Looking Back (12 page)

Why do we feel like unwelcome strangers in our own skins? I change clothes half a dozen times a day when I feel at my worst, leaving pools of discarded costumes on the floor, arranging myself in Outfit Number Nine, until, at last, I’m reasonably pleased with how I look and then, catching my image in a window two hours later, I find my shakily assembled image has disappeared—I must change again. I long for a face that I can count on; I’d like to have eyes that are never puffy, a skin that’s uniformly olive (not sallow, never sallow), hair that bounces and emerges from convertibles and bike rides looking artfully tousled instead of just plain lousy. It isn’t necessarily beauty I covet, but dependable attractiveness, a face I can catch off guard and be happy at the sight of.

When I talk about it, all this must sound like a casebook neurosis, but I think it’s too commonplace to be labeled an abnormality. It’s our culture that has put a premium on good looks—all the clothes designers and hairdressers and department store buyers and magazine editors, all aware, at least subconsciously, that we—women—will suddenly and at long last escape the tyranny of fashions on the very day we wholeheartedly
like
the way we look. While constantly creating more products to help us reach that point, they have managed to keep it always slightly beyond us. Just getting to a state of fashionable attractiveness is hard enough because fashions change so quickly. Staying there is impossible. A newer, better model is always around the corner—built-in obsolescence—so that, no sooner do we buy a pair of suede hotpants, satisfying one season’s requirements, than another more pressing need is created (a patchwork skirt, an Argyle vest …). Our insecurity is what the beauty industry depends on and encourages—the constant, one-step-behind limbo we live in where each purchase, each haircut, each diet is undertaken in the hopes that it will bring us to some stable point where we can look in the mirror and smile. Sometimes, of course, we do. Never for very long. Pretty soon someone even better-looking passes by on the street, or on the TV screen or in a magazine, and the quest is on again.

Early on, magazines brought out the worst in me—greed and jealousy, wild competition. In
Seventeen
the clothes and make-up and the hairstyles fascinated me, but what really held me to the page was the models. In
Vogue
and
Glamour
they are anonymous, so the envy is at least targetless, generalized. But
Seventeen
models were, like the characters in monthly serials, old friends and sometimes enemies. We knew their names, their beauty problems (“Lucy’s skin is oily, so she scrubs nightly with astringent soap and steams her face for that extra zing …”), their dieting secrets, their special touches. (Colleen would be “an individualist” one month, with a flower painted on her cheek or a tiny gold bracelet around the ankle. Next month we’d all be sporting ankle chains and cheek flowers.) What we remembered from the ads they posed in was not the brand of clothes they wore but what the girls who wore them looked like. I’d notice when a model had gained weight or when her stock seemed to be going down, when she was no longer one of the girls the magazine was on a first-name basis with, and—secretly, of course—these failures pleased me. Perhaps that’s what the magazines depend on—our bitchiness and envy and our less-than-entirely joyful reaction to New York-style model beauty. We buy the magazines, study the models, to study the competition. Then if we like the way they look and, most important, feel envy, maybe we’ll buy their outfits too.

It’s not true of just me, I think, but of nearly every sixties-bred girl, that no matter how bright or scholarly or talented or generally contented with her life she may be, she’ll have some hidden weakness when it comes to models and modeling. To be loved for nothing but our looks, to make a living simply out of
being,
to be graceful and sweatless, cool and fashionable and most of all, looked at by other girls and envied—that is the hidden dream. The world is full of teen-age girls who long to model—short, plump, acne-scarred
Seventeen
readers who balance books on their heads behind closed doors or vamp in front of three-way mirrors, mouth slightly open, stomach forward, slouching, Twiggy style, toes in, knees knocking. Whatever our official goals, whatever we write on college applications, whatever we tell our parents that we plan to be when we grow up, the dream of modeling remains.

I went once to an agency, naively answering a want ad in the paper (“Glamorous modeling career?”). I was sixteen then, and my relatives had always told me “you could be a model.” As soon as I arrived at the agency I saw I’d made a mistake, of course—all glass and chrome, with glossy pictures on all sides and deep shag rugs and a beautiful secretary (if
she
hadn’t even made it as a model …) with one of the English, Carnaby Street accents that were so fashionable then. I had my interview anyway—a humiliating examination that made me feel ashamed of my presumptuousness to think, for even a moment, that I could be a model. I sensed, worse than contempt, my bell-bottomed, blue-booted interviewer’s amusement. The agency’s gambit was clear then—I’d pay them for a charm course and a set of photographs and for the privilege of being managed by them. I’d gone from employee to employer, with dazzling suddenness—asked to pay for their services as aging women hire gigolos.

