Homely Alone

Kim Shable

 

I don’t know exactly who first came up with the standard of beauty. It could have been the caveman, choosing as his mate the woman with the least amount of hair on her breasts, the shapeliest forehead, the thickest eyebrows.

            Oh, to be a woman in caveman times.

            Unfortunately for me, the fact that my breasts are relatively free of hair, or that my eyebrows reach an almost tropical lushness if not often attended to, does little to attract a mate, or even to be given prompt service at a Burger King, for that matter.

            I am homely. Hear me roar.

            Note that I don’t say ugly; no, ugly is a word reserved for circus freaks, for women with mustaches and men with goiters on their necks. Queen Victoria was ugly. Queen Elizabeth is homely. Richard Nixon. There have been no ugly presidents, but plenty of homely ones. Bea Arthur is homely, Mickey Rooney. Neil Diamond, Ted Koppel (not Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, not outwardly; but Tom’s got a speech impediment and Pete’s Canadian—inner homeliness.) There are plenty of homely actors, but no homely actresses, unless you count Katharine Hepburn, but she’s more frightening than homely.

I am a rare breed, a homely young person. Almost everyone is homely, but most of the youth can keep it a secret until their forties. There are others like me, I’m sure, but they have been better trained in the art of camouflage, in rouging and dressing and mimicking the lithe ballerina women who waft around them like eager myna birds, their dull black feathers hidden under a designer sweater set and Gap chinos. I can see through these women, these members of the secret society of the not-so-pretty, the big-boned, the tire-wasted. It’s in their eyes, a half-smug, half-terrified smolder; they’ll enjoy it while they can, but they’ll be caught eventually. One day, they’ll wake up, their makeup destroyed in a tragic bathroom accident, their Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts betraying their winter blubber.

           

            At work yesterday: another receptionist and I argue over who will ask the moving man to put the discarded cabinets in her truck. She wants the cabinets, she needs them. Her boyfriend loves them. She is tall and blonde, has a tattoo spanning her back. Her boyfriend loves her.

            The moving man comes in and I ask him if he’ll help her. Homely girls can ask anything they want, because they never expect to get it. He looks at me, and then at her, and agrees.

            Our boss comes down later, sees the moving men loading up the cabinets. “Of course they’d do it for you,” she says to the blonde girl. “You’re so tall and beautiful.”

            “Actually,” she says, “Kim asked. Kim got him to do it.”

            “Oh.” My boss looks at me, up and down, checks me out, and smiles. “You… you’re good with people.”

 

It’s hard to say what constitutes homeliness. A general awkwardness, a chimp in an evening gown competing for Miss America’s crown. It’s easier to define it as the absence, but not the opposite, of beauty—magazine beauty, easy, breezy, beautiful Cover Girl beauty. With my rubberized stomach, pizza-poor skin and dustpuff-dull hair, I am homeliness’ poster girl, and have been for a long, long time, since before “ugly” became politically incorrect. I was a homely baby, and I grew into a homely child, who matured into a homely teen.

            No one will ever tell you you’re homely. When pressed, your mother will tell you that you’re beautiful inside—there’s a sign. Your insides are black and slimy, filled with shit and bile. If your mother—as my mother did—thinks your insides are more beautiful than your outward appearance, you’re in big trouble.

            The most frightening thing about homeliness is that you must discover it on your own, like a lump discovered during a shower examination. Young homely people remain engulfed in a placenta, invisibly surrounding them with a thin layer of absolute ignorance until the day—which, not uncoincidentally, is almost always in the sixth grade—that the placenta is punctured and they come face to face with the absolute unprettiness that is their lives.

            For me that moment came on a fateful January day, when, given two options by my mother—the utter embarrassment of wearing a floor length brown cardigan sweater given to me by my grandmother for Christmas or living the rest of my life knowing I had turned my back on my grandmother’s precious, precious gift, thereby disgracing my family name for generations to come-- I stupidly chose to sport the sweater. Were I given a chance to relive the moment, I would laugh in my mother’s face, throw the vile sweater to the ground theatrically, spit on it, and take my place among the millions of cowards and ne’er-do-wells whose mothers’ heads drooped with shame. But being only ten years old, I Did What I Was Told, and toddled off to school, ignorant for the last time to my homeliness.

