To an 18-year-old, all people over forty look old. The woman on the other side of the desk was no exception. She also looked pitifully ugly, being a skinny 6-foot stick with a flat chest and no hips. Nevertheless, she smiled, and the smile lit up her face. She sounded very sure of herself as she rose and shook Ariel's hand, introducing herself. They sat down with some iced tea in a cozy corner of the office. The woman smiled even wider and said: "So, you're the ugly one." Ariel watched her over the rim of her glass. The woman seemed to have decided to compensate her ugliness with good but boring taste, wearing a cream-colored mohair jersey over a pretty silk blouse, and a pencil skirt that left her spindly legs free from the knees down. The patent leather heels were classy too. But no man would look twice, surely, would he? Nice blond curls and quality make-up did the utmost for her eyes and face, but all this toiling was to no avail, was it? Ariel chuckled by herself at the opening sentence of the woman. Great trick to call her ugly, just like only black people can use the N-word. If it was meant to create a bond, okay, here we go, she thought.
"Well," she said, smiling. "I guess it takes one to know one." The woman grinned and took a sip from her glass.
"I remember being your age," she said. "Flat and thin and absolutely sure my life had already ended before it began. But I must admit that in the business of defeatism, I was just an amateur compared to you, honey." Mom must have told her, Ariel thought.
"I'm just a realist," she said. The woman frowned.
"Ah, yes, the realist excuse," the woman said, "the depressed teenage pessimist's favorite come-back. Let me show you something." She rose and picked up a folder from her desk. Ariel followed her supple, easy movements, elegant, like a dancer, she thought. Sitting down, the woman, what was her name again? Anna, opened the folder and put a picture in front of Ariel. It showed a girl in close-up, half her face disfigured by a huge purple splotch. A second picture landed on the first. It showed a girl with no hair, not on her skull, not on her eyebrows and not around her eyes. The eyes hardly had color, and the girl's upper lip was split by a reddish scar running from her nose down to her disfigured mouth. A third picture had a girl with a glass eye and a mutilated nose. Next came a young, impossibly obese girl, followed by an anorexic skeleton. Ariel looked up; the woman had lost her smile. "Now, let's talk ugly," she said. Ariel surmised what the woman was at; and she knew she was way beside the point. Making her feel pretty because there were real monsters around? If this was how she thought to 'cure' her, she'd better leave. She put down her half-empty glass and rose.
"This is a waste of time," she said. "You really don't have a clue." She turned to walk out of the room but hesitated as the woman called after her.
"You think no boy will ever fuck you," she said. "Well, look at this." Ariel's curiosity won out. She turned around and noticed how the low table was covered in snapshots. Stepping closer, she saw that on each one of them there was a blond girl, kissing or making out with a guy. Inspecting them further, she found out that the girl must be the woman, Anna, even skinnier, but much younger. Some of the photos were pretty raunchy, showing her half-naked; in one she had her face in the crotch of a boy. Almost each picture showed her with a different guy. "I'm not proud of these," the woman said. "College life can get pretty wild with all the booze and the weed and the raging hormones, you know." Ariel said nothing; she just looked, sorting through the pictures. The girl had typical eighties hair, maybe nineties, lots of fake curls; and some of the guys had moustaches--ew. She also had no tits and no ass to speak of, but it didn't seem to bother any of the guys.
"You see," Anna said, leaning forward, "boys don't care about tits or fat round asses, not really. Oh, they love them as a bonus, or to boast about afterwards, or to jerk off to online, but the only thing they really care about is where they can put their dicks. Especially when they get drunk; all they want is a warm, wet hole to put their cocks in and come before they pass out." Ariel looked at the woman, amazed by her choice of words. Looking back to the pictures she wondered if anything was true about what she said. But the pictures seemed real enough, and it was her. Then one more photograph fell on the pile -- bigger than the snapshots, and glossier. It also was more recent, showing the woman, Anna, in a swimsuit. Her arm was around a little girl who looked a lot like her. On her other side was a boy of about ten, grinning and holding a ball. Behind all three of them was a man of about the woman's age, tanned and wide-shouldered, looking very fit. He smiled, leaning against a surfboard.
