The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Once we get beyond our lawn, we discover with a thrill that no one outside the house knows of our defeats opposite siblings. For now we bicycle or walk away from home base, where we return to refuel, physically and emotionally, but which is no longer our entire world. Beyond our house there is a new audience of eyes that perceive us in a way that we have never before been seen: Until now, everyone has viewed us within the context of our parents, looking from them to us, us to them. “You look just like your dad,” they have said. “You have your mother’s eyes.” This is very nice, but it is not us.

  On our bicycles, on our walks, at school, and in the homes of friends, we are seen for the first time as separate from our family. An unexpected window opens. How could it be otherwise? These people don’t know our dreadful family nicknames; they have no expectations of us. The man at the filling station where we get air in our bicycle tires, the woman behind the counter at the store where we buy candy, the way they see us comes from their lives and has nothing to do with us, which is oddly freeing. They could care less, which gives us room to practice a posture: a way of talking and walking that captures their attention. For maybe a minute they stop what they are doing, and if we are sufficiently winning, we see their pupils dilate as they focus on us.

  Us. It dawns on us that we can make ourselves up! As in the fairy tales read to us all these years, we can be the hero of an adventure, at the very least we can effect and accomplish, not just be acted upon.

  It is a moment in literature, film, life when someone outside the family informs the parents of their own child: “What a wonderful storyteller your son is. What a charming kid, so funny, so kind, so adorable.” The parent is enlightened, maybe thrilled, but not always. Although they will deny it, some parents don’t relish being instructed about their own children by a stranger; not having been let in on this side of their child’s character gives them an odd sense of failure, almost of betrayal, that the child didn’t show them first. But the child sees the disappointment and suspicion of disloyalty in having given something special of herself outside the familial bond, and so decides to keep these new, secret identities just that.

  The private quality of much that goes on in these years can be our way of protecting parents as well as ourselves. That certain adventures are kept to ourselves for “their” sake forges a newfound sense of responsibility. It is the growing child’s version of the adults’ whispering to one another, “How can you tell a child that?” What the boys in the film Stand by Me learn is that the adventure they have just been through is best kept private; it doesn’t just knit them together in camaraderie but binds them with an oath of protection of parents, the beginning of the passing of the torch. They emerge from their adventure feeling different about themselves, and looking different too, less childish, more self-assured.

  Someone may be prettier than we, but there are other assets that count now, count as they never will again, given the later sovereignty of looks. We match our intelligence, speed, inventiveness, bravery against a pretty face and come out a winner! Well, at least equal. Practiced again and again, these abilities become ours, become in time who we are. Believing this, we begin to look like the athlete, the actress, the leader. In earlier years, uncertainty dogged our features as our personality was being formed by constant comparisons within the family. Now, with luck, the baby face with its lowered and sad look comes alive and takes on character. We don’t need to look in mirrors; we have begun to embrace internally the knowledge of who we are, and in our own mind’s eye it is how we look.

  Our parents and siblings may notice that we have begun to walk and talk as if we were playing a part; indeed, a brother may accuse us of “showing off,” a sister advise us to “stop trying to be someone you aren’t.” With newfound bravery we brush off their criticism, keeping our new selves to ourselves. Things may never change within the family portrait, where brothers, sisters, parents may for the rest of our lives continue to see us as we were placed in the earliest hierarchy. “John is the handsome one,” they will say twenty, thirty years later when, indeed, we have become far better-looking than John. When a parent has invested his or her own image in a specific child early on, there can be a refusal, conscious or not, to alter that favored child’s position in the family; to do so would diminish the parent.

  Try to force a reevaluation today at a family reunion and we walk into a minefield. So they called us “Tubby,” “Four Eyes,” “Shorty” and refuse to acknowledge what we’ve accomplished in our lives. Let it go, I advise you. Dump the old baggage of sibling and/or parental injustices, for there is nothing that sucks out joy more than arguing old family judgments in an endeavor to force them to see us as we have become. Take the anger, look at it in its age-appropriate frame, and let it go.

