Some Girls

In 1966, a teenage girl walked into a fancy salon in London, England wanting a simple shampoo and set. Instead, persuaded by the owner, she had her long locks cut into a short crop. After the cut, a picture was taken, revealing an almost waif-ish yet intriguing schoolgirl: pretty, wide-eyed, and made up beyond her years. Barry Lategan, the photographer, said of the girl, “She was gawky, but she had a sort of elegance…I think it was the eyes…she had such a presence.” The photograph hung in the shop window, touting the new hairstyle, where it was seen by fashion editor Deidre McSherry, who subsequently published the photo and wrote about the girl in the Dailey Express, calling her "The Face of 1966.” By the following year, that girl, Leslie Hornby, or Twiggy (a kick-name she’d acquired from friends) became the first “supermodel,” and another photo of her made the cover of Vogue magazine.

Soon Twiggy, posing in plastic dresses or wrapped in men’s ties, was everywhere, spanning continents and crossing oceans to where I, a young fledgling living in Los Angeles, searching for a kind of direction, found her. And I, and my fellow impressionables, like so many, grew a hero worship.

As is often true of It girls, there was a certain something about Twiggy, an indefinable essence animating from a locus beyond the camera’s eye. But it was also a constellation of elements, the explained and unexplained of history, that included quite rightly her name. Because she was not a Nancy or Veronica, and because this term of endearment from friends could have just as easily been a mean moniker given some poor girl by the adolescent savages we lived with daily, because in spite of that she did not shun it, but translated it into a brand of allure, her name announced a revolution, a rejection of the status quo.

Twiggy’s short hair, skinny legs, and flat chest were not the reliable attributes that brought eight grade boys to a quiver. It was we girls who could not look away. We scrambled for affordable knock-offs of whatever she wore, naive to the fact that clothes alone do not make one super. But what sealed our bond to Twiggy, the magic more attainable, was the flaunt of her makeup—the shadow, the liner, the mascara—which was not subtle, not a deceptive portrayal of inborn good looks, but more as if Twiggy herself were the canvas for whatever she desired to create. She gazed at us from the glossy page, thick-lashed and cat-eyed, like she was handing us her pistol and teaching us to shoot. Intoxicated by this hoodoo power, and working out a source to pay for it, skimming off lunch money, or squeezing our allowances, my friends and I dabbed and smudged creams and colors, tipsy in the realization that our cheeks would be rosy, our lashes long. Our lips were up to us.

Each day, readying for school, we practiced our craft in ways that could highlight a girl’s prowess or expose her lack of ability. Of all the unfortunate mishaps was the dreaded orange line along the jaw that no one was cruel enough to call out. We simply looked on and learned, little women on tippy toes, stretching for something we couldn’t quite reach. And we took our ensembles to the halls and yards of junior high, grading each other’s work. It was entirely different than acknowledging someone’s natural beauty, because that was a thing to be coveted, not admired. Makeup granted the rest of us the power to ward off girls like Peggy, with her congenital peachy flush and her unbleached flaxen hair that flowed supernaturally past her waist.

During this formative period, a new girl arrived on the scene. Although I’ve forgotten many people from that time, even the faces of some of those who signed my yearbook—Stay sweet love, and have a bitchin’ summer— I remember Linda Rose. Because she forged into our teenage caste like she too had made herself, and seeing her creation said it was good.

Showing up in eight grade from out of the blue is like washing up on an island of natives who may or may not be friendly. There’s always a curiosity about the new girl, and if she’s pretty, she needn’t be as eye-catching as the current crop to gain attention. The grass is always greener, the envy from other girls is thick, the lust from eighth grade boys, overgrown.

But the thing about Linda Rose was that she wasn’t especially pretty. Linda was something else, a creature we could barely fathom. Because each morning—and she must have gotten up early to do it—she applied a palette of eyeshadow, mascara, and eyeliner that reeked of a power of which the rest of us had only caught a whiff. Linda Rose walking among us oozed this elan we’d only seen in still life. Her figure, less long, less lean than Twiggy’s, filled the confines of her double knit skirt. Her hair was cropped like Twiggy’s but not straight, rather it was a mop of curls that other girls would have spent hours ironing away. Linda, though, took it all and packaged it with fishnet stockings, powder-blue pageboys, and an attitude of invincibility. And like Twiggy, she understood the wells of mystique that were her eyes. In the same way of our idol, she boldly painted lower lashes on the delicate skin behind her real ones.

My friends and I took one look at this level of artistry and were consumed with reverence. Some might have seen Linda as clown-like and believed she held no allure, except for the fact that she plainly did, making her way to class, to lunch, and our parties collecting an eager group of friends, even a boyfriend, as she flouted the rules of beauty and literally applied her own.

