Stereotype: Physically beautiful women

She was a beautiful woman that was certain. Sometimes her beauty would surprise her, jolt her back to herself, in front of a mirror or with her hands folded neatly upon her lap, the image of a fine crease upon her smooth white brow, or the ghost of a grin, then away it went, this very present gift of fate, her own incommodious beauty, that sometimes she’d bite her pale, oval nails, with their stark white lunulas like crescent moons upon her skin, as though they’ve been bitten off by some animal. Her name is unimportant, what matters is the way she sat on her armchair, a variety of journals strewn artfully upon the beech armoire. She sat with her legs curled beneath her, toes pointing downwards, reticent and unassuming. She barely glanced at the vanity mirror, she’s seen herself countless times before, yes, she’s memorized her own face, blinking, it would disappear for a nanosecond. Once her eyes were open again, she’d feel the impact of time upon the veins in her skin, the marrow of her bones, and she’d feel sullen and dull again, wondering if physical beauty lasted and whether any man would truly love her for what she was and not for what she looked like. There were few men, she was too ethereal to have men lined out their picket fence like bettors betting on a racehorse. Her beauty was her curse. It delivered her to solitude and misunderstanding, ascetism and misanthrope.
Let us name her Sophia, wisdom. She was tall, with a lithe frame, and a sort of Teutonic beauty about her, high cheekbones, elongated torso, she had small breasts and in an act of willful eccentricity she’d wear a dream catcher she bought in some dingy backroom stall just to show to the world that she cared. Sophia will be her name, and that is what we’ll call this haunted stranger, with her deep moss-colored eyes and the pale rosebud complexion of impeccable skin. Some women are born stellar. Sophia was one of them. As a child, her mother, a sewer, would push her into joining beauty pageants, but mostly for the prize money, for Sophia was not from a rich stock. They’d spend an afternoon teaching her that beauty was a prize to be sought, a treasure. She was still young, her mother had sewn a dress for her, a confectionary assemblage of pink and white chiffon that showed off masterfully her length of limb, her depth of gaze, the mysterious depression in her eyes that made one question, what indeed was beauty. Was she merely a creature of fancy? A young Sophia would parade around their home, donning the ghastly pink and white dress, watching it trail behind her like her own shadow. She’d peer cautiously into the mirror and wonder if anybody would love her had she been ugly.
“You look beautiful, we’re sure to win first prize this time,” her mother had said, beaming at her, for she had born this marbled statuette. She’d win the pageant of course, and take home that coveted prize. Her mother would grab the money and go if she had the chance and pleasure herself with drink as she’d sew more and more dresses for more and more pageants and the money would pile higher and higher and Sophia’s self confidence would sink lower and lower until it sank out of reach, into oblivion, beneath the surface of the horizon that no amount of seeing would find her, trembling, an alien in this world of normally beautiful people.
She was a child when she started reading and writing, but she wondered if there would be a career for her in those fields. She believed her beauty was a curse. Too many men leered at her, but her beauty would stand steadfast and strong and no amount of encouragement would push any man into conversing with a goddess, a woman who Vermeer would have painted, a woman whose physical beauty clashed with Blackwood’s, with Sidall’s, with Juel’s. Her mother discovered her diary, a pathetic compilation of sheaves upon sheaves of loose paper, bound together somewhat inexpertly. Sophia would write into it every day, recording the events of her young life, recording every single triviality. In her mother’s rash, overworked hands, her pathetic diary had an ominous quality. Her mother would laugh loudly and slap her beefy hands upon her thigh, reading aloud for everybody to hear the highs and lows of Sophia’s adolescent life. Her mother was seated in the middle of the low wooden table, her fellow sewers and workwomen gathered around her like bees to a hive, a hive about to burst with malice and amusement. Her mother discovered Sophia’s diary beneath the sole white pillow in their shared bedroom, and remembered where it was in case she needed to amuse herself more with her only daughter’s sorrows. She’d read Sophia’s diary aloud to her friends and laugh at each passage, as though life were a triviality.
