ONE
I am ugly. There’s a mathematical equation to prove it. Or so I was told by the boy who sat behind me the first day of seventh-grade art class.
“I’m going to stick my pencil through the back of your eye,” he told me, laughing. “It’s not like you could get much uglier. Even the teacher thinks so.”
He continued poking me in the shoulder with his pencil, but I said nothing.
At twelve years old, I was already used to people identifying my flaws and commenting on my ugliness. It comes with the territory of being born with a facial difference as a result of Crouzon syndrome—a rare craniofacial disorder where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. My eyes were too far apart and too crooked, my nose too big. My jaw was too far back, my ears too low. There were regular appointments with doctors and surgeons trying to fix me and my twin sister, Zan, who was also born with the condition. Some of it was for medical purposes, other times for aesthetics. We would sit in a room while doctors took pictures of our faces from every angle. They would pinch and poke, circling our flaws. We would sit and let them pick apart our every imperfection, and we wanted it, we did.
“Fix me,” I would beg.
They would do their best. We’d have surgery, recover, and return for more pictures, more circling, and more detailing of every flaw. By the time Zan and I were eighteen, we’d each undergone over sixty surgical procedures to alter what we looked like.
My art teacher that year was a woman named Ms. J. She had a laugh so loud it echoed down the corridor. She wore beautiful, bright colors and taught us about artists and movements I had never heard of and encouraged us to explore what art meant to us both collectively and as individuals.
On the first day of class, Ms. J introduced herself, then asked us to state our names and what we were most looking forward to learning. There were students in the class who were naturally gifted, who wouldn’t need a reference photo or outline to guide their creations. I was not one of them. I couldn’t even draw a straight line without a ruler, and even then, it took me two or three times to get it right. So when it was my turn to answer, I told the class I wanted to improve my skills. After every student answered, Ms. J passed out a syllabus and told us that every week, we would be required to research an artist, a movement, or a piece of artwork we were drawn to. We would write a one-page report explaining our topic and what it meant for our art.
“By the end of the year, I want everyone in this room to understand art as more than a pretty picture,” she told us. “Art isn’t about what you see. It’s about what you feel. I want you to show me what you feel.” But if having a disfigured face had taught me anything, it was that without beauty, nothing else mattered. My physical appearance was often mistaken for my character, and to those who did not know Zan and me, our disfigured faces were imperfection personified. When strangers looked at us, they did not see normal children. They saw crooked, asymmetrical eyes. To them, the crookedness was who we were—it was all we were. So I spent my childhood obsessed with symmetry, obsessed with bridging the gap between the person I was and the person I felt I should be.
That afternoon, after I told Mom about the boy in my art class who said I was ugly, I told her I wanted to die. She brought me to my therapist the following day.
* * *
My therapist’s name was Beth. She was a middle-aged woman with red, curly hair that fell just past her shoulders. She had a round stomach and round glasses and almost always wore green. Every week, I would sit in Beth’s office, play mancala, and tell her of my dreams to travel and write. By the start of seventh grade, I had only been seeing her for a few weeks, and the topic of my appearance had not yet come up.
When I entered Beth’s office the next day, she sat facing the burnt-orange plaid couch that looked straight out of a 1975 home furnishings catalog. We did not play mancala. Instead, Beth looked directly at me and asked me if I was happy.
I did not know how to answer, so I cried. Beth took a tissue from the small table next to her and gave it to me, still listening as I sobbed. When the tears stopped, we sat in silence for several minutes.
“It’s like when you reread the same sentence over and over again without understanding what it means,” I said, finally. “That’s how I feel about my life, about what I look like.”
She nodded as I spoke, looking at the tablet and pen sitting next to the tissues on the small table. She began to reach for them but stopped. Instead, she folded her hands and put them in her lap.
“I don’t understand it,” I continued. “These things, they just keep happening, and I know it has to mean something. It has to. I want my suffering to mean something.”
She responded by giving me an assignment. She told me that she wanted me to take a picture of my face every day for the next few weeks. She said I had no connection with my physical self, because my appearance had undergone drastic changes so many times. This made sense to me, and I was surprised I had never made the connection.
“You don’t have to show these to anyone,” she told me. “Just take them for you.”
