Another Brick in the Wall

We don't need no education


We don’t need no thought control


No dark sarcasm in the classroom


Teachers, leave them kids alone


Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

~ Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2

I’ve been en route and then busy with visiting family for the last couple of weeks, but I am home again, in my quiet house where I can cogitate without interruption, and I am ready to write.  Lots of words and ideas, jotted down so I wouldn’t forget, are pushing to break free, and I warn you, this post is lengthy and random, but it’s all connected in my mind.

Though most people don’t want to recognize racism or consider themselves a part of a racist society, it is integral in our societal structure, one brick laid on another and another, made strong with individual prejudice and what I’ve come to call willful or knowledgeable ignorance – the refusal to acknowledge what is right before one’s eyes, a denial of the truth.

There was a front-page story in the Winston-Salem Journal two Sundays ago: Separate worlds. The article begins with the following:

Many of Forsyth County’s public schools have resegregated over the last 40 years as national court decisions, and local political ones, favored neighborhood schools over racially and economically balanced ones.

It goes on to say:

Past Winston-Salem Journal and Associated Press reviews of the U.S. census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 have shown Winston-Salem and Forsyth County to be the state’s most segregated major population center. In focusing just on Hispanic population data from the 2000 census, the Associated Press determined that Hispanics here are more segregated from whites than in any other city except Oakland, CA.

Can anyone deny the racism that exists in the town I live in? I’ve already warned Ronald that he will be responsible for selecting the next city we move to. Some people say everything happens for a reason; some think God has a plan and puts you just where you need to be to fulfill a purpose. I think I just made a poor choice, and yet, this may be the last place I call home. I think every place is similar, anyway.  Racism exists everywhere in this country.

I didn’t see the wrinkles and imperfections of this city when we used to drive down to the dance conservatory to see Cara and Mackenzie perform, or to spend time watching their classes, or to pick them up to take them home for the summer. The Carolina blue sky must have blinded me. Every day we live here teaches me that this town has plantation mentality. Every day I see that although we experienced racism in the North, here racism runs deep and true. It’s a part of the lingo and the philosophy that gets passed down through the generations. There is no denying it. And I’m not even out there talking to the citizens as Ronald is.

One white guy told Ronald that his great-grandfather owned slaves, and they were treated right. They even had doctors look after them when needed. He averred that they had a good life, better than what they might have faced in Africa.

“Do you know how much my great granddaddy paid for just one slave girl?” he asked Ronald. He had found his grandfather’s bookkeeping logs.

“Don’t know,” Ronald said.

“Eight hundred dollars. That was a lot of money back then. You wouldn’t abuse your slave when you paid that much for her,” he said, proud of how he had proven the humanity behind slavery.

“Oh, just like you wouldn’t mistreat the oxen or the other farm animals,” I said as Ronald finished up the story.

“Just like that,” he agreed.

“Never mind that you consider them animals and property, not people.”

“And they still want to believe it.”

“Take back America,” I said. “That’s where they want to take it back to.”

Ronald had been called a Yankee again and told that Yankees came down here for the weather but hated the people. Ronald told the white man that while he didn’t like the opinions of a lot of people he had met, he had never been rude or called them names as he had been since moving here.

“Did you remind him that the Civil War is over and that they lost?”

“Sometimes I want to,” he said.

I’m not perfect. My emotions are strong and deep and not always appropriate. There they are like banners, displayed for all who care to look, snapping in the wind on a bright day, hanging wet and limp in the rain, or rendered stiff and immobile in sub-zero temperatures. I don’t and won’t apologize for having them.

When we moved to the South, it was a big adjustment. Ronald lived his entire life in one city, and that was the same city in which I spent most of my adult life. We had always struggled to find a few close friends, mostly, I think, due to our being interracial. People, even when we could tell they really liked us, just couldn’t compute how to fit us into their social network. I had lost my aunt, with whom I had a close relationship, a couple years before.  (Ronald and our daughters had changed her mind about black people and interracial relationships.) Then I had gone through a rough patch with my siblings as I settled my aunt’s estate. The unresolved issues dampened my skin like fine, misty rain, and I wanted a big change. Moving was the big change we chose. I hoped we could run away and lose the past.

In the South we knew no one but our daughter, and we weren’t ones to think our children were obligated to entertain us. So I imagined we’d make new friends, and I would entertain a girlfriend or two on long Saturday afternoons spent drinking hot tea and eating scones, settled around a Scrabble board. We didn’t make any new friends. And most of the old ones never visited as they had promised.

I always thought I was strong and resilient, but the move knocked me down for the count. That surprised me. I didn’t realize how attached I was to our old home, the one we raised our daughters in, and to the city that I always thought looked dirty, worn, and gray. The doctor said my serotonin was low. She prescribed something to increase it.

