The Neighborhood

There’s a ritual to making yourself pretty.

 

When I was young, my Grandmother would blow-dry my hair for me. She was very glamorous and she knew how to make herself attractive. She didn't have to try that hard. 

 

I’d study her through the mirror amidst the lulling hum of feminine routine. Conair. I always thought she was so beautiful. She carried grace with her. Her nails were always manicured and she would sing to herself while she was cooking in the kitchen.

 

She loved to sing. She loved to watch crime shows. 

 

She quit smoking cigarettes before I was born. Supposedly, she chained smoked for sixty years prior to then.

 

One Christmas, when she was in her late 80s, my family and I spent the holiday in the hospital with her. She had dementia by then.

 

I’m not sure if she remembered who I was, but when I greeted her, she would look at me with love in her eyes and tell me I was beautiful. She reached out and held my hands with her manicured nails—my sister had just painted them for her. I didn’t know it then, but it would be her last Christmas.

 

Even in her final days she was still grabbing for her lipstick. Her hands would always shake. 

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While we were sitting around her hospital bed, she kept exclaiming how badly she wanted a cigarette and a hamburger. I drove to the diner to get her one and I almost went to the drug store to buy her a pack too, but my mom said no. ​

 

To this day, I wish I had. I still think about it. I think about how when I'm in my 80s on my deathbed and want a cigarette, someone should have the courtesy to respect that. 

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My mom raised me to be more of a tomboy—maybe a quiet rebellion of her own. As a child, I was obsessed with her. I’d cling to her hip and was afraid of my own shadow. I took after her for a long time. Back then, I wanted to be like the boys too. 

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But even still, Isabel taught me how to wash my face and how to drench my body in Skin-So-Soft after the shower. It made my blood sweeter. Bugs would have a field day on my arms and legs when it got humid.

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Those scorching summers were a lifetime ago, but I can still remember running wild through suburban streets. Playing jailbreak. And when I was eight, I got hit so hard in the face with a draw-string bag that I popped an eye-vessel.

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I screamed louder than I ever had before but somehow, now, even the pain of that moment feels charmed.

 

I tend to romanticize the transient moments of girlhood, although I’m sure at the time it was agony. My recollection seems to tie even the tragedies up at the ends.

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I can recall furiously scratching at my tits in an airport bathroom wondering when they’d stop growing. I’d wear my hair slicked back in a tight ponytail every day until I learned how to use a straightener. In the sixth grade, I woke up late on picture day and I was mortified because somehow the brace on my front tooth got flipped around and I had to take the school picture anyway. 

 

It wasn't until I got into high school that I began fostering my femininity.  I found it almost taboo to express myself that way for a long time. And even still, sometimes the expression of being a woman feels like a  performance—a way to assert dominance. A quiet power that we hold.

 

A few months ago I was in Pasadena, where I used to take guitar lessons and I came across three peacocks displaying their feathers in someone's driveway, a delicate dance of power and intrigue. It's like they were saying, "look at me, look at me, but don't get too close."

 

I watched in awe of these birds as they stood six feet apart from each other seeking attention and doing the dance. While I was standing there, I recalled looking at myself in the mirror of my childhood bedroom in the suburbs, putting on lipstick and taking flash photos with my digital camera in knee highs on and only a sweater. 

 

That winter, I snuck out of the house to meet up with my friend. I was only fourteen. I didn't really know how to do the dance yet, but I had the biggest crush on this boy. We walked through the middle of empty streets at four o’clock in the morning; our closeness and conversation heightened by the abandon of severe weather and muffled atmosphere of tightly packed snow. He told me he thought he was going to die young and that scared me.

 

I lived for the drama. Still do.

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After, I tiptoed back inside, praying my parents wouldn’t wake at the sound of the sliding glass door. I didn’t yet understand that being young was its own kind of liberation—and its own kind of prison.

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But still, I yearn for the suburban streets. The fawn-like clumsiness. The tragedy. The joy. My awkwardness. The first sip of beer.

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Privacy was something I craved in a house that was caving in on itself. 

 

There’s an inherent furtiveness to suburbia—the white house with black shutters. The tire swing in the side yard. My father smoking a cigarette in the dry-cleaner’s parking. Mom bringing laundry upstairs and setting the shoes on the carpeted closet floor. Everything's fine

 

I was so fascinated to get to know myself, but adolescence felt like swelling beyond control; limbs stretching, elbows knocking over furniture, my head pressing up against the ceiling beams. Let me out.

 

I used to be ashamed of the instinctive curiosity I had for myself. ​

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Memory is the most eloquent of storytellers, and there is nothing more perfect than the stories of our lives.