            The rest of the story is short, though its repercussions shake me every time I try to style my hair, make up my face, dress myself well. Once my tight knot of curls, a duller, darker version of the permed hair of elderly bingo fanatics and church organists, passes through the neck hole of my Gap button-down, my department store dress shirt, my sleek black dress, it becomes The Sweater, a brown and shapeless thing, thrusting my homeliness outward like a sonic blast instead of cloaking it, absorbing it, as something so dense and voluminous should. My clothes are no longer the bomb shelter, but the bomb.

            But I didn’t know this then; I wasn’t born with that sort of instinct. I knew ten ways to vacuum a plush carpet, and twenty to hide my teeth in pictures, but no one had ever taught me the gentle art of style. And more importantly, no one ever told me my style was wrong. In fact, it seems a miracle now that I got as far as I did in school without such an incident; by right, I should have been accosted long before for my predisposition for men’s T-shirts, size extra-extra-large, which I used to camouflage my preternaturally large breasts, or for my unfortunate decision to begin wearing floppy-brimmed hats to class, black ones, with big silk flowers sewn onto the front. Hats that, when worn, absorbed the fashion sins of others into the inky blackness of the wrinkled, lopsided brims, making everyone around me look as though they had slunk from the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, even in their overalls and discount store shoes.

            But it was the sweater that finally got their attention, or, more specifically, Mike Marcin’s attention, in fourth period home economics that day. I was hunched over a flowered piece of cloth, intently sewing a button onto it like the housewife I will never be, avoiding the eyes of others. “Yes,” I seemed to say to the world, “this button sewing business is fascinating, isn’t it? My, my.” But I could feel the sweater glowing on me like the burning bush, burning but not burning, and someone would see the light.

            That someone was, as it always was, Mr. Michael Marcin, my mortal enemy, thrower of dodge balls and stinging truths, who found himself drawn to my sweater as my needle was to the black hole of the button’s loop.

            “Hey.” He slapped my knee for emphasis, a jolly tap that sent my fabric stuttering to the floor. “Nice. Sweater.”

            He always paused between every word he said, as if to make up for his lack of wit with the added oomph of empty air.

            “My grandma got it for me.”

            “Aww.” He nudged his companion, Jordy Comaccio, for whom I always felt sorry because his name was Jordy, a homely name. It didn’t seem to hinder him. Jordy snickered. “How sweet, huh? Her. Grandma.”

            “It looks like a bathrobe.” Jordy scanned me with a leer, as he would have a centerfold in one of his father’s secret stash of Playboys.

            “Hey,” Mike said. “At school you wear school clothes, Ugly. Not bath clothes.”

            At this time Ugly was my second name; I accepted it, knowing I was more than the impossibly gigantic red glasses and snarled teeth that seemed to comprise my face. If it made him feel better about himself, I had no problem with it. I could transcend.

            “It looks like your afro.” Jordy again. He nodded his head approvingly of his analogy. I looked around without looking, a skill I acquired from years of torment. To be seen looking for a teacher when in distress only increased the level of taunting, as if the label of teacher’s pet had been sewn into the back of the nefarious sweater, as well. I saw no one, just the chugging washers and dryers and the neatly sewn buttons of others resting neatly on brown plastic tables.

            “It does!” Someone else now, one of their compatriots, whose grandmothers gave them money for Christmas, gave them violent video games. “It does. It looks like someone shaved her fucking head and made a bathrobe out of it.”

            And thus, Afro Bathrobe, Queen of 1990, was born. 

Anxious to escape their droning chant—Afro Bathrobe, drawn out like sheep being slaughtered by a lion—I dashed into the bathroom, where I saw myself for the first time without the pleasantly thick gauze of the placenta before me—a homely girl, all lip and tight curl and breast and height.

But at least they had made me their queen.

 

I cling to the knowledge that my calves and feet are perfect. No one could ask for better calves than mine, so smooth, muscled, slim but strong, ending with these feet culled from royalty, with long slim toes and elegant shape. I sleep a little easier knowing that at least one-fifth of my body fits the social norm.

