This Face: Saturday Morning

Betty, my friend since kindergarten, still regards me as “the pretty one”--though it is she who has the better skin, flawless and unlined and smooth.

In the last decade, when we’ve traveled together, she always spends two hours getting ready, while I’m pacing the motel room, ready to get on the road and look at new places. “You could still be really pretty if you gave a damn,” she says, as she lines her eyes, her hair in rollers. “Wear some make-up, do lipstick, buy some mascara,” she advises.

Linda, my Canadian friend, always brings me creams and gels and other first aid products for the face and hair. “Don’t go to bed without washing and moisturizing your face,” she says in a big grown-up voice. While she’s here, I use them, following her moves in the bathroom like a child copying her mother. But when she leaves, I forget again. Attending to my face in the mirror is about as interesting as reading a financial prospectus. I’d rather be taking pictures of faces of strangers, looking through the camera lens at the colors of rust on old trucks, or just wandering down the streets of broken-down old towns, looking. I am the poster child for scopophilia, the love of looking at things.

The cracks and lines in my face announce my age: 61.

Rarely does its skin wear anything from a tube or bottle.

I am lazy about washing my face, considering it plenty clean after a bath.

Still, it carries something essentially Linda in its expressions--so I’m still recognizable as myself to anyone who knew me at six, at twenty-one, at forty. I know it from the inside, from behind the eyes, from the way its mouth sags when it feels sadness or relaxes when it feels joy. I know this face backwards, the way mirrors show us ourselves. And I know it from a collage of photographs in memory--Baby Girl, Adored, snuggling against her daddy; Birthday Party Candle-Blower, Seven; Homecoming Queen; Child Bride, Glowing but Clueless; Pregnant--with babies and projects and hopes; Deflated after Giving Birth; The Mother of the Bride....

It is the face of a woman who was adored as a child.

When I see my daddy’s eyes reflected back in my mirror, I always remember my friend Gary’s words on the morning of his funeral: “Your daddy gave you a gift of belovedness. Nothing can ever take that away.”

It is the face of a woman who married the wrong man too soon and stayed way too long, a man who left tracks in my face that are still there, under the surface.

I mean to attend to my face, Betty, I really do. But I forget. I simply wear it, like a pair of comfortable old jeans that fit. When I’m driving sometimes, alone, a face looks back at me from my mirror, and it is--best I can tell--me.