North of Beautiful Read online

  This was worth it, I assured myself. Don’t we all need something to hold on to, something that tells us it’s going to be fine — whether it was an explorer in the New World, armed with only a map whose edges faded into the Unknown? Or Mom with a brochure, rich with promises that my face would finally look normal?

  “Great idea, Mom!”

  She nodded again and grabbed not another piece of peanut butter toast but my hand. She squeezed. “You’re going to be so beautiful.”

  I couldn’t tell which one of us was lying — me with my fake enthusiasm or Mom with her eyes set on the shimmering mirage of my beauty. The timer on the oven buzzed, and we both jerked back in our seats, surprised. Both of us giggled nervously as if we had been caught doing something illicit, something forbidden, simply by hoping.

  Every map tells two stories: its contents — the physical, social, or political landscape. And its creation — how the cartographer came to make the map. I told other people’s stories. Not mine. But that night, while Mom and Dad slept, I couldn’t help it; I had to create my own collage map, chart the terrain of my thoughts. The urge was insistent, undeniable.

  So in the privacy and security of my locked room, I assembled my materials. My best tools were in my studio, but I had the basics here: a matboard I kept meaning to bring to Nest & Egg, now dented from tossing shoes carelessly on top of it in my closet. An ancient bottle of gluey medium that I inverted now so that the substance would drain to the top. An old makeup brush losing its bristles. And the hundreds of images from my Beauty Box.

  Sitting on the ground, I dumped everything out of the box and pawed through the ads, the articles, the marketing brochures. I almost laughed. Brochures, maps — they were both as much fantasy as they were fact. What mapmakers didn’t know, they just made up. Uncharted territory? Heck, toss in a man-eating monster. Unexplored ocean? Throw in a sea serpent. An abundance of imagination and guesswork defined unknown lands.

  I winced at the sudden sharp pain pricking my cheek. The memory of laser treatments, like beauty, was skin deep. I cupped my cheek, comforting it. So what if the surgery was just a Band-Aid? Or the promises in the brochure as trustworthy as fabricated landmarks on an antique map?

  I selected a magazine ad for colored contact lenses — the model’s eyes an unnatural violet, the shade Karin declared perfect for me. That, I centered on my blank board. I layered other images around that focal point of Beauty, spiraling out into a large circle. Models with thin, muscled thighs. Models whose foreheads could never fashion a frown. Plumped-up lips. All with smooth, smooth skin as unblemished as new canvas.

  I stood up, looked down at my collage of a map. Here, then, was the Land of Beautiful that I would try to breach.

  Chapter seven

  The Topography of Guilt

  YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT after years of laser therapy, nothing about the treatment would have fazed me. And in fact, for a while, nothing did. Not the pre-surgery preparations. Paperwork, check. I had filled out all the forms — insurance, medical history, HIPAA — in my studio, where Dad wouldn’t discover them. Emla cream, check. Right on schedule, an hour before heading for Children’s Hospital, I rubbed on the numbing lotion outside of Costco. Soon after, our mammoth load of groceries chilled in the trunk, my cheek chilled in the driver’s seat.

  It was the operating table that unnerved me. Still, I put on the hospital gown. I sat on the operating table. I lay down. Clearly, my four-year hiatus from treatment had softened me so I forgot what it was like to recline supine on the table, control stripped from me as effectively as if I had been strapped down. But as soon as the back of my head rested on that table, I remembered. My earliest memory of Dad was of him pinning my arms so I wouldn’t flail when the laser beam worked on my three-year-old’s face. I didn’t realize that a tear leaked from my eye now until the nurse touched my shoulder gently and asked, “You doing okay?”

  “Yes,” I lied, and disguised my furtive wiping away of the tear by brushing my hair back.

  “You need me to get you anything?” Mom asked from where she hovered in the periphery, sending me pained looks every now and then as if she were the one laid out on the table.

  “No.” Yes, another face. Another father. How’s that for a start?

  “Are you sure, honey? Some water? Ice chips? I can run and get you a Popsicle for after?”

