Column Reflections on fleshy vulnerability
By JEANNETTE BATZ
They seem so practical, those
mirrored closet doors at business-class chain hotels. You can see your whole
outfit in them, no need for contortions to check whether your slips
showing. And the mirroring even has a certain ersatz art-deco elegance.
Until you step out of a steamy, thunderstorm-force shower, still
savoring all that unlimited hot water free of clanging pipes or yelling kin ...
and see what I saw.
The shock of all that plump pink nakedness jolted me senseless.
Surely those billows were magnification, the dimpling in the
mirrors surface?
Knowing full well which one of us was lying, I turned 90 degrees
and ignored all reflection. Was this shame, this abject nakedness that
proved me all too fully human, precisely what scripture meant to convey with
Adam and Eves banishment? Had Eve eaten a little too abundantly from that
tree? All we know about their nakedness is that they fled, rather like
adulterers rushing unceremoniously from a daytime motel after the camera-flash
explodes outside their window.
Vulnerable.
Babies are naked; so are lovers. So would corpses be, if we
didnt insist on dressing them up like theyre about to leave for
their spouses class-reunion dinner. But the aforementioned categories, by
definition, lack self-consciousness. Its the rest of us who are truly
naked, even beneath our clothes. An uncomfortable state that begins, as best I
can recall, with puberty. Thats when the changes get interesting,
mortification mixes with shy pride and comparison becomes a relentless
hobby.
Alas, all those intense feelings are wasted on notions we will
later see as negligible. A tummy that protrudes all of a half-inch does not
destroy ones chances of marriage. Oozing pustules do not signify base
worthlessness.
With age comes the real shame, as our lives begin to show in our
flesh. Gravity -- and gravitas -- pull the body ever farther
from its media ideal. The progression begins to dawn on us as irreversible. We
are, we joke bitterly, falling apart.
In point of fact, what disintegrates is an illusion. The illusion,
so necessary to youth, of immortality. Invincibility. Reliable beauty. Ready
conformity to whatever standard society dares advance.
I recently interviewed a young woman, flawlessly beautiful, who,
because of a tragically mistaken diagnosis, had undergone a double mastectomy
at 25. Until that surgery, shed been healthy, athletic, thin,
thoughtlessly attractive. Now, she takes comfort, not just from the plastic
surgeons excellent reconstruction, but from older friends, women
stretched into new shapes by pregnancy, women whove lived long enough to
fall apart a little. I never realized your body changed anyway, she
said softly.
Change it does, and if one avoids monitoring those changes
closely, a hotel mirror is rather a shock. But before I fled screaming into the
hallway, it dawned on me: Ive been this vulnerable all along.
Its just that now it shows.
Jeannette Batz is a staff writer for The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis.
National Catholic Reporter, October 8,
1999
|