The Beautiful Anthology (18 page)

• Nodding out in bars with an ice pack tied to my head

• Giving head to my girlfriend on the sidewalk of Avenue B

• Puking out of the window of my car, while driving

• Stubbing out cigarettes on my arm

• Pissing behind bushes, cars, in my purse, or in my pants

• Shooting up with toilet water in the bathroom of a Lower East Side bar without a functioning sink

Gross, yes. Stupid, yes. Antisocial, perfectly. But, according to my belief system around the turn of the century, gross, stupid, pathological traits could go from bad-crazy to good-crazy with the right leather jacket. I might crash your car, puke in your mouth, and cheat on you, but I made
really
good mix tapes, made eye contact when it mattered, and could charm your mom in a blackout. I was
good
crazy.

“You’re
crazy!
” my dates would yell at me, their eyes shining with admiration. They were twenty, too, and none of us knew that running around acting crazy is usually just running away.

Fast forward ten years and a lot had changed. I got sober and replaced the drugs with more frequent showers, regular meals, and semi-appropriate clothing. Not only that, but after a few years without a drink or a drug in me, my belief system shifted along with my body’s chemistry. After working on the inside of my head for a while, the outside of my life started looking not-so-bad.

My boyfriend (the only person I’d ever dated who had a steady job) and I had just bought a swanky new condo in a swiftly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood; I was teaching creative writing to college students, and I’d finally sold my first book – a memoir about my past experiences as a professional dominatrix and heroin addict and exactly how unlovely that time had become, in retrospect. Life was good. It sure wasn’t what I’d wanted back in the late 1990s, but I had changed. I was a citizen now. I voted. I had long hair, a graduate degree, and a vitamin regimen. I was the opposite of my old self. I had everything I wanted, right?

I’d never been the kind of little girl who fantasized about diamond engagement rings, gleaming new-construction condos, or Kennedy-style afternoons on the patio with my waspy in-laws. But then, I’d always rejected those clichés with the conviction of someone convinced she didn’t qualify for them in the first place. I’d chosen ugly/pretty because it suited my politics, but also because pretty/ pretty wasn’t on the menu for me. In junior high school, I’d stopped shaving my armpits and pierced my own nose because I was a tiny feminist and I liked the way it looked. But I also knew I was too bookish and big-titted and vegetarian to ever be a cheerleader. I didn’t read
Seventeen
magazine and go to football games; I made ’zines and had a secret eating disorder.

But after years of defining myself by choices made in defiance of social prescription, I was happily resigned to having sold out, or given in, or grown up, or let go, or because I’d simply fallen in love at a certain age, I discovered that I wasn’t immune to the desire for diamonds, or babies, or Kennedy-style afternoons on my in-laws’ patio – even if every Sunday I was sweating underneath long-sleeved cardigans that hid my tattoos and claiming that my forthcoming memoir was just about my “wild college years.” I wasn’t hiding; I just had less to prove, right? I felt good, mostly. I felt beautiful, mostly, and in a way I’d never thought I would.

But still, that instinct for extremity kept popping up in its relentless Whack-a-Mole-ish tenacity. After five years of total, continuous sobriety, I found myself:

• Standing around for hours in Central Park in the dead of winter

• Falling asleep in the afternoon with ice packs tied to my knees

• Running circles around Prospect Park in ninety-degree heat for so long that my tits bled and my toenails loosened like rotten teeth, turned black, and fell off

But that was just from my marathon training. Turns out, there are plenty of socially accepted forms of perverse extremity. You don’t have to be a junkie, spank anyone, or get spanked for a living to experience the exhilarating numbness of pushing your human limits. This kind of extremity was arguably
healthy
, wasn’t it? My sober running didn’t qualify as running away from anything, the way my old running around had … right?

I mean, I was happy. My boyfriend and I were in couples’ therapy, making progress.

“I don’t really like the book,” he told me. “It’s my least favorite thing you’ve ever written.”

“I’d rather work out maniacally, or watch porn at my desk, than have sex with you,” I thought, but didn’t say.

Sure, he worked more hours than any human ought to, and there was that anger thing that once led him to smash an entire box of Tofutti Cuties against his forehead one by one.

This wasn’t easy, but when had I ever chosen anything
easy
? Relationships weren’t supposed to be easy. And also, it was the best I’d ever done at loving someone. I was committed to not leaving, because that’s what I wanted to learn how to do sober –
stay
. And we loved each other. I hadn’t been able to let anything hold that much of me since heroin.

So why couldn’t I stop thinking about my neighbor? Our courtship started the usual way – with a little Facebook stalking and some innocent texts that I deleted immediately. The trouble began in earnest when I rode on the back of her scooter to a reading that we never attended – instead trading stories of our criminal histories on a stoop. When I told her about getting banned from C-Town for doing whip-its and hiding the empty whipped cream cans in the dog food aisle,
in my twenties
, instead of exclaiming how she couldn’t imagine such a thing, she laughed, and told me about when she accidentally set her bed on fire. So I laughed, and told her about when I accidentally set my bed on fire. After that night, the clump of feelings in my gut grew into a hernia and became harder to ignore.

I’d never been immune to crushes in relationships, but I hadn’t ever acted on them sober. She was too much my type, too much of everything that didn’t come with my new condo, and smelled way too good for me to let our “friendship” progress into the realm of mix tapes with neon subtexts. I knew her well enough already to know that I didn’t have long before she blew the cover off our friendship – she was too honest not to say what we were both thinking.

