Katie Makkai "Pretty"

Pretty by Katie Makkai

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? What comes next? Oh right, will I be rich?” Which is almost pretty depending on where you shop. And the pretty question infects from conception, passing blood and breath into cells. The word hangs from our mothers' hearts in a shrill fluorescent floodlight of worry.

“Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?” But puberty left me this funhouse mirror dryad: teeth set at science fiction angles, crooked nose, face donkey-long and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting. My poor mother.

“How could this happen? You'll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist. You sucked your thumb. That's why your teeth look like that! You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were 6. Otherwise your nose would have been just fine!

“Don't worry. We'll get it fixed!” She would say, grasping my face, twisting it this way and that, as if it were a cabbage she might buy.

But this is not about her. Not her fault. She, too, was raised to believe the greatest asset she could bestow upon her awkward little girl was a marketable facade. By 16, I was pickled with ointments, medications, peroxides. Teeth corralled into steel prongs. Laying in a hospital bed, face packed with gauze, cushioning the brand new nose the surgeon had carved.

Belly gorged on 2 pints of my blood I had swallowed under anesthesia, and every convulsive twist of my gut like my body screaming at me from the inside out, “What did you let them do to you!”

All the while this never-ending chorus droning on and on, like the IV needle dripping liquid beauty into my blood. “Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Like my mother, unwrapping the gift wrap to reveal the bouquet of daughter her $10,000 bought her? Pretty? Pretty.”

And now, I have not seen my own face for 10 years. I have not seen my own face in 10 years, but this is not about me.

This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in. About women who will prowl 30 stores in 6 malls to find the right cocktail dress, but haven't a clue where to find fulfillment or how wear joy, wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those 2 pretty syllables.

About men wallowing on bar stools, drearily practicing attraction and everyone who will drift home tonight, crest-fallen because not enough strangers found you suitably fuckable.

This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.

“You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely 'pretty'.”

Needs: The Cavity

To want to be taken care of is something that most women will not admit to. I can say that I have had everything I've been set up to believe by my female role models tainted because it hurts to admit that I have not yet broken in to the "independent woman" category and probably never will. I need to be taken care of. I don't depend on myself fully to make myself happy. I used to believe that happiness was always within myself but when you've been in as many relationships as I have, all of which have made me feel stronger about being able to find love, you kinda start getting lazy. You start to not believe in people, exactly but believe that there is someone out there who will read your mind.

Then again, it's because you start becoming either more hopeful or more adamant about finding the things you want in someone, or a weird mixture-delicately balanced-between both. I don't depend on myself fully for money, sustenance, and shelter. It might take me a while to get used to being all alone, truly alone and self-sufficient. So this is where the decision about going to study abroad comes from. Should I stay? And find the same old Diana, lingering for another chance to take advantage of, not bettering myself? Or should I go and crash and burn, and be ashes blown away to a different existence, starting from mere dust?

And it's like going to the dentist. The cavity is your insecurity, your reliance on others that goes rotten and you only feel it when the damage is irreversible. So you go, and they put a needle in your mouth. And it stings on that space between your gums and your bone (I think?). But maybe that experience is rewarded ten-fold because when that anesthetic hits, if you've suffered enough, you know you won't feel a thing.