  Forget the laser; Mom’s worry was doing the job just fine. “Mom, it’s my face, not my throat they’re lasering.”

  The nurse handed me heavy glasses to protect my eyes from the laser beam, but it didn’t stop me from seeing Mom retreat in hurt silence. I wanted to knock the glasses out of the nurse’s gloved hands. I wanted out. Hope may have brought me to the hospital, but guilt kept me on the table.

  “Okay, then. Is your cheek numb?” The nurse was the nonplussed teacherly sort, the magical kind with twinkly eyes who could calm a group of hyper kindergarteners just as well as she could one snarky junior-who-was-technically-a-senior. I swear, her calmness was hypnotic, because instead of bounding off the operating table, instead of sassing back — “Could you please anesthetize my mom?” — I nodded. I actually nodded, submissive as a dumb, sedated lamb.

  “Good,” she said, and grabbed crushed ice in a piece of gauze from a large pink bin. “We’ll just numb your cheek up even more so the laser can penetrate deeper.”

  The doctor walked in, a permanent resident of the Promised Land with her corkscrew curls and dewy skin. “So,” Dr. Joseph said brightly, her white teeth gleaming with predatory eagerness, “ready to do this?”

  From the corner of the room, Mom whimpered. I lifted my head just as the nurse and the doctor turned around. But Mom had returned to her silent fussing with the curtain in the corner of the room.

  “Perhaps it would be better if you waited in the lobby, Mrs. Cooper,” said Dr. Joseph, swiftly assessing Mom’s nerves. Mine were just as unsettled, but unlike Mom’s, they were well-hidden, trained to bunker deep under my bravado so Dad would never know how his potshots riddled me with doubt. I kept my eyes off the harmless-looking laser the doctor picked up, the exact shape of Mom’s glue gun for her crafting projects.

  “Is that what you want, Terra?” Mom asked, her voice soft like a piece of bruised fruit. I could hear her real unspoken question — do you want me to leave? — fermenting around us.

  What do I want? The question bounced in my head, a question I didn’t want to delve into too deeply. I was scared of the answer.

  “Let’s just do this,” I said firmly, staring at the paneled ceiling.

  The laser whistled, short and sharp. Unprepared, I jolted as though waking from a nightmare.

  The nurse laid her hand on my arm. “We’re just calibrating it, remember?”

  “Yeah, right.” I laughed nervously and then took a long, deep calming breath, pretending I was embarking on an epic five-hour snowshoe. I had to envision finishing. I had to envision returning in one piece.

  “Here comes the puff,” cautioned Dr. Joseph as a cold blast of air darted at my cheek.

  And then the laser — powerful enough to facet a diamond — began, zapping me over and over within the boundary line of my birthmark from temple to cheek, the inside edge of my nose to my jaw. And then the circuit began again. Experts describe the procedure as feeling like a rubber band snapping against skin, which makes it sound deceptively pain-free. But it’s more like getting spattered with a drop of hot oil, sudden and sizzling. Try a hundred — or two hundred and fifty — laser blasts in a single session, and one word comes to mind: deep-fried.

  With each blast, the light from the laser passed through my skin and into the gnarled blood vessels of my port-wine stain, boiling the red blood cells until each of the vessel walls erupted.

  I closed my eyes.

  This is what I wanted, I reminded myself. This is the price of normal.

  Two weeks ago, on one of our teacher-in-service days, a teaser for Christmas break, Karin and I had made plans to catch a ma
tinee at the nearest theater in Wenatchee, a whole hour’s drive away. The guys had decided to sneak in some skiing at Loup Loup against the wrestling coach’s orders, but flinging myself down a mountain on nothing but two thin pieces of wood had never appealed to me. So I told Erik I’d meet up with him afterward.

  As planned, I drove to Karin’s house right at ten in the morning. You would think by now I would know to be fifteen minutes late, because usually I have to wait for her to finish getting ready — the extra swipe of pink lip gloss in front of her hallway mirror, the running around to locate the perfect coordinating necklace she only just remembered, the last brush of her hair. But today, as I approached her front door, I heard her loud “Thank God!” as if I were the one who was perpetually late, and she yanked the door open, face averted. Then with a dramatic fling of her hair, she unveiled her face, fluttering her hands under her jaw line, and announced, “It’s a disaster.”

