Sex Object (3 page)

It was not a coincidence that I met Andrew so soon after I ended that first pregnancy. The abortion marked the last in a succession of decisions to take hold of a life that was increasingly careening out of control. A few months before getting pregnant I had moved out of Brooklyn to stay at my parents' home in Woodstock, New York, under the auspices of writing my book.

Really, it was to avoid an ex-boyfriend whom I still loved despite all reason and proof that he had been cheating on me for the whole of our relationship, and to stop doing cocaine in earnest, breaking a nearly two-year habit that had just started to scare me. I decided, consciously, that I would not do these things anymore: drugs, date assholes, believe that my professional good fortune had nothing to do with my ability.

And so I published a book meant for young women who didn't quite know if they were feminists or not and threw a party to celebrate, and my mother brought a salad and spinach pie she made at home to put out for the people who came. Andrew was in California visiting his grandmother. And so I got drunk and snorted Adderall in the bathroom, cleaning my nostrils of the blue powder before going back out. Somehow I reasoned that it wasn't as bad as doing cocaine; also I didn't have any. Piles of the book lay on a table near the entrance to the bar, and when I thumbed to the back to see my author photo I realized that I was pregnant at the time of the picture. Smiling, unknowing, posing.

MY SISTER DIDN'T SAY A WORD ABOUT THE GASH ON HER WRIST
until she was stitched up with black thread and back home. Even then, it was only to remark that the blood that had spread across her green Easter sundress looked a lot like the shape of a puppy.

She wasn't supposed to wear the dress that day—my mother was worried it would get dirty. But my sister insisted and so we walked next door, her overdressed, to play with the little girl who rented the apartment above my uncle's.

When you grow up in a family of beautiful women, the last thing you want to be told is that you look like your father. The reality was hard to miss, though. I took after my dad and my sister looked like my mother, a woman so beautiful men would politely stop her in the street to tell her so. Children did the same thing to my sister. In our neighborhood—mostly Italian, South Asian, and Brazilian at the time—she was a blond-haired, green-eyed wonder and little girls would stop her at the concrete playground sprinkler a few blocks from our house to ask to stare into her eyes.

The day she wore her good dress and her hair in pigtails, we
argued with our friend about what we should play. We settled on a game called Spud, where one of us would throw a large red rubber ball into the air while the others ran down the block. Once the ball was back in your hands, you yelled out
Spud!
with the hope of catching the runners moving instead of freezing. We only played a few rounds before our neighbor accused me of cheating. I remember that I wasn't.

As she stormed up the brick stoop into the vestibule of her building, my sister followed along after her. She stood making funny faces through the glass-paned door until our neighbor finally opened it. But when she did, and saw me close behind, she slammed the door just as my sister put out her arm to stop her.

The arm shattered through one of the panes and our neighbor yelled up to her mother that we had broken it. She didn't see the blood. The red was spreading across my sister's green dress and I ran toward my house, screaming for my mother. I hopped over a metal chain-link fence to the yard shared between my aunt's house and our own. My sister walked in slowly behind me, saying nothing, blood spreading further still, pouring out of her arm onto her dress and pooling at her shoes.

My parents were in bare feet when we got into our car, a wood-paneled station wagon. My mother sat in the front seat with my sister, holding a rag onto her wrist. My father screamed
injured child injured child
out of the window, his voice a makeshift siren, as we drove to Astoria General Hospital to get the other cars out of the way when beeping wasn't working.

When we ran into the emergency room, my sister silent and
smeared with red, I remember the old women in the waiting room. One on a gurney gasped audibly at the sight of her.

Every year that went by I got more awkward while she remained beautiful—hardly sprouting a pimple except once or twice during puberty. So while she and my mother would try on clothes and earrings and makeup, I would lock myself in the upstairs bathroom to prove to myself how ugly I was by comparison. There was a large mirrored cabinet there above the sink and if I pulled all three of the doors out, I could create a three-way mirror to look at my face from all possible angles.

My nose was too big, my chin was too small. The hair on my upper lip, bleached by Jolen secretly bought at the Genovese drugstore with stashed-away lunch money, stood out against my tan skin. When you look hard enough and long enough at your own face, everything about it starts to seem hideous. Especially when you are ten.

