
appeared to be in excellent health. And she was unlikely to hand
them over in a burst of madcap exuberance. This was not a happy
time. My mother’s father had died just a year before, her mother,
ten years before that, making my mother an orphan at thirty-two.
Across the street, Mrs. Foster was dying a slow and painful death
from liver cancer that turned her eyes and skin a deep canary, and
it was my mother’s unhappy volunteer project to give her daily
sponge baths. Mrs. Foster died within a year, living just long
enough to bury her two-year-old daughter, who died after consuming
a bottle of her mother’s medication.

I remember this as a dark, uneasy period, steeped in
‘70
s
earth tones that flattered none of us; we are a
sallow family. The earth tones, I’m sure, contributed to our
general malaise. And in a deeper way, those yellows and rusts came
to represent the subdued, jaundiced time. This was our blue period,
painted in sickly shades of ochre and carbuncle.

At four, I didn’t fully understand everything that was going on,
but the frailty of the body, I got. This I understood. Bodies could
break. They broke all the time. They had to be controlled, groomed,
tricked up with embellishments to hide their failings. They had to
be painted and plucked. That’s all we had to protect us, these
cosmetics and compulsions. All we could do was put some make-up on
the bruise, count all our arm hairs, and move on. So I ticced and
tapped and tweezed. You work with what you have.

And it succeeded; things improved. Family members and neighbors
stopped dying. The earth tones of the ‘70
s
gave way
to the purples and teals of the ‘80
s
. We began to
feel happy and safe. When things got better my compulsions waned,
but my interest in make-up did not. By age eight I was making my
own cosmetic preparations, all of them consisting of nothing but my
own saliva. I licked my lips constantly to impart a moist, glossy
sheen. I wet my eyelashes to mimic mascara, my brows to approximate
brow pencil. My face was continually basted in my own spit. It left
my skin chapped and the upholstery soiled, but what could I do? I
was forced to turn to the resources of my own body. Failing blush,
I chewed my cheeks raw sucking in and biting down to create the
impression of cheekbones.

“What’s with that face?” my mother asked.

Speaking would have required me to release the clamp I had on my
cheeks, so I responded by arching a brow and mimicking a face I’d
seen Cybill Shepherd make.

“I’m not sure what you’re doing, but that’s not a face you want
to make at your mother. Cut it out.”

Finally my mother broke down. She agreed to let me have some
cosmetics as long as she didn’t have to pay for them and I promised
not to wear them outside. I spent my allowance on maraschino-bright
used lipsticks I found at garage sales. “Doesn’t look septic to
me!” she announced cheerfully, unworried that the expiration date
was twenty years past. When I was nine she thought me old enough
for her own cast-off cosmetics and happily handed over her
tangerine lipsticks and magenta eye shadow. “Look at you!” she
exclaimed the first time I came to dinner made up like a showgirl
in shades of flame-retardant Vegas carpet. “I think that’s a
special look just for tonight, okay?”

The next day my eyes and mouth were ringed with an angry rash,
but I was undaunted. I was allergic to expired cosmetics,
apparently, but that didn’t mean I had to go without. I could make
my own all-natural products. I promptly concocted a signature scent
from beheaded marigolds pickled in dishwashing liquid and my
mother’s Jean Nate. It was a mixed success. I liked the scent just
fine, but at dinner that night my father demanded to know who
smelled like compost, and the bee stings dotting my face made the
culprit easy to track down.

Still, I was not discouraged. My next creation was an
all-purpose preparation I called “Beauty Sauce.” It was a blend of
lotion, bubble bath, shampoo, conditioner, solid perfume, beer, and
pancake syrup, mixed together in a peanut butter jar. It
immediately thickened and grew mold. At a loss, I hid it under the
bathroom sink, where it remained until I went to college.

Shortly after that experiment my affection for cosmetics soured,
too. Adolescence began, and my relationship with cosmetics, like my
relationships with good humor and common sense, became an on-again,
off-again affair. I had never expected this, but there it was. Now
that I was finally old enough to wear make-up outside the house, I
found that I didn’t want to. Sometimes I couldn’t because the
scrupulosity forbade it; other times, because good taste did. I was
in junior high now, but I was very short, and the least bit of
make-up made me look like a pageant baby.

My sister had no such reservations. By now she, too, had
discovered make-up, and her typical preteen bungling of the medium
did little to reignite my interest. She favored attention-getting
colors and circled her features in liner, making her face look like
it had undergone a particularly thorough copyedit. She came to the
breakfast table furry with powder and foundation, not managing to
even get a lipstick print on her juice glass before my parents
marched her back upstairs to tone it down. When they slept in on
weekends, she snuck out with a full face on, the application so
heavy-handed that even strangers were moved to offer advice.

“My niece has your coloring, and we found that fawn eye shadow
suits her much better than the navy blue you’ve got on there,” a
saleslady told her. “Some people think you have to
choose
between a bright blusher and a bright lipstick, and experience has
taught us that’s a good rule to follow.”

The same saleslady scanned my washed-out features and asked if I
was sick, but I figured too little was better than too much. I was
having none of this. It was tacky and immodest. It was idolatrous
and treyf. Later I would meet yeshiva girls and learn that even
drag queens don’t wear as much mascara, but at the time I thought
cosmetics were unkosher. Lip balm, soap, shampoo, deodorant: all
these things were out. The multipurpose saliva I had relied on as
an eight-year-old was out, too. Who knew where my mouth had
been?

But then the scrupulosity would subside, the skies would clear,
and I’d find myself ankle-deep in a paraffin bath. The energy I put
into inspecting the carpets during my scrupulous periods went into
pore wrangling during my sane ones. I spent my babysitting money on
Ten-O-Six and department store moisturizers. I formed friendships
with the offspring of Amway sales reps, helping myself to the free
samples of night cream they kept around the house.