So I abandoned my short-lived modeling career. I feel resentment still, flipping through fashion magazines, although I buy them all and never miss an issue. Love-hate is what it amounts to, I guess, and a little self-flagellation. My comfort lies in the knowledge that fashion models, like fashions, go out of style. The crop I grew up with has almost turned over—
Vogue
models live forever, sometimes, but
Seventeen
cover girls go on to modeling nurse’s uniforms and pantsuits in Sears catalogues. I know their faces and their wig collections well—Terry and Cheryl, from my earliest days, then Lucy and Colleen, Twiggy, of course, Mona and Cybill. I wait in mean, small-minded anticipation for their mid-twenties. I haven’t really conquered my envy, I’ve only passed it on from one set of smooth faces to another. All of which is a pretty sad and unliberated commentary on female nature (or, more likely, on our conditioning).

I can’t quite bring myself to throw out my back issues of
Seventeen
magazine—every copy, since 1965, so worn sometimes, especially the fat August issues, full of back-to-school fashions and back-to-school hopes that This Year Will Be Different; beauty make-overs, exercises, tips for shiny teeth (rub them with Vaseline). I should want to be rid of them; they are what enslaved me to the conventions of fashion, what made me miserable about how I looked. Their pages were always full of clothes I couldn’t afford and helpful hints that never really worked. (Talcum powder on the eyelashes—to make them look thicker—was gilding for a lily, not a dandelion.) Cucumbers over the eyes, lemon in the hair, face exercises to be done watching TV—I tried them all, rushing to the mirror when the miracle operations had been performed, expecting changes and finding only cucumber seeds stuck to my cheek and sticky, lemon-smelling hair no lighter than before.

My nights, from fifth grade through the ninth, were spent not so much sleeping as waiting for my hair to curl. I slept on plastic rollers and metal clips, in pincurls that left my hair squared off like wire, in hair nets and hairsprays and setting gels and conditioning oils, propped up on three pillows because the curlers hurt so much, or with my head turban-wrapped in toilet paper. I went through half a roll a night. Every morning I’d wake up with dark circles left under my eyes from a troubled half-sleep spent dreaming strange, curler-induced nightmares. I’d run to the mirror, when I woke, to unveil myself, never prepared—not even after all the other failed mornings when my efforts yielded only limp strands (or —worse—tight, greasy ringlets that would not come out) for a new disaster. Then I’d rip off the curls I’d stuck, with Scotch tape, to my face, arranging my hair so the red splotches left on my cheeks from the tape wouldn’t show, and tease my hair, when teasing was still done, so the back of my skull looked enormous. It amazes me now to think that all those ugly styles I wore looked good to me back then. Will what I’m wearing now seem just as strange ten years from now, I wonder?

I was a slave to fashion—chopping off my hair one year to look like Twiggy, sweltering under a Dynel wig the year wigs were being worn, disappearing altogether for a while beneath an eye-obstructing curtain of bangs. Even when straight hair became fashionable, when girls slept on tin cans and ironed out their curls and when, presumably, I should have felt free to be myself, I felt, instead, the need to change my hair some other way—to alter the color or the length, to bleach a racing stripe down one side or tint it some other shade of brown, no better, maybe, but
different.
I grew up a believer in variety above all else, in quantity over quality, in “change of pace” (I heard that in a Lipton tea commercial and it stayed with me). No matter what you looked like, the way to improve your looks, I believed, was to change them. All through the sixties I fought nature, wore my face like a mask, my clothes like armor and my hair, that pinned, clipped, rolled, taped, teased, washed, set, sprayed mass, meant to hang straight forever—I wore it like a hat.