"That's my family," Anna said, pointing. "Little sweet Annabelle, Glenn, Jr, and Glenn, Sr." Ariel's eyes kept fixed on the man. He looked much like Tim Bradlee, same surfer type, almost the same smile. "You see," the woman went on, draping an arm around Ariel. "There is sex..." She made a vague gesture to the snapshots. She smiled as Ariel looked up. "When you leave for college, next summer, there will be parties and outings, long weekends and trips to the beach. And there will be booze and weed and pills and sex, hard, sweaty sex, and you will be at the center of it all." Ariel slowly shook her head in disbelief. "You will," the woman insisted. "And it'll mean nothing. Oh, it'll be fun, big fun, a time you'll never forget. And it'll seem to mean everything for a short while. And then something will happen that'll change it all..." She took a pause, letting her words dangle in silence. Her eyes sparkled, fixating Ariel's. Then she once again gestured at the snapshots. "So, as I said, there is sex," she repeated. "Lots of raucous sex, and then..." She picked up the family picture. "...and then there is love." The woman seemed lost in the picture. Then she looked up and said: "Please, Ariel, don't leave yet. Please sit down and at least finish your drink." Ariel sat down, picking up her glass.
"When I met Glenn at yet another of these rather sleazy frat parties," Anna began, "I wasn't ready at all. I was prepared to go through all the usual stages -- flirting, dancing and drinking until nothing mattered anymore and the fucking would start, ending in unconsciousness and a huge hangover the next day." She smiled weakly. Ariel tried to compare the words she heard with the woman who said them. She tried to imagine her there, boozing and making out, getting naked and getting fucked. This neatly ugly, nicely dressed, flat-chested, stick-limbed suburban momma... "Then this boy... no, this man appeared," Anna went on. "Glenn, he said his name was. And I was sober in a minute. We left the party and just walked, talking about everything and nothing. All I remember now is this sense of... safety... and his cologne, of course. He was tall and warm and save... alien and yet very close; a grown man, calm and yet... vibrant with energy. All I wanted was to be with him, to crawl into him; and I'd only met him minutes before..." Her voice petered out as her eyes lingered at some distant point. The intimacy of her words embarrassed Ariel.
"He escorted me back to my dorm building," the woman went on. "We kissed at the entrance. Now, I had kissed and tongued and slobbered like a pro all that year, giving head by the dozens, but that one chaste kiss almost made me come." Another short silence, then she said: "Could you believe that?" Anna looked at Ariel with dreamy expectation. Then she chuckled. "Ah, sorry, honey," she said. "What am I telling you? Waaaay too intimate." Ariel looked at her own hands that she'd folded in her lap. Images crowded her mind as she heard the woman rave about her lover. She recognized the warmth, the safety, even the cologne... She knew every sensation the woman alluded to, and her memory put a face on it: tanned, blue-eyed and with a crooked smile. They were sensations she'd resented, memories she'd subdued, and feelings she'd run away from. Tears stung behind her eyes.
***
Being with Von and Barb was like listening to a radio: they talk, you listen. They'd always been the ones who set the agenda, deciding what was and wasn't worthy of their time. Not that there ever was much surprise in the choice or the ranking of their gossip-priorities. Boys came first, in every sense of the concept: popstars, movie stars, and maybe three or four boys at school -- plus the occasional teacher. The second item was make-up and fashion, including a never-ending stream of critique on the way other schoolgirls used them. Then, third, after a long stretch of nothing, came whatever might be the topic of the moment, like a pending party, a broken relationship or a broken nail. Ariel didn't mind. Well, she used not to mind. She used to just sit and listen, bored, usually, amused at times -- or amazed. But today she felt different, hearing the predictable litany of banalities, the superficiality of it all. Today it irritated her. It was the day after she saw the woman, Anna.
"Can't you ever talk about something important?" she asked. The silence was deafening. Two carefully painted mouths hung open. Maybe it was because of the question; more possibly it was because Ariel asked anything at all.
"Are you all right, Ari?" Von asked. She was a big girl, always talking about dieting, and always buying tops and skirts that were a size too small. Ariel knew that Von was very aware of the boys ogling her tits, and today was the first time she felt annoyed by the way the girl played at that, each time a boy passed by.
"I'm fine," Ariel said, shrugging. "But I was talking about you." She'd always hung with the girls, Von and Liz and Barb. Barb wasn't as big as Von, but she had a real 'JLo ass' as she put it. Liz, who wasn't around that day, claimed to have it all, both front and back. 'I'm Liz Kardashian, actually,' she liked to say. Today Ariel wondered for the umpteenth time why on earth she kept hanging with them. They only emphasized how flat and skinny she was. The girls even loved to rub it in, turning it into compliments, of course -- using words like slender, and catwalk-quality. When they really liked to be mean, they cried out how jealous she made them.
