I and Myself
written by: Molly Wadkins
I met her in the mirror. During my youth she mocked my funny faces, the loll of a sucker-stained tongue, and wide eyes. We bared our teeth as my mom said, “Don’t forget the backs,” and my mouth filled with toothpaste that always tasted of fruit, never the boring adult pang of spearmint.
When we drove down the street at night, I’d catch her racing along under the streetlights, her doe eyes pressed near mine, the pink headphones trailing down and getting lost in the down of her coat. On the sidewalk, she was my companion, trotting as an obedient dog, shifting between the reflections of shop windows and the stretch inside my shadow.
I loved her, almost as much as my mother did. I loved the way her nostrils flared, the way her bottom lip tugged towards her chin, the way her chin rounded as though it embraced her face. I loved her until she began to change. I loved her until I couldn’t stand the sight of her. Until I buried her, and I didn’t love her again until I buried someone else.
It started when Carl Scarborough turned to me in homeroom and when I politely informed him I didn’t have a spare pencil for the test, sorry, he pressed the tip of his nose up and snorted.
Heat scorched my cheeks as nearby students laughed. In the mirror, the girl I knew bore a pig snout from then on, a twitching, fleshy mess with errant hairs. We were sixteen, on the cusp of realization that we were embroiled in the discovery of ourselves, and everyone wanted to have the answers first. What we’d become, what we’d look like, who’d we marry. I just wanted to paint with dried colors beneath my fingernails and to say the correct things to make my mother smile again.
Instead of taking to art when I arrived home, however, I went to the mirror and stared at my nose. I must have stood there a long while because Mom showed up wearing a scrub top and her pajama pants under her faded robe. It had been my father’s, so worn that a gap yawned at the shoulder, the frayed threads gnarled teeth.
“Ella? What are you doing?”
“Do I have a big nose?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s beautiful.”
My mother was an emergency room nurse, and never one to shy away from a brutal truth. Realizing this was the certified wrong answer for a teenager, she slumped into the doorframe and sighed.
“You don’t have to have small, delicate features to be beautiful. You’ll get that a lot in school. I did.”
The same big nose I’d been mocked for sat in her face, a face I’d loved and admired for so long. I hated Carl for tainting that, for the embarrassment of loving her features because they were mine.
“I think school is a bit different now.”
“Ella, it’s all the same. Always. You’ll never have the right body or face. Paint, study, be happy anyway.”
Wisdom dispensed, she squeezed past me and snatched her toothbrush.
“Late for work,” she mumbled, half to herself.
Julia Romero was an artist, too. When thinking of a list of people to help with my swine-like affliction, I placed her top of the list for both her skill and her kindness. Everyone knew social media paid her just for wearing brand-name clothes and looking pretty. Though I didn’t sit on a throne of popularity, people liked me enough that I didn’t feel like a complete beggar approaching her.
This is how my childhood died. This is how the funny faces in the mirror stopped, and I kept my mouth closed the best I could when I brushed. Julia brought over an arsenal and went to war on my face, carving and shaping my nose, hollowing out my cheeks, and giving a bend to the spine of my eyebrows until they looked like a startled cat. Her methodology spoke of patience and routine, no hesitation on what plane of my face to bully into submission next. Her weapons covered the entirety of my vanity.
“You’ve been doing this awhile,” I said. “I don’t think I can remember all these steps.”
“It takes practice,” she agreed. “Lots of time. I get up three hours before school.”
The thought almost sprang tears to my eyes, but I remembered the fragility of my new mask.
“That’s…a lot of work.”
“It is. But it feels like the me without makeup is the wrong me now. Like she’s the one I have to erase.”
In the mirror, my faithful friend was locked away in the blend of blush and bronzer. The pig nose had been contoured into a human-like shape, my small eyes enlarged, and my hair parted to hide my ears that Maggie Turner said reminded her of Dumbo.
We were still doubles, the reflection and I, but better, more acceptable. We were strangers embarking on a first encounter, shy and peeking at one another.
“It’s addicting, erasing flaws,” Julia said when she caught my stare in the glass. “There’s nothing wrong with makeup. Nothing at all. But sometimes I forget-”
A real blush bled beneath her artificial pink. I waited in silence as she returned to the task, memorizing every stroke of her deft hand, until I could meet my eyes again in the mirror. Until I was beautiful enough to not be mocked.
Carl Scarborough didn’t apologize, but the next day he offered a candy bar from the vending machine, eyes sweeping my hair to the denim stretched on my thighs.
“Busted thing gave me an extra,” he said with a shrug.
Kindness came in droves. To our class I was still Ella, but better. To strangers I was new, and no me existed before the beautiful creature that buried itself under filters and smoothing edits. That started when Julia offered to help me set up social media, then scoffed when I showed her my account.
