Chapter Twenty-Three

Beauty, I read somewhere, is in the eye of the beholder. What a bunch of shit that saying is. Beauty is whatever is in fashion. Paging through the many teen magazines at the Supermarket, I did not see one fat-faced, big-nosed, pimpled girl with braces on any of the covers. All I saw was Brooks Shields smiling with dimples, and wavy lustrous brown hair-- so people made fun of her thick eyebrows. At least she made it on the cover of Vogue, that’s more than anyone I know could say. The closest I ever got to having my picture on the cover of anything was when I was ten. I had my picture taken with my blonde-haired, perky cousin from southern California and then had it ironed onto the front of a white cotton T-shirt. I wore it all through my fifth grade year at Bethesda. And of course I got teased by the boys. “Wow, are you sure you are related to the blonde next to you, because there is no family resemblance at all. She is pretty and you’re not!” Then the boys would laugh and say, “Well, they got one thing in common - they are both flat as pancakes!”
Mother said I would grow into my face; that it was just something every girl had to go through. She pointed out that when she was my age she was called Bucky Beaver because of her oversized front teeth, and that Nanna had worked long hours in the restaurant pocketing money from Papa in order to put braces on her teeth. Papa, of course, would not contribute a dime to her much needed dental work. Now years later, Nanna is doing the same for me. She is the one who helps pay for the damn steel on my teeth.
“But why are girls so mean?” I cried to her one day when coming home from school. Vickie had started up her comments again, calling me a pimple-face, braced-face, four-eyed freak that should go join a circus. When my Nanna came to pick me up after school, I complained to her that Vicki was at it again with her mean comments. She only laughed and said that one day the tables will be reversed and that she was going to become a fat, short Mexican with sagging boobs. And I was always going to have my height to my advantage because nothing was going to sag on me. “Yeah, Nanna, I got nothing to sag,” I said, pointing at my chest. “Well at least you got one that kind of sags,” she said with a smile. And you know what? I smiled back, because Nanna had said it kindly. Nanna was the only one that really accepted my new look.
She said it was a stage I needed to go through, and that expressing myself was part of growing up, despite how ugly she felt I made myself appear. The only thing she asked me was to never dye my hair black or wear black lipstick, and please, she begged, never wear a dog collar around your neck. Too freaky, she said one evening when she had come back from a friends house who lives near Clark and Sheffield and saw the line of so-called punks lining up to get into Medusas. “Nanna, those people are Goths. I never want to be Goth, I think of myself as a romantic new waver!”
“Whatever, your Mother thought she was some beatnik, with her skin-tight black pants and French Beret.”
“And what were you?” I asked. And then she smiled again, the kind that goes right to her eyes, and she said, “I wanted to be a flapper, but that was past my time, so I just put together my own sense of style by weaving together whatever I could find from my mother’s old Vaudeville costumes. You know, Gianna, you look very much like your great-grandmother Tillie.”
“Really, how so?” I asked.
“Well, you got the same shape of face.”
“Really? Tell me more.”
And then Nanna grew silent, and I let her be and went and watched T.V. One day I was going to find a picture of my great grandmother Tillie and see if my Nanna was telling me the truth.
The next day Marie stopped me in the hall and asked if I wanted to come over to her house after school. She said she missed me and we hadn’t really spent that much time together this whole year, ‘just the two of us’, she said with smile.