You're Not Pretty Enough (15 page)

“What’s that photo of?” the mother asked her daughter.

The daughter turned toward her for full effect: “What are
you,
RETARDED?
It’s JFK! Before he was shot!” Her mother, shorter and less trendy than her daughter, looked a little embarrassed but otherwise shrugged it off.

A line in the sand was drawn. Before this moment: innocence.
After this moment: knowledge that I lived in a world where family members referred to each other as retards.

You know what, I’m a fine daughter,
I thought.

But it was an eye-opener regarding my willingness to be
intimate. Back then if a guy looked me in the eyes for more than two seconds, I would either look away or pat him on the back and say, “OK, that’s enough now,” in a tone that sounded as condescending as you think. I was just beginning to
realize I was unhappy and still making unhealthy choices. I was moderately exercising—I played in a volleyball and football league at least twice per week—but I was not eating a good diet, I was drinking a
lot,
and I was rarely at home because I didn’t want to be left alone with that negative self-talk. My cats, themselves unhappy with my frequent absences, let me know it by pissing in my laundry, so for a few months I smelled faintly of pee. It
was time to get happy, and to do that I needed to open myself up. To open myself up, I needed help.

“Talk to me about what’s going on,” my therapist said at the beginning of our first appointment.

“I’m good!”

“You mentioned on the phone that you recently went through a divorce and a fresh breakup. How are you feeling about all that today?”

“Really good!”

“Great,” she said, “but since, you know, you’re
here…
why
don’t you just…
talk…”

At first I tried to trick my therapist into thinking I didn’t really need it—that I was, in fact, holding it together quite well considering the circumstances. I was thriving at work, had terrific friends,
and didn’t smell like cat pee anymore. I was completely well adjusted and just needed her to validate that for me, and I’d be on my way.

“My God, you’re
better
than good,” she’d say. “You’re
perfect!
Can I use you in a case study? Perfect Patient X?”

Sticking your head in the sand is easy. Doing the work to be who you want to be is not. Gently but surely she helped me begin to examine my life and put it into context: to see patterns where I didn’t and rationale
where I couldn’t. We set goals. I was getting somewhere. In a few months I was able to identify the behaviors and types of relationships I didn’t want to continue. From there I just needed a plan to transition from who I was to who I
wanted to be. But who was
that?

*******************

At least once per month my mom and I would meet for dinner and sometimes a movie. She belonged to a film club that gave its members access
to advance screenings a few weeks before they were distributed nationally. One was
Chocolat
starring Juliette Binoche. She played Vianne, a free-spirited drifter and single mother to a six-year-old daughter. Following the wind, they’d move from place to place, settling temporarily somewhere until
things got boring or hard, and then it was time to move again. In the movie, Vianne and her daughter arrive in a small, rural town in France and open a chocolate shop during Lent: a metaphor for temptation. While the town’s
small-minded mayor labels Vianne a temptress, she is also seen as a helper to various townsfolk. She is compassionate, clever, and strong. But can she resist the wind the next time it blows through? Can she save herself?

“I want to be Vianne!” I said to my mom as we exited the theater.

“Juliette Binoche? I know, isn’t she just luminous?”

“Not Juliette Binoche, VIANNE.”

I was almost thirty, had never lived outside of Ohio, and
had barely traveled beyond touristy locales. Vianne made me want to wander. I had closed myself off from real intimacy to avoid future hurt. Vianne made me want to see the good in people, to be kind, and to connect in a meaningful way.
Vianne made me want to both chase the wind but also trust my instincts when they told me to let it pass.

“I want to be Vianne,” I said again, for good measure.

A couple months before, I started working with Lyndsey, a
senior consultant out of my firm’s New York office, who became a real mentor. She pulled me into projects in Boston, NYC, Atlanta, Houston, and Washington, DC, where she made a permanent move. Soon, I was traveling to the nation’s
capitol twice per month and staying for three to four days. After about six months of this, we were at dinner when she said, “Why don’t you just move here?”