The rest of me, though, is wrong. Like a five-year-old disassembled it without his parents’ permission and put it back together, leaving parts out, the pieces that remain dusted with lint from the carpeting. When I was younger, ten, maybe, I had the body of a supermodel, huge breasts, flat stomach, thin toned thighs that flashed when I ran in the sun. But then, on top of it all, I had this head, this jack-in-the-box head, like a transplant from the homely factory. Like someone had cut off a supermodel’s head and replaced it with that of a doll that’s been played with too much.

Then, when my head was fixed—contact lenses, nice straight smile, hair long and curly like a flaming mane—the body revolted, became revolting, puffed out and sagged and aged. It looked at the clothes I wanted and did the opposite. “You want that tank top?” it said. “You want that strapless dress? Here. You wear this yellow suit with shoulder pads instead.”

When you are homely, your clothes don’t hang right. They drape, they bunch, they cling like cobwebs to sacks of potatoes. Even tailored clothes, even bathing suits. Your clothes know that you are homely, and don’t want to be seen with you. They envy the clothes of the size six girl and want you to feel their envy. They become brown sweaters like bathrobes, and everyone can see it.

I guess some of it I brought on myself. To hide my breasts I wore men’s shirts, sized extra, extra large. To hide my long neck I wore cowled sweaters. I never wore belts. I wore shoes—these shoes, these slip-on monstrosities from K-Mart, priced $1.99—that even the blind knew were not fashion-forward. All for the sake of comfort. And then my stomach grew to match the shirts, and my neck shrank down into my shoulders. But my feet, God bless my feet, and my calves, they went about their lives oblivious to what was going on three, four stories up. They are amazing, like a restored basement on a dilapidated townhouse.

 

At band practice one day: a friend’s mother looks at my shoes, brand new, and smiles. “You have such tiny feet for such a big girl.”

Homely finds homely, as a general rule. Behind our speckled foreheads and thick brows we have a magnet that draws us to each other, allows us to float beauty-blind into each other’s company. I have had only a handful of beautiful friends, and very few pretty ones. My friends are almost always tree-trunk thick, solid, as if made entirely of flesh, without bone or blood or inner workings, just stuffing, like dolls. Some are painfully thin, a human vein. But few have The Shape, necessary for furthering oneself in the world, a physical résumé—experience in thigh toning, butt building, waist whittling. Special skills: looking sexy in hot pants. We are like factory seconds, almost perfect, but imperceptibly wrong, and discounted. But when we finally find each other—some, like myself, sitting hunched over my sewing as if to make myself as invisible as the thread binding button and fabric, are easier to spot than others— we band together and become the norm, the standard of beauty: sweatpants and T-shirts and naked faces creased with cynical smiles. We, the homely, pass judgment on the ugly, the only tier lower than us.

It’s really surprising to me that we talk about ugliness so much, having been subjected to critiques of our own beauty for middle school eons. But it comes up shamefully often in our conversation.

“That girl,” one of us will begin, dangling a forkful of spaghetti in front of her like a mother bird bringing home worms to her babies, “has the single largest ass I have ever seen.”

At this, we all turn to survey the owner of the ass, unconscious to the fact that our own spreads are roughly the size of Belgium. She is as thin as the spaghetti that still dangles, uneaten, from the fork, but in proportion to her body… Indeed, her ass is huge! We congratulate ourselves for having spotted such an obvious slap in the face of human decency. Thank God someone spotted the ass! And thank God we were able to bear witness to its elephantine proportions!

We do not talk of marriage, or of love. We are far too busy judging for that.

 

Homely girls are every man’s sister. As in, “you’re just like a sister to me.” As in you wouldn’t take your sister to the prom, wouldn’t kiss your sister at the movies, wouldn’t let her hold your hand when you walked down the street together, but you love her anyway. Just like a sister.

Maybe other homely girls date. They must. I see them, resting their hands on the backs of tall, worthy men, these big fat girls, their faces cockeyed and wide. And I think: what am I doing wrong? I devise a checklist: I am funny. Check. Intelligent. Check. I know about football, about fishing, I can play an instrument, I am nice to old people, I look good holding a baby, can burp discreetly, have been known to sing along to rap songs, watched Star Trek as a child, am a good goalie, can throw a ball fast and hard. I should be every man’s dream. But instead, I am every man’s sister.

Does your sister listen like I do? Does she wear low-cut shirts when she knows she’ll see you? Does she unlock the car door for you after she gets in? Does she let you choose what’s on the radio? Maybe you should take another look at your sister.

