My Face

a short story

detail from “Ophelia” by Friedrich Heyser, oil on canvas, c. 1900

Ever since I was a little girl I dreamed of being someone else. I quickly learned that my shining blue doll’s eyes, my porcelain skin and perfectly sloped nose, my cupid’s lips and golden-curled halo, would cause me nothing but trouble; a curse disguised as a blessing. But nobody else seemed to see it that way, especially not my mother; in fact, she seemed only too eager to take credit for the symmetry of my face, claiming creative control over the lines of my lithe body; my smile that shone with pearls and the sapphires encrusted in my eye sockets. She would doll me up in sweetpea dresses and brush bows through my bouncing ringlets, those same ones the boys in my class would pull and the girls would stare at in awe, watching the waves cascade down my back as we lined up for chapel, or lunch, or special day assemblies–I was always voted line leader on those days, leading my fellow third graders as we triumphantly crossed grade lines and sat besides older kids during assembly.

Family functions were the worst. We were WASPs so accomplishments came from the children, naturally; my mother would parade me around, her personal puppet, greeting each of my aunts, her sisters, in turn, throwing my beauty before them, sneering and smiling sympathetically at their slightly worse-for-wear daughters.

By high school it only got worse. My breasts got bigger while my waist got smaller, never having to deal with nary a pimple aside from the rare period blemish (and on those days my mother asked if I would like to stay home from school, trying to tempt me with a shopping spree or cheat day). Soon the girls at my elite Catholic day school began to loathe rather than love me, while the boys at our brother school would place bets on who could go the furthest with me. And meanwhile, my mother would still dress me up like a doll on display before each and every holiday, never guessing that each time, less and less of my innocence remained intact…she always saw me, but could never truly see me.

But all of that was a lifetime ago, though when I look in the mirror she’s still there; older, sure, but thanks to years of skincare and Botox and personal trainers, not by much. My mother had always instilled in me that beauty fades, but only if you let it. Though I had been trying to let it fade; for the last five years I had all but abandoned any beauty routine, but it didn’t seem to matter–no postpartum varicose veins, no crow’s feet or smile lines (not that I ever did much smiling); my body snapped tautly back to place two months after delivering my third child; my forehead couldn’t crinkle no matter how many sleepless nights I spent trying to cry over my husband’s newest affair, each more abhorrent than the last…

“You’re so lucky, Charlotte,” the women working out beside me at the invite-only trainer’s class would say wistfully;

“Char, you are so lucky,” my housewife friends would say resentfully, downing back the rest of their red wine;

“Lottie, never forget how lucky you are,” my mother would say to me, all the time, using the pet name only she preferred; but now she didn’t say it at all, she had been dead for the past five years. A heart attack at fifty…at her funeral, a grand affair with nearly every member of our town’s upper echelon in attendance, I imagined her looking down on me, clucking that my crying would cause wrinkles, chuckling and reminding me, “But darling, why would I want to live past fifty anyway?” After all, it wasn’t the aesthetic choice.

I began to despair that I would never find a cure for my affliction; a perfect Cassandra, I could see my future but was absolutely powerless to stop it. Until one wine night, between complaints about careless children and incompetent nannies and absentee husbands, one of the board members of the PTA let slip-and-slide through canals of white wine about a new-age spa in Switzerland.

“I heard they can do some incredible reconstructive surgery,” she slurred confidentially.

Another buzzed belle added, “I heard that a Turkish princess walked out with an entirely different face. Just sewn right onto her skin.” She shivered delicately, although it was evident she was delighted, “Just sewn right on, like it was nothing.”

By the end of the week, I had my appointment booked.

I knew that with a whole new face, everything else would fall into place; my exodus from the upper echelon would begin slowly, and then all at once. Societal shifts, especially in a town like mine, could certainly be jarring; so I began to talk to her, my imagined ugly self, to prepare her for our deliberate downfall.

“You’ll need thick skin, Lottie,” I told her while driving to pick up one of the children at soccer practice (the nanny had left early that day), “they’ll be polite to your face but they’ll talk behind your back, and oh, will you be able to hear it.”

“You won’t be shopping here, Lottie,” I explained while picking the perfect pieces of produce from the specialty market I favored (a pre-made salad was $26), “oh, no, it’ll be Stop & Shop produce for you, my girl.”

“Don’t worry about this nonsense, Lottie,” I muttered under my breath at yet another board luncheon, twenty pristinely dressed women around a table, smiles on their wrinkle-free faces and hatred burning through their cosmetically lifted eyelids.

It was strange but soon enough Lottie became a friend, almost a sister. Funny how one’s relationship with another can change in the blink of an eye, from strangers to acquaintances to friends to nearly kin. There were even a couple of extra lonely nights where Lottie seduced me, despite her horrifying face, and I fluttered with pleasure as I felt deformed fingers drifting inside of me.

The day before the trip was a disaster. Lottie kept getting underfoot, no matter how many times I told her to wait for me upstairs. “I’m doing this for your own good, Lottie,” I told her, hauling her to the master bathroom and locking the door so I could pack in peace.

After a few hours: “Do you want to say goodbye to them, ma’am?”

The nanny had knocked me out of my reverie, coming up behind me in respectful reverence.

“To who?” I asked her.

“The children, ma’am.” She paused. “Your children. Since your flight is early tomorrow–they’ll still be asleep when you leave.”

“Oh–yes,” I said distractedly, “yes, I’ll come kiss them good night. I just need to check on something first.” Nodding, to both her and to myself, I took the stairs two at a time to check on Lottie.

I threw open the frosted double doors of the bathroom to find it in disarming disarray. “Lottie!” I cried, dismayed, “what have you done?”

She turned toward me and I gasped at her grotesquerie. Her face, a painted mask; she had managed to make her way into my makeup supply, smearing concealer over uneven skin tone, applying blush where cheekbones should be; garishly red crooked lips completed the portrait.

“Bad girl, Lottie!” I admonished, “Very, very bad girl!”

She had covered the mirror in lipstick kisses; I went to wipe them off with my sleeve. I looked in the mirror; Lottie’s face stared back at me. I smiled; she smiled. I wiped; she wiped. “Oh, Lottie,” I cried joyfully, “it worked! The procedure worked!”

I turned around and Lottie was gone, but no matter; my face was all that remained.

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i’m currently working on my novella, which is taking most (if not all) of my creative energy. in the meantime, i figured i’d go back through my archives and post some older pieces to share with you all. i found this short little story in a google drive folder from my first writing class in New York, circa October 2024. the assignment focused on character, and we were prompted to write 1000 words based on one we had created in class. finding this particular piece seems quite serendipitous after discussing Allie Rowbottom’s 2022 debut novel, Aesthetica, with Sophia over at Return to Reading, so i figured i would dust it off the shelf and share. hope you enjoyed~

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& don’t be shy, feel free to…

xx