A Brief History of Beauty
Nina Sharma
“Don’t tell anyone, but the boys in school tease me for my mustache,” said my nine-year-old niece.
“I’m sorry. You know that just means they are insecure.”
“Oh. Well then I feel bad for them.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“If I tell them, they will say wax it. I don’t want to. Did it ever happen to you?”
“Yes, boys and girls. And you know what, those same boys would ask me out on dates years later.”
“Did you go?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
I lied. Those boys didn’t ask me out. Long after the blond girl stopped taunting “Amazon woman” at my eleven-year-old hairy legs, thick pubic, armpit, and upper-lip hair in the shower after gym, long after I started going to the waxing lady working out of the back of a sari shop and then to the many others waxers and waxing parlors that cropped up in my town afterwards, the boys didn’t ask me out.
I lived the kind of life I imagined I was supposed to live. Not the life of the ugly, but of the not-as-beautiful. I was the funny one. The thinker. The one generous with money, time, and patience, infinite patience for white suburban teens especially.
At home, my father would twist his face so it lost all symmetry. The lips a disheveled pout, one eyebrow slanting up and the other down, head cocked to the side. He put on a gruff voice.
This was my mother. This was how he saw his wife.
Sometimes there was no twisted face. There was just him watching some movie with a pretty woman saying, “I should have married a woman like that, not you.”
I would let out a laugh—a full-throated “Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman” type of cackle, an unabashed laugh, a sexy laugh, a laugh like my life depended on it.
When I was a toddler, my older sisters lined me up with stuffed animals, placing me in the center. “We’d pretend you were our doll.”
At twelve I began to go to a child psychiatrist, I was worried about what was real and what was a picture—scared of movie monsters in particular. I just wanted to cry. My father drove me home. “You are like the story of the ugly duckling,” he said to comfort me.
For my thirteenth birthday, the blond girl who called me “Amazon woman” bought me lingerie, a see-through maroon Calvin Klein bra-and-panty set. She demanded to know which boy I liked.
I was reluctant to tell her about the boy. It was not a secret as much as it was an issue of permission. Am I allowed to be that kind of girl? The one with a romance life, with a body?
That blond girl would grow out all of her body hair, dye her blonde locks blue, and begin to ardently follow white-boy-hippie-bands like Phish.
I wore a low-cut dress from a vintage shop to junior prom. I loved myself in it. Next year, the white girls would take me shopping at Macy’s, where they’d find me a “proper gown,” as they put it.
A white boy reluctantly took me to senior prom. I was going to go alone; our friends suggested we pair up. We dated through my first year of college.
“Who do you love more, him or me?” my father demanded once over the phone. I burst into tears; he just yelled the question louder. “Who do you love more, him or me?”
At the start of my sophomore year, I had a manic break. I walked around campus for twenty-four hours straight asking questions and expressing worries to any passing stranger. My mom drove me back to New Jersey from Rhode Island. “Where are we going?” I asked when I saw her turning off of the expected route. We were going to the salon. I had not slept in days and the last shower I took was before I went in-patient. “I can’t have you looking like this if I want to introduce to suitable boys.”
When Babita raked a thread across me, my whiskers came undone from their roots.
That night I cut my long curly hair short with a pair of desk scissors. My mother came into the room and cried.
Waking up in a hospital bed after the first time I tried to kill myself, with pills, I saw my mother with a hairbrush in her hand.
Felt the tug of the hairbrush trying to make a part out of my curly hair.
Felt the sting of the hair-straightening formaldehyde trying to deaden the curls.
Felt the crack and thaw of a burn scar on the lip when the wax was too hot.
Felt the thread string like an incessant paper cut, as grating as the woman who would make conversation saying, “You are Punjabi? Aren’t
Punjabis cheap?”
I gained forty pounds on one medication, acne on another, lost my appetite on one more—around that time I straightened my hair.
My Dad’s macho friend said, “Wow, what beautiful eyebrows on this girl.”
A friend’s mother said, “You are beautiful but you do not know it yet.”
My oldest sister said, “I wish I could take an eraser to your face, to your acne marks.”
When I returned to school, another school, I wore my hair long and straight and spent two hours every few weeks in a waxing parlor and nail salon getting dehaired and shiny-fingered. After a night out, I tried to hail a cab with two white women. “Caroline should do it, she’s prettier,” Lisa said to me.
In my thirties, I text this new guy I started dating:
“I’ll go with you. I’ll be that something nice on your arm.”
“Someone,” he texted back, “You’ll be that someone beautiful with me.”
On the eve of my wedding to this man, my oldest sister asks me, “Nina, if he’s black, then why is his skin so light?” I begin to cry. “Does he have Europeans in his blood?” I cry louder. “I’m only asking how he has Europeans in his blood, geez.” My middle sister comes in running, scolding our elder sister: “Don’t talk to her like that! Hello! Bipolar disorder!” she says without looking at my face.
“A Brief History of Beauty” was first published by the Feminist Press in WSQ: Beauty, volume 46, numbers 1 & 2, spring/summer 2018.
Original Article: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690845