I wrote in my diary at the time,
I'm so ugly I can't stand it. I have a big gross nose, pimples, hairy arms. I will never have a boy like me or a boyfriend. All of my friends are pretty and I will be the one with no one.

I was feeling that loneliness acutely at the time because I was obsessed with a boy named Matt in my Roosevelt Island elementary school.
*
Matt—the first in a long line of blond boys I would fall for—told me once that I would be so, so pretty if not for my big nose.
He thought I could be pretty!

I loved him completely despite his short stature, bowl haircut, and occasional taunts. But on Halloween in the sixth grade, when he came dressed up as a baseball glove and I was a cavewoman, he said I should have won “most attractive” costume at the class contest even though a group of cruel girls asked if I was meant to be a dog since I was carrying a big plastic bone.
Most attractive!

My parents told me later that the girls were part of a group whose parents didn't like the fact that a few kids from off of the island had been allowed into the elementary school. That we lived across a small bridge in Queens had marked us as outsiders.

Matt had a cat named Mookie and when he wasn't making fun of me he was pulling me aside to talk about the things he loved: the Mets, his mom, his cat, and maybe another cat one day. We were in every class together from the second to the sixth grade, which I took as some sort of divine intervention—proof that we were meant to be together.

I started to measure my nose. First with my fingers, which I would try to keep the same distance apart as they were when they were on my face and then bring them over to my mother and her nose to demonstrate just how much bigger mine was compared to hers. She would insist that my nose was smaller—the kind of well-meaning parenting that just inspired fury and distrust in me. The nicest thing someone said to me at that time was that a lot of people my age had big noses, and that I would eventually “grow into it.” The comment acknowledged that the ugliness I was feeling was valid and not some in-my-head child
ish self-hatred. That comment was the only thing that gave me hope, the idea that my face would slowly morph into something more reasonable and proportional than the monstrosity I was currently working with.

Still, I started recording the size of my nose with a soft tape measure meant for hemming that my mother kept in the junk drawer. I kept the measurements in a small lavender notebook that I used to write poetry in but now wrote the numbers on the last page because I believed if my parents found it they would not think to go all the way to the back of the book.

The thing about hating your face so intently is that it takes an extraordinary amount of care and attention. The obsession is almost contradictory, because you start to love the self-hatred a little bit. It becomes a part of your routine—you whisper
I hate you
when you pass by a mirror or think the same silently when trying on clothes or putting on makeup, acts that feel foolish at the time because you know you're not tricking anyone into thinking you're beautiful. There's nothing that you could pile on your body or face that would make it worthy.

But at least I could bear to look. A friend I lived with for a short while after college had an ID card for work that she was supposed to keep hanging around her neck at all times. To avoid having to look at the picture of herself all day, she carefully cut a small piece of yellow paper into a square and taped it over her face. Later I would find plastic bags of vomit hidden underneath her bed, wrapped in towels meant to mask the smell that eventually led to their discovery.

I think a lot at the time about how my parents met in elementary school and I wonder if that means Matt and I might get married one day. I ask my parents to please let me have a nose job. Now when I look in that three-way mirror I carry a piece of paper with me that I position over the bump on my nose so I can see what I might look like if it were gone. My father tells me my nose is part of my Italian heritage, that getting rid of it would be a slap in the face to our ethnicity. I tell him we'll always have spaghetti. He is not convinced.

I imagine all of the things that would go right if I were to just have a smaller nose. I would have a boyfriend—or at the very least Matt would think about liking me back—and the girls in school would stop making fun of me. That year, several girls would bring me to a playground to have a “talk” about why we could not be friends anymore. Because I am too loud, because I agree with everything they say—desperate for approval in a way that is unseemly.
We're not trying to be mean
, they say,
it would just be better if you ate lunch somewhere else
.

I know if I looked more like them, with a small nose and long light hair in braids and bows, I would not have to travel across the island to the building where the younger children are to eat lunch with my sister.

There is only one other girl I know who travels to Roosevelt Island from Queens, a girl who moved from Costa Rica in the third grade and whom my parents give rides to since she lives only three blocks away from us. She is the cruelest one of all, throwing things in my hair as we stand in line, telling me I look
like I'm wearing my clothes backward because everything I do is ridiculous. It doesn't occur to me that the piece of cardboard I saw over her window in her apartment once—she says her mom's boyfriend broke it—has been there all year.

