The listing for the estate sale read, “LEGENDARY ENGLISH PROFESSOR ESTATE SALE: SPANISH-STYLE HOME, FURNITURE, BOOKS!” The 1920s cottage had belonged to Jenijoy La Belle, writer and historic trailblazer who sued Caltech after being denied tenure over her less-accomplished male colleagues.
It was obvious she hadn’t married. Everything gently worn and set precisely to her taste, it seemed impossible that a man had ever waltzed in and ruined it. There were books. Lots of William Blake prints. Primary colored bathroom bins.
“Every morning I shower with Milton,” she told the LA Times in 2008. The bathroom tiles were tiny recreations of William Blake’s interpretation of Paradise Lost she purchased on eBay. "My life has been the study of literature, mainly poetry. And this is a poem of a house," she said.
The tiniest details were full of intentionality, every object hand-picked with love, a shrine unto itself and I understood for the first time what Timothy Morton meant when he wrote that a face was the history of everything that ever happened to it. He wrote about faces but he meant objects too. An object does not possess history; it is history.
The house breathed a woman I loved but did not know. She loved medieval imagery and color-coded bathroom receptacles and William Blake. Like me, she loved California. I could just tell.
I got into a losing argument with a woman on the patio over a floor lamp but successfully went home with three novels, a brown leather Timex watch, a desk lamp, stationary with her signature, a sunshine-yellow Chaps cardigan, and a 60s replica Unicorn in Captivity tapestry.
I looked through her notes at home, crying. My boyfriend looked up her name and showed me a picture of a beautiful blonde woman in her seventies smiling for a teaching headshot. He scrolled again to a black and white photo from 1969, the year she became the first female professor in Caltech history.
In the photo she’s in the process of whipping her hair behind her, wearing a polka-dot dress with a lace collar, her lips painted a light nude, eyes wide and thickly mascaraed. She looks a little like Matilda Djerf and Sharon Tate or a 1970s Aurora.
That night my boyfriend purchased her book on feminism and mirrors Herself Beheld for me. There’s one line everyone remembers: “All men have faces, many women are their faces.”
1.
I talk to my reflection nightly. The closet glass is imposing with big silver teeth like swarming minnows eating my mess. There’s the wrought iron bed with painted roses on the headboard, the Amazon sheets, Jenijoy’s lamp, a poster of On The Waterfront, a photo of a shirtless woman on the beach, clothes on the floor, a shabby velvet burnt-orange couch, me.
When I finally turn off the lights I lay my cheek down, toes feet from the mirror. The audiobook drones and I close my eyes but I feel her opening wide, baring down. Turn on the lights. I want to look some more.
Doppelgängers are everywhere; needy, whiny, relentless. Familiars flicker in rectangles colored black white clear and eternal. She stares. I stare back. There I am I guess.
2.
May Sarton wrote of her aging friend losing her vision that “it was a strange alienation, as though she did not exist because she could not longer meet herself as others saw her.”
I have tried for most of my life to determine what I look like. Determine which features were tricks of light and which were characteristic and permanent. It all seems so cubist most of the time. Lips nose chin eyes and cheeks never clicking together. Features that, the longer I pore over them, float away from one another like seeds on water. How many times has the mirror surprised me? Horrified. Jarred. Enamored me like a three-week situationship.
Five weeks ago there was murder in her eyes in the bathroom—skin grayed with deep crevices circling the mouth. Monster teeth and monster eyes, she held me there for ages and carried me away until the face wasn’t mine. I punched the medicine cabinet and the double flashed away. Then very slowly it swung back with a whine.
Oh God she’s back. What a drag.
3.
Is it a question of the face of a woman that affects her dedication to and identification with her looks? If she is screamingly plain (like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s description), is she encouraged to develop and nurture other parts of herself as compensation for her looks?
The logic is sound: people prefer pretty faces in romantic contexts, friendships, and work. In its absence, a certain amount of character padding might be useful. Think of the “ugly phase” phenomenon in which people claim to have developed personalities at a young age before “glowing up.” Ostensibly they possess the best of both worlds: hotness and a vibrant inner world.