  Had I not become a writer I would never have unearthed that young girl I was in my preadolescent years, she who has been the positive force in my life. In every book I have written in the past twenty-five years, I have grieved over abandoning her when adolescence overwhelmed. But she never actually went away. Her basic optimism worked on an unconscious level all of my life until recently, when she took conscious form and I remembered myself running along those high walls that contained all the lovely secret gardens in that wonderful place where I grew up. Once I was big enough to bicycle away from home, where I felt invisible, it was thrilling that the eyes of the people I met reflected a different me, an inkling of myself I’d always had. Now, just being myself was enough to win love.

  When I stood atop my walls, soft bricks crumbling underfoot, and surveyed the world below, the sadness of not being able to catch my mother’s eye was gone. My sureness of self came from a newfound sense of borders, safety. I believed I could take care of myself. While it was not actually true, what I felt was belief in the world as a good place, the open heart of the boy hero in fairy tales and novels as he strides away from the parental home in search of his fortune. What did I know of gender lines, the stereotypical roles that lay ahead, where everything that made me feel alive—initiative, bravery, competition—would be denied me? How could I anticipate how the love of boys, the desperate need to have them see me, would make the surrender of my twelve-year-old self immediate and overnight? For the rest of my life I would never have as agreeable a self-image as I did then. I suppose it was what drew me, and millions of others, to Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in the early seventies. “This world of childhood memories,” as he would write, “will always seem to me hopelessly more real than the other.”

  This period of time we get between being tied to mother and adolescence is a small picture, a camera shutter briefly opening and closing. But time doesn’t matter as long as we pin down the important character features that describe us. These years are money in the bank.

  We spend so much of life fulfilling what family and society expect of us, although it may not be how we see ourselves. While it is necessary to learn to support ourselves economically, and perhaps a family too, do we really need so much baggage, possessions, clothes, and makeup as we are programmed to want? When we look in the mirror, saddled with all these acquisitions, we do not like what we see nearly as much as the sight of ourselves when we were ten and stood on top of the world.

  The bicycle comes to mind as the symbol of these years. Learning to ride it is mastery, but short of owning a horse—my dream image, cowgirl—the bicycle was my companion in opening up the world I’d never explored beyond my house, streets, neighborhood. Being alone for the first time on a bicycle is an experience of control and adventure unlike any other, until perhaps the first car, even greater mastery as the world’s boundaries open farther still and the camera lens widens to show us moving into territory ever more distant from the first judgmental eyes. Strangers enter our lives. Strangers can turn into anything, become anyone, as can we in their eyes.

  I see me on my green Schwinn, no hands, singing, wearing jeans and a sweater of no particular color or style, for what did I care of mirror images? I fe
lt who I was, in motion, flying past mere pedestrians, covering familiar ground that had become mine in repeated trips to school, suddenly hooking a right, experimenting with a new route, getting lost, getting found, doing it on my own, proving I could, proving, proving, proving. Legs, muscles, coordination became a sense of self in motion, totally in control. In my mind’s eye I imagined others witnessed my passage and power. So what if they hadn’t even noticed? Hadn’t I left them in the dust? Reality was unimportant; it was the picture of me in my eyes and in theirs that reinforced mastery, the look of it. I had entered their world and left it at will.

  The ingredients for happiness were so limited then, and I had them all; take one bicycle, add one girl, cook until done. I could have lived on that. I still could, if I could get back that feeling of being good enough. Was I ever that happy again?

  The magic of these years for all of us is that for a brief time we are free to explore, to imitate admirable others, practice genetic treasures for which we find we have a natural talent, to which we bring a skill. Suddenly we are special. A teacher says, “Why, you have a real eye for drawing!” Someone has recognized us! Try me on! Be this! Act thus! inner voices urge; spontaneity is king as it will never be again, not with this unique freedom from judgmental eyes, slotting us. Just around the corner waits adolescence with its ironclad rules of behavior, a straitjacket compared to the leisured informality of the noncritical world of the nine-year-old.

