North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  I picked up the photographs from China now. I had never defined myself as beautiful. But studying these images — with me, Mom, and Jacob — I saw it. I’d never be classically beautiful, never be modelesque. But I could see what the people who loved me saw.

  I lavished the back of the photograph of me with Peony, the little girl from the orphanage, with a covering of medium, and set us down firmly far to the north of Beautiful. In that grim nursery, I had told Peony we were both handsome. But a better term would have been jolie laide.

  Back in Shanghai’s overcrowded Yu Garden, I had told Jacob that True Beauty connected me with everything. In its presence, something cleansed me like a wash of warm water so that even afterwards, I could appreciate every color and shape, every vista and vignette before me. It had just taken me until this moment, until I created this collage, to realize that the magazine world’s vision of beauty had the exact opposite effect on me, shriveling me so that I only paid attention to my own imperfections.

  Enough with that.

  Physical beauty wasn’t the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North. I preferred my brand of beauty where Norah was more beautiful than any bimbette, and Mom was beautiful whether sized extra-small or extra-large. Where Peony could look at herself in the mirror and murmur, Wow, look at me. Just look at me.

  Now I propped my collage against the wall behind my desk, and I backed up all the way until I stood at the opposite wall and looked, simply looked.

  I nodded once, satisfied.

  Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead. Jolie laide, that’s what I would choose. Flawed, we’re truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.

  Chapter thirty-four

  Theatrum Orbis Terrarum

  IT’S A PRETTY TOUGH AND lonely road, marching to your own drummer. Especially when your father stops you with a horrified “You aren’t going to school like that, are you?”

  “Like what?” I asked, playing dumb. I knew all too well what he was getting at: my naked face poised for its official debut at Kennedy High, thirty-five minutes and counting.

  Bypassing breakfast altogether so I wouldn’t have to stay in the same room with Dad was tempting. But hunger won out. With Mom walking mornings now, she rarely cooked a hot breakfast anymore, not that I was complaining. Mom doing things for herself was the best souvenir we could have brought back from China. I poured cereal into a plastic container that I could eat dry on the way to school. A blah-bland breakfast was a small price to pay for peace.

  “Easy on those carbs,” he said, sipping his antioxidant green tea. “You don’t want to pack on your freshman fifteen before you even start at Western Washington, right?” Chuckle, chuckle.

  Just to spite him, I shook more cereal into my Tupperware, too vigorously as it turned out. Cereal bounced from the container, carbohydrates cascading plentifully onto the floor. I bent to scoop the bits up, and as I straightened, my head whammed into the sharp kitchen island ledge. How many times had any of us hurt ourselves on account of Dad? Even overeating — like Mom — wasn’t that a rebellion that in the end only hurt us?

  What Dad did next, though, made me forget my throbbing head. He waved a white postcard, a matador’s cape of paper. My first thought — and hope — was that it had something to do with Williams College again, maybe asking me to reconsider my decision: please come to our school; we need you.

  “Your appointment card for your next treatment,” said Dad, eyeing my face in that same accusatory way I’ve seen my entire life. As if I had begged in vitro for a birthmark, this personal affront to his sanitized, temperature-controlled world. “Not that any of it’s done much good.”

  It’s my face, I almost automatically retorted. I’ll do what I want with it.

  But as I took the postcard from him, I smelled the aromatic scent of the tea he was drinking. Iron Goddess.

  I thought about the Iron Goddesses I knew: Mom, who had figured out our way into the orphanage. Norah, who had traveled the most dangerous parts of the world in search of the perfect coffee beans, Susannah in search of adventure. Even Karin for all her flaws was absolutely fearless in chasing her dreams. Not one of them clung obstinately to a map, static and out-of-date, when a new, interesting opportunity emerged. Sometimes, they simply let their instincts and intuition guide them.

  “People are going to laugh at you,” Dad warned me flatly.

