Slave to Beauty
A vignette from some images found
By Maryanne Peters
I was brought up in a beautiful home. My mother called herself “A Slave to Beauty” as if that could explain everything that she did to me – or perhaps excuse it. It was like saying that she had no choice, but surely that was mine.
My father loved my mother because she was beautiful, but she always said that he suffered from an absence of that. “It is not that your father has an ugly soul, it is just a plain one,” she said. I am sure that she believed it. She said – “He does not sit easily among beautiful things.”
He left. I am sure that is what she wanted. Without him she could focus on beauty.
I had two older sisters. They were beautiful. My mother made sure that they were. I was pretty much left to my own devices until they left home. The oldest is a model in Paris, and the younger of my sisters works for a cosmetics company is New York City
When she left, my mother’s eyes turned to me. It had me very worried. “You are beginning to take after your father,” she said.
Actually, I looked more like her than my sisters did, but she could not see it because I was a boy. She said “The only beauty in you is that hair of yours. Dark, but thick yet fine. I forbid you to cut it!”
As it grew longer it became a talking point that I would rather have avoided, but I did my best to rock it as my own thing. I even changed my music choices to give a reason for wearing my hair long.
The problem was that my mother insisted that I wash it with perfumed shampoo and that she brush it for me every night.
“So beautiful,” she would say. “The most beautiful thing about you. Girl’s hair.”
When the summer break came up, I asked whether I could go to camp, but she would not let me go.
“Getting back to nature is not what we are about,” she said. “True beauty is artifice. No, we will spend the summer together. You will learn all about beauty.
She talked about a new hairstyle, and it seemed to me that the scissors might be a good start, but instead she cut girlish bangs
Then she set about styling my hair in a massive updo! She worked right there in her basement salon which was fully equipped and I had never had access to before. My sisters would also close the door behind them when they went in – “No boys!”
I just sat there and took it all. I guess I felt that it was not true humiliation if nobody could see, and Mom was just having so much fun humming away. She was as happy as I had ever seen her since my sisters left.
“This is true beauty,” she said. “The truth of it is that you do have naturally pretty hair, as I have always told you, but nothing shows off wonderful hair better that height and volume, and some curls and rolls well pinned that catch the light and bring the do alive.”
Do salon chemicals fog the mind? They certainly seem to. I sat there just determined to endure and then quietly undo her work when she was not standing over me. But in front of a salon mirror there is nothing to look at but yourself, and it occurred to me that the person I was looking at was not the person that I thought I was.
Mom said that I had pretty ears and they should be pierced. “With a do like this, you should be wearing drop earrings,” she said. “Let me get a mirror and show you the back – swept up with just the perfect nape.”
Chemicals or contemplation? Or was it that the creeping spell of beauty just rolled over me? The love of it and the need of it. The need to reveal it.
Mom always said – “There is too much ugliness in the world, children. We have a duty to make the world just that much better by making it more beautiful. We need to show people that when we walk down the street, that all is not tawdry or hideous – that there is beauty. I have seen the effect it has on people. I have seen the downtrodden look up from their troubles and follow me with their eyes and smile. Beauty is wonderful, and all my children are blessed by it. But with a blessing comes a duty.”
Which is why I am now following her. I am now a slave to beauty too.
The End
© Maryanne Peters 2023