An exceptional face can paper over any number of personality flaws and become a vessel for wild, vivid projection. Would it matter if the woman was funny or smart or read books? The hot girl is everyone’s fan-cast for their favorite story anyway. A twitch of the mouth, a slow blink, could be read as evidence of unfathomable depth, spurring a thousand stories and hypotheses (did she run from a troubled home? What’s her opinion of Proust?) but behind the eyes the answer’s probably: what’s for lunch? Where’s my vape?
4.
I visited Olivia’s new apartment on Laurel where she’d covered up the closet mirror with peel-and-stick wallpaper. In her old place the mirror was inside the closet and therefore shut up when necessary.
“I hate mirrors,” she said. “It’s so big I would never sleep.”
We put her new sheets on the bed while Rob got some emails done. And I turned instinctively to the glass, now muffled in green floral print and adhesive. I had the urge to wedge my fingernails at the corner and tear it off as if the other me was suffocating on the other side. Find the glue-coated face, fuzzy and indistinct, but there.
I hunt her into digital forests and draw the bow; bring the broiled HDR face to the dumpster fire. I imagine old lovers zoom in on the skin, worn and picked and plucked. She’s lost her edge, they say. They called me vapid but no one cared more about what I looked like than them.
5.
At the height of Instagram two-inch doppelgängers went out, spent weeks abroad, had babies, behaved like people living. Self-documentarians and auto-fictionists produced shit en masse.
A story appeared and new iterations materialized out of thin air like a shape-shifting hydra, each head made for and by our attention. The stories were frequently of doomsday proportions, self-soothing only in the idea that the worst might have already happened.
New islands bubble from the earth every minute across-shore but I just feel beached most of the time. I, like most people, get lonely.
6.
A year and a half ago I was getting dressed in my ex-boyfriend’s closet. We had recently moved in together though we had ostensibly been living together for much longer. I rifled through his brightly-colored rugby shirts, mohair sweaters, and ill-fitting jeans, looking for something to pair with a long black skirt.
I put on a jacket and stepped out to find him prone in bed, the laptop on his stomach. How many times had I found him exactly like this?
“Didn’t you say you were going to start dressing—” The words trailed off as he looked at the skirt. He didn’t like being the bad guy, though he so often was.
I looked down, smoothing down the black. “I know it’s conservative.”
He shrugged, “Just thought you were going to wear shorter things. You know, sexy.” Vaguely I wondered if it was his attempt to fuck.
“I never feel comfortable in that kind of thing.” He went back to typing on his laptop. A pause. “I’ll be cold.”
He looked up, the smile appearing again. “Wear what you want.”
7.
A few months after the breakup we met up for coffee. He mistook my olive branch as an invitation to get back together. It was not. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” he said.
He didn’t say he missed me, only repeatedly reminded me how we had been great together, implying that I’d been silly and overreacted. All would be magnanimously forgiven if I just came home—as though my entire life lay inside the two-story West Hollywood apartment.
“But you never knew me,” I said.
I expected these words to have some sobering effect but he just blinked. Then he rallied, grinning. He was wearing six-hundred-dollar sunglasses. “Rebecca, I know you. I know you better than anyone.”
It was ridiculous. How should he, of all people, know me better than anyone? Someone who in hindsight I had revealed alarmingly little to. To reveal my past and the true nature of its violence would dash the clear undisturbed surface in which we regarded each other.
There were flashes of understanding, I’m sure of it. We knew the other’s habits preferences and, paramount to our relationship, the precise vision and shape of our dreams. Our relationship was built upon shared future imaginings but reality never seemed to live up to the glittering reflections.
Was it some impersonation of me that had loved him, defended him to the hilt? Where could I have been in the West Hollywood bedroom? Did the mirror girl step out of the glass to take a hand, any hand, as though her shininess could block the rest? If that’s the case, where did I go?
8.
There were days as a teenager when I took bodies like shots. Spit and mouthing sounds on repeat like a pop song. Back then it was all about the taking. I would think, “I could bite it off. I could eat it.”
I never loved anything without also trying to eat it. I ate God, lovers, spat out friends. Eating is carnal attention at its purest: an attempt to embody fully what you love. I’d gotten it into my head that salt was some kind of life force so when the boys left I’d stick my fingers down my throat and wait for salt to reappear.