  Above her upper lip was an unmistakable pimple.

  What? That little thing? I almost scoffed, but tears were welling up in her big blue eyes.

  “The photographer’s coming in half an hour!” she wailed.

  “What photographer?”

  “Remember? I told you that the Methow Times is doing a story about my podcast with Kennedy’s famous alum.”

  “You did?”

  She shrugged — it didn’t matter — and turned back to glare at her reflection in the mirror. “I can’t have my picture taken looking like this! I look so ugly.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, and returned to my car to retrieve my backpack with its usual stash of emergency makeup. The light was bad in the hall, so I steered Karin in front of the windows in her living room, where I inspected her makeup job. She had made the number one mistake in camouflage: she gooped on the wrong shade of foundation, one that matched her skin too perfectly. The key to masking yourself is to use two shades of makeup, one lighter and the other darker than your natural skin color.

  “Go wash your face,” I told her briskly, glancing at the clock.

  She held still for me while I patted on the lighter foundation with my middle finger, her anxious breaths blowing warm anxiety on my cheek. Makeup tip number two: personally, I use a finger, not a makeup brush, for more control. Anyway, after her fifth question about whether her pimple was disappearing, I had to break the truth to her, “Karin, there’s only so much makeup can do. Plus, we’re not exactly the same color.” I moved her face gently to one side, then the other, peering at my makeup job. The pimple was entirely covered. As I bent down to select a bottle of slightly darker foundation, holding it to the light, I confessed, “So . . . I’m going to do some more laser surgery.”

  “What? Why?” she demanded. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  I shrugged. “There’s some new laser.” With my finger, I pressed the darker makeup on top of the base layer, taking care not to rub. All that would do is wipe off my carefully applied camouflage.

  “You shouldn’t do it,” she said.

  At last, the tiny part of me wound tight since I declared my intention to Mom loosened. Talk me out of it, Karin. I stepped back, nodded at my work, and then slipped my pocket mirror from my backpack. “Have a look.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath like she was about to dive out of an airplane, and then checked the mirror I held out to her. “Wow, I almost look normal,” she said, surprised. Staring at herself in the mirror, Karin continued, “I still don’t know why you’d have more surgery when you’re so good at covering yourself up.” Her eyes widened and she finally lowered the mirror. “You should be a makeup artist.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, nodding over my protest. “You could do all the stars. Then you could have your own makeup line: Terra Rose. Or Terra Cooper. Maybe just Terra. Yeah,” she said, beaming. “Terra.”

  I packed my foundations while Karin’s brainstorming spooled out from her brain to her mouth, apparently bypassing her ears. She didn’t hear my unspoken “no comment” or “I’m really not interested” and certainly not my “Hello? I want to be an artist, not a makeup artist. What are you thinking?” Finally, Karin paused in her monologue about my future megabillion cosmetics company that would take on Revlon and Estée Lauder. “You’ll stay, right?” she asked uncertainly. “In case I need a touch-up?”

  The photographer wasn’t from the New York Times. Or even the Seattle Times. This was our Valley’s little paper with a total readership of not many.

  “Please?”

  How could I say no when I knew the fear of having my own mask slip? I nodded even though I could have been skiing with Erik. Well, maybe not that. But I could have been in my studio, working.

  Fifteen minutes later, the photographer arrived complete with her huge pack of equipment. I had never been to a professional photo shoot before, and despite my misgivings, it was fascinating how she set up the shot, posing Karin in front of her. She didn’t take the picture so much as make one.

  “Why don’t you get in this one?” the photographer asked, gesturing me to sit next to Karin. “We could show people how Karin conducts her interviews.”

  I recoiled. But before I could decline, Karin did it for me: “Terra never has her picture taken if she can help it.”

