The things I saw women doing for beauty looked crazy.
My mother, a beautiful woman, got too little of the pleasures that I could understand.
I saw that her beauty hurt her:
teeth-gritting abstinence at celebration dinners,
fury on the scale,
angry rub-downs,
self-accusing photographs,
the small notepad kept by the dishwasher:
1/2 grpfruit.
Blk coff.
4 Wheat Thins.
A black scrawl:
‘Binge.’
Some memoir.
It would be nice to be beautiful like her, I figured, sure:
but
nothing about it seemed nice enough to make up for that endless degradation.
nothing.
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