I asked a man out once, tired of waiting. He had taken me somewhere—somewhere that didn’t matter, a department store, or a dollar movie—and it had seemed real, in my head: a man, and me. Out in public, together, and the world doesn’t know, doesn’t know we’re not together. “I had a nice time with you tonight,” I said, like I had seen men do in movies to other women, normal women, attractive women. “Maybe we should go out some time.”

And he looked around my room, his eyes rolling in his head. A good two minutes passed. “Do you have any Kleenex?” he said.

So we didn’t go out.

But later, he talked to me about the other girls he liked, the girls who ignored him or led him on, and leaned against me and sighed. “If only they were more like you,” he said. Unsaid: “But not you.”

 

From the director the latest local production of Bye Bye Birdie, when I asked why I had been cast in such a small role, came the news that I was just not pretty enough or thin enough to be successful on stage. So, I became a writer.

 

An old photograph: me and my mom and my cousin, my pretty cousin who was pretty then and is pretty now, standing in front of an old-now, new-then Grand Am. My hair is short on top, long in the back, just like my mom’s, and I sneer at the stuffed dog my father has won for my cousin at the amusement park that day. Her dog is cuter than my bear, in its checked sweater and formless matching hat. My face is puffed and sneery—I have been crying, getting salt all over my matching pink tank top and shorts. Everyone in this picture is happy but me. I am a homely girl with a homely bear, and they don’t even care.

            Another photograph: my mom and me at a dock in Delaware, waiting to board the night-time dolphin cruise. She is wearing mirrored sunglasses that you can see my dad in. She is the centerpiece of this picture—I must have stuck my head in at the last second, looking to all the world, and preserved on film, as a mental defective with a perfectly round head, snarled teeth, crazy black-slit eyes behind ridiculously, clownishly large glasses, my forehead contracting with the effort of the open-mouthed smile I use to welcome the world. The world, I am sure, is afraid I’m going to eat them, just as I’m afraid they’re going to eat me.

            And another—I point at an Easter egg, green, covered in glitter—hideous, the egg and me, both. I’m wearing a sweater under a jumpsuit, and my mouth looks wrong, punched in and healed badly. My hair cut so close to my head that I look like the survivor of something ghastly. But it’s the sweater-jumpsuit combo that gets me. I was only a little girl then, right, no control over the clothes I wore, right? My parents, did they love me at all?

 

            A woman comes in to the spa where I work to get her nails done, a pretty woman who wants me to get her some water. And when I come back with the water, she’s already begun telling the manicurist, a pretty woman in a white coat like a doctor of beauty, how she needs to get her thirteen-year-old daughter a facial appointment, because she does not understand the importance of good skin care, because she has a blackhead on her nose that made her father sick, because she needs help, and she needs it now. Later, she said, she would be taking her daughter on a tour of the plastic surgeon’s office, just to let her see what options were available to her.

            Her parents—do they love her at all?

           

One last photograph, taken years, a decade, maybe more, than all the others. Me, in a restaurant, or a bar—someplace dark— smiling wide, my teeth straight now, my glasses gone. Gone the big shirt, the skim of hair, the pocked skin, the terror. Here, now, in this bar, this restaurant, is someone new, someone different, with long, curled hair that shines under unseen lights, almond eyes that laugh—yes, like women in romance novels, these clichéd eyes that I have hoped for for so long laugh—and breasts built for the resting of heads, yes, oh yes, I am beautiful.

But not beautiful. Because the girl in this photograph still went home alone. Because they know, the men know, everyone knows. Because these other photographs, old photographs, are still me. They are how I was, and they must be how I still am, just like the alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink in fifteen years is still an alcoholic. And when I look in a mirror, I don’t see the girl in this picture, the stranger in this picture who might have been a beautiful child, who grew into a beautiful girl. I see a girl who doesn’t belong in the clothes that she’s wearing, who doesn’t deserve the hair that she’s got, or the friends, or the respect, because she is too homely. I see a girl who’s good with people, who has such tiny feet for such a big girl, who’s just not pretty enough or thin enough to be successful on stage. I see this girl, and I smile at her, like she’ll eat me and I’ll eat her, and I admire her personality, because it’s not looks that matter. Right?