  What better time in life to find out who we want to be? An audience is waiting, and while there may be stage fright, it will never again be less daunting. Do it now. Be whoever. The time to find out what we want and who we are is upon us. Nothing succeeds like invention. No one is more inventive than a nine-year-old. Quick, before adolescence, when sameness is everything and uniqueness is death! Think of The Red and the Black, Tom Sawyer, My Life as a Dog, Stand by Me. We love these young heroes because we see ourselves in them, and though I would wish for more nine-year-old heroines in films and books, I nonetheless can look at Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale and lose myself in that little boy, sleeping with his bed pushed under the window so that he will miss nothing in the street below that is his world. I too used to sleep with my pillow on the window ledge, so sure was I that my life was happening out there, everywhere, life without limits, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. And there were no mirrors.

  In those years I was not the least self-conscious. Free of physical comparison with my sister and mother, I grew on the love I was able to inspire in others. A feeling of great generosity was born in me, a desire to give that was as big as my need. How did I lose that, where did it go? Dear God, what a totally different person I would be today if the creativity of those years had been stoked instead of shut down by the tyranny of adolescent beauty.

  It never occurred to me to question my love of romantic music. Riding the green bike, I would sing full throttle the ballads I had learned from my mother’s recordings of Broadway musicals. Heartbreaking love songs flew from my lips as I rolled along those sweet, narrow streets of my youth, melodies that opened me in a way I didn’t yet understand, pulling me into their yearning; maybe romance was taken for something else in my youthful mind, but maybe not. Romance, after all, is not sex; in fact, the very essence of romantic love, as originally understood by the troubadours, was the unattainable beloved. Pure yearning.

  Certainly I was desperate to get lost in someone’s arms, which, now that I think of it, was one of my favorites, “I Got Lost in His Arms,” from Annie Get Your Gun. I could sing it for you now, every word. His arms, her arms, what did I care? Being held was what mattered and I didn’t even know it, couldn’t let myself acknowledge it for fear of being rejected, again.

  I can still give myself to romantic music like no one else, except, perhaps, my sweet neighbor Peter Allen, who commanded the entire stage at Radio City Music Hall, kicking as high as the Rockettes. He sang his love songs on the terrace that we shared for twelve years. No one could write love songs like Pete. In the summer, I would sit on the terrace listening to him compose, feeling my life had come full circle that I should have this music man within singing distance. The summer before he died, we had his piano wheeled onto the terrace, and with Manhattan as the backdrop, the full moon over the Carlyle Hotel, Pete sang love songs, nothing but love songs.

  Peter was like the brother I never had. It had always seemed sad when I was growing up that I didn’t have a brother, since I would have flourished in the role of kid sister, so like a boy was I with my height and love of all things adventurous and, of course, my disinterest in mirrors. Identifying so little with my mother and sister, perhaps I cast myself as the brother. Surely I identified with my grandfather and, as I mentioned earlier, felt an obligation to be “the man of the house” given my mother’s and sister’s propensity to tears, as my sister’s deepening adolescence exacerbated my mother’s anxiety and competition. Someone had to be seen as in charge, and though I couldn’t pay the bills, I vowed to bring no anxiety into that house and not to cry “like them.”

  This relaxation of gender roles is what I relish in these preadolescent years. Mother’s imprint of how a little lady should look is still there, may always be there given her bedrock in the unconscious, staring at us critically from today’s mirror as we pose in our Wonderbra wondering why we don’t like what we see. What wars with mother’s overly harsh judgment of our adult sexual look is the preadolescent flash of self-assured independence and bravery. When else in a woman’s entire life is she given a respite from the judgment of men and women because, not yet being sexual, she is considered to be “not at risk”? Most of us will never again have this opportunity to invent ourselves or will dare to take it for a thousand different reasons, none of which, though they may feel that way, is insurmountable. And so we die untested, who we really are tightly curled inside, an embryo of what we might have been.

