Their Pretty Girl

Trigger warning: contains themes of sexual violence, self-harm, and body image disorders

When I was young, I used to slide my feet into Mama’s high heels and shuffle around the house like that, pretending I was a lady. She proudly tells people that one of the first questions that came out of my mouth was: “Am I pretty?” And the answer, of course, was, “Oh, Lily, you are my beautiful girl.”

I tried on Mama’s shoes for the first time in years last week. They’re still just slightly too big, too much wiggle room across the toes and an extra inch or two behind my heel. To wear those glamorous shoes, I’d have to hobble around, careful where and how I stepped, forced to keep my ankles in perfect alignment like a ballerina. Mama could own her beauty in those shoes, and in whatever else she wanted to wear. I couldn’t own my beauty because it’s never really been mine.

“Am I pretty?” I would ask Mama. 

“Oh, Lily, you are my beautiful girl,” she would answer, and walk us both to the bathroom mirror. “See, you have those big blue eyes. Mine are squinty. And your little button nose. Look, mine has a bump right here on the bridge.” And I would look at Mama’s nose, searching for the huge red posts of the Golden Gate, and she’d smile softly at me.

I entered my first pageant when I was three and a half years old. Back then, it was just Mama and me. None of those silly pageant coaches who smelled like hairspray and whitening toothpaste. In those early pageants, I only remember that the lights hurt my eyes and that I had to spin around in a tutu for the talent portion. We went to a lot of them, Mama and I. Some of them were very far away, and I would stare out the window from my car seat, watching the landscapes gradually change until I fell asleep against my own reflection in the window. After a few years, when Mama’s closet began to fill with designer denim and genuine leather purses, I understood that the pageants were more than just recitals.

People started to use the word “serious” once I turned 10. Mama hired our first pageant coach, a woman who reminded me of bubblegum that had been chewed for too long. She took me to a pageant six hours south in Los Angeles, where one of the judges met me backstage in the dressing room. I don’t remember his face but I remember his voice: hushed, deep, and stern. 

“You’re my pretty little winner tonight,” he told me. 

“It hasn’t started yet,” I said, and even though I was telling the truth, my words felt flat and stupid.

He laughed then, and told me to give him a hug. For good luck. As his thick arms wrapped around me and his meaty hands fell lower and lower on my back, my heart pounded anxiously in my chest. When he finally pulled away, he looked long and hard at me. Only he wasn’t looking at me – he was admiring big blue eyes, a tiny button nose. In this world, it was all that mattered.

Mama hired an agent who secured my first modeling contract at 14 – what a funny name for a profession that specializes in taking people’s agency away. Nonetheless, it was a blessing at first; it meant no more pageants. But it didn’t mean an end to the bright, painful lights and the choreography of it all. The world, once as pink and soft and simple as Mama’s closet, was hardening and turning grey. I didn’t have to ask if I was pretty anymore; men’s gazes provided their unsolicited answers. For the first time in my life, I was afraid to ask the question.

My beauty was no longer mine. Those stolen glances robbed me of my pride, my power, my deepest sense of self. They reduced me to big blue eyes, a tiny button nose. Nothing more, nothing less. Mama encouraged me to stop attending school. We were going to buy a house in Los Angeles and I was going to become famous. Who wouldn’t want that?

Around this time, everybody stopped pretending. After one particularly long session of strutting about a Hollywood photo studio, trying so hard to stop my sensitive eyes from watering at the persistent flashes of the camera, an executive cupped my face in his large, hardened hands and told me, “Honey, you are going to make us so much money.” 

Although I wasn’t a member of the us he referred to, I earned money anyway. It turned the world a little bigger, a little more transparent. Mama bought a house in Hollywood with an entire wall of glass. It was unclear if she had done this to look out at the street or if she had done it so the street would look in at us. The rest of our money was tucked away into investment accounts by analysts whose handshakes were as cold and fishlike as their stares.

I remember the first time I saw a public image of my face, plastered on a billboard on Gower Street, fifteen feet tall and twenty wide. “So beautiful for all the world to see,” Mama said, her voice quivering with pride. My cheeks had burned scarlet as a group of men walked by, craning their necks to see what we were looking at. They smiled to themselves, whispered to each other, and glanced furtively at me. It was for the world to see and they were staring at it. I leaned against the post of a stop sign, unable to look at that image for long. It was the exact opposite of looking in a mirror – the closer and harder I looked, the less I felt like myself. They had airbrushed away the freckle on my chin and colored my hair a lighter shade of blonde. But the most important part, the most obviously unobvious part, was the corporate logo stamped over my cheek, marking me, a cross between a hickey and a cattle-brand. 

