Graceful...

Her face was peeling off. It felt so dramatic to say it that way, but that was the truth. She had gone into an office, they had applied an acid, and now her face was peeling off. In another day or so she would go back into the office, they would exfoliate any of her old face that was left, and she would have a new face.

And it would look just like her old face.

But better somehow.

She wasn’t sure why she subjected herself to this. Why wasn’t she one of those women who could just age gracefully. Or maybe not even gracefully but with a giant dose of fuck you. This is aging. It’s natural. We get wrinkles. We get age spots. Aging is beautiful.

But she was not that sort of woman. She was the sort of woman who paid a lot of money to have acid rubbed all over her face.

And when this healed, she was going to have a vampire facial for those stubborn wrinkles. Little needles, filled with her own platelets, puncturing her face all over to form new collagen production. And if that didn’t work then she’d get a little extra filler around her lips to get rid of those stubborn pucker lines, and a few in those annoying nasal folds. Eventually she would have a smooth, plump, age-defying face.

And when people said, “Oh you look so great!” she would claim good genetics. And she would ignore the unspoken or even worse, spoken, “For your age.”

Maybe it was good genetics, her mother did the same. Kept the local plastic surgeon in business until she died at the ripe old age of…well she didn’t know honestly. Her mother’s age was a tightly kept secret. She sometimes gave an age that would be impossible considering the age of her children. But usually, she just smiled and told people she would never tell. She railed against aging gracefully until her last breath. Literally. She made the nurse put fresh lipstick on her before the priest came in to read her last rites.

And what was aging gracefully anyway? Who needed that sort of judgement? What does that even mean, aging gracefully? Is it graceful to age naturally and just let everything fall and droop and discolor? Or was it fighting it with cosmetics to cover up any signs of aging but not actually change them? What does graceful even mean? Ballerinas are graceful right? Ever look at a ballerina’s foot? They are disgusting. Toenails falling off, blood-soaked toe shoes, warped feet that never recover.

Nobody understood the pain that graceful took.

They only saw what they wanted to see. The beautiful part. They ignored everything else. The work, the struggle, the acid peels. But better they ignored the work as long as they didn’t ignore her. She refused to become one of the invisible women. Women past their prime that could walk down a street and no one would see them. Women in a restaurant that nobody paused to stare at. Women who weren’t ever seen. Looked past, looked through, ignored for a younger woman. A more desirable one. She held on to her desirability. With hands that had their age spots bleached off and fingernails always done in the current shape and style.

Like a work of art. Nobody saw the brushstrokes, the time it took to look like she did. They just saw her quiet beauty and were drawn to it.

Her nieces were different. They were the ones on the street protesting. Holding up signs yelling about everything. Demanding that people pay attention to them. Care about them. She admired their passion but worried about their skin. All of the sun damage. And when she’d remind them to wear sunscreen, they’d smile but then roll their eyes. She was a bit of a joke to them.

She wondered sometimes what a child of her own would have been like. But the one thing her mother consistently regretted was what having children had done to her body. Some things you just never recovered from. That much skin stretching, even though she had only gained 15 pounds with each pregnancy, that she had lost within 6 weeks of giving birth, it still gave her a tiny little pooch in her lower belly that no amount of liposuction or tummy tucking could seem to get rid of.

Even though to her, her mother’s stomach always looked, not flat, but concave. Hollow. Even when she would pinch invisible pockets of fat and tell her, “This is what you did to me. Ruined really. Ruined.”

So, no children for her. She had thought about adopting but even that seemed a fraught choice. So many of her friends who were mothers looked so much older than they had before. Not just the time passing, but the times that they had sleepless nights or gotten sick because the kids had brought home every cold and flu they were exposed to. Her brother called his own children “adorable little germ factories” when they were little. She had laughed at that and then made sure to go wash her hands after hugging them.

And the time involved. Children were a lot of time. How did you make it to the gym? Or the nutritionist’s office? Not to mention the money. How did you afford your own care when you had to pay for summer camps and music lessons and braces and whatever else children might need.

She had focused on herself. On keeping herself in mint condition as her first husband used to say. Or was it her second? She was pretty sure it was the first. Definitely not the third. That one had not been a talker.

She was just glad she wasn’t married right now. Booking a hotel while she healed from the face peel would have been inconvenient. She would have done it, she had gone away to “spas” before in her marriages, so it could be done, but something about recovering in her own house was lovely. And really, she didn’t think she needed to marry ever again.

She had married often, yes, but she had also married well. She had never left a marriage with less than she entered it with. That was the sign of a good marriage in her mind. She had remained friends with most of her ex-husbands. And of course, still felt the loss of the ones who had passed. She was never sure if she should call herself a widow since she had remarried and then divorced after each of those marriages. Does widowhood end with a remarriage? Or are you a divorcee widow? A double divorcee, widow, divorcee, widow, double divorcee, single gal on the go?

Though now that she was thinking about it, it was the sixth husband who made the mint condition joke. It was right before she divorced him. Because he hadn’t said she was still in mint condition he had said she was losing a battle to keep herself in mint condition. And he had said it in public. Which was unforgivable.

She wasn’t in mint condition. She knew that. But people needed to have the good graces to pretend that she was. To acknowledge the work she put in, without ever directly acknowledging the work she was putting in. To pretend with her that the acid and the platelets and the filler all worked. That she looked good, not for her age, but for any age.

To see that she was aging gracefully without acknowledging the blood in her shoes.