One of the convenient things about those of us with a tendency for addiction is our preternatural ability to pretend that something is anything other than what it is. So long as we don’t say it out loud. When she finally looked at me and said, “I don’t want to be your stupid friend,” I knew I was triple-fucked.

At the outset of that summer, I could see further into my future than I ever had before. September of 2009 showed that picture upturned: I had broken up with my boyfriend, was in post-breakup couples’ therapy, desperately searching for a new place to live while camping out on my side of the now disarrayed condo, smoking cigarettes again, and, to my great surprise, falling in love. All while teaching seven college classes.

I had stopped running.

What happened in between is the exciting part – the three months I spent feeling like I was going to shit my pants, and having the best sex of my life. During those months I saw my knees hit the floor of more than one public restroom, not to puke, but to pray that I’d survive the way I felt. I felt the kind of crazy you can only know sober, feeling every breeze of self-loathing, every inch of becoming more myself, every glimpse of my anticipated future disintegrating. I couldn’t even see into next week anymore.

Before every class I taught that fall semester, I stood outside my classroom door and took a deep, shaky breath, convinced that this time I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. My voice would falter, and I would dissolve into a professorial puddle before my bright-eyed students, nothing left of their once-confident mentor but a crumpled, pearl-buttoned cardigan. It never happened. When I walked in, everything would simply fall away, leaving me, my students, and the small miracle of whatever story we were discussing. Slowly, I started to have a little more faith, and I stopped wearing pearl-buttoned cardigans.

A year later, I’m still teaching college, still going to bed on the early side, and back to running regularly. But now, I don’t hide my tattoos from anyone. My fitness routine doesn’t cause more damage to my body than benefit. I’ve put on ten pounds. I look a little bit less like everyone else, and a little bit more like myself. And my relationship? Well, it’s pretty damn easy.

Here’s the thing: Bodily pain is something to withstand. Risking your physical safety, or even your dignity – sure, maybe those are acts of bravery, or toughness, or simply self-disregard. Or maybe they are desperate attempts to avoid having to withstand that greater risk, of having an earnest feeling, of being
still
long enough to be seen, or to see how you’ve changed what you touch. In my experience, risking your ass is a lot easier than risking your heart. Being completely awake for every kiss, every choice, every fuck, every risk: That’s the most hardcore beauty I have ever experienced.

MARNI GROSSMAN

PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES

My mother says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She says that beauty is only skin deep.

My mother says that I’m gorgeous. She says that I’m adorable.

That I’m not fat, no, she swears, it’s the truth. My mother says
I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.

Right
, I say with a smirk.
Through love cataracts.

My mother says there will be days like this. There’ll be days like this, my mother says.

We are one. An undulating mass of freshly shaven legs, glitter eye shadow, cheap taffeta, and hormones.

We are women. We are thirteen.

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are playing. Or possibly Sugar Ray. “Bad Touch” or “Mambo No. 5.”

When a slow song comes on, people pair up. Pair off. Mary Nash with Roger, Anna with Alex. No one comes for me, though, and “we” becomes “I.” Alone, I stand around for a minute, nervously picking at my dress. But I’m not stupid, not blind. I beat a hasty retreat.

I walk fast, with purpose, to the bathroom. In the mirror I can see that I am not what I thought I was. Under the fancy dress, I’m just me. Ugly.

I lock myself in a bathroom stall and hang my head between my legs waiting for the moment to pass.

I am, in fact, intimate with ladies’ rooms. With powder rooms and lounges, the loo, and the john. In fact, sometimes I feel as though my life has been nothing more than a long line of evenings spent hiding in bathroom stalls.

My face is the shtetl. I am Galicia. I am the Warsaw Ghetto. I am Zabar’s. I am the new Woody Allen film. I am some tertiary Philip Roth character.

Because my eyes are dark and brown and heavily lidded, they are often described as soulful. Or mournful. Sorrowful. There’s something of Susan Sontag in them. And there’s a bit of Rosa Luxembourg in my long, hooked nose. Or maybe Emma Lazarus. In my smile, there are echoes of Anne Frank.

I invite comparisons – not to movie stars, but to Holocaust victims and Ellis Island rejects.

Even my body is foreign: fleshy and puckered. Tits and ass and hips. I have unruly brown pubic hair, one part Chia Pet, one part steel wool. I have a faint mustache that I bleach faithfully. My hair gets greasy and my skin is dotted with fading pimples. I am neither svelte nor toned. It’s telling: There’s no English word for
zaftig.

I am much too much.

I am not a pretty girl. I know this, but, at the same time, I’m hoping someone will come along to contradict me.

I’m not a pretty girl and the most I can aspire to is “striking.”

Striking. Or “unusual.”

In college, a friend asked me to be in her student film. ”You have such an
unusual
face,” she said.

But everyone knows, of course, that “unusual” is the polite word for ugly.

Pretty is as pretty does, the saying goes. But the thing of it is, pretty does well.

Studies show that being attractive comes with plenty of benefits. Pretty people make more money, more friends. They get more sex and better jobs.

And while my mother would have me believe that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, science says otherwise. Beautiful people, they say, have symmetrical faces. Lithe bodies. Wide-set eyes and generous mouths.

Even babies know this.

In 1989, psychologist Judith Langlois found that infants have an innate sense of what is and is not attractive and act accordingly. The babies in her study stared significantly longer at attractive faces than at unattractive ones.

Which is to say that I am, and always have been, doomed.

Pretty is as pretty does, the saying goes. But women have always known this to be a fallacy. We know that all we’ve got is the curve of our ass. That a pretty face is worth more than a PhD. We know that when our looks fade, we will be irrelevant, obsolete.