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The Forgiven (Part 2)
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Time for One Thing
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| FACE-OFF | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
After a week, she was going house-crazy. "I've got to get out," she implored. She put on a turtleneck and big, dark glasses, wrapped a scarf around her head and put a hat on top of it. We drove all of half a mile, and in that time I saw two other women with scarves, hats and glasses. It was as if the streets were filled with look-alikes for Claude Rains in "The Invisible Man." My mother looked at them too, and smiled to herself in recognition. I assumed that after my mother's second face lift, she'd call it quits on plastic surgery. I was wrong. Shortly after she turned 70, she called to tell me she'd had another face lift -- "but only a partial." I was furious that she'd done it, and furious that she hadn't told me. "You'd only have argued with me," she said. She was right. I didn't speak with her for weeks, and felt like a jerk. "Were you angry with me?" my mother asked later. "Yes." "Why?" I paused, because I couldn't tell her the whole truth, so I settled for part of it. "Because when will you decide that enough is enough? That it doesn't matter that you have wrinkles? So what if you no longer look like a magazine ad?" "Don't you think I've thought about that?" she answered bitterly. "Don't you think I know that this pressure for women to look young sucks?" For the first time, I saw that she was not so cavalier about her surgeries. That she was angry, too. That she was more complicated than I knew. What I didn't say was that I'm disappointed and sad that I have to look to other women to show me how to grow old. That my friend Kate, with her silver hair and deep furrows, is still beautiful to me. That my friend Yvette's jowls seem to give her a kind of dignity and weight. I want my mother to show me how to grow old, but she can't. My mother must have sensed my thoughts, because she said to me again, 20 years after the first time, "You'll see. Just wait and see what happens when you're older." I am older. I just turned 40 -- now far enough from my 20s to taste the beginning of my invisibility to others. I walk down the street and men don't look as much as they used to. I go to a party and a man I am speaking with looks over my shoulder at a woman 10 years my junior. "You'll see," she said, and I do. I see that I am changing. Tiny spiderlike veins begin to appear on my thighs. My waist is slowly thickening. A red spot appears on my chest. The skin on my chin is getting more slack. I sometimes look tired even when I'm not. I have the urge to put up a fight. I put on more makeup. Highlight my hair. One day at a party I pass myself in the mirror and think I look like a female impersonator. I get home, throw all my makeup into a bag and stick it at the top of my closet. A week later, I take it back down. I've staked a lot on being different from my mother. But I wonder, how different am I? Maybe makeup and hair color are just steps along a continuum that ends in a face lift. As horrific as plastic surgery is to me, I don't yet know to what degree I'm willing to go to feel beautiful. "Do you think if we give up our true faces, we give up our true selves?" I asked my mother one day over coffee. As soon as the words came out, I was embarrassed. We don't usually speak on this level; she'd always call my introspective tendencies "morbid." "You're being morbid," she said. "No, I mean it," I said. "If we change how we look on the outside, does that affect who we are on the inside?" I asked, aware that, even as I asked it, I was wearing lipstick. "Like how?" "Maybe if you just let your face be and worried less about how you looked, maybe you'd spend your life differently." I stop. "Maybe it would be a huge relief just to live your life." We looked at each other. I could tell she took my suggestions as criticism. Maybe they were. Over her lifetime, she had spent extravagant amounts of time and money on her appearance. And I wondered what else she could have done with all that time and money. My mother looked at me with hurt, beautiful, unlined green eyes and remained silent. The conversation was over. But what I really wanted to say was this: "I haven't seen your real face in 20 years. Do you know what it's like
to dream about a mother you can never see?"
Anne Levine is a writer living in Portland. Have you had a face lift? Would you consider one? Share your secrets in Table Talk. T O M O R R O W: Are we a nation of plastic surgery junkies? Lori Leibovich talks with Elizabeth Haiken, author of "Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery," about the American obsession that has left no part of the body untouched. |
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