  There it was, the mapmaker’s warning, an apocalyptical prediction. Sail too far and you’ll drop off the edge of the Earth. Venture into the Unknown and an untold Beast will have you for dinner. But in the end, Dad’s warnings were as false as any fabrication cartographers put forth before him. I thought about Peony, the little girl at the orphanage, who inspected my naked cheek in disbelief, awed that someone like her would dare hold my head up high. How I proclaimed her beautiful. And she me.

  If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields. Isn’t that what compulsive eating was for Mom? And round-the-clock work for Merc? And Dad’s meanness, his sniping, his criticism — wasn’t that just a front to cover his shame? His humiliation?

  “You know something?” I asked, dumbfounded at that thought. I set down the postcard reminder of my next laser treatment, this invitation to continue spiting my father by hurting myself. And now, I told Dad earnestly, “No one knows about the China map.” He blanched before he shook his finger violently in my face, shushing me, his face growing alarmingly red. I plowed on. “I bet the Chinese don’t even know about the China map, Dad. And if they did, they wouldn’t care. So that leaves, who? Five experts in the entire world who remember? Who care? Do they really matter?”

  Deflect, that was my family’s defense mechanism, and that was what Dad did now. As if I had said nothing at all, he snapped, “Your face will never change. You’ve got to know that, correct?”

  There were far worse things than wearing a map of Bhutan on my face for my entire life. Then again, maybe that map was just a temporary fixture, a henna tattoo that would wear off in time, because who knew? In another sixteen years, some genius might invent a new technology that would obliterate my port-wine stain with one (truly unpainful) zap. And then maybe I’d revisit my decision. But for now, I didn’t want blind defiance to define me. Not anymore.

  Throughout history, wars were won and lost based on maps — who had the best maps, who had the inaccurate ones, who owned the boundary lines, who knew the terrain. And I knew the terrain of my family intimately, our private fears, our embarrassing weaknesses, our cached secrets. This time, I knew what to say to my father.

  “But Dad” — finally, I looked at him face full-on — “Dad, I have nothing to hide.”

  I won’t lie by saying that it was easy to leave the house with Dad spluttering behind me, singing his siren’s song of doubt. But that was a cinch compared to getting out of my car to brave even the school parking lot, much less the school itself. Without my protective covering of makeup, I felt exposed and displayed in a way I hadn’t in China. There, no one knew me. And I was fairly positive I’d never see any of them again. But this was school. And these were kids I’d known since preschool. I couldn’t help but stare at myself in the rearview mirror, turning my face from side to side, wondering what people were going to say when they saw me.

  Before I left the house, I had pulled my hair off my face into a high ponytail. A small salvo at Dad to show him that I really couldn’t care less if people laughed at me; what can I say? But now, I slipped the brown ponytail holder off, shook my hair free so that it could veil me if I needed it. As I twisted around to stuff the elastic into the front pocket of my backpack, I saw my collage-map in the backseat.

  I had made an appointment with Magnus for an after-school art lesson in metal today so I could weld the crumpled remains of my car accident to my collage. Funnily, he wasn’
t nearly as scary as his crotchety reputation made him out to be. “Anything for an honorary Twisted Sister,” he had said when I called yesterday. And then more ominously, “Just bring your work.”

  So there was Peony again, looking out at me from our photograph with her cautious, wondering eyes. I hated picturing her cowering in the nursery — and maybe in a car someday in the future — because she was scared of what people in the Land of Beautiful might say or think about her face. Let them say what they want. That’s what I would have told her. Leave Terra Bella to the shallow, and claim the world for your own.

  The entire world, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to travel it, experience it, revel in it. Abraham Ortelius made history in 1570 with his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the Theatre of the World, the first modern atlas of Earth as was known and catalogued at that moment.

  It was time to update that atlas, and what better place to start than with my own collection of collages. What were those but maps that charted women’s journeys as they traversed the rocky terrain separating girl from woman? Wasn’t that what I created for Lydia? For my mother? And finally, for me? Our maps, our histories, our reminders of how we found our truest selves?