The more I saw that image, the more ill I got. It was reproduced all over Hollywood, in magazines and posters and billboards, my face a commodity found behind the windows of shopping malls and in the hands of sick people flipping pages in waiting rooms. A homeless woman once approached me in the street, recognized my face, and proclaimed, “You are so loved.” I thought I had never heard a stranger thing to tell someone. It made me want to cry, scream, and laugh all at once. 

My sixteenth birthday came and went. Mama offered me a low-sugar fruit tart that we ate alone together in our fishbowl of a living room. Sometime that afternoon, a girl my age drove slowly down the street in a vintage convertible. I couldn’t see her face – it was obscured by her billowing hair and her wide-frame sunglasses – but I knew she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. 

Since I was now considered on the verge of adulthood, my agent decided that it was time for a bigger break. “Judy Garland got her start at 16,” he insisted in the car one day. “Lily, you’re not in Kansas anymore.” I gazed calmly out the window at the palm trees that lined the street, standing artificially straight in the still, dry air, their fronds so green they could have been spray-painted. Just another over-saturated piece of the Los Angeles desert rainbow. “I remember,” I responded.

He took me to the office of an executive on Melrose Avenue, a short and balding man. The executive’s sunken eyes regarded me with a calculating interest, adding up my assets, scrolling up and down and up again to pause at my chest. He didn’t meet my gaze as he asked my agent, “Have you considered implants for her?”

It wasn’t only this executive who asked insults. It was the entire industry. They all reeked of cruel cliches – Irish coffee breath, self-righteous sweat, and the kind of cologne that clings stubbornly to the insides of your nostrils. They were angry men, not because they had a thing to be angry at, but because their hungry egos were like teenage boys – incessantly irritable, growing bigger, demanding to be fed. I stood maturely, emotionlessly, with straight-backed posture as one after the other created new descriptions for my breasts. Not marketable, unideal but doable, in need of adjustment. I didn’t cry. 

It didn’t take long for us to circle back to the short balding executive on Melrose Avenue. He eagerly greeted us: “So, have you thought about it?”

“About my breasts?” I clarified.

“Yes.” He arched an eyebrow.

I smiled demurely. “I’m a 16-year-old girl,” I told him.

I didn’t wait for his reply. I stood and walked from the office, into the bright sunlight of the parking lot, and strode to the car. The driver was evidently surprised to see me tapping on the window of the driver’s seat so soon after he had dropped us off. Confused, almost alarmed, he opened the door. “We heading out?”

“Yes. I just need your help…” In one fluid movement, I shoved him aside, jumped into the driver’s seat, and switched the car into drive. The driver’s hollers grew muffled as I slammed the door and stamped on the accelerator. 

I had never driven a car before. Mama had told me I was privileged to not have to drive, to have a chauffeur that toted me around like a pretty little show dog. I managed to exit the parking lot with only a few minor scrapes. If the driver was running or screaming or jumping in agitation, I didn’t see him. The rearview mirrors weren’t adjusted to my height.

I navigated north, growing irritated at the constant phone calls vibrating in my pocket.  As I turned onto Gower Street, I rolled down the window and threw my phone into oncoming traffic, another spoiled, maniacal child star who had lost her mind. And, seeing the empty street ahead, I pressed my foot to the gas pedal, swerved into the oncoming lane, and steered further left so the driver’s side of the car accelerated into a stop sign and collided with the brick wall of a century-old building.

Mama is trembling. Her eyes search anywhere but my face – her hands, the floor, the fickle god in heaven – as tears pool in them. My right eye blinks, frowns, as I attempt to discern how far away she is. 

I’m not in pain. There’s a button I can push on the side of the hospital bed that injects morphine into my veins. I only lost my left eye, broke my nose beyond repair, and sustained a deep and massive scar that runs from my left cheekbone to my lower lip. They are the results of proper execution of the plan. No one will let me look in a mirror, their discomfort forcing them to mumble from the sides of their mouth.

The doctors say I will walk again and that my brain wasn’t damaged. I’m a healthy young woman. Their words of comfort don’t stop Mama from crying. They think that maybe her tears are tears of relief that I’m still alive, but I know better.

As the sunbeams grow long and thin across the room, signaling the end of another day, I softly ask Mama, “Am I pretty?”

Her attempt to stop the tears makes her cry harder. “Oh,” she manages. “You are my beautiful girl.”

It is only when I close my eyes and steady my breath to a slow, sleep-like pace, that Mama feels safe to say, “Oh, Lily, I lost you. I lost my beautiful girl.” 

As she sobs softly into the night, a smile curls at the corners of my broken lips.