  I bristled, wanting to tell Karin to stop assuming things about me, but it was no random assumption. She was right. I hated having my picture taken, loathing every single shot I was in. If I could get rid of my pictures in the yearbook, I would.

  The photographer glanced sharply at me to confirm. But Karin smiled, well-meaning, understanding, an I’m-in-this-with-you-Terra smile, the same as in ballet class when we weren’t even three feet tall and she stood up to my bully.

  “That’s right,” I said, nodding benignly at the photographer.

  So I stepped far back from the action and watched as the photographer repositioned Karin yet again to create my best friend’s first fifteen minutes of fame.

  An hour later, my cheek throbbed to a dull drumbeat of pain. That’s what I got for trying to show Dad. What would the researcher, Dr. Holladay, say now if I told her: See, I wanted to take control of my face, but — out, out damned spot — my birthmark yet again bested the latest and greatest that new pulse-dye laser technology had to offer. I quickly checked my cheek in the rearview mirror. There it was, my port-wine stain in all its blazing glory, eggplant purple now from two hundred and fifty shots of the laser and swelling turgid like a newly pumped soccer ball. My cheek looked even worse than any other treatment that I could remember. So now I kept my eyes firmly off the rearview mirror, off my face, and on the road ahead.

  “Terra, you look great,” Mom chirped, filling in my silence as I looked both ways down a street I didn’t recognize. With a few turns here and there, we somehow went from the Children’s Hospital parking lot to one of Seattle’s hilly streets, and now I was lost. Mom continued, “Just great. I really think this doctor knows what she’s doing.”

  My face, slick with antibiotic ointment, pulsated in disagreement. How the hell was I going to drive the five-hour trip home when I just wanted to curl up in the backseat, pop another two Tylenol, and sleep until I didn’t feel anything? I clenched the steering wheel and made a mental note to tell my brother Claudius that the mnemonic he taught me to remember Seattle’s street order — “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest” — only worked if you knew where you were. I didn’t. Were Mom and I heading toward James or Madison — or had we already overshot and were well past Seneca, University, and Pike? Face it, I was the blind driving the blind, and had been ever since I got my driver’s license and Mom staked her claim to the passenger seat.

  “So which way should we go?” I asked, more rhetorical than anything since I knew Mom would shake her head.

  “This street isn’t on the directions.” She helplessly rifled through the pages I had printed last night.

  I know, I know. I should have taken a closer look at the map before putting the
car in gear. But all I could think about was making a fast getaway from the new doctor and her useless laser, and how irritated I was with Dr. Holladay. And irritated at myself for lashing out at Dad with my face. And my mom for dragging me here, with her “Oh, Terra, you’re going to look so beautiful” pep talk.

  On cue, Mom hoisted around to look at me. “You really, really look wonderful.”

  More cars surrounded us than on the busiest summer day in our one-street town. I needed to pay attention, focus on the traffic. Still, I brushed my hair over my right shoulder so that Mom couldn’t miss — couldn’t deny — what everyone else saw so clearly. I demanded, “How can you say that? It looks the same as every other laser treatment.”

  “Baby steps,” she said stoutly. “It’ll be three months before we see the full effect of the procedure.”

  “That’s what they all said.”

  “You know, at your next appointment, we’ll be able to hit all the spring sales.” From the corner of my eyes, I could tell Mom was ogling all the boutiques we passed, filled with clothes that she wanted so badly to buy for me, as if I could actually wear that edgy shirt, that clingy skirt in my high school where girls go hunting with their dads.

  “Mom.”

  “We’ll need to get you all new makeup, too, once your birthmark’s gone. Won’t that be fun?” My mother’s hope is two parts determination, one part delusion. Even through my annoyance, I envied that. She continued, “I bet you’ll be able to pull off purple eye shadow now. Maybe for the prom —”

  “Mom,” I interrupted, unable to listen to any more of my mom’s fairy tales about my ugly duckling face. “Look, after six doctors and eight different types of treatments, my cheek isn’t going to get any better. I’m part of the ten percent who can’t be fixed.”