The Beautiful Anthology (8 page)

When I was growing up, I escaped to my friend Linda’s house every day. Linda’s mother didn’t yell or pick on her about her weight or take away her radio when she got Cs. At Linda’s house, we could drink all the soda we wanted. Once, we ate an entire family pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

When I was growing up, I got fat going to Linda’s house.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be like my friend Elise. Elise was a ballerina with lithe limbs, huge eyes, and a pert Irish nose. I thought if I stretched my arms farther in swimming, they’d elongate; if I reached my legs more in running, they’d grow; if I pinched my nose whenever I blew it, it’d narrow.

Of course, none of that happened.

I thought hidden behind my glasses were big double-lidded eyes, like my grandfather’s, my father’s father. People said I looked like father’s mother, except that she was so bony, I thought I’d break her when I sat on her lap.

But when I removed my glasses, I didn’t find big, double-lidded eyes. I found one eye big and one small, like my father’s, even worse than two small eyes.

I tried to wear mascara, eye shadow, and liner. But none of it looked right. The mascara flaked painfully, the shadow seemed flat, the liner did nothing except run.

“Maybe you need more,” my friends told me, my well-meaning, big-eyed friends.

But I didn’t want to use more. I didn’t want to look like the woman my parents and their friends had dubbed Panda Face because of her black-ringed eyes. I didn’t want to look like Connie Chung, who despite all her makeup still looked Chinese.

When I was growing up, our house was surrounded by whiteness. White neighborhood, white school, white friends. “What are you anyway, Mexican?” boys in my nursery school would ask. “Chink,” said the kids at the bus stop. “Ching chong,” whispered a boy in my high school math class.

When I was growing up, there were very few other Chinese. David who was older; Amy who was younger. One day there was a boy with an unpronounceable name full of Xs who cried every day on the bus. The driver put him near me and my brother.

“He may feel better with his own kind,” she said.

He wasn’t my kind. I knew English. I didn’t cry till my nose filled with snot. I didn’t wear weird sweaters that smelled like mothballs. I didn’t stand up the whole bus ride.

“Sit,” I said to him in Mandarin, and he sat.

When I was growing up, our house was Chinese. Chinese words, tastes, and smells. Chinese accents, yelling, and expectations. A Chinese grandmother who spoke no English, a Chinese grandfather who insisted on early-morning walks past our bus stop and stopped to talk to us in his broken English.

“One, two, three, four,” he’d say, counting us, and laugh.

“Your grandpa can count,” a boy would say, and I’d say nothing. I’d shrink and will my grandfather to disappear.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be someone else.

I wanted to be a movie star, part Italian, part French.

I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to dance. I wanted a strong, yet patient mother who was once a ballerina, a father who was a fellow actor, reticent yet loving. I wanted parents who supported me in everything I did.

When I was growing up, I wanted to undo my parentage. In so doing, I wanted to undo myself.

When I was growing up, I had crushes on only white boys. “Asian boys are like my cousins,” I said. “My brothers.” Only white boys came close to the movie stars I liked. Only white boys were worthy. Asian boys were lesser. Asian boys who liked me were lesser still.

When I was growing up, I didn’t think a white boy would ever like me, would ever turn his head the way heads turned when Elise walked by. If a boy said he liked me, I assumed he was making fun of me, that there was something wrong with him. I assumed he wasn’t special enough.

When I was growing up, I moved to a new neighborhood and was no longer surrounded by whiteness. There were kids who looked like me. Kids with parents who had accents. Kids with accents themselves. I no longer felt ugly. I no longer thought about the shape of my eyes, the length of my legs.

I was no longer “the Chinese girl,” but the new girl, then the angry poet girl. The girl who rarely spoke, but I didn’t care.

No one called me chink or ching chong.

I went away to college and found even more people like me, people who had grown up around whiteness, who had swallowed it up. Let it swallow them whole.

I fell in love with one Asian man, then another. I fell in love with an Asian man who loved all that I hated about myself. My round face and pale skin. My freckles, sturdy legs, and dark eyes. My reticence, tomboyishness, and bookishness. He loved me for who I was.

Or so I thought.

He knew that when I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer. That I still did. Yet he chastised me for not making enough money, for not caring much about money at all.

When I was growing up, I didn’t imagine caring for a sick person, for a mother not my own. My parents didn’t expect us to take care of them. All we had to do was show up, bring a little something, set the table, wash the dishes. Let them know we cared.

Really, they expected so little.

My husband expected much more. Every holiday at his parents’ house. Every Saturday taking care of his mother, wracked by Parkinson’s disease. I held her walking from the bed, into the shower, up and down the stairs. The whole time I held her, I was afraid she’d fall. If she fell, it would be my fault – as, it seemed, everything was.

I fed her, and listened to her talk; I listened to her delusions and tried to discern what was real and what was not.

“You’re such a good daughter-in-law,” my friends told me. But I didn’t care. I only did what I did to make my husband happy, or if not happy, then not angry. I did what I did, and I began to resent it.

I didn’t expect to have to earn love.

We didn’t talk about these things, my husband and I. He tried, but everything out of his mouth was a knife wound. Nothing I did was good enough, but I didn’t know how to make it better. I didn’t know what to do.

I left our bed at dawn every morning to go running. Four, five, six miles on the treadmill. Only while running did I feel accomplished, as good as, good enough.

Then suddenly I
was
good enough, in some ways. I was thin. I was beautiful. “
Ne me shou!
” my mother cried, impressed. So skinny!

I was happy she was happy. What I didn’t know was that underneath, she was worried that something was wrong.