For weeks afterward, I cried at the sight of a picture of myself. The tears consumed me, and I spent the following days refusing to leave the house. Seeing images of the person I was made me angry.
I was ugly.
* * *
Later that week, Ms. J spent the first half of class discussing the role of beauty in art. Though the very idea of beauty is subjective and dependent upon the interpretation of the audience, she said in order to develop our understanding of art, we had to first understand the role of aesthetics in determining what makes art art. She taught us about the “golden ratio,” the mathematical equation that, in many ways, explained beauty.
During the Renaissance period, artists would use an equation to create balance, symmetry, and ultimately beauty in their work. It was first explained over two thousand years ago in Euclid’s Elements, which describes a sequence frequently found in nature. The ratio was later supported by the Fibonacci sequence—a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. Using the same math found in the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio combines symmetry and asymmetry in a way that is alluring and attractive to the eye. The closer an object’s measurements were to that ratio, the more beautiful it was considered to be. I didn’t fully grasp what the equation meant for physical beauty until days later, when during a discussion on facial structure and drawing portraits, Ms. J mentioned the golden ratio again. She told us that scientists had studied this equation, using the formula to try to quantify beauty.
“They analyze and they measure,” she told us. “They measure the hairline to the root of the nose, right between the eyelids. And from right between the eyelids to the base of the nose. And from the base of the nose to the bottom of the chin. If these numbers are equal, the individual is said to be more attractive.” She gestured as she spoke. According to the ratio, she said disapprovingly, the ear should be the same length as the nose, and the width of an eye should equal the space between the eyes. In order to be considered beautiful, the length of a woman’s face divided by the width should have a ratio of 1:1.618. She showed us work by Renaissance artists like Raphael and Botticelli. Her tone made it clear she did not subscribe to such a narrow definition of beauty, but I found the existence of these algebraic and geometric formulas oddly comforting. At least there was an ideal—something to work toward. I did not understand mathematical equations or ratios at the time, and so the only thing I learned from her lesson was that these were the standards a woman must meet if she wanted to be deemed worthy. Beautiful.
Ms. J went further, telling us that the golden ratio had been used to create an attractiveness ranking system for women. I do not remember the studies she referenced, only that individuals, mostly women, were rated on a scale of one to ten, based on the symmetry of their facial structure, with most people scoring between a four and a six. Never had an individual been ranked a perfect ten, but still, she said, we lived in a society that found the need to measure and rate and rank and score.
“These ideas are everywhere,” Ms. J told us. “Look around you.” She said that once we looked for it, we’d start to notice the ways beauty standards shaped our society. “How many times do you see a magazine article about the most attractive celebrities?” she asked the class. “We celebrate their beauty—their facial proportions, as if that is all they are. As if achieving a specific aesthetic is all any of us should ever hope for.”
This expectation, though daunting and unrealistic, felt familiar to me because I was raised in a family that understood the privilege of beauty. My sisters Marissa and Alexis were ten and twelve years older than Zan and me, but even as a child I understood the rare, natural beauty they possessed. With dark eyes and long, dark hair, their looks were classic and timeless. Even my sixteen-year-old brother Aaron knew what it meant to be admired for his appearance. In my fantasies, I imagined myself having symmetrical bright blue eyes like my brother and thick, sleek hair like my sisters. But alas, my eyes were brown and crooked, and my curly hair left a row of frizz across my head that was neither sleek nor stunning.
My siblings inherited their beauty from my parents. My dad had perfectly coiffed dark hair and a beard that highlighted the green in his eyes. He was exactly eight inches taller than my mom, who stood two inches over five feet. Until her late thirties, my mom had always been tiny, weighing barely ninety pounds. For years I watched her cling to this fact, because in her thinness and beauty she found her worth.
I grew up in Alamo, California, surrounded by beauty and wealth. Dad owned a construction company and Mom issued building permits in the next town over. Though my family was well off, I felt out of place among my peers. I wanted to look like my siblings and resemble my parents—to experience the world as they did. I wanted to blend in, to be normal. When strangers stared at me in public, I desperately wanted to believe it was because they were in awe of me. I told myself their stares of disdain were actually ones of admiration. But the more Ms. J taught us about art, the more I couldn’t help but think that if my appearance had been measured against the golden ratio, my formal rating wouldn’t have been higher than a two.
