Thirty-four years. That’s what today is. The first day of my thirty-fourth year. There is something shocking about that, I think. Definitely a part of me never thought it would get to that. I remember when I was sixteen I just wanted to be eighteen and have a driver’s license and I think for the most part I believed it wouldn’t go much further than that.
But today I am thirty-four. I have a mortgage and a husband and twin boys and they are four and I am thirty-four. “They” as in the twins are—four—not the husband. I feel the need to clarify. He is at least eighteen now. He’s like Benjamin Button, I think. He definitely started out older than me, chronologically speaking, but we’re on separate trajectories. His skin, for example, has only improved while mine has assumed the jagged downward quality of a losing stock. I see women noticing him. I don’t remember women noticing him before. It used to be that I had simply found the diamond in the rough and had been smart enough—I’d like to think deep enough—to recognize it. We’d stand side by side in the mirror in the mornings and we would both be looking at me. Now, I think, we are looking at him. We are comparing. His muscles have hardened.
That’s all I could focus on today at coffee with the local wives’ club—that’s what I think we all refer to ourselves as in our own heads, that gathering of women with children young enough and husbands employed enough to allow us the free time to sit around and drink coffee and chat—the wives’ club. And that’s what we do. We chat. No real worthwhile conversations. We just sort of exchange pleasantries and size one another up. At least that’s what I think we do. Maybe I’m the only one doing it. Maybe they are all really quite stimulated by these chats about who wore what in the tabloids and little Susie’s test score and what they think they’ll do about the weather next week and I’m the only dark emo one running my own monologue through it all with questions on why Stephanie looks better than Lisa when they were born within three weeks of one another, or why Janet is aging backwards despite having three boys of sports-playing age. And why does Amanda’s face look like it’s dripping off her bone structure at thirty-six? She has one child and it is a well-behaved girl. A girl! Girl children are supposed to preserve you until the preteen mark, no?
But I don’t think I’m the only one thinking these things. I think we all do. And I think we all suspect Janet of aging backwards with the help of modern science, if you will, though not one of us will say it. I won’t say it for this reason: because I would also like the help of modern science. But I hold off. Partly because I don’t want people to secretly run their emo monologues and gather their suspicions while I talk out loud about the weather. I don’t want them to secretly suspect me of this, in the event that I do it. Because then they’ll think I’m vain, won’t they? But I am vain. I’m thinking about this, after all. I’m comparing my abs to my husband's in the mirror and when we were married mine were better but his have improved with age and discipline and some strange aging magic that men have that women don’t and mine have simply split down the middle from carrying twins. Women are noticing him.
When I was eighteen I was vain too, I think. I think we all are. But the extent of my vanity went as far as the shade of the tan I could get and the shade of the lip gloss I could find with the shimmer and the only thing I ever really worked hard to change was maybe the bit of skin and thin layer of fat that could be gripped on my thighs. My thighs have become the least of my problems. I might just like my thighs now, when I compare them to the things I have grown to dislike. The texture of my skin, for one. And that split in my abs. My smile. My smile has recently bothered me where before I thought it was nice. Maybe because before people knew that when I wasn’t smiling I, at least, wasn’t frowning. Now people—strangers—comment in lines or in aisles when they pass me. Mostly men, not nearly as wonderful looking as my husband, but still, men. The people who used to notice me and say I had a nice smile. Now they say this—they say, “Smile, it’s not that bad.”
In the beginning I thought it was a new pick up line. What would I have been when I first heard it? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? It was around the age where I first noticed that I didn’t like the surface of my skin quite as much and suddenly I seemed to need to moisturize more often. That was the year I tried every product in the store. Nothing seemed to work as well as youth. Some man said it at a restaurant. “Smile, it’s not that bad.” I’d looked up and realized I’d been sort of staring past the wall while I waited for a table and the friend who would join me and I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t scowling. But I wasn’t smiling. And this man commented. He told me, in so many words, to change that. Smile, because otherwise it looks so bad. I thought of telling him it was a terrible way to meet a woman, if that was his goal. It seemed presumptuous though. And then I heard it again. A month later, a few months later. It cropped up, again and again. Unsolicited comments on how I look from strangers in the aisles of grocery stores, movie theaters, once the aisle of a wedding reception as we all filed out. Was it possible I looked miserable at a wedding? Weddings are one of those places where we all make a collective and conscious effort to look more entertained than we really are, and still, maybe I was failing. Against a conscious effort I might be failing. I began to wonder if it was not a pick up line. If it was maybe me. Did I look less smiley than I used to when I wasn’t smiling? Was my non-smile less neutral than it had been in the past? Is this what happens when you age? You lose expression-neutrality? The corners of your mouth fall down faster than the other parts of your mouth? I wasn’t sure. It was my first time aging. Finally I took stock of this in the mirror. I took my phone and took pictures of myself while I looked away from the camera to see what I looked like to people I wasn’t looking at or interacting with or somehow animated for. I looked… mad.