Because something was wrong, for although I was beautiful, my husband no longer wanted me. He seemed to no longer want anything. All he saw was darkness. All he knew was rage. Everyone was against him. All was going to end, no matter what he did, so he might as well end it himself.

Although I was beautiful, my husband went with another. Although I was his wife, he gave another his child. Although he still loved me (so he said), he betrayed me in the worst possible way.

And yet I couldn’t leave. Because he still loved me, because he was all I had known. Because he was the first who made me feel beautiful.

I ran. I ran to forget, to not feel, to hear only breathing, my own heart, the rhythm of my feet. I ran and ran, trying to escape the darkness. But I could not. When I stopped running, the darkness was still there.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be beautiful.

If I were beautiful, I’d be approved of, applauded, loved.

I became beautiful, and it made no difference.

I know there’s more to being beautiful. I want to believe.

I want to believe that these white hairs on my head don’t need dyeing.

That these new wrinkles are perfectly natural.

I want to believe that my freckles aren’t splotches, blobs, or blemishes. That anyone who tells me otherwise is seeing only their own darkness, that it’s their own darkness they’re afraid of, that it might swallow them whole.

I want to believe my new love will love me, no matter what. Even as I gain unsightly bulges, retreat into my old shyness, and battle, still, the same darkness from all those years ago, he will continue to love me as he does now.

I want to believe that, like the other, he loves those things about me that I hate, but also more. That he wants me to flourish, to be me but better. To be less afraid, to see that my fears hurt more than myself. To believe that it’s who I am and not what I do that he loves.

I want to believe it. I almost do.

But I am still growing up.

JESSICA ANYA BLAU

SEE YA LATER, BIG NOSE

1. It started in fifth grade with Paul B. He reminded me of both Charlie Brown and the father on
Eight Is Enough
– a perfectly circular head, blond velvet-fuzzy hair, pale blue eyes. I wouldn’t say I had a crush on him, but I definitely watched him. His yard was long and fenced and mysterious. He darted around, never walking on a single side of any street.

“Jessica would be cute if she didn’t have such a big nose,” he told … I don’t know; it seemed like he told
everyone.
It came back to me several times. From Kenny J., who was skinny and funny and had sent me love notes in third grade. And from Karen S., who always seemed older than everyone and knew what people were doing and saying at all times the way a mother might. And from Rena B., who lived on the end of my cul-de-sac and was movie-star beautiful but thought she looked like a troll (she sort of did, but she was still impossibly gorgeous).

Following Paul B.’s report, I spent hours in the bathroom staring at my nose and wondering if I’d be cute if it weren’t so big. I examined my nose from every angle: straight on, up, down, profile. When I pulled the mirrored medicine cabinet door open I was able to see my profile reflected from the wall mirror above the sink. This was probably the most examined pose. I knew, and still know, the differences between my left and right profiles. (Sometime in high school I came up with the theory that if I lived in the UK where the car wheel is on the right side, I’d never have dated as much as I did. My left profile, I’ve always believed, is far superior to my right and this fact, I honestly thought, kept those driving boys interested in me as I sat to their right.)

2. Sixth grade: my new best friend Julie T. was obsessed with the movie and soundtrack to
Funny Girl
. She played the record every day after school and sang along while staring at Barbra Streisand’s glowing face on the album cover.

“You look just like her!” Julie always said. “
Exactly
.” I didn’t get it. One day I forced the issue.

“
How
do I look like her?” I asked.

“Your nose,” Julie said, “you have the same nose.” Did we? I didn’t think we did. I still don’t think we do; her nostrils are more pronounced than mine. But I remembered my mother talking about Barbra. “Everyone respects her,” my mother had said, “because she didn’t get a nose job.” Was my nose like that? Was my nose so big that the choice
not
to get a nose job would seem respectable and brave? It sounded like deciding not to wear false teeth, or letting your foggy-blue, runny, blind eye be seen instead of putting on sunglasses, or wearing a bikini on a California beach when you’re a hundred and fifty pounds overweight because G-D-it, you’re just as entitled to a good swim as the thin people!

3. Sometime after college, when I was still living in the Bay Area, I was driving through Oakland on a beautiful day when sunlight was flooding everything into a golden white. All my windows were down and the wind was blowing my hair across my face. I stopped at a long red light on a quiet street. There was a gorgeous black man in a red convertible next to me. Everything about him was sexy: his ropey, muscled arm extended to the steering wheel, his smooth, clear skin, his square, white teeth. I looked at him. He looked at me. I smiled. He smiled. I looked some more. He looked some more. I hoped he’d ask me for my number, or pull over so we could chat, or maybe he’d even follow me until I stopped. And then the light changed. I paused before hitting the gas. He turned his head toward me and said, “See ya later, Big Nose!” I drove slowly and let him spin out of sight.

4. For years now, I have confiscated photos of myself that were taken in profile (always without my consent as I have been turning
toward
the camera since Paul B.’s first comment) and coloring in the bump in my nose with a Sharpie to see what I’d look like with a smaller nose (I look like someone who isn’t me). I’ve shown these doctored photos to other people, who often stare at me as if I’m presenting them a picture of toe fungus. They claim not to get what I’m speaking of when I speak of my big nose. I imagine they’re all trying to be polite.

5. Not long ago I was at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. I walked into the dining room alone one night, saw an empty chair next to a nice-looking older man, and sat down. He was charming, funny; we laughed uproariously throughout the meal. At some point, I realized he was also famous. Famous in that way of someone
People
magazine would never recognize but any graduate student in America would. A couple of people approached him to sign books. Others were watching him.