Pale and bespectacled, with short dark hair she cut herself, she preferred to spend most of her time in Birkenstocks and plain, loose trousers, maybe because in the male dominated world of science in which she excelled, fashion was of little practical use. However, in text book Freudian fashion, her unlived dreams and ambitions spilt out onto my sister and me. She longed for us to become professional ballet dancers, paragons of grace and discipline, and we trained for hours every day after school to that end. She indulged us in bizarre shopping trips, made more surreal by the fact that we rarely seemed to buy any actual children’s clothes. It was as if she was taking us shopping for her alter ego.
It’s a Saturday morning. My mother’s just picked me up from ballet class and we’re in Kaufmanns department store in Pittsburgh. I’m about twelve, but already I’m sporting a pair of high heels, ‘wedgies’ to be exact, with thick crepe soles and a denim wrap-around skirt, just like my idol, Farrah Fawcett in ‘Charlie’s Angels’. Like all the girls in ballet school, I want to look like a prima ballerina. We cake on tons of foundation, eyeliner and mascara and roll our eyes around like silent film stars on acid. We’re dying swans with our exaggerated posture, ridiculous turnouts, and scraped back hair-dos. It never occurs to us that make-up that’s meant to read on stage to the last row of the Metropolitan Opera House might not be suitable for street wear.
My mother and I are shopping in the eveningwear section. It’s 10:30 in the morning and we’re looking at sequins and taffeta. She’s going to a formal Christmas party with my father and we’re here to shop for her, but she can’t bear to look at herself or try anything on. I carry gown after gown into the changing room, where she’s slumped on the stool in her bra and girdle, cradling her head in her hands. ‘You put them on,’ she says and I do, preening and posing like a midget version of Maria Callas. My mother is a ghost, thin and shorn next to my drag act. ‘You’re so slim,’ she says, as I shimmy into a pink sequined sheath dress. ‘You look good in everything.’
We spend hours wading through piles of silk and satin and in the end she buys me a black sequined top and a cream coloured marabou jacket at vast expense, which I wear over my school uniform, despite the fact that it lands me in detention for a month.
My mother buys nothing.
And after we shop, we go to the chocolate counter and buy a pound box of Godiva chocolates, which we eat on our way back home in the car. My mother and I don’t do lunch. Lunch is, after all, fattening. So we sit in the front seat of the car, not looking at one another, cramming chocolate into our mouths instead.
By the time we get home, the excitement of shopping is gone. Vanished. Mom is suddenly furiously angry and I’m filled with fear and shame. She gets out, slams the car door and strides across the garage into the house, where I can hear her yelling at my brother. She yells for no reason – because a towel is badly folded or because the television is on. She yells because she hates herself; because she’s spent $300 on evening clothes for a twelve-year-old; because she’s so livid she can’t contain it any more. She throws something but misses.
I hear her storm upstairs and slam her bedroom door. Getting out of the car with my bags, I take the now empty chocolate box with me. It’s important that no one should see it. And I walk, or rather waddle the way dancers do, into the house. My brother’s there, crying, and there’s a pile of glass and plastic that used to be a clock around him on the floor. He looks at me with my Kaufmanns bags and the Godiva chocolate box and I know that he hates me. I stick my chin in the air and walk on. I am a bad person. I am a very bad person.
My mother doesn’t go to the Christmas party. She has an argument with my father and spends the evening locked in her room instead.
Closing the book, I get up and walk down to the end of the platform. In the corner, where the cement gives way to rubble and grass, I turn and throw up the two Kit Kat bars.
The light is softly dimming and I notice, as I wipe my fingers on a clean tissue, that the birds are singing, the way they do sometimes at dusk on early spring evenings. They sound impossibly hopeful.
And suddenly it occurs to me, that maybe my mother and I have something in common.
Maybe I come from a long line of women who felt like a terrible mess.
Since time began, women have sought after beauty with all the passion and vigour of Menelaus pursuing Helen into Troy and often with similarly violent results. And why shouldn’t they? Being beautiful has always been synonymous with owning the world on a string and what girl would not wish that?
Sadly though, only God and nature can make a beautiful woman and, to be perfectly frank, most of us do not and never will fall into that exclusive category. Perhaps you think I am being a little hard? Maybe I am. But I am of the philosophy that it is best to face the facts about oneself, especially the most unpleasant ones, early on in life and make peace with them rather than to waste years in nervous agitation pursuing goals and expectations far beyond our reach.
Besides which, being beautiful is no guarantee of happiness in this world. I have known many beautiful women whose own inelegance and lack of breeding rendered them so hopelessly unattractive, that it would’ve been simpler and less painful for them if they had been born plain. A woman must have a very strong character not to become distracted by her own unnatural power to excite attention everywhere she goes. And there is nothing more tragic than the sight of a badly ageing beauty who never had to develop her wit or imagination in order to amuse her companions or who always relied upon the excellence of her figure rather than the elegance of her clothes to make an impression. They are poor company and almost invariably develop ‘champagne chins’.
While beauty, in its purest physical form, is nature’s gift alone to bestow, elegance, grace and style are infinitely more democratic. A little discipline and a discerning eye, along with a generous helping of good humour and effort, are all that’s needed to cultivate these admirable qualities. And a plain girl who spends a little time in honest self-reflection and who applies herself with diligence to the improvement of her mind and character, will awake soon enough to discover that she has blossomed into a fully fledged swan. The time she spent alone and undistracted by the world will fortify her, the discipline she learnt will carry her into old age with grace and courage, and above all, she will possess compassion, which never fails to make a woman more attractive to those around her.
I reach across to my bedside table and pick up the Post-its and a pen, while taking another sip of my tea. Of all the pleasures in this world, reading in bed in the morning with a fresh, steaming mug of tea has to be the most luxurious. I prod the mountain of pillows behind me into a more yielding shape and lean back.
To be beautiful. There are days when I feel fairly confident that I’m attractive but am I or could I ever be beautiful? Or am I one of those women who are better off facing up to the ‘unpleasant facts of life’?
It’s not really a question a girl should ponder before nine in the morning, still suffering from bed head and wearing her favourite faded Snoopy night-shirt. (I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw it away.) I push it from my thoughts and resolutely peel off another Post-it. ‘Beauty is no guarantee of happiness,’ I write firmly, ‘strive instead for elegance, grace and style’, and then paste it next to the other one on the wardrobe mirror. My husband, who’s getting dressed to do a radio play at the BBC, sighs wearily.
‘I sincerely hope we’re not going to become one of those “happy-clappy households” with charming