At the next meeting of the local wives’ club I watched Janet relay the scores of her three sons’ teams from over the weekend. I watched the corners of her mouth. They tilted just ever so slightly up… The others.. the others’ did not. The others looked like me. They looked severe when they were not smiling. As if life had made a few promises it didn’t keep or somehow turned out to be less than they’d anticipated. But these are happy women. Happy enough. They are comfortable women. They are women like me who mean nothing by not smiling but send a message anyway. That message is that it is that bad, whatever “it” is. Amanda was staring listlessly into the swirl she made in her latte as she stirred it with a stick. It was hard to tell whether she was listening or not, or whether her internal monologue was going full steam ahead. It was probably emo. I nudged her under the table. I said, “Smile. It’s not that bad.”
She looked up and she looked angry. But then I realized that was only her startled look. She said, “What?”
And in the mirror in the morning next to my husband I watched his unsmiling face as he shaved before work. He just looked handsome, like someone you don’t mind looking at while you take him seriously.
Men aren’t expected to smile the way women are. There are studies behind this. Agreements between people in lab coats. We are perceived differently than men.
I took to the Internet. Because, modern science. Because this is something I would like to change about myself, among other things, and I’m tired of feeling like I can’t make that change because of what the other wives might think. The other night I saw an old wallpaper in the bathroom of one of those trendy little restaurants that keeps the light so low you sort of have to feel your way between the tables and the doors and the wallpaper was just a running reprint of advertisements from the 1950s. One of the ads was for a hair-coloring product. L’oreal, I think. And the message was, essentially, that if you use this product no one will ever know you colored your hair. Because it looks that natural. So back then was a woman coloring her hair the equivalent sort of dirty little secret that a woman fixing her falling smile might be today? Because I found a way to fix it on this Internet thing. Something temporary, in case I don’t like it, and something subtle, and affordable. Like hair color in 1950. A "dermal filler", is what it’s called. Relatively mild side effects. Maybe some swelling or bruising. I can handle a little swelling or bruising. That’s what I decided last week right before I turned thirty-four. I decided I can handle a little swelling or bruising, but I cannot handle being constantly told by men in aisleways to smile because it’s not that bad. Why don’t they have to smile? I decided after that fact that I wish I had asked them that—why do I, as a woman, have to be responsible for smiling at nothing while I go about life in public and they, as men, can look serious and brooding, and maybe even mad, if they’ve aged that way. Or they can be mad if they simply are mad. They can express mad. We can look at an angry man and say, That man is angry. We can look at an angry woman and you know what we say? We say that woman is a b—.
A big difference, there.
Maybe it’s the movie stars. Maybe the modern science they’ve employed has warped the bar for the rest of us. They are always smiling, and aging backwards. I saw Christy Brinkley on the cover a magazine this month and the caption was “Christie Brinkley: Fabulous at 60”. She looks more fabulous than I did at 30. Then another one came out with Sharon Stone and the message was essentially the same. This is the new bar. Movie stars didn’t maintain like that in the past. They are superhuman. Something has changed. It is modern science. Modern science is the new bar. This is what I’m up against.
And all these thoughts were what I was running through my emo monologue yesterday when I went to my (secret) doctor’s office and got a little liquid lift, if you will. Just a little filler under the corners of my mouth. A little in the parenthesis that seemed to surround my smile, as if somewhere along the line my smile had become a side note rather than the main point. Nasal-labial folds, the doctor called them. I said, “Whatever”. I call them parenthesis. Or, I should say, I called them that. Because today they are gone. I am thirty four and when I am not smiling I am not frowning. I feel fresher. Softer. Stephanie commented on it at the wives’ club. She said, “What are you on? I want some.”
But it’s not her comment that has most reinforced this decision for me. It’s this one: as I walked through the grocery store shopping for my own birthday cake I noticed a man noticing me. And what did he say? Nothing. He just smiled.