Oh, the money that went into make-up! We never bought the cheap Woolworth’s stuff, my friends and I, because you don’t skimp on Beauty, and the more expensive the make-up, the better it must be. Mostly we paid for the packaging: blusher (that was 1960s talk for the unthinkable—rouge) in a tiny thumb-sized compact with a little swivel-out brush attached with a chain; false eyelashes that we never really wore except in the bathroom, packed in pastel carrying cases; lip glosses arranged like paints in a water-color box; face powder with silver sparkles; cheekbone contour brushes to give us the emaciated look. Lipsticks sometimes came in flowerpots and doll shapes (that’s what they were—toys, finger paints you applied to skin instead of paper). Eyeshadow swung in colored globes and psychedelic buckets from the belts in our hip-hugger bell bottoms.

Make-up was joyously synthetic back then, before the natural look, before organic skin creams and lipsticks whose aim was to be invisible and ads for “down to earth” cosmetics filled with genuine Arizona mud. It was the era of fads, white lips and rainbow eyelids and, for one brief period, an idea that never caught on—body painting. Yardley sold (or didn’t sell, but tried to) buckets of purple, pink, orange and green paint and rollers to apply it with—to legs (instead of stockings) and arms (instead of sleeves) and even faces. No one at my school wore it because along with the desire to be the first one to get noticed, we were all afraid of going too far, and we stood for hours in front of the mirror, making sure that our see-through blouses (with strategically placed pockets) didn’t show too much, agonizing over the exposure of a garter or a slip. (“Your slip is showing”—that dread whisper—always seemed a bit silly to me, when one of the big fashion fads of that year was dresses with matching bloomer-pantalets whose ruffle trailed at least an inch below the hem.) Those were loud, unsubtle, get-attention days, when wild and crazy and eye-catching meant fashionable.

Days that added up to the junk era. Every decade has its celluloid dolls and baseball cards, of course, and there are plenty of them still—overpriced, overpackaged make-up and flimsy toys that always look better in the catalogue, and breakfast cereals that taste like strawberry and marshmallow and chocolate. But we are more quality-conscious now, I think, aware, at least, of what it is we lack, and longing for a return to natural ingredients, solid old-fashioned construction and practical function. In the sixties it always seemed that we had money to burn; our quarters, like everything else, were disposable—you spent what you got, and never thought of waiting for dimes to become dollars, or dollars to turn into bank accounts. I shopped for the sake of shopping, always looking for new things that I didn’t need, with new needs constantly being invented. What I bought one Saturday would be gone by the next. Giant plastic earrings, glow-in-the-dark Yo-yos, posters, paper dresses, paper flowers, papier-mâché bracelets, polka-dotted knee socks, issues of
Mad
magazine.

It was a time for fads, the little interval before what we loved most was permanence. First Hula Hoops (two, three, four at once—little ones for arms and ankles and necks); mine always dropped early like horseshoes clanging as they landed in the dust around their target. Then there was Silly Putty, Super Balls, hi-riser bikes and bike motors, whose only function was to make a noise (Varooom!) when you rode, plastic trolls with glassy eyes and long ratty hair; Vac-u-form mold sets and a machine that made toys you could eat, and something called Super Stuff, a pink powder you added water to until it made a jelly-like pink goop. For about two weeks everybody at school had it. One boy I knew brought his stuff to Sunday school and threw it in the waist-length blond hair of a girl in his class, the kind of gesture that’s as close as sixth-grade boys can come, perhaps, to demonstrating love. That day her hair was finally proved to be natural gold and not a dye job, as I, and the other mousy brunettes had hoped and hinted to the world—we had ample time, in the hours that followed, picking the Super Stuff out of her curls, to study the roots. (They were whiter than ever against the screaming pink of the Stuff.) We gave up in the end, and the girl got a haircut. About a month later I found my old bag of Super Stuff, with a funny green mold that seemed to be crawling all along the bottom.

And all that junk—the flashy make-up and jewelry and fashions and the gadgets—all that has affected even our eating. We are the snack food generation, raised on potato chips and Orange Crush, Cocoa Puffs and Froot Loops, popsicles and a new type of peanut butter (why, among all the other things, does this especially shock me?) that comes with marshmallow fluff mixed in, right in the jar. Our hamburgers are so well-done they’re black, our orange juice is dehydrated, our vitamins come in the form of colored pills shaped like the Flintstones. Everything seems to be dried up or carbonated, colored, fancily packaged and, naturally, sugared.