The Beautiful Anthology (2 page)

As the doctors and nurses promised, her face did heal, her complexion, unnaturally tan from a bout of infant jaundice, turned a burnished rose and was smooth to the touch, as if you had dipped your fingers into a pot of cream. Not even a birthmark marred her perfect, brand-new baby flesh. As every new mother does, I inspected her daily from head to toe, kissing the top of her head, her forehead, the tip of her nose, the translucent alabaster insides of her wrists, reassured, at least, from the things I could see on the outside, that she was as normal and beautiful as any baby should be.

As she grew, the only visible mark left over from her birth was the angel’s kiss. If she had a high fever or a terrible tantrum, the smudge beneath her bangs would flare a dusty red, like clay, only to disappear when the fever subsided or her demands had been either met or forgotten.

Through toddlerhood to adolescence, my daughter’s body endured the regular battle scars of childhood: a cut lip, scraped knees, an irresistible urge to color her face and limbs with markers or paint. When she was four, she had me draw freckles, on a daily basis, across the bridge of her nose with a brown eyeliner pencil – due, in part, to her love of
Pippi Longstocking
. In her early teens, she streaked her hair a rainbow spectrum of pinks, purples, and greens from the little pots of Manic Panic she purchased with babysitting money. She rejected the fashion of the mall and, instead, trawled thrift shops and created her own clothing. As a budding artist, she silkscreened T-shirts and drew on everything – bags, notebooks, canvas, paper – until the designs migrated to her jeans, and her hands and her arms were covered with a fine-point black Sharpie.

The hair was just an extension of who she was at the time, and I never balked, instead recalling the advice of a woman with five daughters. Her girls could cut, color, even shave their heads if that’s what they desired, she said, as long as they didn’t permanently mark or maim their flesh with tattoos or multiple piercings, and I adopted this decree as a casual guideline. “Choose your battles,” everyone advised, and so that line in the sand was mine.

I never imagined that I would one day sit next to my firstborn in a tattoo parlor while a stranger bent over her perfect arm with a vibrating needle.

As the person she was soon to be emerged, my daughter’s dedication to her art became clearer. She wanted to be a painter. For years, she got up at 6
a.m.
every Saturday morning and took a train from our home in Saratoga Springs into New York City to take classes. The colors that had once been on her hair and her body began to surface in her paintings, and by high school graduation, she had been offered a place at each of the top art schools in the country.

So, when my daughter came to her father and me, six months after she had turned eighteen, one month before she would leave for college at the Rhode Island School of Design, and said that she had been thinking about getting a tattoo of her own design, I experienced all over again that moment right before her birth of not being able to stop what was about to happen.

She opened her notebook and slid across the table a piece of paper with a beautifully rendered deer, head and antlers only, and above the antlers, a flock of birds. It was in her classic illustrative style, black on white, the lines clear and steady.

The subject was no surprise. She had been working on a series of paintings of deer over the past year, and these paintings were a huge part of her portfolio. They had been featured in a solo show and in several group shows, and one in particular, two deer against pink wallpaper, had won several major awards. While the animals were always realistic, each of the paintings was a stark contrast of juxtaposition, with the deer posed against fanciful paisley-patterned wallpapers in vivid colors.

“It’s amazing,” I breathed, unable to look at my husband seated to my right. I knew what he was thinking just by his body language. No way was he going to allow her to mark up her body.

“No color,” our daughter assured us. “And I want it right here.” She held up the inside of her left arm.

I think my husband gasped before he stuttered, “That can’t be safe. I mean there are a lot of veins and what if you needed to give blood or get a line or …” He seemed to be suppressing his urge to scream, so he was drowning her in a sea of horrific medical scenarios – a way he knew to get at our slightly germ-phobic daughter.

Ever pragmatic, our daughter responded that she had already researched the health risks. She could not give blood for a year. She could not swim or be in chlorine for several weeks after the tattoo. She would need to apply A&D ointment for at least five days, hypoallergenic lotion for another five days after that, or until it stopped peeling or itching. She had to be vigilant about keeping it clean and out of the sun.

“What about a career?” her father asked.

Her goals, which she had set from the very beginning, were to get a BFA in painting, followed by an MFA in painting, so she could teach at the university level and still be a working artist. And, she added, nearly every teacher where she had attended pre-college classes and summer sessions had been inked.

Our daughter had also, to our surprise, done the fieldwork. She had visited every tattoo shop in town, looked at their books, interviewed the artists, and had already decided where she would get it done. She had designed a tattoo for a friend and had gone with him and checked out the cleanliness of the needles and the employees, their professionalism, and their willingness to answer her questions.

In reality, her father and I could do nothing to stop her. She was of legal age. She understood our hesitation, but it was her skin to do with as she pleased.

Eventually, to appease us, she agreed to wait until after our family reunion trip over the summer that would coincide with an eightieth birthday celebration for my father. During this “cooling off period,” where my husband hoped she would forget about the idea of a tattoo, an artist friend of ours, who sported a dozen tattoos herself, said to us, “You need to face it: She’s going to get this tattoo. This idea is not borne out of a drunken night of partying.”

Reluctantly, we agreed. The prejudices against tattoos were ours alone. Our daughter was all the things a parent would want in a child; she had never given us reason to question her decisions. When we returned from vacation, she made an appointment and put down the deposit, and I heard myself saying to her that I wanted to go along.