  I settled back in the driver’s seat and nodded at my reflection. If there was one thing I learned from Lydia and the rest of the Twisted Sisters, it was that artists do not cower. They live to make statements. So I forced myself out of my isolated cocoon of a car and headed for the toughest audience in town: Theatrum Prisonus Terrarum, my high school.

  “So she’s really got a honking thing on her face?”

  I looked up from my locker to find Erik and his group of wrestler buddies strutting by in that thick-limbed way of theirs, arms too muscular to tuck into their sides. The guys stopped to stare at me, the local recruit in a traveling circus. I waited for that knife-edged moment when Erik distanced himself, first flushing with embarrassment and then studying his beat-up work boots as if he’d never seen them on his feet.

  Six weeks, I told myself. That’s all there was left to high school. Six weeks and I would be out of here.

  “No wonder you broke up with her,” said one of the guys, chuckling.

  It wasn’t Dad’s malicious chuckle, chuckle exactly, but close enough to make me flush angrily.

  “Actually —” I started to say.

  But Erik interrupted, “She broke up with me.”

  In that moment, I liked Erik so much more than I ever had.

  “But you should have broken up with me.” I grinned at him, probably my most real smile that I’d given him since Halloween. To his credit, he gulped. Hard. I heard him. Never before had he made me feel more beautiful.

  And there, shimmering between us, was a moment when one of us could have made a move. A step, a sorry, a let’s try again, and we could have slipped back into the past, into each other. I didn’t want that. And I didn’t need anyone — even this good guy of a jock — to assure me of my beauty. The moment disappeared as surely as sea monsters vanished from maps once explorers ventured into the Unknown and made the world Known. Erik went his way to gym, and I went mine to Advanced Biology.

  A week later, I received a call as I headed out of the house earlier than usual. (I was craving a caramel macchiato, what can I say?) Hoping it was Jacob, I foraged for my phone in my backpack on the passenger seat next to me. Not Jacob, but Lydia, who rarely used her cell phone. So now she shouted in my ear: “Is that you, Terra?”

  God, at her age, maybe she fell, hurt herself. Why else would she call at seven fifteen?

  “What’s wrong?” I demanded, equally loudly.

  “I thought I’d get your voicemail,” she said, stymied now to be speaking with me.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m just fine. The question is, will you be after you hear the news?”

  Clearly, building up my anticipation was part of Lydia’s grand announcement plan. So I played along. I had about an hour before I had to brave school. Let’s just say, I’d become a connoisseur of stares — although my classmates to their credit were starting to get accustomed to my face. Slowly. “Tell me, I’m dying here.”

  “So you met Magnus,” said Lydia.

  Yeah, I had met Magnus. He had frowned so fiercely when I first showed him my almost-final collage, complete with my cartouche in the lower-right corner, I thought he was going to deride my “good first effort.” Instead, he had given me a new term to describe the heavy layers that I had built in the Land of Beauty, one on top of the other: pentimenti. “It’s from the Latin,” he had said in that growly voice of his. “To repent. And correct.”

  Lydia continued in her drama-filled voice, “Magnus said you showed real promise.”

  “Meaning that I’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Meaning he actually bought one of your pieces. I just picked up the messages from yesterday!”

  “No way.”

  “The one you made for me. But the real news is that he wants you to work with him as his apprentice, once a week,” cried Lydia, so breathless, she panted. “He never mentors anyone.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’ll be free, of course. And he’s a real piece of work, so you’ll hate working for him. But that’s art for you.”

  It takes a lot to make me cry. Years of living with Dad had something to do with that; he inured me of tears. I rested my head on the steering wheel and wept. After working alone in my studio, wondering whether I was wasting my time, wondering whether anyone would respond to my work, this hard-won affirmation undid me.