It worked, kind of. I stopped having panic attacks, the kind that caused me to pass out in the shopping mall and crack my head open one humid August evening just months before we made the move.

Then I noticed something after taking the medication for a couple of months. My emotions were neutral. I didn’t cry at movies. I didn’t feel pleasure, displeasure, angry, happy, joy, or despair. I was completely and utterly devoid, empty. I imagined my soul had oozed out of my body and left behind an empty vessel. I thought, “The world could crumble around my feet, drop away, leave a void as big as infinity, and I would feel nothing.” I stopped taking it.

Within a few weeks, I was sniffling at movies again, loudly enough to disturb other moviegoers. Laughing out loud at commercials. Wearing my love like a hot pink blouse and my anger and sadness like itchy woolen leggings. I truly missed feeling, and I embraced all of it: the good, the bad, the best, and the worst. You can’t know one emotion without experiencing its opposing emotion.

I’ll never cede my emotions again.

So my last post, Checking the Other Box http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/checking-other-box.html

was an emotional rant, most likely addressed to the wrong person, but warranted, valid, and real. It was as honest and authentic as can be.  I’m not afraid to show my humanity with all its imperfection.

“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be wearing dresses that show my knees,” I said to Ronald this past week as I stared at my reflection in the hotel room full-length mirror. I was traveling for work, and he came along because we were bringing his parents back with us for a visit.

“Why?” he asked. I know he appreciated how well the dress fit over my curves and the way my heels elongated my legs. Later that evening when we returned to the hotel, I watched a man back up so he could watch me walk down the hallway, my walk slower, more languid, than it was thirty years ago, but my hips still rolling in that sensual, feminine way. I like that kind of attention, distant and non-threatening.

‘My knees show what age I am,” I said. I think fifty-five must be the magic number. Rest my elbow in the car window and turn to see the skin above it fold and crinkle. Straighten my arms and look at my elbows, and the flesh covering them looks like tiny elephant knees. Glance at my hands, and notice how the skin is thinner and losing its elasticity. Stick my hands under the dryer in the restroom and watch the force of air swirl the skin in skittering patterns. I keep applying lotion, believing I can hydrate myself to twenty-something. Staring in the mirror, I noticed the skin above my knees looked crepe-like, spidery fine webbing etching my flesh. My once smooth and flawless skin has texture.

“Some women’s knees are like that their whole lives,” Ronald said. He’s always trying so hard to make me feel better, and I laugh at his attempts, not meanly, but sweetly and thankfully. I know, though, that his artist’s eye has wandered and explored every new crevice and crinkle. I think it must be painful to see the woman he pursued, photographed, plastered, and painted enthusiastically fade before his eyes like an old Polaroid snapshot. Even I, devoid of the sharp vision he has, noted how his eyes sit deeper in his face, the skin on his forearms, backs of his hands, and ankles is textured, and the bald spot on the crown of his head is growing. Disbelief rises. I think I don’t want to know, but why deny the truth? I refuse to practice willful ignorance.

I have to embrace aging the same way I’ve come to embrace my emotions. The alternative doesn’t appeal.

Neither does the alternative to speaking out about racism. My voice in the matter will be heard. I don’t want to shut others down, but sometimes their willful ignorance rattles my sensibilities.

A couple weeks ago the guys at the golf range told Ronald that President Obama stole his identity by assuming a dead man’s social security number. His grandmother aided and abetted Obama when he was fourteen and perhaps wishing for his first summer job. I got my social security number at fourteen for the same reason – to obtain my ready to work papers.

Apparently the conspiracy to turn us into a socialist country was born years ago by a conniving mixed-race child and his power-hungry white grandmother. The agencies of government that vet candidates for office were too dumb to discover the complex scheme, or perhaps they were in on it. But not the Tea Party and “Take Back America” conservatives – they were on to his masterful and evil plot to displace and disempower D. Whiteman.

“Snopes debunked that myth back in 2010,” I said to Ronald as he told the story, and I typed in a quick search. “Don’t they have the internet?”

‘They don’t want to know,” he said. “If not that, then something else. They just can’t say the truth. They don’t want a black man in office.”

Then my disappointment in humanity was further fueled by an experience we had this past weekend. We drove my parents-in-law back to NC to visit with us for a few days. Every place we stopped along the way garnered stares.

“Dianne, they’re just looking at you. They can’t figure out why you are with us,” my father-in-law said several times during our travels.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

“They think you’re our social worker or something,” my mother-in-law said at dinner in a Ruby Tuesday’s in Maryland. I had ordered my father-in-law’s dinner for him and then asked the waitress to bring him another soda as the first one had too much ice and was shades paler than the usual Coke products.

