The Beautiful Anthology by Unknown Page B

Sun around which they, female planets, revolved. The Mother was jealous of her Beautiful Daughters, because the Father was obsessed with them and thought of nothing except saving money for their security and making sure they were not hit by cars. The Rebel Sister was tired of having her arm gripped tightly by the Father every time she approached a curb, so she had her head shaved and joined a band and painted vagina-looking abstractions on the walls of her bedroom and wrote beneath them, I am obsessed. The Good Sister got a Puerto Rican Boyfriend and repeatedly injured herself on the gymnastics team. At night in their shared bathroom, the Sisters made fun of their Father and wished that he’d get off their backs – He is such a dork, they said. He is so lame.
    But when the Rebel Sister (now the Band Sister) was eighteen, and the Mother and the Father sold their pretty house to move to Long Island and live among the Jews, the Sisters could not believe the Mother had won. The new condo had only one extra bedroom, utilized as an exercise room. In Madison and Minneapolis respectively, the Sisters cried for days.
     
    After the Boyfriend dumped her and she became Unstable, the Beautiful Woman acquired a reputation among off-campus Jewish Frat Boys as a Blow Job Queen. For months her Girlfriends, including the Intelligent Woman, tried to keep this hurtful gossip from her, but when news inevitably trickled her way (actually, one of the five guys who lived above Taco Bell on State Street, all of whom she’d blown, told her in an effort to make her leave his apartment so he could study), the Beautiful Woman was secretly proud.
     
    In the fluorescent lights of the cruise ship bathroom, amid giddy tales of simultaneous copulation, the Intelligent Woman glimpses old acne scars embedded along the sides of her own face, like somebody took a smooth, clean picture of the Beautiful Woman and crumpled it up tight then left it there, ravaged under the glare.
     
    And some things – like hearing that a woman who does not receive roses has no right to an opinion in this world – are things you never get over. Even when you receive your own roses, along with diamond earrings and a Victorian house and a Baby From China and everybody seems to respect you more than the person who made that Statement to begin with. You still don’t.
     
    The Intelligent Woman’s Husband turns to her and says, Aren’t you going to take your top off? You’re always dying to take off your top. She looks at him, so pale in the sun, his laboratory-hidden body nearly transparent, the way it looks when he’s working naked in the morning after his shower, bathed in computer-glow. He has been with her on many a foreign beach – they met in France, for God’s sake! – and in addition has fucked her enough times in enough ways to know that, though she is not Beautiful and knows it, she is nonetheless an exhibitionist. She cannot fool him. He stares, waiting.
    (It has not occurred to the Intelligent Man that his Wife may realize he has a hankering to see the Beautiful Woman’s juicy C – maybe D? – cuppers. He is too consumed by calculating that the Beautiful Woman, by far a more timid woman than his bold Wife, will only disrobe if his Wife does so first.)
    The Intelligent Woman watches her Husband’s eager, glowing body. Once, when she had to get an MRI for her bladder and found herself unexpectedly claustrophobic, the Intelligent Man sat in a folding chair at her feet and held her toes comfortingly until the procedure was over. Every night in their shared bed he spoons her body and breathes into her hair, and she knows her curls tickle his nose but he stays in this position anyway until she falls asleep, and neither of them call it un-Feminist. She finds that she does not want to disappoint him – hasn’t he, in a sense, earned this stupid pleasure?
    Men: They are like children. What can you do?
     
    There was a period of time during which the Intelligent