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.
 

The US Mint keeps bugging me about coming in to have my portrait done. I told them, Lincoln’s head has been on the penny for 200 years, it can wait a little longer, but they’re adamant. The guy who called about it is a real asshole. He’s obviously looking to score, just like everyone else. It’s been this way since I won the Miss Universe pageant. Which, you know, I was proud of, but not as proud as I was when I single-handedly prevented the economic collapse of Antigua, or when I won the Nobel prize for my latest novel, a heartbreaking story of two small dogs who found their way home after being abandoned at a Canadian Laundromat. But it’s the Miss Universe pageant they all remember me for. I don’t know when a sash and crown became the universal symbol for "hey! Let’s all fondle this woman in the name of worldwide brotherhood!," but I for one don’t condone it.
 The man from the mint tells me that the picture I sent in "would be good enough," but he thinks the only way my face can be rendered into legal tender properly is to come in for a sitting. Sure, I cut a striking profile, he tells me, but wouldn’t it be something if I stared straight out of the coin, hypnotizing the American tax-payer with my awesome beauty? It didn’t really work for Susan B. Anthony, I counter. But she looked nothing like you, he assures me. Asshole.

 It took a lot of convincing on his part to get me on a coin at all. First he wanted to give me the dime, but I said no way. If anyone should have the dime, it should be Roosevelt. I mean, what did Truman do? Drop the atomic bomb. Good for him. So I think he’s looking into having Truman scrapped. It’s amazing the power of suggestion I have over people. Then he tried to foist me off on the nickel, and I said no way, buddy. If there’s one coin I don’t want to be affiliated with, it’s that fat waste—worth only five pennies, practically useless except when making long distance phone calls from smoke-darkened gas stations. No thank you.

 So he was about to create a whole new coin for me when I, being the diplomat that I am, suggested that he put me on the penny. Lincoln already has the five dollar bill, I reasoned. Why should the Great Emancipator waste away on a tarnished disc of copper when he’s worth five hundred times that on paper? Of course, the Mint man knew I was right.

 So now I have to waste some of my valuable time, time I could be spending building huts for insect-addled poor children in Guatemala, flying down to D.C., so I can be raised in bas relief on the penny. Quite a step down from the thousand dollar bill I grace in Antigua, where my name is spoken only with the utmost reverence, and my picture hangs in every dining room so that I may be properly thanked for the meals my economic plan have brought to the collective Antiguan table. But I am more than happy to see my face in the change I receive when buying gauze to donate to burn victims at my local hospital. Because I am humble.
 

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 they 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 Lizzie Bordens and Hulk Hogans, 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 had I been 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 as black people used to accept being called Colored, 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 and educational software, which was promptly thrown away. "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.
 

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 never had a beautiful friend, 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 none 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. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.
 

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.
There is nothing to be done. When you are homely, you stay homely for life, like a member of a street gang. I know I will never be pretty. No one will ever ask me for beauty tips. I can get by on my personality. Because it’s not looks that matter, right?
 
I’ve learned it is best just to lie to myself.
 

I turned down the sitting at the Mint after all. The man I talked to on the phone greeted me at Dulles with a sign and a bouquet, ushering me to the limousine as pair after pair of tourist eyes, so dull, like a cow’s, jogged after me, begging "please! Pick me! Touch me as you pass!" I didn’t touch anyone, except a little crippled boy, whose limbs untwisted before my very eyes.

Once we got to Mint, a giant compound, smelling of money—not too unlike my own house—he took me upstairs to a small room, its windows draped with red velvet. The walls were lined with presidential portraits, framed bills of different denominations, like tiny works of art. This was the ‘art’ room, he told me. And wasn’t it hot in there? Wouldn’t I be more comfortable in this, the gown of Lady Liberty?

No, I wouldn’t. This was to be a facial portrait only; although my body is stunning, it has no place on the back of a child’s first allowance. He frowned admirably and told me the artist would be right in, leaving the gown in case I changed my mind. Retiring, I suspect, to the bathroom, he dealt with his desire for me the only way he could, the only way he ever had, like millions of American men.
Hands in the pockets of my perfectly cut Versace blazer, I perused the mini portraits: Jackson, Lincoln, Franklin, homely men, all. Jefferson and Truman shone from their silvery pools, but no amount of glitter could mask their high foreheads, their receding hairlines, the little rat-tail protruding from the base of Jefferson’s skull. How could I align myself with these men, with their poochy jowls and wide, flared noses? No; I will not be appearing on anyone’s penny.

I may be humble, but I am also beautiful.