We had to turn in early. The drive is arduous for two octogenarians, so we pulled over at a Holiday Inn Express in West Virginia at around 7:00 p.m. I went in to book the rooms. That’s something Ronald and I figured out a long time ago. It’s using that white privilege I’ve spoken about in past posts. I’ll get the lowest rate. Why shouldn’t we get the white people rate? There should only be one rate.

We know this because one time when we went down to visit Cara and Mackenzie while they were at the dance conservatory, we stopped into a nearby Comfort Inn. I booked the room and got a really nice rate. Ronald was back a couple of weeks later by himself, I can’t remember why, but when he returned to the hotel, they quoted him $30 higher.

“I stayed here a couple weeks ago with my wife, and that’s not what we paid,” he told the clerk behind the desk.

“Impossible,” the clerk responded.

“Look it up,” Ronald said.

He did.  “They made a mistake,” he told Ronald, but he gave him the rate I paid. How could he not?

We chose the Holiday Inn Express because my parents-in-law have used them in their travels for the last fifty years and feel comfortable there. The reason my parents-in-law like the Holiday Inn is because back in the mid-twentieth century that was one of the few hotels that would let blacks book rooms. I guess there’s no way to know if they gave them the same rate as white people.

That kind of memory stays with a person. It’s like Dillard’s. A long time ago, they did not welcome black shoppers. My in-laws have never forgotten, and they refuse to shop there when they visit the South. Though I love the store, I understand why they don’t, even if it happened fifty years ago.

I booked two non-smoking king rooms, asked for the AARP rate (he never even asked me for my membership card), and told the clerk, an Asian Indian man who spoke broken English, that my parents were elderly and needed to be close to us because they had health issues. He gave us rooms across the hall from one another.

I returned to the car, we parked, got our luggage, and piled into the hotel. The clerk stared as we passed the desk. I had a bad feeling from the start. I’m not psychic, but I use my intuition, and nothing felt right. I chalked it up to a long day on the road and the worry that clutched at me because I knew this trip was going to be awfully difficult for my parents-in-law to make. As soon as we got up to the rooms, the evening slid into chaos.

The clerk did not give us two rooms with king beds as I requested. One room had a king and the other had two doubles. No problem, Ronald and I took the one with the doubles (we slept in a single dorm bed together for three of the four years of college), but the one with the king bed had a broken A/C unit. Ronald and I trudged back down stairs to tell the clerk. His uncle, a small man the same size as my father-in-law, stood behind him with a toddler in his arms. Ronald explained the situation. Then I added that if the A/C could not be repaired, we would have to move on to another hotel.  “You understand that my in-laws are elderly and have health issues. They cannot stay in a room without air.”

The desk clerk said he’d be up in twenty minutes. A half hour later, he still hadn’t come.

Ronald went back down while my in-laws propped open their door with a chair. I was trying to get them into our room to wait, but they didn’t want to miss the clerk. There were white people filing past us down the hall with dogs, lots of dogs. There must have been a dog show in town. They all stared as I stood with my in-laws, my father-in-law growing more upset as the minutes ticked by.

Downstairs the clerk told Ronald he was rushing him. Ronald explained, again, that his parents are elderly with health issues and the temperature in the room was well over 100 degrees. Finally the clerk agreed to come upstairs with him. The clerk’s uncle tagged along.

As soon as my father-in-law saw them, he wanted to explain the situation, but already tired and not feeling well, he was agitated and emotional. My mother-in-law made him sit down as the two men stooped around the PTAC (that stands for “packaged terminal air conditioner”) and examined it. Ronald stood nearby them. I waited in the hall.

After several minutes, the clerk announced the PTAC needed a new circuit board and maintenance would be there in the morning.

“Unacceptable,” Ronald said.

“Open the window,” the clerk answered. Even though it was evening, the temperature was still in the low 100s.

Ronald went into fire lieutenant mode. When you’ve managed fire scenes, you learn to communicate clearly, succinctly, loud enough to be heard, and with no room for interpretation. He did not curse. He did not lose control of his voice. He stood inches from the man’s face, his finger in his chest.

“You’re done. I gave you a chance to make it right,” Ronald said as the clerk backed out of the room, Ronald in close pursuit.

The clerk said, “Let them sleep in your room with you or take them to a different hotel and you stay here. You have another room.”

“Why don’t I call the police and they can help us sort this out?” Ronald said.

“Okay, okay, I have another room.”

“Too late.”

I jumped in. “I’ll see you at the front desk to check out. I already told you we’d be leaving if you couldn’t fix the air.”

