Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer

Word Count 1299

In the upstairs bathroom at my grandparents’ home, I first discovered the friend in the mirror. The mirror itself was ornate, antique, like everything in my grandparents’ home. I traced my finger meditatively around the gold frame surrounding the mirror’s edge. I would glance up and see her there in the glass, waiting to catch my eye, my friend.

On some level, I knew that she was me. She had the same brown hair, green eyes, freckles. When I spoke to her, she understood me. We laughed and smiled and sometimes no words were needed. I told her jokes and secrets. I loved her.

Eventually, my mother would knock. She knew where I was hiding, only I wasn’t hiding. I was seeking.

*

One morning, during a sleepover at my grandparent’s home, a great uncle stopped by to say hello. He seemed very old to six-year-old me. This uncle was married to one of Pop-pop’s sisters and had owned a bar on the boardwalk. The rough way he carried himself, so different from my grandparents, who wore their education proudly, scared me.

Uncle M asked my grandmother what my name was, he couldn’t keep track of her grandkids. She told him Gabrielle.

“Gabrielle,”  he said, “I am very sorry that you are such an ugly little girl.”

I stood quietly, not knowing what to say.

“It’s a shame you’re so ugly,” he said again and I suppose he smiled but his mouth was so creased with wrinkles, I couldn’t see his lips move.

I looked at Grandma. “Uncle M is teasing you,” she said. “Because you are beautiful.”

No one had ever commented one way or the other about whether I was ugly or beautiful but I knew that being ugly was an awful thing. I fled the room to find my friend in the mirror.

I wanted something from her: Which is true?! I demanded. Are you ugly or are you beautiful?

She shrugged. I am me.

I went downstairs when I heard the door close, knowing the uncle had gone. Grandma could see that his teasing had shaken me. “Uncle M said that because beautiful girls were not supposed to know they were beautiful in the old days. You are certainly not ugly,” she said.

I nodded but wasn’t sure I could believe her. What if she made that up because I was a real ugly duckling. What would happen if I never turned into a swan?

Maybe this old uncle came, like a witch in a fairy tale, to tell me the truth.

*

From then on, when I looked in any mirror, I saw: beautiful or ugly?

As I got older, I brought a book with me wherever I went; when I felt nervous, I could lose myself in the book. Adults praised me: she finishes one book and begins the next. When I read, I could both seek and hide.

I avoided mirrors as best I could, washing hands quickly, not looking at my body after a shower.

At thirteen, just weeks past my Bat Mitzvah, my body would not let me hide so easily.

First, my breasts came in very full, quickly. Then my hips spread. My waist was narrow and I had to walk around in front of everyone with this hourglass. When I put on the school gym uniform, polyester shorts attached to a tight striped top, the teacher commented about my ‘child-bearing hips.’

The girl I saw in the mirror scowled, Look away! 

*

In college, I took a job waitressing at the Museum of Fine Arts restaurant. I loved going to the museum and if I arrived early for my shift, I meandered through the galleries.

Wandering its halls became a meditation path. Gazing at the paintings, my black apron in hand, my long hair pulled back in a bun for work, I became absorbed in the paintings.

I loved some artists most—Renoir, Matisse and then I found my favorite work: an enormous painting by Paul Gauguin, “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

Two women, naked and sensual in that strange paradise, crouched together, silent but sharing secrets. A flash of something wonderful from years ago came back to me, the depth of those silent conversations with my friend in the mirror. 

One day walking home in the snow, a flier taped to a phone pole caught my eye. A professor at the nearby art institute needed nude models for a portrait class. Pay was $15/hour. I ripped off the paper tab with the professor’s phone number. When I got back to my apartment and took off my boots and scarves, I called her.

She invited me to come see the studio. She showed me the classroom where I would stand on a little platform in the middle of the students who would draw and paint me. She asked whether I might like to come try it and I said I would.

The first time that I walked into that studio filled with students quietly chatting and mixing their paints, I felt at home. Jazz music was playing. I took off my clothes behind a screen with no trepidation and climbed up to the platform so the students could see all of me, my face, my flaws, my curves.

Modeling for her class became a ritual, one that I kept up week after week. I could quickly shift, turn, pick up my hair, sit down, lie back, give them different angles. We took a break halfway through class and the professor poured me a mug of the coffee that she brewed from a pot in the back of the room. Sipping it in my robe, I did not put my head in the book, instead I chatted naturally with the students and looked at their sketches and paintings. The woman on the canvas intrigued me.

The students always thanked me at the end and asked if I would be coming back. The professor gave my name and number to her colleagues and I came to do the same thing for other classes, filling my purse with cash.

I told myself that was why I came back but I knew there was a deeper truth.

Through the artists’ eyes, I began to see myself. It was no longer that old binary, ugly or beautiful. Through the artists, I saw what I was: human, mortal, flesh.

—

Gabrielle is a writer based in Philadelphia. She teaches online workshops at the intersection of writing and spiritual growth. She is drafting a memoir about ongoing conversations with her ancestors.