Beauty Queens

Her mother was always on her about one thing or another — hair, skin, nails, figure. “Well. I guess you got your father’s color,” her mother would say. Her tone, aggrieved, aggravated, made it clear that this was simply one more cross the universe had asked her to bear.

Nicole’s mom had been a Laker Girl. She’d enjoyed being in the spotlight, and when her own ambitions hadn’t worked out, she’d turned her attentions to making Nicole a star. “Because my baby is special,” she’d say. My baby is going to nationals in ice-skating. My baby is going to be a Grammy winner. My baby will be an actress. My baby is going to be a star. And when her baby could barely stand in skates, couldn’t sing on pitch, and mangled her lines in the school play, her mother only became more determined.

“Those people are just stupid,” she’d say, tugging on Nicole’s hand as they left agent after agent’s office. “There is no way my baby is average. We’ll show them. I’m going to get you an audition with Sweet Sixteen Gone Wrong31.

Nicole had wanted to please her mother, but she knew she didn’t really have any talent for being famous. What she wanted to be was a doctor. Instead, she sat through countless DVR’d episodes of teen shows where the only girls of color were the sassy best friend, the Girl with Attitude who came in to swivel her head, snap out a one-liner, and fall back like a background singer. They had one thing in common, though — they were all light-skinned.

One day, Nicole’s mother came home with a new jar of something called Pale & Pretty, which promised to “brighten the skin.”

“Bleaching cream,” her Auntie Abeo clucked, and Nicole could hear her mother and auntie arguing in the kitchen.

“She needs to do something with herself,” her mother said at last.

“Fine. She can come help me out in the office.” Her auntie stuck her head into the living room. “Come with me, Ne-Ne.”

When they were alone together in her aunt’s office at the clinic with her take-apart anatomical models of the uterus and copious medical books, Auntie Abeo held Nicole’s chin firmly but lovingly in her soft hand. “Don’t you ever use that cream, do you hear me? What it takes from you, you can’t get back. And I’m not just talking about pigment. Here, got you your own copy of Gray’s Anatomy. A book doesn’t care what color you are. Bleaching cream, my foot.”

Nicole took comfort in the clinical book. When you peeled back the skin, you were dealing with bone and muscle, blood and nerve endings. It was all the same. She liked the beautiful logic of the circulatory system, the elegance of the neurological, and the fierce warrior spirit of the heart. The body had rules and it had quirks. Nicole respected that. Nicole’s mother couldn’t. She couldn’t revel in the way synapses fired and blood cells defended against foreign invaders. She could only see her body’s failings.

“Look at these stretch marks, girl. It’s like a road map to ugly. I better cut out the fried clams if I don’t want to look like your grandmother and have to wear nothing but size twenty-four housedresses the rest of my life.”

Nicole worked the knife over the softened bark, cutting long, rectangular slits in the log’s flanks. With her hem, she wiped away the wood filings, then made slightly wider cuts, curving away layers of casing to deepen the drum’s sound. As she carved, she thought about her mother’s crazy diets: Juice fasts. Cayenne pepper and lemon. Low-carb. No-carb. Grapefruit and steak. Nicole had suffered through them all. “We’re getting rid of all the refined sugar in this house,” her mother would announce out of the blue, carrying in bags from Whole Foods, eco-friendly tubes of rice cakes and no-salt-no-sugar-no-wheat-no-taste cereal, food as punishment. The next month, it would be something else.

Sometimes, her mother would come up behind her while Nicole sat at the kitchen table studying and wrap her arms around her daughter, kiss the top of her head, and for a fleeting moment, Nicole didn’t want to be separate from her. But then her mother would inevitably say something — “How come your skin’s so ashy? Aren’t you using that cream I gave you?” “I don’t think I like what you’ve got on.” “I swear, my baby’s just like me” — and the affection would be undone.

“I’m not you; I’m me!” Nicole wanted to scream.

Instead, she would speak in chewed fingernails and mauled cuticles, nervous scratching and upset stomachs, habits that frustrated and angered her mother, but in the anger, there was space. There was separation.