Downstairs, my voice shaking, I said, “I explained to you that they have health issues. You see they are elderly. I better not see one cent charged on my credit card.”

Then he argued with me about the room numbers. He said we were in 320 and 322. We were not side by side but across the hall from one another in 320 and 321. I didn’t want 322 charged to my card.

“Really?” I asked. “Weren’t you just up there?”

“The computer doesn’t lie.”

“I don’t either. We are in 320 and 321. I want documentation that you cancelled the rooms.”

He said he had none and I took a business card from the desk and told him I would be checking to make sure he didn’t charge me. There was a white woman standing at the counter during our exchange. She stood with her mouth open and her wallet in her hand. As I stood waiting at the elevator to go back upstairs, I mouthed to her, “Don’t stay here.”

She excused herself from the desk and came over and whispered, “What happened? He was so rude to you.”

I explained. She said, “Oh, God, we prepaid.”

“Good luck,” I said.

I took my in-laws to the car while Ronald gathered the overnight bags, and the white woman and her family were parked next to us. It was the first she knew of our interracial status. She and I spoke again.  She offered the understanding that I wish for lots of times and don’t get as I navigate this interracial world.

I don’t think every white person hates black people. It’s the way our culture operates silently behind the scenes. Racism is institutionalized and systemic in how we live, work, and socialize. It’s about power and privilege and the oppression of others. Most people don’t realize it. They think racism is an individual thing, but it isn’t. That’s just plain bias or hatred. That white woman was kind and understanding, but in our society, she is still part of the majority race and benefits from that membership, just as I do. Until we eliminate the unwritten racism hidden in our social structure, it will remain, and the majority will continue to enjoy power and privilege while minority groups continue to suffer their status of “less than.”

Later, lying in bed with the lights turned off in our king room at the next hotel we found along the route, Ronald and I chuckled as we recapped our day before dropping off to sleep. We talked about all the people who stared and wondered what our story was. Then I mentioned the look on the hotel clerk’s face, how it went from arrogant to fearful, when Ronald went into lieutenant mode and told him we were leaving. We didn’t know if the man was stupid, rude, prejudiced, acting superior, or all of the above, but it had made for a very bad evening, one that we’ll talk about for years to come, no doubt.

“I guess all the white folks with their dogs were worried that the niggers were going to turn out the place,” Ronald concluded. He keeps a sense of humor about these situations.

“Yup, it’s always an adventure,” I said, laughing.

I told Ronald the story of the white woman who nodded to me one last time after I had pulled our car up to the front door to wait for him while he imparted a last warning not to charge our credit card to the clerk and his uncle. The woman tilted her head and smiled, and I smiled back at her and shrugged my shoulders.

We are all just another brick in the societal wall, but I hope that together we can modify the structure so there will be true equality. I’m talking about the kind of equality where everyone pays a better rate at the hotel and the clerk aims to please all of the hotel guests. We can’t run away and lose the past. Instead we have to shake up our willful ignorance and face the undeniable truth.

Riding the Interracial Marriage Highs

No one should be surprised that interracial marriages are at an all time high. 8.4 percent of all marriages in the U.S. are interracial, up from 3.2 percent in 1980.  The increase includes interracial marriages of all combinations but is tied to the increase of the Hispanic and Asian populations in our country.

I remember going to the movies with Cara and Mackenzie to see Save the Last Dance in 2001. It was a movie about dance, and that’s why we went, but it was also a movie about an interracial couple that faces prejudice from peers and family. I cried through the whole movie: not sniffles and discreet dabs at my nose with tissues, but outright sobbing, snot and tears flowing, and shoulders heaving. I didn’t realize until then how much emotion I had stuffed inside me and pretended didn’t exist. I felt the full onslaught of anger, loss and hurt at the way people treated us and how much of it went unresolved after the death of my parents, Dad in 1981 and Ma in 1983. Cara and Mackenzie were embarrassed and baffled that I had reacted so strongly to a predictable and sentimental film.

They were rising seniors in high school and were about to leave to attend their first year at the conservatory that was predominately white. Their whole school career had been at urban public schools that were around fifty percent ethnic minority. They wore the confidence of acceptance amongst their peers. Too soon they would experience prejudice, stereotyping, isolation, and racism at the conservatory, but at the time we saw the movie, they could not understand what their own parents had experienced.

I realized that day that I just wanted to be like everyone else: worry about the bills; wonder how Cara and Mackenzie would fare 700 miles away; work at getting to know one another again after raising two kids and beginning a new phase in our relationship. I didn’t want to have to think about Ronald being treated poorly because of his skin color or worry whether or not we’d have problems if we tried to buy another house or went to have dinner at a restaurant or tried to get a hotel room when we went south to see the girls. That’s all anyone wants – to feel the freedom of not being judged and to live one’s life without someone stepping in and trying to make something out of it that it isn’t.