What was going on in that head of mine with my drugstore cosmetics? It wasn’t to be like Peggy. Because I knew there was no eyeliner or mascara that could have imbued me with Peggy’s loveliness and her knowing of it. I already understood what kind of pretty I was. Early on, the world tells you. And it can be more power than a budding mortal can handle, or it can prune your little soul to a nub. Some girls sashayed into theirs like Peggy. Others gave it away, not grown enough to know what they were losing. Some girls looked to Peggy and decided to pack it up. Yet some of us, many of us, aspired to be like Linda, who anointed herself and possessed a secret beyond her liquids and liners.

Driven by forces I was too young to name, I brushed my lids and coated my lips. I wanted to float through the halls of junior high and hear my name hollered sweetly. I wanted what Twiggy had. But fantasies aside, I wanted what Linda had, and I thought I could buy it.

***

Before eighth grade, a young girl on the cusp, I stood in the lobby of the local movie theatre, slid my coins into the vending machine, and waited for the metallic tube to drop to the bin. I pulled off the top and turned the base to reveal a bullet of pearly cream, smeared it on my baby lips and stared at my reflection, just beginning to make myself up. At that age the lipstick I bought and applied in the theatre bathroom and took off before going home was like playing dress-up, like dousing myself with my mother’s Faberge cologne when she wasn’t around, or trying on her peep-toe heels. I wanted to know, impatient and oblivious, what lie ahead.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder

There I am, little legs dangling from the ruffle of my dress, beaming for the camera. Yet as I grew into the woman I would become, that light dimmed. My father, wielding a power greater than he knew, did not hold with blind parental adoration, and, in ways that hurt and confused me, would point out the awkward jumble of my adolescent metamorphosis as if it wasn’t hard enough for me to see for myself what was going on. Even Twiggy described herself as “a funny little thing,” during her transfiguration. But there was something about my looks, even after I became a butterfly, that didn’t match my father’s aesthetic, and the need I had for his approval felt primal. The thing was, I looked so much like him, sharing his sleepy hazel eyes. Maybe seeing himself in me was too much, was a reminder of his own flaws. But whatever it was, it’s tragically true that parents sometimes look at their children and see something of themselves they can’t bare. Or hope for some possibility of themselves granted by extension. All these visions block the light, cast a shadow. Yet as I’ve learned of love’s imperfections, I know my father gave it the best he could. But it was not a love like Nick’s.

Nick came to me in third grade, faithfully walking me home, holding my lunch box and sometimes my hand, and third grade must be the time of purist ardor. Because there is no lust when you’re eight-years-old. We talked and laughed as if we knew a secret, as if whatever fresh, immaculate thing we were was a found treasure.

Later came a thing more carnal. He was beautiful, and his look told me I was, too. His look silenced the menacing voice telling me to be more, his cherish not tangled in a single thing. And it felt like reaching a pinnacle, a place where I could finally rest.

In trying to understand this thing called love, science considers that the experience of beholding your dearest involves a kind of third eye, a place in the biological and psychological-being that detects our singular glow, the diffraction of our onliest crystalline, the spectacle of our rainbow, a kind of heaven on earth. And if there’s a heaven on earth, it’s this boundlessness, this blue sky for which our flesh and bones is just a package.

So Pretty

The nurses were the first to rave, minutes into her life, in tones of authority, because they’d seen hundreds of babies. She’s beautiful. Of course she is, I thought, she’s my baby girl, awash in the white hot love light of my blood flame.

Soon, though, if I was reluctant to see the extent of my daughter’s desired traits, the world echoed them to me. And to her. There was a creepiness to the fawning, the remarks blurted right to her little face. She’s sooo pretty. Isn’t she adorable? Later, She’s gorgeous, stunning, hot. And I really wished people would just shut up, because what’s that like for a child or young woman to hear? I know there’s something deep in our coding behind these outbursts. That we’re all hardwired for symmetry and shine. But I took the comments as if they’d been made about some physical imperfection instead of perfection. I looked on a little panicked realizing my daughter was not like me or Linda Rose. She was Peggy, and there was nothing I could give her to teach her through it. I knew, though, that for all her loveliness, she could break like the rest of us, and I prayed she would withstand this glorification of the corporeal. I hoped she would be like Linda. Because, approaching middle-age, I saw how precious and eternal Linda’s gifts were, how they could be carried till the end.

