the beauty question (reflections after reading Rebecca Mead on Middlemarch)

I have made light of it, of course. I have said, within the past week, even: If only I were beautiful, Then. I wouldn't feel so unsettled as I sit before a camera, filming essays about memoir I've given my whole heart and head to. If only I were beautiful, Then. That driver wouldn't have cut me off; it was my turn after all. If only I were beautiful, Then. She would have never dared. If only I were beautiful, I'd be something.

No self-respecting woman is supposed to say such things, think such things, wallow so ungraciously. I know that. But the thoughts come unbidden, and there they are. Mucking around with me.

How easy it is to cast blame on those things I cannot control. How undignified not to stand up to the superficial me, not to embrace all my good fortune first and only. But there it is. I am.

Earlier this week, while reading the intensely intelligent memoir, My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, I found myself all caught up in the beauty question again. Mead is pondering George Eliot's appearance—the images she finds as she conducts her deep research into the life and mind of this complicated writer. Eliot did not, it seems, impress others as a beauty. She was possessed of a large nose and jowly facade. She was not svelte. She was not to be found in the fashion pages.

But, Mead writes, something happened when Eliot spoke. Something that contested the physical facts of her matter:

... a first impression of her hideousness, [Henry James] said, soon gave way to something else entirely. "Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her," he continued. "Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking."

Sara Jane Lippincott, Mead tells us, first found Eliot to be "exceedingly plain, with her aggressive jaw and her evasive blue yes.... Neither nose, nor mouth, nor chin were to my liking; but, as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable."

Mead ends that paragraph with, "Ivan Turgenev, a friend of Eliot's, said that she made him understand that it was possible to fall in love with a woman who was not pretty."

Mead's entire book deserves your time. Mead's deft examination of how Eliot's biography shaped her fiction. Mead's brilliant assertion of the power books have to help us read our own lives. Mead's never-intrusive insertion of her personal journey as a repeated Middlemarch reader.

And, finally, Mead's lesson—Eliot's lesson—that, in a world of static images, Facebook portraits, video essays, beauty is not a closed one thing. Beauty moves.

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Fiction or Not: The Juarez Novel

My friend Nancy stopped by yesterday—unexpected, unannounced. The glads in the vase were past their prime, I was overdue for a date with Windex, a spider had been busy whitewalling the post rails outside, and the geraniums were sadly ill-attended (I'm not going to talk about the dust). The house looked neglected, and frankly, this past week, it has been. I have been in another world. I have been writing. The boys have eaten. The bills have been paid. The clients are happy. But the house? Not so much.

Nancy had come to return an ARC of The Heart is Not a Size, the Juarez novel due out next March. I'd wanted Nancy to have the story early, for her husband and daughter were among the many with whom I'd traveled to Juarez a few years ago. They had been there, and Nancy had not, and it seemed to me that the book was a way to impart to her some of what we had seen and felt in that faraway place. We talked about many things yesterday, Nancy and I, but at the end we talked about what was real and what was not in this novel elixir called Heart. The dust storm was real, I promised. So were the men who sat on neighboring roofs, watching us from above. So was the morning honk of an old woman's old goose. So was the half skull of a horse in the street.

And so, as well, was the little girl, pictured here.

Some brands of beauty we simply cannot make up.

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The Shadow Catcher and the Word "Beautiful"

I am there, in the round chair in the thin room, the day coming in through the slender screen, and I am reading—finishing the final pages of Marianne Wiggins' odd and remarkable The Shadow Catcher (a WG Sebald-like melage, a tour of the early lives of the photographer Edward Curtis and the woman he married, an inverted commentary on the making of a novel, a discourse on sound). Outside it is still, save for the bounce-echo of the ball that my son sends up and down the driveway.

I don't know how much time has passed. I think, perhaps, too much. That I went away inside a book and that I need, somehow to return to the day. To my responsibilities.

So I call to my son, through the screen, "Hey there."

Which must, to him (the distortion of distance, the ruffle of tree limbs between where I sit and where he stands), sound like a question, for he calls back, "Yes, Beautiful?"

And I sink. And I have nothing to say. He has disarmed me, the way that he does. Using a word so rare and heartbreaking.

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Forever Young

Sometimes when I'm out walking in the dark, as I've just been, I find myself in the company of K., who has lived seven full decades at least, but isn't a day over 33. She has spectacular green eyes and a jumbo turtle in her back yard, and once, when a girl in Philadelphia, she watched an entire circus come to town, unpack, surprise, then leave; let her tell you about the elephant when you see her. There are hats in her background and many children, two lost already, and K. will tell me about stews and how she makes them; zinnias and how she holds them over, year to year; an after-dinner drink that is hers alone.

She knows who has come and gone in the neighborhood, and we mourn together, as tonight we have, over the loss of a young neighbor—too soon, unexpected, unjust.

Finding K. in the dark is like finding hope on a day when hope is up to no good, has gone hiding. It is this promise whisper, these words in one's head: Beauty, true beauty, never leaves.

I've never photographed K., though someday I must, I will; I need those green eyes forevermore. But last week I was photographing my friend, Judy Evans, whose beauty will never leave her, either.

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The Price of Beauty

On the one hand, this photo says it all. On the other, it doesn't even come close to capturing the way I feel when confronted by a mirror. Affronted. The word is affronted. Walking down the streets most days, I half-expect people to turn on their heels and flee—to run for their lives from my untame-able hair, my ever-pursed lips, that indent in my brow that screams, I'm thinking. On my best days I'm wearing two-inch heels, no higher. I'm toting a no-name bag, wearing some little bought-it-on-sale number. Bought it on sale, then put it away, then pulled it out of the closet three years past its fad date. Please please please don't get me wrong: I know how to dress when I have to. But most of the time, I'm just me, and me is the girl-now-a-woman who stands on most every conversation's margin, hoping to be noticed not for what dangles from my ears, but for what I have to say.

Being a writer, like I'm sometimes a writer, my whole lack of beauty thing shouldn't, in theory, matter. But the fact is, it does. Young female readers, according to a Sunday NY Times story, want their characters endowed with fashion sense and beauty knowledge. They want nouns accessorized with brands; they want the lips through which their characters speak drawn on with the most mod-possible lipwear. Once one of my friends was reading one of my books and called just slightly disgruntled. I need to know what kind of pants this girl is wearing, my friend said. Because, I swear to you, Beth, she can't be wearing trousers. I can't read this if this girl is wearing trousers.

Well. That's it, then. That's it for me. I thought I'd chosen a career that let me get away with being me—that girl with her head in the sky and her nose in a flower, that woman with her brow pressed against the window glass, wearing some torn-up old T-shirt and wishing for a conversation with the moon. Beauty counts. Everywhere it does. And I can't even keep the smoky-eye thing straight.

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