(Excerpt from essay Staying on It: Beauty and Aging)

My aging hair upsets me the most. I can never recapture its color, a blend of browns, golds, and reds that lit up in the sunlight and glistened with health. I didn’t start dying my hair until I was in my late thirties. I had, long before then, advised my sister Peggy, ten years older than I, to dye hers.

“My God,” I said to her when I was searching for her in a large crowd of people on the concourse under the New York state capital plaza. “I didn’t recognize you. You look like Aunt Josephine.”

She called me a week later, my thoughtless comment still stinging, and asked me if she should start dying her hair. “Yes,” I said, “you look older than your years.”

I knew women whose hair had turned gray or white prematurely when they were in their teens or twenties, and I loved the uniqueness of it. But why am I so tormented by my own gray hair?

“Don’t dye your hair,” Ronald said weeks before I started getting it done. “They can’t duplicate your hair color, and I’ll notice if you color a single strand on your head.”

It took him six months.

Now he complains that my hairdresser doesn’t know what she’s doing. “She’s putting the lighter color underneath the dark,” he said. “It looks like your scalp is showing through. It should be the other way around.”

“Ronald, that’s not what she’s doing,” I said, anger flaring for his pointing out what I can no longer hide. “That’s how white my hair is, and when it starts to grow out, that’s what you see. I’d have to have it colored every two weeks to keep up with it.”

Debra Gimlin studied how middleclass white women take care of their hair and the role hairdressers play in helping them in her book Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture. She says, “Clients above all want ‘natural-looking’ hair. However, this quality is related not to its being ‘natural’ in any genuine sense but rather to the painstaking construction of ‘naturalness.’”

Both Cara and Mackenzie think I might like the white or gray my hair really is, if I would just grow it out and try it. I talk to Ronald about it, but neither one of us seems to be able to make a definitive choice. Besides the awful skunk stripe I’d suffer with for the months it would take me to grow it out, I’m afraid that I’ll have succumbed to being old.

“I don’t want to look like George and Barbara Bush,” I’ve told Ronald on several occasions. His hair is salt and pepper, he has a growing bald spot, and he sports a spare tire at his waistline. I’ve promised to tell him when the bald spot has become too large, and he should shave his head. Cara, Mackenzie, and I see how he has aged, but strangers think he is years younger, even twenty years younger than his chronological age. I feel the unfairness and obsess over it.

“Are you going to leave me for someone younger?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“Dianne, I’m still here. Let me deal with the sadness I feel sometimes. Give me time to sort through what it feels like to watch you age,” he said.

I was hurt that he felt sad for me, even as I felt sad for myself. I felt old women became invisible but old men continued on as always.

“Dianne, it’s like a favorite pair of shoes,” he said, as we lay on the bed, my head resting on his shoulder, his arm around me. “They might be worn, but you’ve grown attached to them.”

A pair of shoes, I thought, anger breaking like beads of sweat, an emotional hot flash, but I realized it was his way of saying that he couldn’t imagine living without me, just as I could not imagine living without him.

Fatal Attractiveness

Ashton Kutcher, sixteen years younger than his ex-wife Demi Moore, is grieving the end of his marriage by partying in Brazil with a bevy of young, beautiful models. In the meantime Demi struggles to heal and move on. This week she was hospitalized for a reaction to some drugs she took at a party she hosted at her home and is now headed to rehab for “exhaustion.” It is also rumored she is suffering from an eating disorder, possibly anorexia. She remarked in an interview with Harper’s Bizarre, "I would say what scares me is that I'm going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I'm really not lovable, that I'm not worthy of being loved. That there's something fundamentally wrong with me.”

At forty-nine Demi is five years younger than I am. I remember how beautiful I always thought she was and still is, but even beautiful women are plagued by vulnerability and insecurity. Society has us brainwashed, and men, too, to believe a woman is less than if her physical attributes don’t match a certain standard or when those attributes begin to change and fade with age. No matter how rationally and intellectually I view this issue, my emotions rule, and I find myself wondering if age will render me unlovable.

What can we learn from other cultures? That age brings the beauty of wisdom and the character of a life well lived.

(Excerpt from essay Staying on It: Beauty and Aging)

Norma, you're a woman of 50, now grow up. There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.

~ Joe Gillis played by William Holden

Sunset Boulevard (1950)                                               

Just a few months shy of nineteen, I held Ronald’s hand as we strolled across the quad at Syracuse University in the early spring of 1976. The day was unseasonably warm, and the sun turned my brunette hair a golden red. 