“You are super talented.” Her lacquered nails clicked against the phone screen as she scrolled the display of pastels and oil paintings. “But you know how you’d get more attention for your art? If you showed your face.”
A pig squeal rang through my ears.
“I don’t know if-”
“No, this face.” She waved at my new mask, the one I’d worn to school for weeks. The one that made Carl pass me a candy bar. Sensing the hurt, she sighed.
“Ella, you are lovely. But on social media, beautiful is average.” She waved my phone, blurring the colors of my artwork on the screen. “Your talent is nothing. You have to stand out and bring lots to the table. Being you isn’t enough anymore.”
Her tutelage carried me through high school. I learned to paint my face and paper with the same zeal. My mom said there was a line, and I was aware of that. Except the line had been misplaced. When she spoke, I stared at the riverbeds yawning empty across her forehead, the deep brackets around her mouth. Botox calculations ran through my head, along with curses for genetics.
Because Julia was right; when I began to post my face, when I made videos and showed pouting expressions as I pondered blank paper, the attention swept me into sponsorship and gifts, a bank account with regular deposits. By the time I graduated, I didn’t see much cause to pursue any further education.
My art prints sold and my face helped sell them. When I first awoke and looked into the mirror, I avoided my eyes until I could stomach the true features of my face bleeding through. When Carl took my virginity at eighteen, I waited for him to fall asleep before removing my makeup. Then I set an alarm to be up before him, to apply my basics.
“God, you are hot even without all that stuff.”
I had $200 worth of product on my face, but I gave him a demure thanks cradled by a bashful grin. Not long after, I stopped looking at my mother’s face when she spoke, unable to stand the crinkles by her eyes, knowing they were a prophecy for my own vanity. When I passed strangers on the streets, I wondered about them, if they slid from one form to another and loved both the same. How they managed it, how they kept themselves from weeping at their pores or the shrink of their eyes against the mottle of their cheekbones.
I was thirty years old and in Paris when my mother died, because taking pictures somewhere exotic was good for social media. When I answered the call, standing in the Louvre, I realized two things in rapid succession, the first being that I had not truly taken in the art around me, instead trying to frame it best in my camera lens as the background to my face.
The second thing was that I had not seen her in two years. We’d kept in touch, but she’d never figured out video chats, and the coffee mug in her hand stayed full. She’d needed me too after Dad died, but we’d both sequestered ourselves away in addiction. At that moment I wanted to see her face more than I wanted to see any Van Gogh or Delacroix. She was, after all, the last person to love me underneath the paint.
A red-eye flight sent me soaring back to America. One troubled flight attendant named Daisy brought me tissue packet after tissue packet, her frown deepening with each delivery. Halfway into the flight, she pressed a bourbon into my hands and I cried harder, thinking of how my mother’s coffee mug would never be filled again, and if it had been empty in the first place, she might not have died.
In my hometown, I sat down in a hardback chair across from the portly funeral director. His heft spilled over the arms of his own chair, his buttons straining to keep the fabric of his clothing together. “Closed casket.” He wiped at his brow with a lace handkerchief. Embroidered, of course. Everything in the office stank of solem riches. “It’s for the best.”
Of course, she’d been drinking and driving. Of course, she’d still been wearing her wedding band. Of course, she’d tried to call me ten times in rapid succession, mere hours before her time of death was pronounced. Of course, I didn’t answer, too busy trying to find the right lay of silk sheets over my legs for a picture.
“I wanted to see her,” I whispered.
“I’m terribly sorry. It’s best you don’t.”
“I understand.”
Except I didn’t. I returned to my hotel room gulping down screams. Papers rained onto the floor from my trembling hands. I swept into the bathroom, heaving. Makeup covered the counter. With a vicious sweep of my arm, I sent it careening around the small space. Compacts ricocheted off the walls. A tube of lipstick fell into the toilet with an almost comical geyser of toilet water. Gasping, I looked to the mirror, at the wild creature born of guilt, and saw, just there, a glimpse of my mother.
“Wipes,” I muttered. A frantic desperation seized my heart in its talons. “Wipes, wipes, WIPES!”
I held them aloft, beaming, then wavering into hysterical laughter. Great, I’d lost it. The laughter returned to sobbing. The tears slid down my face as bit by bit, I deconstructed the mask.
Mom, in the small curve of my eyes. Mom, in the upturned nose. Mom, in the bottom lip. And, there, yes. Mom, in the faint beginning of wrinkles in the creases of my eyes.
“There you are, Mommy,” I whispered, and there were cracks in my voice and cracks in my face, and I had never loved deconstruction more than I did until I stared at my mother, a phoenix in the hollows of my imperfections.
My double, patiently waiting for me to return.
- I and Myself - July 21, 2024