Sophia loved to read, it compensated for the deep longings she felt to connect with other people. It was not that she was friendless, she wasn’t. She met her friends somewhat regularly, once or twice a week they’d brunch in some café as nameless as she was. She’d pick sullenly the morsels on her plate, moving them around recklessly, as reckless as she sometimes was, given her indecision and caution, move them like ants on a molehill, or the way God did, knowing. But no. She did not know what she was doing, moving uneaten food around her plate, it gave her control. She, in her kindness would save some food inside that white porcelain rim, a rim of the world or exercised authority over everything, and like a naval woman rent the food off the plate and into another woman’s territory, for beautiful as she was, she had no sense of time, of sense itself, that is she was an empty, beautiful woman, with a dark chasm in the order of her orderly living.
Sophia entered beauty pageants when she was young. Did she want to join beauty contests in her adult life, with her mother dead and rotting like a common carcass? Her mother had died of skin cancer when Sophia was twenty one, who was at the prime of her life, full of vigor and energy. She tended to her ailing mother, ignoring rebellious calls from within herself, discouraging her from saving a mother who never behaved like a mother, who was interested more in marketing her daughter like some commodity to earn fast money to ease her selfish self from the tyranny of sewing. Her mother died slowly and painfully, as if it were her last blessing to a child she never loved, as if her slow tortuous death was meant to torture Sophia in turn, in semblance of a curse. Perhaps she was too often exposed to the sun though she worked indoors, or perhaps her skin reflected her prickly personality, red and boiling, sadistic and malign. The skin of her hands and arms wasted away, shriveled. Her mother’s generous throat wrinkled as it aged and her tongue was most definitely a shade of purple. She was often sick in the morning and refused to leave her bed. Sophia’s diary, which had so amused her during the previous years (Sophia never kept the diary to adulthood, concerned about her privacy and moral well-being) didn’t keep her for a day any more and amuse herself by doodling fashion dresses on paper and ordering her only daughter around. Her mother was no beauty; she was a washerwoman in the strictest sense, wide and generously flabby, with loose brown skin and a receding forehead. Whatever vestiges of beauty she possessed soon died with her. She died dragging everybody down with her, she would not suffer alone, and this was slyly the most unselfish thing about her. If she suffered, so must Sophia. If she died, Sophia must die too.
Sophia felt her beauty was a curse. She felt the stares of strangers crawl upon her skin like caterpillars upon green leaves, they snatched her body from within and clamped down on her beating heart and stilled it. Only when alone, with her mother thankfully dead, would she begin to relax. Her friends did not understand her, for they were not beautiful. She hated them secretly for this. They did not undergo the biases she underwent and remained pitifully ugly through time and were unaware of the hurricanes and cyclones that stirred within her pale breast. Were men afraid of them? No. Were they more attractive as partners? Yes. Sophia grew to despise their mediocrity. They were of average height with prominent, dull features and bright smiles. That was all. But they had better luck with men; their beauty was no threat. But Sophia was an unearthly alien.
Was she ever free? Sophia’s favorite book was Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Growing up in their little apartment in the outskirts of the city, had she ever truly earned liberty? Sophia was a quiet child, too tall for her age, which excluded her from many street games. She was an average student, which frustrated her. Had she possessed uncanny intelligence, her doubts and personal fears would have dissolved and what would remain would be a tantalizing inner core of suspended brilliance and mental wanderlust. She possessed ordinary mental powers, but found refuge in books and the diary she had kept as a teenager. In books, she learned to love. She made up for her mediocre brain with reading as many books she could get her hands on. She favored Philosophical books. She could not grasp most of the abstract concepts and worldly ideas but found tremendous pleasure in covering her face with the jackets of any single volume and delighted secretly in the fact that her physical beauty had been concealed for a moment. Books to her were symbols of an elite society she wanted badly to be a part of. In this society were tweedy professors and young mathematicians and beautiful, mysterious women. This world, her inner reality, was the only sure thing she knew. Sophia belonged to this world. In her solitude and in her misery, she fabricated this surreal landscape where everyone was as beautiful as she was and there was no more loneliness.
She had a dream one night. She was running through a forest. Prickly bushes and thorny flowers cut through her skin. Her bare legs were bleeding and she, too, was barefoot. What was she running from, and where was she going? It seemed she, herself, did not know the answer, but she was certain of one thing: that she must go on running, though it pained her and exhausted her and tormented her. She had been running for a while now and she never looked back. (Joanna Carlos)