On Beauty & the Wasteland - v.2 /issue 1 - Rough Patch

  

On Beauty & the Wasteland

V.2 / issue 1

Rough Patch

I found it while I was shaving my legs in the bath — feeling my legs with my hands to be sure I hadn’t missed any hairs. A small rough patch of skin. I couldn’t quite see it where it was located, not without a mirror. It didn’t look like much when I checked it out, a little red perhaps. Rubbing some lotion into its coarseness, I put on my pajamas and climbed into bed. “We all have rough patches sometimes,” I told myself, not giving it another thought.

A few days later, the 1st cool day of fall, I noticed my feet caught on my socks as I pulled them over my heels. Removing my socks, I ran my fingers over the bottoms of my feet. When had they become so craggy and jagged, ‘like the fjords,’ I imagined unsolicited, shaking the silly thought from my mind. I applied lotion, replaced my socks, and put on my sensible shoes for a long day on my feet. 

In the bathroom, I evaluated my face, concealing my dark circles and blemishes as was expected. Receding the parts of me that were too much. Promoting the parts that weren’t enough. Making the surface of me just right. “Putting on my face,” I mused before giving myself a practiced smile. To check to see if there were cracks in my mask. It feels as though there are, but I can’t see them upon close examination. “I look normal enough, just right” I determine. 

As I determine anytime before I leave the apartment. Or the ladies’ room. As I determine when I happen to catch myself in a window reflection. I hardly notice myself in these moments I look so normal. I blend in. Beneath this determination is a question. Though, I’m not sure I am aware. “Am I safe?” “Yes,” I respond, “you are normal enough, just right.” 

One ordinary evening while watching something unremarkable on the TV, I feel a sharp jolt of pain on one of my heels. I look down to see that I am bleeding. My heel is bleeding a pin head of red where I had opened up one of my crags with a nail. “What am I doing?,” I ask myself reproachfully as I stand up looking for my socks. 

More and more often, I catch myself picking at the bottoms of my feet. Sometimes, I allow it or perhaps don’t quite notice it, even absentmindedly putting the pieces into my mouth — chewy. Until I awaken to myself and with horror, I think, “I am eating myself; cannibalizing myself.”

I try to control the picking. Sometimes, even if I had put on socks, I’d find myself with one leg or another bent, contorted, my sock pulled down over a heel, fingertips tracing the roughness, absently testing with a nail for the right spot to leverage. Exasperated, I’d pull up my sock.

I took to wearing socks on my hands as well. In the long solitary evenings while watching TV. At first, this solution seemed to work, to offer some relief. But it wasn’t long before my fingers within their casements began roaming over the edges of my nails, my cuticles, my nail beds. Feeling for catches, so sensitive to what feels out of place, wrong, rough, too much, not enough. Wanting the surface to be smooth, just right, no way in.  “Or,” with a shudder I consider, ”are they looking for ways in? Ways to expose me?”

Tearing off my socks from my hands, tears pricking the backs of my eyeballs in frustration, I rush into the bathroom, looking for my nail clippers and a file. I cut my nails back to the beds, over cutting in places so lines of red surface. Filing down my nails further til they are undetectable to themselves, I remember hearing that when we declaw cats, we are amputating their first finger joints. I consider this for a moment, wishing I could declaw myself. 

The next day, at work, several of the other girls approach me en bande. The one who is queen bee, Jessica, the prettiest one by far, is saying that she’s sure her boyfriend’s going to propose. I detect invisible bubbles filling the gaps between them like a bottle of champagne is overflowing.

I feel both contempt and envy towards Jessica and her pretty face, and her simple expectations, and her easy laugh. Her boyfriend will propose. She will wear white. He will make sure her car is always filled with gasoline and bring it to the garage for her when it needs a tune up or an oil change. She will be forgiven even as she boasts of his generosity and care to all her friends she has in for coffee. Or to those friends she has over for the dinner parties she will host, creating soufflets that always rise followed by pies baked with the ripest of fruit. 

“The two of them will be happy and normal enough, without effort. Blend in, make friends,” I think.  As I walk around the counter to my register, I hear her make her own proposal. “Let’s all get mani-pedi’s together!,” she thrills, looking around to each of us. 

When I catch the flash of her eye, my stomach jumps to my throat like I might vomit. I swallow hard trying to sanitize any vapor of disgust that I might have allowed to emanate from me. I don’t know what to do with my hands, placing them down by my sides, inconspicuously I hope, hiding them behind the counter. I feel the tears pricking the backs of my eyes again. It sounds like so much fun to go out with the other girls to get mani/pedi’s. How normal. 

I run the smoothness of the thumbs over the smoothness of the fingertips. Where the nails might be if I were truly a normal girl. I think about the nail tech crouching below me, feeling my heels, examining them, looking at me questioningly. Only a language barrier keeping her from announcing my little secret to the whole nail salon. I consider that she may speak aloud in Korean or Vietnamese. To the other nail techs who may hear her, may all laugh amongst themselves, glancing at me sideways. These foreign strangers all knowing my little secret. I can’t possibly.

Declining the invitation with remorse and a tone of finality, I excuse myself saying, “I’m going through a bit of a rough patch.”