Love Island, Missouri

Body dysmorphia in a suburban cul-de-sac

I like this part. We don’t know each other well. He thinks I have a gentle nature that cannot bear any sort of altercation. He thinks I will be soft to hold. I pick him up at night while his car’s in the shop; I pull up to his building and he is waiting out front. He approaches my car in his shy, arrogant way, dressed plainly and deliberately in his coolguy clothes. He gets in, we drive, I don’t know what to say to him, he seems so beautiful now—I pretend to focus on my driving. I am a bad driver; it would be easy for him to make a joke, as I often have, but he doesn’t. Maybe I am not a bad driver after all. I am not sixteen anymore; how bad can I really be? What constitutes bad or good in driving, as long as no one dies or even gets pulled over…he is speaking now, and I have to ask him to repeat himself because I was not listening. Completely humiliating, but he obliges. “You were focused on the road,” he says. “Of course,” I say. We both sound stupid. We are learning to speak, to insinuate. 

This is how it ends, ten months later, on a long stretch of highway in central Missouri. There is a big round moon when the night takes hold and static from the radio stations of Peoria and Springfield and Bloomington and Chicago and Kansas City. He is driving, of course; he always does the driving, because I am, in fact, a bad driver. We have been driving for two days and are sick of each other’s company. When a song breaks through the static, I have to remind myself to retain my bored composure, to desire nothing from other people but their absence, let the cold quiet be—but it seems to be my own hand in the dark that turns the volume higher.

He pulls into a Phillips 66. We are not in urgent need of gas, but we don’t know when the next station will be. He lives according to caution; I have often pretended, affectionately, to be exhausted by it. This night I do not need to pretend, nor am I feeling particularly affectionate. I don’t remember why I was angry with him to begin with, but the feeling sticks and won’t be reasoned with. When we get to his parents’ house in a cul-de-sac outside St. Louis, the first signs of sun stripe the driveway and the light pours all over him. It’s alright, he says, just come here.

The cul-de-sac is tucked into a highway exit that becomes a sudden residential street, eventually sloping into the town, into rows of identical houses and an elementary school, behind it the Buffalo 66 bowling alley and a Greek restaurant, slate clapboards, bevel siding and fixed window panes like all the new buildings have. He sleeps by the pool into the late afternoon while I watch Love Island with his sister. The faces of the women are puffy and expressionless with filler. Their smiles reveal harsh white veneers. Their fake boobs are round and high. There is something especially tragic about seeing them cry over boys with their perfect new tits and long flat stomachs—like all the work has been for nothing, no one loves them still. 

I look out at the pool deck where he is sleeping, his cap pulled down over his face. A maintenance man fishes a dead bird out of the water with a long net. The boy’s head jerks slightly; he is in the fragile beginning phase of sleep. He is sunburnt across his chest, a tan breaking from his shoulders where his shirtsleeves would end. It’s alright just come here.

His sister can’t be more than fifteen. I watch her watch the show—her stillness, her soft round face, the vague attentive look that moves between the TV and her phone. Does she think these people look normal? (“Don’t ever let me get that bad,” I say to Stephanie when we watch reality TV. She knows what I mean.) Something happens on Love Island that makes for good viewing and miserable relationships: the people, their uncanny valley faces incapable of showing discernable human emotion, constantly misunderstand each other. They misunderstand and fight and cry and storm off set; they seem to be missing the part of them that offers visual cues of joy or pain or apology. Their expressions are paralyzed, their performances dull; the tendons of their neck strain to emote. They do not appear to feel a single human thing for one another.

(I have never had a normal reaction to beauty. I don’t know what a normal reaction to beauty is—maybe a solemn nod, scrutinizing a work of art, maybe nothing—but I know I do not have it. For a few months after college, I lived in a sublet with an 18-year-old ballerina. She moved downstage and fluttered about our shitty apartment with aplomb—from á plomb, the French “according to the plummet.” She was a bad tipper and big talker and a child of divorce. She broke in the shanks of her new pointe shoes at dawn by striking them against the kitchen furniture with the aplomb of a mother shaking her infant to death. But she did not come from money, and she did not reveal the cause of her patterns. I came to love her, but it was a reluctant kind of love. She was beautiful, so thin and so young. Her mother had lost a fortune to a psychic in Sedona. When she (the mother) was caged in the psychiatric hospitals of Arizona for days or months, the girl lived with a series of mothers’ boyfriends. As an adult, she did not accept her mother or the boyfriends in their trailer park homes as contributing factors to the way she was—they were not, she said, precursors to psychological distress, to stage fright, to the habit of dating older men, of wanting and refusing and still wanting to be loved. She did clerical work for her college’s admissions office and, on weekends, worked for a catering company at donor events; dressed in black, she tended the bar, pouring wine for patrons of her education. It was embarrassing to be in public with her—she often bent and stretched and paced to avoid being still, or sometimes she would just start brushing her hair in a restaurant—but I indulged her vanity because it was the narcissism of low self-esteem, and because it was my own. I indulged but did not forgive it, just as my friends indulged and did not forgive mine. But to watch her move, all according to the plummet. It was to witness what you might call natural talent, the pearl of her disease.)

The last time I went home, my dad was unhappy with the sight of me. You are too thin, he said, and your mother and I are unhappy with how you spend your money. It was the closest he has come to acknowledging what I have done to myself.

When I get work done, I look forward to the crack of the needle under my skin. I adore the pain of it, the utter waste, the money leaving my bank account, the bruising it leaves. In the Miami hotel room where I recovered from my spring surgeries, I settled into domestic infancy as the night nurse hovered, shone a flashlight in my eyes, dispensed the codeine when I insisted on waking in pain, spoonfed me plain yogurt when I did not want to eat. I am addicted, if not to beauty itself, to the false memory of a perverted billionaire surgeon-to-the-stars standing over me with scalpel and retractor, the unconscious body on a metal exam table, its naked entirety in the fluorescent operating light. He embalms me, performs a coroner’s inquest—study the body, locate its defects and fix them.

This is how it ends. The boy is good to me. He does not flirt with the other women around, who have a hard fleeting urban way about them that I can only aspire to imitate. He is awake on the pool deck, looking at his phone in the high sunlight. His sister has left the couch in hot pursuit of the family cat, who claws at the peeling wallpaper in the kitchen. Bad, the sister says in a mock-scolding tone, grabbing the cat by its belly and kissing its dear brown head. She cradles the animal as though it is something gentle, something that demands to be held—Shh, she instructs, as it hisses and squirms to get free. On Love Island, a girl in a red thong bikini is crying on the balcony after screaming at her boyfriend of two weeks. The boyfriend, comforting her, catches the eye of his friend and tries not to laugh. It’s alright, he says. Just come here.