On weekends I turned the kitchen into my own personal day spa,
making messy, complicated treatments from the family’s lunch
fixings. “This is so unsanitary,” my mother complained when I took
up residence in the breakfast nook, my hair coated with salad
ingredients, my feet propped up on the table for a strawberry
scrub. “My sugar bowl is not your personal supply of cleansing
grains,” she sighed. “My tea is not your steam treatment.” She went
on some more, but her pleas were muffled by the terry cloth tent
over my head.

My family could scoff all they liked. I believed in what I was
doing. My faith in a beauty regime was so absolute at these times
that I thought there was nothing a good makeover couldn’t cure.
When I was in eighth grade my best friend and I decided that a new
look was all one particularly unpopular classmate needed. We
invited her over to my house for a day of spa treatments. “This is
a onetime thing, Lorene,” we told her. “We’re not going to be best
friends after this or anything. But we think we can help you.”

The memory shames me now, but at the time I was quite pleased
with myself for coming up with the idea. Here was a way to combine
my two hobbies, beauty and good works. I’d found my cause. If this
went well, I would become a door-to-door missionary for Avon and
dedicate my weekends to doing pro bono work for the
acne-scarred.

In spite of my insensitive invitation, Lorene graciously
accepted. It went downhill from there. She had scoliosis, but we
treated her as though she were uncommonly retarded.

“Here’s a product called ‘a-strin-gent,”’ I explained slowly as
we sat by the pool, the patio table covered with beauty supplies.
“And here’s how you use it.” I mimed a swipe over my T-zone with a
cotton ball. “I’m sure this seems very complicated and foreign to
you right now, but you’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

Lorene’s posture may have been impaired, but her manners,
certainly, were much better than mine. Resisting the urge to remind
me that she was in all my honors classes, she cheerfully replied
that she’d gotten the hang of it some years ago and already used it
twice a day.

I was puzzled. If she was already using a toner, why wasn’t she
more popular?

“Next you’ll want to ‘ex-fo-li-ate,’ with a gentle scrub like
this apricot kernel paste.”

Lorene informed us that her dermatologist had told her to avoid
exfoliants – she had a dermatologist? – but said she’d defer to our
advanced knowledge.

Next we gave a presentation on choosing figure-flattering
clothes and the importance of a healthy diet. After that, we
enjoyed a break over fruit plates and iced tea. Finally we did her
hair and painted her flushed, overstimulated face with a coat of
make-up.

“That looks nice,” she agreed when we held a mirror up to her
face. “
Vogue
says that blondes like me really can’t get away
with burgundy eye shadow, but look at that, you proved them wrong.
Thank you so much for all you taught me today. I’ll be sure to
incorporate your tips into my routine.”

Monday arrived and nothing changed. She was wearing lip gloss,
but she was tortured as usual by the slack-jawed preteen Pol Pots
who shared our homeroom. How was this possible? We had exfoliated!
We had toned! We had
made over!
Why was she still unpopular?
I felt like a jerk and winced with embarrassment every time I saw
her. In high school I was relieved when we were in few of the same
classes. I avoided her in the halls, and we never spoke of the
incident again.

After that spa day I wasn’t the same. If anyone got a makeover,
it was me. I’d become a non-believer. Beauty treatments lost their
magic; make-up, its appeal. Now I rarely wear anything more than
root beer lip gloss, and then only because I secretly like to eat
it. My hair-care routine is limited to weekly brushings and
bi-annual self-administered haircuts. Several years ago I was hired
to write a series of beauty features for teenagers, and my friends
were baffled. “Have your editors ever seen you?” they demanded. “Do
they know you wash your hair with bar soap?”

That my campaign to change Lorene’s life might fail had never
occurred to me. Until then I had had complete trust in the power of
cosmetics to transform and repair. Everyone does, deep down. In my
twenties I liked to hang out at the CVS in Harvard Square, watching
our country’s premier students use their massive brainpower to
spend forty-five minutes picking out a conditioner, all of them
convinced that the right formula had the power to make their lives
perfect and whole.

But I understood. That’s what this was, the cosmetics and the
compulsions, all of it an attempt to be perfect, to live a perfect
life in which nobody died or had bad skin. Sometimes conditioner
was the key and sometimes compulsions were. They were both
variations on a theme.

Obsessive-compulsive disorders foster a strange relationship
with one’s body. You’re constantly coming after it with tweezers
and anti-bacterials. It is part enemy, part endless pastime. It is
always giving you something to do and to dominate.

Mine kept me plenty busy. My body was unpredictable, and most of
my compulsions – picking, dieting, washing – were an attempt to
exert control over this thing I couldn’t trust. I had no faith in
it at all. It flushed and stumbled and refused to do my bidding.
Where were the prominent cheekbones I had tried so hard to coax
out? Where were the long tapered fingers? The shapely legs? What
was this large mole doing on my forehead? Why the big yellow
teeth?

I could not trust that my body would do what I wanted. I was
grateful for the involuntary bodily processes that didn’t require
my input, but I didn’t trust those, either, as I secretly believed
that I could, accidentally and against my will, make my heart stop
beating with my scarily potent mental powers.

Bodies break. Cosmetics could only do so much, and then it
seemed they could do nothing at all. It was useless, all of it,
nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Makeup could guarantee you an
attractive open-casket funeral, maybe, but it couldn’t bring the
corpse back to life. It couldn’t stop you from dying in the first
place.

Why do we call bodies temples? They’re a mess. My body was just
a disaster. Everything was wrong, and new wrongs sprung up all the
time: stray hairs, warts, broken veins, all signs, surely, that
something was very screwed up, that I was sick, and worse than
that, too short to model.

BOOK: Devil in the Details
11.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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