“Yo, Ronnie,” a light-skinned black man, whom I would discover was Ronald’s childhood friend, called out from across the quad.

“Yo, Bill,” Ronald shouted back, his voice giddy. “This is Dianne.” He held my hand up and twirled me around so his friend could see his girl.

Ronald made me feel beautiful that day and he still does when he pulls me close to him and says, “You look very Dianne today” or when he talks about my eyes and laments how they bedazzled him.

Ma didn’t make me feel beautiful. She made me feel ugly from the inside out. She called me Witch Hazel, banshee and a hateful child. I thought that meant I was so filled with hate no one could ever love me. I imagined the hate seeped out of my soul through my skin and hair, making dirt cling to me and my hair twist and knot.

Ma’s German-born friend, a member of the Overseas Wives Club, looked at me one day when she was visiting us and shook her head. “She’s pallid. She looks sickly,” she said, as if I weren’t sitting right in front of her.

I can only remember two times when Dad said something about the way I looked. The first was when I was seventeen, and I cut my waist-length hair. He drove me to the beauty salon, the first time I had ever been to one and the first time someone who wasn’t Ma or a neighbor cut my hair. Dad sat out in the car and waited. I watched in the mirror as the hairdresser, a small, olive-skinned, deaf man, sheared off my long locks. I had asked him to save my hair, but he had misunderstood or forgotten, and piles of hair lay on the floor around the chair. Then he curled and sprayed, and I didn’t recognize myself. I thought maybe it was because he was deaf, and he hadn’t understood the style I wanted. As I approached the car, I saw Dad with his arm resting atop the open window, staring straight ahead. When he heard me, he turned, looked me up and down and said, “I don’t like it.”

I cried on the way home, and Ma led me into the bathroom and wet down the curls so they looked more natural.

By my eighteenth birthday, I had let my hair grow to my shoulders and had learned how to style it using a newly marketed handheld blow dryer and a round brush. That evening, dressed to go out with friends, I posed for pictures. In one of them I sit on the arm of the dark green sofa, leaning back seductively, my left hand on my hip, my chin up, and my legs crossed. My hair is feathered a la Farrah Fawcett. I wear aviator glasses, a fitted red T-shirt tucked into a denim miniskirt, and four-inch cork-heeled wedges.

When I came out of my bedroom, Dad whistled.

“Wow!” he exclaimed and my Uncle Rocco, who had stopped over for coffee, nodded approvingly. That was the first time I felt beautiful.

As I matured, Ma pointed out my flaws. “If I had a nickel, I’d stick it in the slot and get on the bus,” she mused while looking at my backside one day.

I don’t think Ma really saw me as ugly; she was bemoaning her own loss of youth and looks and taking it out on the person who most reminded her that they were fading. As a young woman during World War II, she had captured the attention of the soldiers stationed in her hometown of Ryde, Australia, including Dad, with her buxom figure, long legs, and her bawdy sense of humor.

She fretted as I matured, and maybe hoped if I remained a child, she might stop aging. I fought in vain with her to buy me a training bra when I turned twelve. It was embarrassing to be one of the few girls still wearing undershirts. I was so thrilled when I finally got one that I lifted my shirt up to show Dad.

Ma wouldn’t teach me how to pluck my brows or shave my legs, despite the teasing I got in middle school from the boys.  She worried I was too young to handle tweezers and a razor, but I solved my brow problem.  I squeezed two quarters together and yanked, over and over, until I had made my unibrow into two smooth brows that framed my large eyes. My soon-to-be sister-in-law taught me how to use Nair on my legs one day during one of Ma’s many hospital stays. Forty-two years later, I pluck my brows daily and call Sundays my hair removal day: top lip, under arms, legs and pubic area.

Now I see my own loss of youth and beauty. In seven years I’ll be the same age Ma was when she had a heart attack and died at sixty-one years old.

The Beauty Booby Trap

Courtney Stodden, the seventeen-year-old who married fifty-one-year-old, B-list actor Doug Hutchinson, may very well be the poster child for the decline of women’s equality, rights and self-actualization. She was just sixteen when she began an Internet relationship with Hutchinson and her mother both encouraged and signed consent for her to marry him. Still underage, she is often photographed in provocative poses. One has her in a T-shirt on which Yes, they are real is printed across her enormous breasts. But they aren’t real – photos taken just a year or two earlier show a different girl. She is a regular teen with regular sized breasts, no stripper makeup, no hair extensions, and no pouty mouth.

