We settled down on a bench and I felt my feet in my unfamiliar boots, the way the zippers cut into the inside of my foot. A freckled boy with wild, naturally highlighted curly hair sat a few feet away from us.
“Emily?” A young woman held a clipboard to her face and then scanned the benches. I stood up.
“Flip your hair,” my mother whispered. I swung my head forward and felt the blood rush into my face, my hair surrounding me. I came back up, my hair falling to either side of my face. I could feel my mother’s eyes on the back of my head as I disappeared into the casting room.
On the car ride home, I rested my head in my hand and stared out the window. The sun hit my cheek as the freeway flew by.
“That boy looked at you when you stood up and flipped your hair,” my mother said. “He was watching you.”
What did he see? I wondered.
13.
My mother liked to recount stories about men noticing me from the time I was twelve （“I’ll never forget the look on his face as you walked past him! He stopped dead in his tracks and his mouth fell open!”）。 But she also believed that men’s understanding of beauty was limited and unrefined.
“Marilyn Monroe was never really beautiful,” she’d say to me, when my father would make an approving face at mention of her.
She made distinctions; there were women whom men found appealing and then there were true beauties. “I don’t get Jennifer Lopez,” she’d say, wrinkling her nose. “I guess men like her.” I learned over time that “men liked her” ranked far below “beautiful” but was decidedly preferable to not being mentioned at all. She could be quite condescending when speaking about such women: “She’s cute,” she’d say, smiling sweetly, a subtle trace of pity in her tone. When we’d watch a film featuring a young female actor, my mother would almost always remark on her looks: “I mean, she’s not a beauty.” She also did this with my friends, casually assessing their appearance as we shopped. “She’s certainly not pretty, but she does have a nice figure,” she’d proclaim as she inspected California avocados for their ripeness.
14.
After I left home, my parents made a habit of posting professional pictures of me on their Facebook pages. My mother responded to each comment from her friends with a “Thank you so much, Suzy!” or “We are so proud of her, Karen.” My father responded to his friends, too, but instead of saying thank you, he liked to joke: “She has my heart and soul and that’s about it, Dan.” I read his comment and thought of the time he told me that I’d inherited his nose.
“It’s kind of big,” he’d said, laughing. My mother scowled. “Don’t say that, John,” she whispered, her voice low and disapproving.
15.
My mother seems to hold the way my beauty is affirmed by the world like a mirror, reflecting back to her a measure of her own worth.
She says, “A friend of mine from college wrote on Facebook that he’d seen your recent magazine cover. He said, ‘No surprise Kathleen’s daughter is beautiful! But she’s not as gorgeous as you, Kathy. No one compares to you.’”
My mother loves to remind me of the time she’d been complaining about the way some women had treated her, and I, at the age of three, declared, “They’re just jealous, Mama!”
She recites this story as a charming testimonial to my sweet and perceptive nature at a young age. It wasn’t until I was older that it struck me: How had I already been introduced to the concept of competition between women before I had even learned to read? How had I understood so early that my remark would provide my mother some solace for the unkindness she experienced?
16.
I find other ways of constructing a mirror not unlike my mother’s. I study red-carpet and paparazzi images of myself online and in the camera roll on my phone, tapping the screen to zoom in on my face as I try to discern whether I am actually beautiful. I scroll Reddit, reading and weighing the comments in my thread, wondering if I am “overrated,” as one user notes, or in fact “one of the most beautiful women in the world,” as another says. I learn from one commentator who claims to have worked on the crew of a recent shoot of mine that I am “nothing special in person,” and from a different user that, after seeing me at a coffee shop around the corner from my apartment with my dog, she can say that I am “way prettier IRL. Better than in her pictures.”
I post Instagram photos that I think of as testaments to my beauty and then obsessively check the likes to see if the internet agrees. I collect this data more than I want to admit, trying to measure my allure as objectively and brutally as possible. I want to calculate my beauty to protect myself, to understand exactly how much power and lovability I have.