BY CLAIRE SEYMOUR
The Barbie’s hair is yellow, like dandelions were braided into the silky strands, and her eyes are an impossible blue, like she had blinked in cornflower petals, or maybe painted her irises with pieces of the sea.
She is beautiful, not pretty, but beautiful, like apple trees or sprawling deserts. Her face is blank and her expression is frozen over with ice, her rose petal lips are pushed out and sparkling.
Chloe is not beautiful, because she is three years old, and if I look at her, I can see bits of myself, from when I was a kid about four million years ago. She has light brown hair like tree branches, and her eyes are dark, ripped up bits of velvet. There is innocence to her clumsy fingers and longing when she looks at the Barbie doll, a desire to grow up too quickly.
“You can choose your doll now, Claire,” she suggests, gesturing to the cardboard box filled to the brim with Barbies. “Just don’t take mine.”
The one she has chosen is clearly the prettiest, dressed in a flowing pink dress that falls to her skinny ankles and breaks at her white high heels. She is all makeup and luxury and summer and something hot and white courses through my body, something without a name.
I pick through the box, rummage through the various dolls with distorted limbs and bejeweled gowns. I choose one with brown hair that is un-brushed and knotted. She is wearing blue jeans that don’t fit right and a pink halter-top.
Chloe frowns, crinkles forming between her feather blonde eyebrows. “Why did you choose her?”
I shrug, “Why not?”
Chloe just shakes her head, small lips twisting up at my stupidity. “She’s not pretty.”
I look over the doll’s large eyes, like melted chocolate, and her shimmering skin. “She is.”
“Well she’s not blonde.” Chloe dismisses this.
•
“My name’s Claire. But with a ‘K’. K-L-A-I-R-E.”
“You can’t spell it like that.”
“Yes I can. It sounds better. It sounds different and mysterious and beautiful and it sounds better.”
“Okay Claire.”
Not Claire.
Klaire.
•
“Brunette girls can be pretty too.” I argue. I realize that I’m self-consciously twirling a strand of my own straight brown hair, and I immediately put my hands in my lap.
“I guess.” Chloe murmurs. She is focused on brushing her Barbie’s dandelion hair with a small coral comb. “You can put some new clothes on your doll, if you want,”
I nod, and pick a sequined blue dress from the box. My Barbie has delicate arms, like icicles, and bony wrists that look as if you could snap them right off. Her legs are incredibly long and thin, the beginning to end of Florida.
•
“Your thigh gap is crazy,”
“Thigh gap?”
“Yeah, you know. You have thin legs. There’s a space between your thighs when you put your feet together.”
“Oh yeah. I guess. Thanks.”
“You’re, like, so lucky. I’ve never had one. Not ever.”
•
My Barbie is changed into the blue dress, and Chloe stretches her chubby fingers across a Ken doll. He has tousled hair the color of gingerbread and tanned skin that shines.
“It’s my Barbie’s first communion,” Chloe explains, gesturing to her doll. “So she needs a boyfriend with her. She’ll be happier with a boyfriend.”
My heart rattles and my breath tumbles out of my mouth so that my tongue feels dry and heavy, like sandpaper. Chloe begins dressing Ken in a blue shirt.
•
“Did you hear about Mary?”
“No, what about her?”
“She was bulimic, for like, four years.”
“Wow,”
“Whoa.”
“I don’t get why girls get eating disorders. I mean, guys like girls with curves.”
Guys?
Why does it always have to be about the guys?
•
“Well I don’t think my Barbie is going to have a boyfriend,” I state casually.
Chloe frowns slightly, tilting her head to one side. “Why not?”
“Well she can be happy without a boyfriend, right?”
Chloe muses this over, velvet eyes thoughtful. “I mean I guess,”
•
“You’re so pretty.”
No I’m not. I’m not because my stomach spills over the waist of my jeans and my hair gets tangled together, like kite strings. I’m not because my cuticles are all ripped off and my skin shines with oil and sometimes my smile is too forced and my eyes always look tired and my hands are dry and chapped in the winter.