A strip club owner in Seattle has just offered her $5000 to appear on her eighteenth birthday to perform two strip shows. She hasn’t accepted his invitation, but why not? She’s been stripping on camera for a year now. Maybe it’s not enough money. Maybe her price (or her mother’s and husband’s price) is more like the pay one gets to appear in Playboy. Wait until she is eighteen or maybe not, if someone can figure out how to get around the little problem of her being underage.

I didn’t want to write about her. I’ve avoided it for months. Why take part in her prostitution? She is a child. Her mother, her husband, and the media are exploiting and objectifying her. As many adolescent girls would, she relishes the attention while not recognizing the consequences.

Younger and younger girls are dressing provocatively, sharing intimate photos, sexting, engaging in sex. They also suffer from eating and body dysmorphic disorders. Do they understand exploitation and objectification? What have they been taught about beauty by the media, the Internet, boys and men, other girls and women, and their own pursuits of beauty, popularity and celebrity?

I struggle with the concept of beauty and how it is defined culturally, sexually, emotionally, intellectually and personally. Even in middle age, even as a feminist, I still want to feel beautiful. I see how that renders me less than: less than men, less than other women, less than my own potential. At what price is beauty?

(Excerpt from essay Staying on It: Beauty and Aging)

One of my favorite actresses, Vivien Leigh, played an aging but refined southern English teacher, Blanche DuBois, who is fired from her position for her penchant for alcohol and young men in Streetcar Named Desire.

Blanche gives her perspective on beauty and aging when she says:

"A cultivated woman, a woman of breeding and intelligence, can enrich a man's life immeasurably.  I have those things to offer and time doesn't take them away.  Physical beauty is a passing transitory possession but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart, I have all those things."

But the quintessential movie on aging females is Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson, aged fifty, played Norma Desmond, also fifty. Swanson’s declining career closely mirrored that of Desmond’s, only the outcome was different – Miss Swanson had her comeback.

Fran Hortop of Bint Magazine said this of Swanson’s portrayal:

Swanson gives a grotesque, cruel and powerful performance, more than likely the best of her career. She teeters on the edge of the ridiculous: Norma is much larger than life and lives in the black-and-white movie realms of melodrama where every stylised gesture counts for a thousand words. She’s all taloned fingers and bulging eyes, dressed like a psychotic goddess in elaborate turbans and jewels - a brave parody of the kind of über-actress Swanson was herself.

After the film, Swanson was offered other similar roles, but she declined them, saying in her memoir, “I could obviously go on playing [Norma Desmond] in its many variations for decades to come, until at last I became some sort of creepy parody of myself, or rather, of Norma Desmond – a shadow of a shadow.”  She was in two more films after Sunset, but chose to pursue other business and artistic pursuits including sculpting until her death in 1983.

Ronald documented the changes in my face, body, and hair over the last thirty-five years in photos, not consciously, but there they all are. He always made me feel beautiful, even as we both mourn my loss of youth. Though I am always shy in front of the camera, he has managed to capture what he sees and avers.

He took one black-and-white photo in 1977 at the record store on Marshall Street near Syracuse University. My hair is cut to the tops of my shoulders with full bangs. I remember the hairdresser had told me, as he cut and styled it, that I looked like a china doll with my porcelain skin, large eyes and shiny, straight, dark hair. My skin is dusted with tiny freckles left over from the summer, and my small downturned mouth is parted so that just my two front teeth show. I stare at the camera, looking hesitant. I remember feeling embarrassed that Ronald was snapping photos in front the other shoppers in the store.

Back then I only wore a little blush, undereye concealer and mascara. I didn’t need anything else. 

Ronald saw all the photo albums spread out on the bed, after Cara and I had been through them, so I asked him to select his favorite photo from the many he had taken of me that first year. I didn’t like the one he picked: my eyes cast downward, a shy smile that might have been a grimace, my hand running through my hair.

He laughed when he saw me flipping through the pages of the albums a short time later, looking for one I liked. “Why did you ask me?”

There is another photo taken in 2011. It’s a close-up of my face. I’m looking at and smiling into the camera, having just graduated with my MFA degree.

The lines on my forehead and between my eyebrows are apparent, as are the crow’s feet running away from the outer corners of my eyes. My nose appears longer at the tip than it did in the photo taken in 1977, and it could be a result of age or camera angle. My dimples, doubled on the right side of my mouth, are etched deeply. My teeth, off-center due to only having one adult canine, are bright white. My eyes, crinkled in joy, are vibrant and warm. They are framed by my long lashes and the cocoa and white eyeliners. There is a hint of white at my hairline. I like this photo so much I copy it to the digital photo frame that sits in the dining room. Ronald often points out photos of me to guests, as they flash on the digitized screen.