  “Terra?” Lydia said, not worried. She knew what this was: a release. “Your last piece was beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” I said, taking a shaky breath. I knew it was, too.

  My personal map was layered with experience — my trip to China with Mom, my cheating on Erik, the phone call I received from Merc the other night, apologizing for how he acted in China. How there’d be a ticket waiting for me and Claudius the next time he accumulated enough frequent flier miles, which wouldn’t be long, I knew. Together, we’d see Xi’an and the terracotta warriors. Even Dad added to my collage, adding one hard layer after another. And then, there was my old focal point, my port-wine stain. They were all just parts of my whole, pieces of my collaged life. It was time to explore a new subject. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but I was ready to venture out. And in the meantime, there was Mom’s collage. God knew it needed updating and would again, depending on whether she was going to stay with Dad or leave him. Either way, the decision was Mom’s; she was comfortably in charge.

  “Lydia, if you all were still interested, I’d love to be in the show,” I said.

  “Good,” she responded tartly. “We sent out the invitations yesterday.” With that, she hung up.

  I stared at my phone, then pocketed it with a bemused smile. As I backed out of the garage, I saw Mom’s fresh footprints in the dirt heading toward the new running path I had forged earlier this morning. I rolled down the window, breathed in the clean Methow air, pungent with evergreens and newly flowering sage. And then I drove.

  At the crossroads, my usual route lay to the left. Since junior high, I never strayed from the path that took me to school five days a week: left onto Main Street, right onto Grover Street. Today, I hit the gas pedal and plowed out of the Valley. Independence, straight ahead.

  Chapter thirty-five

  Geographia

  OTHER THAN MY RECENT TRIP to the airport, I literally could not remember the last time I had driven to Seattle for any reason other than my face. I didn’t stop to question my intentional ditching of school for the second time ever — and both in a single week. I didn’t worry about what my parents would do or say when they found out. I’d deal with those repercussions later. For now, I just drove.

  The passage out of the valley is always exquisite, but especially so at the start of spring. Then, the two-lane highway bisecting the Cascade Mountains passes jubilant waterfalls fed by fresh snowmelt and exposed r
ock faces so sheer they make you dizzy just looking at them.

  I turned off the radio, the one station that broadcast from Colville having gone fuzzy. Before me now rose Liberty Bell, that massive bell-shaped shaft of granite, its face some 1,200 feet high. I took my foot off the gas pedal and rolled down the window to inhale the sharp scent of liberation at the foot of this mountain.

  Forty-five minutes before reaching Seattle, I saw signs I’d never noticed before for Lynnwood. The city sounded vaguely familiar — Lynnwood, Lynnwood — and then I remembered. That was the location of the spa Norah had told Mom about, the one that had Mom almost crying from laughter because she couldn’t even fathom a place where women went around in the nude willingly.

  Why not? I thought. Why the hell not?

  I took an exit, looked for a place where I could pull over safely to call for directions, and found the Convention Center with its large expanse of asphalt parking lot that I could smell even with my windows rolled up.

  “What listing?” asked the prerecorded, teleprompted operator in her droning voice.

  “Ummm . . . Naked Spa?”

  A live operator came on. “What are you looking for?”

  I explained as best I could: “There’s supposed to be a Korean spa in Lynnwood, women only. You go naked there.”

  “Naked.”

  I blushed, glad she couldn’t see me.

  If there is such a thing as fate and things happening for a reason and things that are meant to be, then I was meant to go to the Naked Spa. Miracles, the operator located the spa for me, official name the Olympic Spa. Not only that, but it was right in front of me — as in I could walk across the parking lot to its front door. As fated as this appeared to be, that’s not to say I didn’t have doubts about it. I did. Located in a strip mall, the “spa” looked like a refurbished bowling alley, down to the ugly seventies stripe of terracotta across the front of the building. I was highly skeptical, Norah or not. Even the most shopping savvy have their off-moments.