“Thanks.”
•
Vivian, the other babysitter for Chloe’s family appears at the top of the stairs. She has blondish-brown hair and light hazel eyes that are free of any makeup.
“It’s 5:45,” she informs me. “So you can go home, if you like.”
I smile at her. “Thanks Vivian.” I glance at the Barbie in my hands, and then back up at Vivian. Something has changed. Her hair is limp and thin, like wilted flowers that crumble and burn around the edges. Her eyes look dull, the color of the gritty Brooklyn cement.
The doll falls from my hands and I stand up quickly. “Bye Chloe, see you next week.”
She mumbles a reply, and I hurry up the stairs to the first floor. Grabbing my backpack, I say a rushed goodbye to Vivian, avoiding eye contact because I don’t want to look at her pale skin, fragments of old, milky bones, and I don’t want to look at the violet-petal circles under her bottom eye lashes.
I shut their front door behind me, and walk through the quiet, residential street. People walk by: a young woman, a little boy, a pre-teen girl. All I see is frizzy red ribbons of hair and pale, ragged lips and heavily lidded eyes. All I see is people who are not beautiful and all I see is flaws printed all over their skin and I want to carve a pathway through the sky because maybe it would be beautiful up there.
I’m at my house and I open the front door and I’m in front of the mirror that hangs by the entrance closet. There are muddy tangles of hair and filthy fingernails and I think that dirt is caked onto my skin and soot is dripping through the gaps in my ribs.
Fireflies are trapped in my throat, glowing and trying to break through my lips. I shove them down with a swallow.
I breathe. I close my eyes.
•
“What do you like writing about?”
“I don’t like writing about sad things.”
I don’t like writing about water bugs that skitter out of my shower drain, or about the shadows that cling to my bedroom walls, as if they want to be loved. I don’t like writing about nightmares, the ones that clench their bony hands around my wrists and drag me out of rest.
Pause.
I don’t like writing about that.
“No?”
“No. I don’t like writing about ugly things either.”
I don’t like writing about ashy, airless Septembers blending into smoky, suffocating Octobers. I don’t like writing about Pandora opening the box, how we all think we’re above temptation, when really, nobody is. I don’t like writing about how it’s colder now, and January is caged in my stomach and February drifts behind me, snapping at my ankles.
Stop.
I don’t like writing about that.
“Well what do you like to write about?”
“Hmm. I guess… I guess I like writing about beautiful things.”
I like writing about the crates of clementines with orange netting stretching across the tops of the sunny fruits that we always buy right around Christmas. I like writing about my grandmother’s pearl earrings that look as if the moon is hovering underneath their surface, or as if they were stolen from the bottom of the sea, from a mermaid. I like writing about my parents dancing in the living room while jazz music floats out of our stereo system, and wraps around their bodies, before drifting through the open windows and settling into oblivion. I like writing about the boardwalk in Fort Lauderdale and the splashing seals in Carmel and the rusty red beach cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard and the endless, loud heartbeat of New York City.
“That’s nice, Klaire,”
No, not Klaire.
It’s Claire.
•
I look in the mirror and something changes. I see April weaving soft thoughts across the curve of my lips and I see buttercups from Pennsylvania braided into the locks of my hair and I see the bits of the Mediterranean in the pores of my skin.
Maybe one day I can shove my insecurities into a green glass bottle, which I’ll throw out to sea, where they will bob among the waves until mermen retrieve it. Maybe one day I can sprinkle stardust onto my scalp and find the ridges of my shoulders and the patterns of my freckles among the constellations. Maybe one day, after July has wrapped its warm embrace around my ankles I’ll be able to look in the mirror and smile at the girl in the reflection.
And I’m sure that then, she’ll be so, so beautiful.
Claire Seymour is a student living in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Baltimore Review, Thistle Magazine, and Chautauqua Literary Journal. She loves pineapple pizza and exploring New York City.