The appointment was for noon and our friend had advised no caffeine and to make sure she really ate a meal. That morning my daughter arrived downstairs with a nervous stomach and nibbled at a bagel. Because she was slight in frame to begin with, I knew my daughter needed to store some fuel. When she refused, I figured she was having second thoughts. I told her she could back out and forfeit her fifty-dollar deposit. It wouldn’t be admitting cowardice.

But it wasn’t that she had changed her mind about the tattoo; she was nervous about the pain, considering the sensitive skin inside her left arm. She didn’t want to pass out or, worse, be sick to her stomach. She still wanted the tattoo.

By the time we arrived at the tattoo parlor, she had managed to eat a banana and nothing else. One of the guys in the shop told her to take nice deep Lamaze-like breaths, but I could tell her teeth were chattering.

We were ushered into a room. A soft-spoken tattoo artist asked her to take a seat while he donned his black plastic surgical gloves, and then something shifted. She looked relieved as he swabbed the inside of her arm with antibacterial solution. “Are you sure you want the tattoo here? It’s a career killer,” he said.

I swallowed hard from my seat by her feet, but I said nothing.

“Yes,” she answered without hesitation.

As he readied the needle, he asked what the significance was behind the design. I was shocked that of all the things my husband and I
did
want to know, we hadn’t asked her this one question. She brought up vegetarianism, her staunch stand on animal rights, which clashed with her fascination with taxidermy. The deer paintings were based on a friend’s father’s kills. She had spent hours in their basement photographing the deer for many of her paintings. The birds in the antlers, she explained, signified a beginning, an obvious metaphor that I hadn’t been paying attention to, so focused was I on the social implications of my daughter’s future with a tattoo.

The artist laid a piece of tracing paper with her meticulously drawn deer on the inside of her arm and asked if she liked the placement. She held her arm aloft so I could see the deer’s proud torso, the flight of birds that alighted around his antlers and gently flew around the curve of her wrist. A wrist I once could circle with my thumb and forefinger, a wrist I once kissed and tickled.

She gave me a tremulous smile, waiting for my approval. I smiled back. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

ZOE ZOLBROD

PAI FOOT

In 2010, I published a novel, Currency, about a Thai man and an American woman backpacker who hook up in Thailand and, in a desperate bid to stay together and score some cash, get involved in illegal activities. The book is not autobiographical, but I did spend some time in Thailand in the 1990s, and after my mom read my novel, she called me. She asked, in a very particular tone – hesitant and brave and slightly accusatory – “Um, how did you know so much about what a Thai man would think?”

I had rehearsed for questions like this, and I had decided to be straightforward.

Now was my chance. “I slept with some of them,” I answered.

Mercifully, she didn’t ask me for a number. She just said, in words hung with skepticism: “Are they really that appealing?”

I often feel like a pissy teenager around my mom, and for a moment I felt myself gathering my resources for a lecture on cultural insensitivity and the reflexive dehumanization of the Other. You know, something along the lines of: “Well, the word
they
in this context reduces a large number of individual people to a depersonalized mass, and it’s impossible to make generalizations on that level …” But I caught myself, and I gave her the short, true answer: “I thought so.”

And the image that came immediately to my mind was not that of my protagonist, with his cascades of black hair and high cheekbones and smooth gold skin spread taut over an inverted
V
of articulated musculature (that a reader of
Currency
would question whether I believed a Thai man could be exceptionally attractive sheds doubt either on my powers of description or on the truism that a reader’s inclination is to equate author and narrator), and it was not that of the real-life prototypes from whom he was built. What I saw when I owned up to my predilection for a type was the bottom of a short, wide, maimed foot being held in the air in a bid toward mother-sympathy.

I was in Pai, a little town in the north of Thailand, and I’d just checked in at Riverside Lodge. For a couple of dollars a day, I’d rented one of the two dozen bamboo huts planted in rows next to the Pai River. The managers of this rag-tag accommodation were a couple, a Belgian man and an Australian woman who had just had a baby, and I was standing under the communal palapas talking to the new mom when a young Thai man approached us. Ignoring me, he said, “Look!” to the proprietor, and he held out his foot, which had been pierced in its ball by a thorn.

It was a perfect bloom of a foot – the color of teak, rounded, sturdy yet smooth, free from reddened knobs or yellowed protrusions, its health somehow only enhanced by the circle of black puncture and by the surrounding stain of Mercurochrome. I have never responded so strongly to an isolated body part. The moment is preserved in resin for me; I can hold it out to examine at will. I can feel my tongue contract and the saliva pool beneath it, my words rescind in awe.

Was it the symmetry, some mathematical formula expressed in the concentric circles – ball, stain, hole? Was it the relationship between the colors, in which those exact shades of brown and burgundy scale a perfectly attuned contrast ramp toward the blackest of blacks? The millimeter-sized hole glistened like an iris. Science aside, certainly the posture in which the workaday appendage was held was part of the charm for me. The foot was slipped out of a rubber sandal and lifted waist high while its owner stood firm on the other one. His knee pointed down, his palm cradled the foot top, the foot bottom was leveled as if displaying a cupcake. A class full of experienced yogis would find this pose a wicked hip opener, but under the thatched roof of the palapas it appeared effortless, the wide leg of a fisherman trouser draped just so to reveal a strapping calf. And then there was the attitude: the offering of the foot, the appeal to sympathy and simultaneous lack of self-pity. And the symbolism: Pai was where I became comfortable in Thailand, where I began to identify myself as a traveler – the process might have begun as little as fifteen minutes before – and here was a jungle foot, a thorn puncture, an antiquated medical treatment.