“Yeah, right.” It had never occurred to me to leave Cleveland. Not even once.

“Jen, where did you go to college?”

“University of Toledo.”

“So, you’ve never left Ohio?”

“I went to London once. AND Chicago AND New York City…remember?”

“Jen, when I was fifteen, I said to my parents, ‘When I am eighteen, I’m leaving Ohio and never coming back!’ You’re, um, twenty-nine?”

“So?”

“So, there’s a job opening under me in the DC office, and I
want you to take it.”

Over the next few days, I channeled Vianne.

“Qu'est-ce que vous dit votre cœur, ma chère?” she lilted to me.

“My heart says to go.”

“Ensuite, il doit être,” she replied.
Then it must be.

I put in the application and began telling people of my plans. My friends were completely supportive, but my parents made counterarguments for staying in Cleveland.

“Washington is a stupid city,” said my mom at first.

“Mom, it’s not stupid.”

“Yes, it is. It’s dangerous.” Hey, she didn’t want me to leave. She pulled out the tactics she thought would work. My dad, who has a
love for Cleveland that dare not speak its name, applied a more pragmatic approach.

“Halle Berry’s from Cleveland,” he said.

My stepmother piped up, “The Indians are doing great!”

“Yeah, I know guys.” I smiled. I knew why they were doing it. They liked having my sister and me around to go to dinner with or to see movies. We were their buddies. But eventually, they got behind the move.

I hardly knew anyone when I first arrived, so random conversations became a way for me to socialize and learn about the city, which is rich in culture and much, much more than the federal government. One night, late, I hailed a cab in DC, heading home. A yellow cab pulled over with two
dark-skinned men sitting in the front seat. Both appeared to be about seventy years old.

“He is a friend who is with me on my last ride,” said the driver after he pulled up to greet me. “Is that OK?”

“Sure,” I said and got into the cab. “Where are you from?”

“Eritrea. Do you know where that is?”

“Near Ethiopia, right?”

“Impressive!” they exclaimed in an affectionately chiding
manner.

“When did you move here?” I asked. The friend started talking. He said that he was given a student visa when he was eighteen and soon fell in love with an American Caucasian woman his age. She loved him too, but
her parents didn’t want her dating a black man. He overheard them say so when she brought him home for dinner and they thought he was in the bathroom. They broke up, his student visa expired, and so he returned to Eritrea. After a
couple years, he married and had children. And then ten years later he got a call from the woman he had loved in the states. He was surprised to hear from her, and she explained that she had always kept him in her heart. She had flown to Eritrea on a whim to see him. He explained he was married and that he
couldn’t see her, and so they chatted by phone for about an hour, catching up on old times.

“And then what happened?” I asked from the edge of my backseat in the cab.

“Well, that gesture stuck with me. I returned to the states
years later to visit family and friends, and I thought about her. I found her mother’s number in the phone book and called. She remembered me and put me in touch with her daughter.”

“Oh my God, did you meet up with her?” I asked. “My place is over here. Tell me the rest!”

“We agreed to meet up at a train station, and she was there before me, waiting on the platform.”

“Yeah? What were you thinking at that moment?”

Silence.
How sweet,
I thought.
He’s searching for the right words…

“That she was very ugly!” his friend, the driver, said and then started to laugh.

“It’s true, she was,” he said also laughing, and then he shrugged. “Still, we had a very nice lunch.”

I laughed all the way up to my front door. I wasn’t laughing at the woman in the story. I actually felt for her. I was laughing because you
never know how a story is going to turn out. These random encounters warmed me and made me realize how easy it can be to connect—even briefly.

I want to be like Vianne.