  If we see more boyish bravado in young girls than we see feminine qualities in boys, it is in part because society is so tough on males, so rigid in defining what a man is. It’s the boy’s job to deny the very qualities in mother he loved most by fleeing everything female to find what is masculine. What a woman is, he knows all too well, firsthand and up close, but what is a man except a disciplinarian with a briefcase? Boys meet, gather outside the home, each identifying with images of men learned from television: Schwarzenegger, Rambo, whoever the boys’ heroes, somehow none is as credible as woman/mother power. To make himself bigger than she, he must belittle women.

  And the fewer fathers, the bigger the mother looms, meaning the greater distance the boy today must race to see himself as different from her. He forms a band of other boys who also need to prove they don’t need women. Together they practice new ways to act, feel, speak, all the while casting off, right and left, female attributes. Picture young boys racing toward a summer lake, throwing off their clothes pell-mell until they are together in the water, naked reborn, as in Eakins’s painting The Swimming Hole.

  Gladly I would have joined those boys in the water, so eager was I not to be like the women in my home, who were timid, in tears, and so involved with one another. Despite the fact that I had neither father nor brother, or even a friendship with a young boy, I nonetheless acted like one. And I did it without conscious imitation, which I find optimistic; but then, as I’ve said, I like myself more at this age than at any other.

  Let me tell you about a summer vacation with two girlfriends and their family on Ocracoke Island, off North Carolina. On my arrival, one foot barely off the boat, my friends race to me, collide, saying all the while, “Oh, Nancy, Nancy, we’ve told them that when you get here you’ll show them, you’ll punish them!” In their eyes I was some kind of avenging hero, for the people I was to take on were a group of rowdy boys. I remember feeling thrown off balance by how they saw me. Was I so formidable? If I was, it hadn’t been planned. I also remember on several occasions that summer locking myself in the bathroom and trying to pee into a glass. Was
I practicing being a boy? Perhaps. I don’t recall how the confrontation with the rowdies turned out, or even if it took place, but I do remember the not altogether unpleasant sensation of trying to contain my stream in that small glass pressed tightly against my vulva.

  My mother has always dismissed my grown-up memory of how I looked in those years, saying, “Why, you were so cute in your pigtails, climbing those walls in your jeans.” But I wasn’t cute, and that is why I climbed, to prove that I was a winner at something other than beauty. It doesn’t matter that other members of our families have their indelible impressions of how we were; for you, for me, the people we are today grew out of our own feelings of how we were seen within the family portrait. When I want to think well of myself today, here is the ten-year-old I remember:

  I get up in the morning, so early that night hasn’t altogether left the room. Clothes folded on the chair from the night before I take out of the bedroom I share with my sister and into the bathroom. On the back of the door hang the stockings and the slip of a grown woman, my mother. The mirror over the sink reflects pigtails, a high forehead, freckles, braces, and the garments going on over my head have no coordination of color or texture. In fact, the mirror is unexamined until I pick up my toothbrush, get it halfway to my mouth, take in my mother’s and sister’s brushes, and defiantly wet my brush under the tap and put it back in the rack. Not brushing my teeth or waiting to have my hair re-braided is a minor victory, a stamp of identity: Different from Them. That no one will notice the toothbrush or the hair is understood, but the rite is performed nonetheless.

  Downstairs I collect Raisin Bran, peanut butter, and toast, sit at my place at the table and eat, playing all the while with pages from a notebook spread before me. I am writing songs, well, actually new words from already existing popular melodies. These I will teach to the other members of The Slick Chick Jivers, a foursome of fifth-graders destined that very day to perform at the Upper School, the magisterial mansion on the far side of the playing fields from the Lower School, which I attend. While I eat, I hum, rehearse a few hand motions, once or twice stand and execute a tricky step remembered from the latest movie musical at The Gloria.