On the bathroom tile I was immortal, squeezing out the night like comedones, purified. I liked the process, cyclical and cleansing as rain, stopping only when I saw blood. Heart pounding in my cheeks, my fingers stinging, knees numb and bruised, I felt very sick and totally alive.
One guy told me he was in school for neurology. I knew he was legit because I looked up his first name and school and saw his picture on the research site for his school. I saw him a few times and I imagined marrying him, waiting for him to get home from his night shift. He’d take me in his arms, encroaching the center inch by inch, tenderizing me like meat. He’d take me in and save the world.
One night he didn’t text me back and I called him twelve times until he finally picked up and said he couldn’t see me anymore. I fell asleep crying, salty and snot-smeared. I hated God. I hated women hated men hated my mother hated my father hated language, school, food. I nourished my hate, coddled it lovingly, stoked every fire in sight.
At dinner in the Mission I called my younger self feral. “I should have been institutionalized,” I said.
“Yes,” my friend laughed. “I was there.”
9.
I did burpees at the gym until the fins of my hips were red and raw. The white-blonde phase had to end; the ends were breaking off and I was losing hair in clumps so I cut my hair and dyed it dark but I stayed hungry. In the summer my mother took me to an endocrinologist two psychologists a therapist and a nutritionist. We did not talk about the fact that I needed a new wardrobe to accommodate the growing space between my body and the fabric.
At the endocrinologist I changed into a hospital gown where a nurse laid me down on the table and rolled a machine into the room. I kept my Converse on like a child. She moved my gown aside and placed stickers on my arms chest throat and forehead.
An angel pendant swung at the hollow of her throat as she hooked up wires to the stickers. Even now I’m not sure of the purpose of the test. Maybe they were just fucking with me or taking my mother’s money. She turned on the machine.
Beep. Beep.
What a fuss over another middle-class white girl who didn’t eat. I’d seen the stories and read the news and knew it had a boring, rote ending: a girl pathetically wafting out of the world from heartbreak and hunger but it didn’t make a difference.
Beep. Beep.
And yet, there it was: proof of life. Blood pumped. The thing on the table was definitely alive. Skin and bones and heart so nobly pushing forward as if their persistence was sufficient proof that I should want it as bad as they did. Looking at the angel pendant haloed in florescent light, I suddenly felt God himself was communicating through the rhythmic beeps. Silently, I started to cry. It sounds like a direct-to-video Christian movie but it’s true.
Beep. Beep.
My life cleaved in two: one path promising a certain tomorrow and tomorrow, perhaps thousands to go, and the other a quiet disappearance. I felt I had been living for months, maybe years, underwater. Without warning a sea change had occurred.
In the early days of eating again I only consumed six things: coffee, scrambled eggs, biscuits, protein shakes, vodka, and the strawberry Chick-Fil-A salad. The sad phase lasted for months until I got on medication after I missed class to have panic attacks, threatened suicide to the head of my college, and became a vegetarian. The meds helped. I ate everything but meat. I’ve been eating for years, even expanded my diet to fish and prosciutto. I mean it when I call it a miracle.
10.
As I was walking with my boyfriend, our gazes slid over to a shop window. We admired our gaits and the way our clothes swished in the wind. The happy way we held hands like people in love. But the moment I met her eyes the image of a couple faded into the background like an automatic lens snapping into focus. I craned my head. She let him walk on while she told me to drown there.
I wrested my eyes away, feeling ashamed. My boyfriend looked at me and draped his arm around me. We crossed the street.
Feeling self-conscious about this lapse of self control I said: “I’m glad I read her book. It gives me something else to think about when I look at myself,” referring to Herself Beheld.
But to be honest I usually only think of the book in the aftermath of looking; when I feel ashamed for being so taken in. When I’m looking I become the act; it’s all I am.
11.
At Jenijoy La Belle’s house, in the corner of the garage, pushed against the wall near a ladder and some out-of-use kitchen appliances, was a wrought-iron floor-length mirror. I realized there weren’t any in the house. The woman who wrote about mirrors kept hers in the garage.
i loved this so so much