When you’re opening yourself up, even everyday things can
seem profound, like the Metro. I cannot underestimate the influence the Metro had on my decision to move. To me, subways meant big city, important city, cool city. After I moved and first started riding as
a local,
I beamed with
pure joy.
I live in a place with a subway!
I’d think.
I’m a big city girl!
I’d smile at the other people during the morning and evening commutes, but they just gave me strange looks or ignored me completely. Soon, I
acclimated and became just another rider who stared off vacantly while listening to my iPod. But for a while, I still felt that joy.

I traveled a lot to other parts of the country, both for pleasure and for work. A couple weeks after I moved, I traveled to a client
site in Houston. On the leg back, I went up to the ticket counter to get my boarding pass.

“Where you headed, sweetheart?” the attendant asked as I handed her my ID.

“Cleveland.”

“Hmmm…” she said while ticking away at the keyboard. “I don’t have you booked on a flight to Cleveland. I have you booked on a flight to
Washington, DC
….” She raised her cadence at the end in a sort of half
question, so as not to insult me.

“Oh, right! I live in DC now!”

She laughed. “Hey, it’s easy to forget where you’re going sometimes.”

I thought about how strange it was that I had forgotten. As
we approached National Airport, I could see the monuments all lit up against the night, their reflections swaying in the Potomac River, and I leaned my head against the window and smiled.

“No one really knows you here,” Vianne said to me as the
plane began its sharp descent. “You are free from your old life.”

Free to be you and me.

“Are you on drugs?”

My dad and stepmom asked me this as we sat across their kitchen table. I had just announced that I would be taking a leave of absence from work. I was going to live in Amsterdam—possibly for up to a year—and travel around Europe. Other than that I had no real plan. It reminded me of the scene from
The Graduate
in which Benjamin tells his parents of his plans
to win back his love, Elaine, who’d rejected him after it was revealed that he’d slept with her mother, Mrs. Robinson.

Benjamin’s Father:
“Ben, this whole idea sounds
pretty half-baked.”

Benjamin:
“Oh, it’s not. It’s completely baked.”

***********

Dave and I met the year before, not long after I moved to DC. He was a bartender at a popular place, and one afternoon I stopped in with
a friend and ordered a Guinness. He poured it properly—stopping when the glass was half full and waiting for it to settle before filling the rest, but he forgot the second part.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked a few minutes later,
noticing I didn’t have a drink in front of me.

“Yeah, my
beer,”
I said as I directed my eyes to the half-filled pint glass. He laughed and we talked for a few minutes. He was in
his midtwenties, a little taller than me, and slim with broad shoulders, and he had a beautiful face that was already wrinkled from laughing. The following Tuesday night, I returned to the same place with a friend. It was packed. A few seconds in, I spotted Dave behind the bar, and he waved.

“Who’s that?” my friend asked.

“Him? I met him on Saturday. You know, I thought there was some flirty banter going back and forth, but I’m surprised he remembered me.”
We sat down at a high-top table, and Dave approached us.

“What can I get you?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, thinking I was being sexy/cool, “I’d tell you, but I’m not sure I can trust you to remember it.”

“I’m sorry, did we meet…?” and then he let the question hang there.

My friend started laughing. “Oh, that’s…sorry…” followed by more laughing. “She thought you were waving to her…She thought you two had a
moment…”

I shot her a look, but he just looked confused. As it turned out, he was waving to someone behind me.

“Anyway, I’ll have a gin and tonic,” I said quickly. He didn’t forget me after that, and following some choice stolen glances
throughout the night, he asked for my number. He was sweet and sexy and didn’t think I was a slut when I dry humped him on his couch after our first date. We started hanging out a couple times a week, sometimes just watching movies,
sometimes out.

Hey, I like where this is going.

Me too.

I was thinking of visiting friends in Europe for New Year’s, and my friend Angela offered up her place in Amsterdam as a possible stop. She
would be on the beach somewhere in Thailand with her boyfriend, Neil.

“It’s all yours,” she said.

It was late November, and Dave and I were out to dinner. We had been dating six weeks when I blurted out: