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Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
Lucy Alibar-Harrison
3:14 PM
Jerome is staring at my eyebrow again. Or the part that’s there. I’ve tried to draw the rest on with Magic Markers, but the scar tissue is too smooth for ink. Elmira pulls his face back to hers and re-inserts her tongue.
She knows how much I hate it when people stare.
3:34 PM
Elmira’s chewing his neck. His neck is beautiful. His eyes are beautiful. Light green and flecked with gold. The color of what I cough up most mornings, but prettier.
Those beautiful eyes look so sad, so pensive and disturbed. Like Daddy’s when he talks about his botched circumcision.
That happened when I was six.
Daddy’s Catholicism wasn’t an issue during their courtship, but after I was born, Mommy wanted a traditional Jewish home. I was enrolled in Hebrew School. Daddy was circumcised.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
All Mommy has to say about it is that it was the mohel’s second day on the job and “things didn’t go quite to plan.”
When I try to ask any more than that he reaches for her bottle of vodka and changes the subject to cancer.
She and Daddy sleep in separate bedrooms now. At night, if I listen hard enough, I can hear them crying.
I don’t want Jerome to be as sad as Daddy. I will make him smile.
I take a deep breath and exhale on a high pitched gurgle. Tiny globes of mucus bubble out between the grating of my braces. I pop them one by one with my tongue.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
Jerome looks away. He doesn’t like it.
Different people have different senses of humor, is what Mommy always says.
“Different people have different senses of humor, Tzipporrah,” she cooed whenever I came home from school crying. “Kids tellin’ you your ugly is their way of sayin’ howdy. Just laugh with them.”
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
“But they say I’m hideous!” I’d wail. “They say I’m so nasty and slimy my own mommy won’t touch me!”
“Horse shit,” Mommy said, reaching for her vodka. “I touch you plenty.”
To prove her point, she reached out to stroke my scar, but the hand seemed to change its mind mid-reach. She mentioned Jesus and disappeared into her bedroom, clutching the Smirnoff.
The next day I laughed with my third-grade tormentors as they kicked me to the ground and took turns spitting at my head. Since then, I’ve handled the hatred of my peers by laughing or doing cool tricks like Mucus Bubble Blowing to make everyone else laugh and forget they hate me.
But Jerome’s not laughing now.
Maybe I’ve lost my spark.
3:41 P.M.
Elmra’s tongue has disappeared into Jerome’s trachea. His thick, burly hands probe the front of her turtleneck.
Elmira looks so pretty in turtlenecks. Elmira looks pretty in everything.
Mommy says I am pretty on the insides.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
3:56 P.M.
Jerome’s arm has vanished beneath Elmira’s turtleneck. I shouldn’t be watching this. That’s sick. I have to entertain myself.
Even if Jerome doesn’t think Mucus Bubble Popping is funny, I do. And they’re not paying attention anyway.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
3:59 P.M.
Jerome leans over and whispers something in Elmira’s ear. Elmira has the cutest little ears. Elmira has the cutest little everything.
She leans and whispers back.
Whisper, whisper, whisper.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
4: 00 P.M.
Elmira asks me if I want to take a walk. She says it will help get rid of my baby fat.
“Sure!” I say. I immediately regret my enthusiasm. Projectile bits of mucus shoot through my retainer. One of the chunks flies into Jerome’s eye and he cries out.
Oopsy daisy.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
I hand him a tissue.
4:01 P.M.
A late afternoon stroll with my two gorgeous friends. Maybe they’ll want to hear some of my prize-winning poetry. Maybe we’ll bond like in “The Breakfast Club” and be friends forever. I swing my rucksack over my shoulder.
Elmira pats me on the head.
“Be back in a few hours. Have fun.”
Jerome is kissing her stomach and she is moaning a little.
Oh.
I get it.
4:31 PM
The interstate is long and hot. Truckers leer out of windows to waggle their tongues between their fingers. I smile and nod and keep on walking.
I am always getting kicked out of places so beautiful people can have sex without having to look at me. A University of Florida biology student named Dale told me once that the merest glimpse of me would render a man impotent. I’d started to explain that I’m pretty on the insides,
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
but he yelled that I was ruining his hard-on. Through the plate glass doors, I watched as Dale held my babysitter Juanita in a passionate embrace. At seven, I was unsure of what “impotent” or “hard-on” meant, but I shrugged it off and went to play Mermaid Princess in a nearby drainage ditch until my parents came home from Couple’s Therapy.
There are no drainage ditches here. Only a long stretch of highway littered with road kill.
4:40 PM
I can understand how I rendered men impotent when I was seven. I had a unibrow until I was nine years old.
Now I have half a unibrow.
It’s because of Couple’s Therapy.
Money was tight when Dr. Singh told my family that I desperately needed braces. Mommy had me fitted with a discount retainer. She said I’d grow into it. It’s rusty and protrudes half an inch from my mouth. The jagged edges mean my gums are constantly bleeding and infected. In winters, the cold freezes the metal bands so that my gums and tongue stick and have to be ripped off at the end of the day.
After school I used to warm it on the stove while I slurped Cheerios at the kitchen table.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
In the winter of 1993, Mommy and Daddy came home from Couple’s Therapy angrier than usual. Mommy was crying and Daddy called her a “castrating kike bitch”. He spat in her face and stalked off to his room.
“Whush uh kike?” I dribbled through soggy Cheerios. Oopsy daisy. I said the words too fast and a few Cheerios flew out of my mouth and hit Mommy in the eye. She dropped to her knees and started to scream. Between her ragged sobs, I heard “Walking Abortion” and “Waste of Chromosomes”.
I finished my cereal as the sobs petered out.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched my mommy climb to her feet. I began slurping at my cereal milk. Slurp, slurp, slurp. I saw Mommy staring out of the corner of my eye.
“It makes me puke to know you slithered out of my womb,” said Mommy.
She snatched the red-hot retainer off the stove and hurled it at my head. The jagged edge caught my eyebrow and ripped off two inches of unibrow and skin.
She apologized in the car on the way to the emergency room.
“Sometimes, the only way to make my anger go away is to watch something bleed,” she explained. “But I love you. You better get that straight. You’ll always be my Pretty-On-The-Inside Princess.”
We held hands and sang “Dayenu” while I got thirteen stitches across my forehead.
“Dayenu” means, “that would have been enough”.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
It’s a Hebrew song about how God keeps giving and giving and giving, and just when we think he’s given us enough---Dayenu---he gives us something even better.
Mommy says my eyebrow used to scare her so badly that she had to get drunk just to breastfeed me. But eventually she’d be drunk enough to feed me and not throw up afterwards. I was a very well fed baby.
Dayenu!
Mommy says that one day I’ll find a man who will love me for my talent and inner beauty.
Dayenu!
Now I have half a unibrow and a bright red scar that splits my forehead in two just like that retainer did.
No more unibrow!
Dayenu!
5:00 PM
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Mommy would croon after Daddy got drunk and said that the scar makes my face look like a vagina.
“Your face has character. Just like you.”
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
“I have character,” I chant as I step over a swollen deer carcass. “I have character.”
5:12 PM
I won a poetry contest last year. This is what my award certificate says:
Tzipporah O’Malley
Second Place
Selena Chambers Award for Poetic Excellence
My poem was a haiku called “Gatorade”. It goes:
Hey, Michael Jordan
What does Gatorade have to
Do with basketball?
I’d entered a lot of haiku about Michael Jordan in the contest, but “Gatorade” I guess is the strongest.
I Xeroxed the certificate and taped copies to my parent’s bedroom doors, and one on our liquor cabinet just to make sure they saw.
Who’s a waste of chromosomes now? Who’s a walking abortion now?
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
Not me!
5:34 PM
I stepped on a chunk of scrap metal a mile and a half back. My shoe has been slowly but surely filling up with blood.
To look at Elmira, you wouldn’t think she has big scabs the size of nickels all over her butt. But she does. All over her butt.
5:35 PM
I am sprawled out at the side of the road, too tired to move. Trucks whiz by and blow exhaust in my face.
I wish Jerome could see my poetry.
Hey, Michael Jordan
What does McDonald’s have to
Do with Basketball?
5:37 PM
A truck driver with a mullet and exema picks me up. His name is Brian and he is very nice. He asks me why I’m out wandering the highway all by my sweet little self. I try to explain my impotence affect, but he says that’s not true, not at all. Not At All. He pats my thigh and tells me he’s got exactly what I need.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
The other half of my eyebrow? My father’s foreskin? A new pair of braces?
Hey, Michael Jordan,
What do batteries have to
Do with basketball?
6:00 PM
Brian scrubs his moustache on his sleeve as I zip up my pants.
“See, you didn’t kill that, baby!”
I didn’t kill that. Not At All.
Brian has promised to take her back to Salt Lake City with him. He will give me everything. Brian can see my inner beauty shining right on through. He says that since Jesus made me, of course I am beautiful.
Of course.
6:46 PM
“Oh, Tzipporah,”
I try in vain to dodge an armadillo.
“That was, like, the most deep thing I’ve ever been through. I mean it lasted like, two minutes ‘cause I think he was nervous, but you know I don’t care about that.”
“I know,” I gurgle. Phlegm is beginning to fill up my trachea.
“And afterwards, I realized that I am still in love with Craig. Because I can’t stop loving him, Tzipporah. I can’t.”
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
“That’s beautiful, Elmira.”
“And Jerome realized that he still has unresolved issues with his father. So we both cried and held each other for hours. It was like--wow.”
Wow.
I roll down a window and spit. I pray that the mucus doesn’t hit anyone’s windshield, but the cacophony of horns suggests otherwise.
Elmira and I lock eyes and beam. Never again will we be this young. Never again will Elmira be this beautiful. Never again will I have so much character.
She maternally picks a speck of mucus from my braces. I scrape away the dried remnants of semen just above her lip. Elmira can be messy sometimes, but it’s alright because we’ll always be there to take care of each other.
“He said he’d email me.”
Of course he will.
Dayenu.
Lucy Alibar-Harrison
3:14 PM
Jerome is staring at my eyebrow again. Or the part that’s there. I’ve tried to draw the rest on with Magic Markers, but the scar tissue is too smooth for ink. Elmira pulls his face back to hers and re-inserts her tongue.
She knows how much I hate it when people stare.
3:34 PM
Elmira’s chewing his neck. His neck is beautiful. His eyes are beautiful. Light green and flecked with gold. The color of what I cough up most mornings, but prettier.
Those beautiful eyes look so sad, so pensive and disturbed. Like Daddy’s when he talks about his botched circumcision.
That happened when I was six.
Daddy’s Catholicism wasn’t an issue during their courtship, but after I was born, Mommy wanted a traditional Jewish home. I was enrolled in Hebrew School. Daddy was circumcised.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
All Mommy has to say about it is that it was the mohel’s second day on the job and “things didn’t go quite to plan.”
When I try to ask any more than that he reaches for her bottle of vodka and changes the subject to cancer.
She and Daddy sleep in separate bedrooms now. At night, if I listen hard enough, I can hear them crying.
I don’t want Jerome to be as sad as Daddy. I will make him smile.
I take a deep breath and exhale on a high pitched gurgle. Tiny globes of mucus bubble out between the grating of my braces. I pop them one by one with my tongue.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
Jerome looks away. He doesn’t like it.
Different people have different senses of humor, is what Mommy always says.
“Different people have different senses of humor, Tzipporrah,” she cooed whenever I came home from school crying. “Kids tellin’ you your ugly is their way of sayin’ howdy. Just laugh with them.”
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
“But they say I’m hideous!” I’d wail. “They say I’m so nasty and slimy my own mommy won’t touch me!”
“Horse shit,” Mommy said, reaching for her vodka. “I touch you plenty.”
To prove her point, she reached out to stroke my scar, but the hand seemed to change its mind mid-reach. She mentioned Jesus and disappeared into her bedroom, clutching the Smirnoff.
The next day I laughed with my third-grade tormentors as they kicked me to the ground and took turns spitting at my head. Since then, I’ve handled the hatred of my peers by laughing or doing cool tricks like Mucus Bubble Blowing to make everyone else laugh and forget they hate me.
But Jerome’s not laughing now.
Maybe I’ve lost my spark.
3:41 P.M.
Elmra’s tongue has disappeared into Jerome’s trachea. His thick, burly hands probe the front of her turtleneck.
Elmira looks so pretty in turtlenecks. Elmira looks pretty in everything.
Mommy says I am pretty on the insides.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
3:56 P.M.
Jerome’s arm has vanished beneath Elmira’s turtleneck. I shouldn’t be watching this. That’s sick. I have to entertain myself.
Even if Jerome doesn’t think Mucus Bubble Popping is funny, I do. And they’re not paying attention anyway.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
3:59 P.M.
Jerome leans over and whispers something in Elmira’s ear. Elmira has the cutest little ears. Elmira has the cutest little everything.
She leans and whispers back.
Whisper, whisper, whisper.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
4: 00 P.M.
Elmira asks me if I want to take a walk. She says it will help get rid of my baby fat.
“Sure!” I say. I immediately regret my enthusiasm. Projectile bits of mucus shoot through my retainer. One of the chunks flies into Jerome’s eye and he cries out.
Oopsy daisy.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
I hand him a tissue.
4:01 P.M.
A late afternoon stroll with my two gorgeous friends. Maybe they’ll want to hear some of my prize-winning poetry. Maybe we’ll bond like in “The Breakfast Club” and be friends forever. I swing my rucksack over my shoulder.
Elmira pats me on the head.
“Be back in a few hours. Have fun.”
Jerome is kissing her stomach and she is moaning a little.
Oh.
I get it.
4:31 PM
The interstate is long and hot. Truckers leer out of windows to waggle their tongues between their fingers. I smile and nod and keep on walking.
I am always getting kicked out of places so beautiful people can have sex without having to look at me. A University of Florida biology student named Dale told me once that the merest glimpse of me would render a man impotent. I’d started to explain that I’m pretty on the insides,
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
but he yelled that I was ruining his hard-on. Through the plate glass doors, I watched as Dale held my babysitter Juanita in a passionate embrace. At seven, I was unsure of what “impotent” or “hard-on” meant, but I shrugged it off and went to play Mermaid Princess in a nearby drainage ditch until my parents came home from Couple’s Therapy.
There are no drainage ditches here. Only a long stretch of highway littered with road kill.
4:40 PM
I can understand how I rendered men impotent when I was seven. I had a unibrow until I was nine years old.
Now I have half a unibrow.
It’s because of Couple’s Therapy.
Money was tight when Dr. Singh told my family that I desperately needed braces. Mommy had me fitted with a discount retainer. She said I’d grow into it. It’s rusty and protrudes half an inch from my mouth. The jagged edges mean my gums are constantly bleeding and infected. In winters, the cold freezes the metal bands so that my gums and tongue stick and have to be ripped off at the end of the day.
After school I used to warm it on the stove while I slurped Cheerios at the kitchen table.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
In the winter of 1993, Mommy and Daddy came home from Couple’s Therapy angrier than usual. Mommy was crying and Daddy called her a “castrating kike bitch”. He spat in her face and stalked off to his room.
“Whush uh kike?” I dribbled through soggy Cheerios. Oopsy daisy. I said the words too fast and a few Cheerios flew out of my mouth and hit Mommy in the eye. She dropped to her knees and started to scream. Between her ragged sobs, I heard “Walking Abortion” and “Waste of Chromosomes”.
I finished my cereal as the sobs petered out.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched my mommy climb to her feet. I began slurping at my cereal milk. Slurp, slurp, slurp. I saw Mommy staring out of the corner of my eye.
“It makes me puke to know you slithered out of my womb,” said Mommy.
She snatched the red-hot retainer off the stove and hurled it at my head. The jagged edge caught my eyebrow and ripped off two inches of unibrow and skin.
She apologized in the car on the way to the emergency room.
“Sometimes, the only way to make my anger go away is to watch something bleed,” she explained. “But I love you. You better get that straight. You’ll always be my Pretty-On-The-Inside Princess.”
We held hands and sang “Dayenu” while I got thirteen stitches across my forehead.
“Dayenu” means, “that would have been enough”.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
It’s a Hebrew song about how God keeps giving and giving and giving, and just when we think he’s given us enough---Dayenu---he gives us something even better.
Mommy says my eyebrow used to scare her so badly that she had to get drunk just to breastfeed me. But eventually she’d be drunk enough to feed me and not throw up afterwards. I was a very well fed baby.
Dayenu!
Mommy says that one day I’ll find a man who will love me for my talent and inner beauty.
Dayenu!
Now I have half a unibrow and a bright red scar that splits my forehead in two just like that retainer did.
No more unibrow!
Dayenu!
5:00 PM
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Mommy would croon after Daddy got drunk and said that the scar makes my face look like a vagina.
“Your face has character. Just like you.”
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
“I have character,” I chant as I step over a swollen deer carcass. “I have character.”
5:12 PM
I won a poetry contest last year. This is what my award certificate says:
Tzipporah O’Malley
Second Place
Selena Chambers Award for Poetic Excellence
My poem was a haiku called “Gatorade”. It goes:
Hey, Michael Jordan
What does Gatorade have to
Do with basketball?
I’d entered a lot of haiku about Michael Jordan in the contest, but “Gatorade” I guess is the strongest.
I Xeroxed the certificate and taped copies to my parent’s bedroom doors, and one on our liquor cabinet just to make sure they saw.
Who’s a waste of chromosomes now? Who’s a walking abortion now?
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
Not me!
5:34 PM
I stepped on a chunk of scrap metal a mile and a half back. My shoe has been slowly but surely filling up with blood.
To look at Elmira, you wouldn’t think she has big scabs the size of nickels all over her butt. But she does. All over her butt.
5:35 PM
I am sprawled out at the side of the road, too tired to move. Trucks whiz by and blow exhaust in my face.
I wish Jerome could see my poetry.
Hey, Michael Jordan
What does McDonald’s have to
Do with Basketball?
5:37 PM
A truck driver with a mullet and exema picks me up. His name is Brian and he is very nice. He asks me why I’m out wandering the highway all by my sweet little self. I try to explain my impotence affect, but he says that’s not true, not at all. Not At All. He pats my thigh and tells me he’s got exactly what I need.
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
The other half of my eyebrow? My father’s foreskin? A new pair of braces?
Hey, Michael Jordan,
What do batteries have to
Do with basketball?
6:00 PM
Brian scrubs his moustache on his sleeve as I zip up my pants.
“See, you didn’t kill that, baby!”
I didn’t kill that. Not At All.
Brian has promised to take her back to Salt Lake City with him. He will give me everything. Brian can see my inner beauty shining right on through. He says that since Jesus made me, of course I am beautiful.
Of course.
6:46 PM
“Oh, Tzipporah,”
I try in vain to dodge an armadillo.
“That was, like, the most deep thing I’ve ever been through. I mean it lasted like, two minutes ‘cause I think he was nervous, but you know I don’t care about that.”
“I know,” I gurgle. Phlegm is beginning to fill up my trachea.
“And afterwards, I realized that I am still in love with Craig. Because I can’t stop loving him, Tzipporah. I can’t.”
Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides
“That’s beautiful, Elmira.”
“And Jerome realized that he still has unresolved issues with his father. So we both cried and held each other for hours. It was like--wow.”
Wow.
I roll down a window and spit. I pray that the mucus doesn’t hit anyone’s windshield, but the cacophony of horns suggests otherwise.
Elmira and I lock eyes and beam. Never again will we be this young. Never again will Elmira be this beautiful. Never again will I have so much character.
She maternally picks a speck of mucus from my braces. I scrape away the dried remnants of semen just above her lip. Elmira can be messy sometimes, but it’s alright because we’ll always be there to take care of each other.
“He said he’d email me.”
Of course he will.
Dayenu.
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