I find out from my male friends that there are cute girls, pretty girls, hot girls, sexy girls, and sometimes variations or combinations of all of the above. The worst to be is a fat girl or an ugly girl. I was an ugly girl who became a sexy girl once my breasts grew in and I started telling dirty jokes with abandon. As soon as I “got a chest,” as my mom would say, the taunts about my face stopped as boys became more interested in feeling me up than making me cry. I started to forget about my face and mean girls and focused on the things my body could do and inspire. During summer break a male friend whom I had known since childhood put his hand on my breast as we watched a movie in the room over from our parents, saying nothing. I remained frozen, unsure what to do.
Wasn't he supposed to kiss me first?
I was eleven.

Over the next few years, I become so involved in trying to forget my face that I don't notice the ways my sister is trying to disappear her body. First under long jean shorts that she wears over her bathing suit when we go to the beach in the summer. She even swims with them on, infuriating my parents, who yell at her to take them off, she looks ridiculous. A few years later the shorts are gone, along with twenty pounds. She refuses to eat anything with sugar in it, makes herself a different meal instead of eating the family dinner my mother cooks,
and feels cold all of the time. My parents say she is just dieting, it's nothing to worry about. But a picture of her from one vacation, writing at a table, all collarbones and hollow cheeks, tells a different story. She is lucky though—she sees the same thing I do when she looks at the picture and starts eating again, just like that. She has always been stronger than most, especially me.

I am only made to feel too heavy once in my life—the summer after my freshman year at a college where I am introduced to drinking until you black out, “penny pitchers,” and a boy who will break me. I had never stepped on a scale outside of the doctor's office until I see my grandmother during a holiday break and the first thing she says is,
Wow, you got fat.

Years later, after I give birth to my daughter, an editor asks me to write a piece about how I lost the baby weight as I am the same number of pounds immediately after having Layla that I was the day I got pregnant. Having a two-pound baby helps, I suppose. A failing liver curbs the appetite as well. Premature birth: the hottest new diet tip for moms. Never before had being skinny felt so empty.

As people get older they get more polite, at least to your face. And so I am mostly able to forget about my nose. Or maybe I finally did grow into it, I'm not sure. But I am safe from that particular taunt save for some thoughtlessly cruel comments that come every few years. What helps me forget is how much these boys seem to want things from me. If they want to touch me, I think, I cannot be quite as hideous as I imagine.

When I have my first real kiss with tongue from my first real boyfriend—a friend of a friend who lives on 110th Street and Broadway—I'm waiting for the tram to Roosevelt Island on a raised platform. It feels quick and wet but I am thrilled. We speak on the phone a few more times before I ask my friend to break up with him for me; I don't remember why.

Later, I date a boy who lives in Woodstock, New York, who likes having a “city” girlfriend. He is named after a Caribbean poet, and after giving me a mix tape with “November Rain” as the first song, he put his hand under my bra while we're making out. We are in a tent that another friend put up in the backyard as part of a coed sleepover. When my parents find out there were boys with us they are not pleased but don't say much. He rubbed against me that night, rhythmically, in a way I didn't understand. He later asked me, if I didn't want to have sex, why did I let him do that?

This marks the time in my life when I first feel wanted. Not by adult strangers on the street or boys in small towns who have dated everyone they know already, but by peers. And when I start high school, seniors even. Guys, who have suddenly become so much more slick and eager, are asking me on dates to the movies or the pool hall. The second day of school my new friend James comes over to my house and my father is struck when he walks in the door by this six-foot-three-inch fourteen-year-old with green hair who may be courting his daughter.

It is not until I think carefully, weighing options I cannot believe I have, that I decide to date Jay. He still has braces and
isn't as cute as some of the other guys I know but is a junior, and a graffiti artist (he says) to boot. Later, when I meet his father, he would say I have nice eyes, which I know is code for
the rest of her face is ugly
. That relationship ended with virginities lost, fights over whether or not I should be “allowed” to drink Zima, and a girl with a lip ring when he leaves for college. At the time, I was just so glad to be wanted.