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The Meat of It
On Dying and Living and the Utility of Ugliness or What My Nana Once Said
“Nineteen,” she told me, then seventeen and nonplussed by her serious tone, her gaze, the wag of her finger. “Nineteen is when I was most beautiful. All women are, then, I think.”
My grandmother told no lies. And maybe she was not wrong then, but she would be wrong, two years later. My nineteen year old face stared, weary and post-pregnancy-puffy, into the steaming mirror, milk crusted nipples just north of my stretch marked stomach. I had missed my one chance, my memory, and belief in her brilliance, told me, to ever be beautiful. If this was where I peaked, I hadn’t, and I never would.
At nineteen my grandmother, too, was a mother. And somehow, slight of hand and slight of figure, she’d stayed girl-like and dainty. Maybe the lone gift of post-Depression poverty and the card trick of pre-preservatives in foods, she maintained petite stature, though five children were born from her small frame. Through some strange genetics, I was destined to be the biggest of my sisters, to tower over my mother, her mother, her mother, hers. Whatever beauty I had at seventeen, yet unknown to me, I had lost by nineteen, by twenty one, by twenty three. The photographic evidence tells no lie. The meat of it, stripped down and steamy mirror reflection, is older and…
