Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young

Author:Ashleigh Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

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Each time we visited Hamilton, I went to a bookshop to riffle through a box of postcards on the counter. For $1.50 each I would buy the most mysterious postcards I could find so that I could add them to the lattice of pictures on my bedroom wall. It was in the box that I found a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo.

I placed Frida’s picture between the picture of the red girl in the mirror and the flying woman tugging on the hand of her earthbound husband. I took a long time to bring myself to closely study the self-portrait. It was because of her moustache; I was a little afraid of it. It made her into a double-sided optical illusion, like the image of the old woman and the young woman concealed inside each other. But once I saw that she was beautiful I couldn’t see anything else. The moustache was not only incidental but a mark of her strength and conviction. It couldn’t have been any other way. It was like the crumbled-away shoulder of the Venus de Milo.

There must be other women, ordinary women, who had moustaches and body hair but who were also beautiful—even if they lived in the depths of strangeness, even if to so many of us they were more frightening than alluring. Didn’t that just mean that their beauty came from a different place, that to find it you needed to learn a different way of looking? Perhaps it was only in the future that the way would be found. Somewhere, I’d read a quote by Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” I had no idea who Bacon was, but I decided this was true. The question seemed to be how much strangeness our eyes would allow before the balance tipped too far.

If I had liked confrontation, I would have shown my father the portrait of Frida Kahlo. “Look, she’s got a moustache,” I’d say, “and you have to admit, Dad, she’s beautiful.” But I don’t think he would have agreed. The only person I remember him describing as beautiful was Michelle Phillips, the singer in the Mamas and the Papas. It was on Christmas Day. We were sitting on the living room floor as “Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)” played on the dusty speakers. My father was staring at Michelle Phillips’s picture inside the CD booklet. She had long golden hair with a center part, and a perfect elfin face. “She is the most beautiful woman in the world,” my father suddenly said. His voice moved up the register as it always did when he was insisting on the truth.

I didn’t like that he had said “beautiful”—in his mouth it was embarrassing, it was explicit. But at the same time I was taken aback, I was impressed, that he saw beauty and then said so.

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