“See that?” he asks, pointing out a photo where I stand between Cara and Mackenzie, both clutching single carnations, both smiling with lips squeezed shut because they are growing in front teeth. The photo was taken at the end of one of their piano recitals. I am in my mid-thirties. Permed hair frames my face and touches my shoulders, large, nineties-style glasses sit below arched brows, and a slight smile activates my right-side dimples. I wear a blue violet dress, the belt cinching my still-small waist. “She captivated me,” he says.

He tells me one day recently that he has been showing a photo of me to the guys at the golf range.

 “Not a college photo!” I respond. That would be false advertising.

“No, this one,” he says, and he pulls out a 5x7 photo taken at work for my ID card picture. I had given it to him several years ago and forgotten about it. “They all said how pretty you are.”

 I think he must be speaking about my inner beauty: the beauty of my mind, the richness of my spirit, and the tenderness of my heart. Maybe they were qualities I always possessed but didn’t recognize when I viewed myself through Ma’s eyes.

Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof felt the power of her beauty and sexuality when her husband Brick, played by Paul Newman, asked her, “What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?”

“Just staying on it, I guess,” she tells him, “long as she can.”

Staying on It

(Excerpt from essay Staying on It: Beauty and Aging)

I don’t look much like my mother did at this age. Her hair, caught between blond and brunet, was gray at her temples and looked as if she had had it professionally frosted. Her eyes were the color of rain, a cold gray. My hair, thanks to monthly visits to my hairdresser, is still brunet, and my eyes are amber. Ma was tall, almost 5’7”, and I must stand straight and proud to nearly reach 5’3”. She was buxom, a D cup; I was barely A up until I got pregnant at age twenty-six. Yet I see her in my hands, the way my thumb joint is curling toward my palm and in the crepe of my forearms and décolletage.  I see it in the bunions that frustrate me away from the heels I so adored wearing because they made me look leggy. I see it in the depressions around my eyes, so unlike hers in shape and color, but now resting more deeply into my face just as hers did at this age.

Ma and I, when we weren’t feuding, sat and watched old movies together when I was a child, with bone china cups of tea and buttered English muffins on paper plates. It was from the movies of the 1940s and 1950s that I developed my vision of beauty. It was Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; or Marilyn Monroe as Sugar in Some Like It Hot; or Audrey Hepburn as Princess Ann in Roman Holiday; or Sophia Loren as Cinzia in Houseboat.

It wasn’t their skin color or ethnicity that made them each beautiful; it was the way they carried themselves, off-handed, sensual, and appreciative of the differences between men and women.

I am a feminist. I didn’t want to be like Ma, a stay-at-home wife who didn’t know how to drive or pay a bill. I wanted to pursue higher education. I expected to work after graduating college, to pay my own way. I expected a career. I expected equal pay for equal work. I thought I could have it all: spouse, children and career. I did, but I didn’t forget how different my inside felt compared to my outside.

I raised my twin daughters to trust what came naturally to them, and I also made sure they knew I thought they were beautiful. I didn’t want them to experience the inner turmoil I felt as a child and a young woman. I didn’t want them to wonder, because they are interracial, whether or not they fit a specific standard of beauty, a standard that holds Eurocentric features as superior.

One of my white work associates, back when Cara and Mackenzie were around eight, exclaimed, as she looked at photos, how lucky they were. She explained her statement by saying, “They have the beautiful dark skin but none of the ugly African-American features.”

I was incensed. “They look like me, but they look like Ronald, too,” I said in response.

Cara and I looked at old photos as I was writing this essay. There were many featuring all the ways I used to style their long, curly hair: half-backs, French braids, herring-bone braids, pigtails, buns, and multiple ponytails that began at the forehead and graduated every couple of inches, gathering more hair, until the last one placed at the nape.

“Oh, I loved your hair like that,” I said of one photo that showed them with their hair down, falling below their shoulder blades, brushed out and full. I remember the arguments I had with Ronald about the oil he recommended we use in their hair so it wouldn’t become brittle and break off. It was the same oil his mother and sisters used when they straightened their hair with the hot comb, a metal instrument they heated in the flame of a gas stove burner. The heavy weight oil made Cara and Mackenzie look like drowned cats. I resisted until Ronald’s ex sister-in-law suggested a brand of lightweight oil. She had an interracial child who was African-American and Puerto Rican.

“Mom, you don’t brush hair like ours,” Cara said, laughing. “I used to try to tell you that.”

“But it was so pretty,” I said, remembering how mine was fine, straight, and tangled at that age.

I don’t want them to experience the uncertainty I feel now as I watch my body change and push against me, this time from the outside in.