* * *
I was reminded of my ugliness again a few weeks later, when I found a Marie Claire article about Zan and me buried beneath memories and a thick layer of dust in the attic. We were nine years old when we were interviewed by journalists from the French edition of the magazine. Two women came to our home. My mom put us in dresses and curled our hair and we sat at the dining room table, which we were only allowed to do on special occasions. The women took pictures of us and asked us questions about our life. All I can remember of them is their accents and the way I felt confused when they kept implying that I was different.
In the center of the table sat a framed picture of my sister and me from when we were five. We were in coordinating blue-and-white sweaters and holding strands of pearls. It was one of those forced mall photos that families like to hang in their homes to convince everyone else they are happy. I hated the picture. My eyes were bloodshot and I looked weak. It was taken only months after Zan and I had surgery to expand our skulls and advance the middles of our faces. They broke our bones and shifted everything forward. The procedure was necessary to rectify the premature fusion of our skulls. They took bones from my hips and put them in my face. I had to learn how to walk again.
After I found the article, I sat on the plywood floorboards in the attic and began translating it with the basic French I had learned in school. What I couldn’t decipher, I plugged into an online translator. The words spoke of the way the bones in my head had fused and described the devices that were invented in the garage of our surgeon’s home as a last resort. I cried as I read the words, because it all felt so simple. The way they described it, I mean. They didn’t mention the weeks spent in the ICU or the fact that my mom spent her nights hunched over the edge of my hospital bed, too afraid to leave. The article didn’t mention that Zan and I were people and not a medical condition. Then, stretched across the page, in big bold letters, I saw it:
Their faces resembled the work of Picasso.
The words were stamped on the page right below a picture of my sister and me sitting at our kitchen table, laughing like normal children. But we weren’t normal children, because normal children don’t get written about in French magazines. Normal children don’t get called ugly in French magazines.
I was embarrassed, or maybe I was more ashamed, and I found myself wondering how I could ever have thought someone could think I was special. It was like the whole world was laughing at a joke I wasn’t in on. I slammed the magazine to the floor and spent the rest of the night in my room.
“They compared us to Picasso!” I yelled when Mom came to check on me.
“They did not compare you to Picasso, they compared you to his artwork,” she clarified. “Picasso was an artist. You are God’s artwork.”
“God should take up a new occupation,” I said back. I shredded the magazine that night.
Separating the art from the artist did not make sense to me. Zan and I never had the luxury of separating ourselves and our appearance from anything we did. We were our faces. To compare us to Picasso’s artwork was to compare us to the man himself.
* * *
Before Picasso, art had been primarily focused on portraying classical beauty. In a 1945 interview with André Flores, Picasso said, “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires—although everything has been done to try and apply a canon even to love.… It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.”
But Pablo Picasso was a terrible person. He was abusive and cruel. Of his eight long-term relationships, two of his partners had mental breakdowns from his abuse and had to be institutionalized. Two of them committed suicide. He was a volatile hypocrite with a God complex. He painted disfigured faces and distorted bodies as a way of dismantling realistic depictions of objects and people in order to remake them in his image. He painted the women in his life—the women he “loved”—this way. It wasn’t enough to physically and verbally abuse them. He had to take his misogyny to the canvas, because he found pleasure in stripping them of their humanity both in art and in person.
Picasso often started his paintings by creating a representational portrait of one of his wives or his mistresses. Then, one by one, he took their features and disfigured them, placing them on the canvas wherever he saw fit. It didn’t matter who they were as women—as people. It only mattered how he saw them. Disfigurement was how he symbolized what he believed to be their character. It was a way to control them by controlling how others saw them—another way of forcing women to exist within society’s patriarchal image. It was also how he kept some of his affairs a secret, how he concealed the women’s identities so they would not find out about each other.
It wasn’t just the fact that Zan and I were compared to paintings of women with asymmetrical and sometimes bizarre faces that upset me. It was being associated with Picasso himself—an old man—that was so humiliating and offensive. The way I saw the world, and the way people saw me, was always an extension of my face. I understood Picasso’s artwork to be an extension of him.
The Marie Claire article shaped the way I understood every memory that came before it. It forced me to internalize the conventional standards of beauty I did not live up to. For that, and for so much more, I hated Picasso.
Copyright © 2021 by Ariel Henley