If you were Linda, you wouldn’t grieve so much when you relinquish the seamless landscape of your body to hold a wee creature with the contours of a large melon, or when the skirmishes with your hair, rebel and grey, become a civil war. A little voice would remind you that you are still the best thing that ever happened to you. And when years go by, you’d be grateful for a good under-eye concealer because you never sleep in a fathomless deep with teenagers in the house, with menopause, and it’s okay to want to look a little prettier. Because even though Linda was so good with makeup, her talent wasn’t in hiding anything but rather in gilding her flower. When one day you catch your reflection in the blunt intervention of someone's camera, and you see your chin multiplied, your jaw etched like a flooded sandbar, if you were Linda, you’d get over the jolt of it. You’d chuckle a little. It’s a bit disappointing, this age thing. But you always knew you weren’t perfect. You always knew you didn’t need to be. When breath itself winds down, you’d be tired in a way that’s natural. You’d lived your days, not fought them, and this twilight would not be a diminishment as much as a culmination.

I try to picture Linda now, although I haven’t looked for her on social media. She wasn’t part of the close group of friends I took with me to high school and beyond. In my mind, she hasn’t been trimmed by barre torture in Lululemons. And she doesn’t have the pained, withered look that many times goes with that striving. I imagine that Linda might dye her hair, maybe with a shock of indigo or magenta to her curls. Her skin’s not taunt, yet it glows, because she’s kept up a regime. And on her lips is a velvety hue, and a smile, like the one in our yearbook.

Tan Lines

Groggy after the surgery, I open my eyes to see the doctor’s masked face hovering over mine, still at work, eyes serious, and I ask her, Will I be disfigured? This is my second Mohs surgery; an excavation in stages, a digging for the gold of good cells. Because if you can’t find the good cells, you must keep digging.

My words break her concentration, and reading her eyes, I detect a melancholy. She hesitates, like she's searching for a response, a spin on the hole she left in my face. Then she speaks, mutters something about the masterful plastic surgeon she’s sending me to. Later, on a follow-up visit, she confesses. Do you remember when you asked me if you’d be disfigured? Of course I remembered. But she remembered because it haunted her. She feared she’d left me badly.

Melanoma on my cheek, crept in beneath all the foundation, blush, and baby oil. Shouldn’t have been a surprise after growing up at the beach. For some time, the little demon had lurked innocent enough, like a mild-mannered spot of age rather than death come to visit. But it won out every time I tried to conceal it. It messed with my palette of golden matte and rosy shimmer, and I wanted it gone. And it was a strange irony that my desire for no spot left me with a hole, saved me.

At the plastic surgeon’s office, I sat stoic as the doctor poked my face with needles. You’re going to be just fine, he said. Comforting to hear, but what was the poor guy supposed to say? He must have honed his reassurances as much as his cuts and stitches. On one of my last visits, his nurse told me how unglued many patients were when they showed up there. Those like me, not seeking perfection, but salvation. And I thought about how they managed the mismatched flow of us. The gulf between we who hoped to just hang on to what we’d known of ourselves and they who believed a tuck or lift would be a new wish for themselves made true in the mirror. They mingling with us who were petrified of our reflections. But maybe we were all more alike than I realized, all of us with our wounds, our own kind of desperation.

As the handsome doctor and his attractive nurse readied for surgery, I gazed out the window to the cloudless sky, then inside to the glint of steel beneath the snowy towels, to the gleam of the wood cabinets, the polish of the spanking floors. Everything so taint-less. And it felt like a kind of heaven, a deciding place where my body was only a quaint memory.

***

Days later, bandage off, I look in the mirror and see a blood-black gorge on my cheek. I think about my friends who’d had breast cancer and the accompanying chemo and how, with a mix of resignation and defiance, they scarfed their heads. In their eyes, you could see how they no longer cared what anyone thought. Now, like my friends, there was no hiding. This was the best face I had to put forward.

Preparing for my first trip out, I dab on as much cover-up as possible ,then throw the tube in the drawer. The line cannot be made away. I can’t make up anything about it. Still, beyond its craggy edges, there’s a face I recognize. The child, the girl, the woman, her made-up eyes, her hopeful eyes, her worried eyes. She’s old and she’s young. Always, I see something of her that’s young. Yet today her gaze is a kind of holy serene.

***

There’s only a trace now, a shadowy remnant detected in certain lights, that in some small mercy, I hardly ever notice. It’s evidence though. Proof of life. Many mornings I go to the mirror and through the ritual of primer cream and blush stick, of which shadow to choose. Of lipstick. I think of Linda and her talent, her ability to accentuate the positive. I flick greying strands from my shoulder and decide on the Rum Punch Matte, a purple pink of sunset.

-Gina Harlow

Gina Harlow is a writer (among other things) living in Southern California who longs for many places. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Austin Statesman, Narratively, The Hunger, Entropy and Janus Literary. Her work in progress is a long story about a young horse. Links to her writing can be found at www.ginaharlowwrites.com