The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen

relationship. And starting a relationship was what Estelle was all about. She was thirty-eight years old, no spring chicken, as her mother liked to remind her. She had paid a forty-dollar fee to join an online community called Loveforreals.com, to find a mate, before “all her eggs went bad”—again, her mother’s phrase. Her mother did not mince words.
    In the universe of Loveforreals.com she had a new identity. She was not Estelle with dangerously old eggs,but Lovegrrl15. She liked the “grrr” in the middle, which bespoke both appetite and a certain feminist ethos she found very cleverly denoted.
    She couldn’t afford to be choosy at thirty-eight; she couldn’t afford not to take every person quite seriously. Her mother was right. And ugly? What was ugly anyway? A word, it was just a word. It began at the back of your mouth and moved forward to your tongue. At the end of saying it you were practically smiling. (If you doubt this, try it.) She typed back: “Oh, don’t be silly. You look fine in your profile picture. I am sure you are not ugly at all.”
    In fact, the man named Charlie had a very fuzzy, softly focused profile picture. He could look like anything at all. He could have a terribly misshapen head. He could be a hermaphrodite, a half-man, half-woman person. He could be one of those half-chicken people they have at the county fair. He could be a Mexican hairboy grown up. Estelle had read about the Mexican hairboy long ago in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. This boy was covered—all over his body—with soft brown hair. It was as if he had been carpeted. But someone, somewhere, would love this carpeted man. They might be very happy.
    Since this exchange, the word “ugly” had begun to grate on her. She had recently moved from a bucolic town in Connecticut to a very plain and sad little town in central New York named Horseheads. A place that certainly could be called “ugly,” with its tired strip mallsand neighborhoods that looked all worn out, like they wanted to just board up already and call it quits. Yet there was beauty there, too, as she constantly reminded herself. There was a lovely full-blown peony bush at the end of her street, Marcus Avenue, that looked like someone had detonated a purple tube of paint. And there was a marvelous weeping willow, right by the entrance to the park, a place where the local boys tore up the asphalt on their skateboards. Whizzing by, flipping in the air and looping on a concrete half-pipe that was the gift of some local good-deed doer, they reminded Estelle of electrons spinning around their atomic nuclei that she had seen in a textbook long ago, criss-crossing and loop-de-looping. They were fun to watch, skidding and clicking up and down, protected somehow by the shadows of those long wispy arms of willow. But she had a nervous feeling about them, too. Sooner or later something bad could happen there, willow or no.
    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, she repeated to herself, and asked Charlie, aka Mr. Ugly (she had begun to refer to him as such in her journal), to meet her for a drink. This was a very daring thing to do, but desperate times call for desperate acts, another quip she got from dear old Mom, who lived in Poughkeepsie, another not-so-beautiful place where there were little instances and inklings of beauty. There had been a beauty spotting just last Thursday, her mother said, when all the Red Hat ladies came out for a photo shoot in front of Mrs.Goldenburg’s rose garden. “Red hats, red roses, you should have been there,” said her mother.
    Yes, she should have, it must have been very cute, but then she lived far away and had a job as an office assistant at a meatpacking company, God Bless America Meats, that gave her great benefits and where her boss gave her Friday afternoons off all summer. How often do you get that at a job? It almost made living in Horseheads, New York, worthwhile, although a Friday afternoon off there was hard to enjoy.