Body Out of Place

LEONARDA CARRANZA

You want to know if you are pretty so you take a Cosmo quiz that invites you to measure yourself. You are twelve and living with your family in Toronto. You remember feeling eager as you followed the instructions. You remember wanting to rush through the questions to get to the part that announced that you are beautiful.

The article does not tell you that you need to be white or skinny but it does say to look at your profile in the mirror and to check for straight lines. You can, if so inclined, bring a ruler to your nose to make sure it is perfectly straight: good profiles and symmetry are signs of great beauty.

When you find your crookedness in the mirror you hunch over defeated. And so you spend years pressing on the bridge of your nose, hoping to flatten the parts that make you unbeautiful.

You don’t know the power of beauty until someone tells you, you are ugly, and then it is like he has made you. Suddenly it is so obvious that you are hairy and bulgy and brown, with a gap between your front teeth.

No matter how hard you try to run from his words and reinvent yourself, it is as if he has put a stain inside you and it seeps out onto all your surfaces.

Ugliness stings more because it is your brother who says this and because since September he has been making excuses not to walk with you to school. And so you tuck that ugliness away into yourself.

And you sob for hours the night he tells you, you are ugly.

You don’t know what race is until the day your father says you look like an Indian. Your skin is dark brown from playing outside all summer in shorts and tank tops, no sunblock. Most of the summer, your hair was black and long and boring. You had to beg Mom for weeks to cut it and now your new bangs brush up against the top of your eyebrows and make you feel brand new.

It is August and everyone is sitting outside on lawn chairs. You are wearing your new bangs and Dad is staring at you with a smirk on his face that makes you feel like you are a strange animal. You don’t know why Dad is saying this or what it means to look like an Indian, but it

makes you feel different. You try to look down at your hands so that he doesn’t see how much he is hurting you.

Years later, you will feel the sharp edges of his words when your brother starts to call you Indian or India whenever he is mad at you. You try to act tough, you pretend it doesn’t hurt, but he makes you feel like there is something in you that permanently excludes you from belonging.

Before you came to Canada you always heard that you looked identical to Mom. Your uncle would stare at you with a smile and say that out of all your siblings you are the one who most resembles your mother. You took this proximity to beauty for granted, thought it was something special that you would always have access to, but in Canada, friends, and neighbours wrinkle their noses and shake their heads when you suggest that you look like your white-skinned mom. It is as if they smell something rotting. They look at you like you are crazy to think that a brown girl like you could resemble a white skinny European-looking woman with green eyes.

When you are sixteen, Mom tries to explain that you do look like her. She holds your face gently in her hands and kisses your forehead. She shows you pictures of herself in her twenties to prove that you are similar, but you are not sure if you believe her. She tells you that people here are caught up in colour and that when they see your black hair, tanned skin, brown eyes, they don’t know what to make of you. Friends ask why your mother is white. Random strangers stop Mom on buses and ask if you are all related to her. Sometimes, they ask, bold face, if you have different fathers: Too many different shades of skin colour for most people to conceive of you as members of the same family. And even Mom starts to hate the way it disintegrates, pulls you all apart from each other and delegates each of you to different races.

Ugliness has a way of being dangerous and you learn this when you are thirteen and walking to school on your own. The first thing you feel is the burning sting of the belt buckle as it hits you on the head. And you turn to find a girl with disgust in her eyes and she is yelling, mouth wide, announcing that she will kick your ass. You don’t know how you are chosen for this violence, but you know that it is easier to attack you because she thinks you are alone in this world. You look around as a crowd of kids gather and cheer her on.

Later that night, you will feel disposable, like any violence can happen to you, like no one will come to your rescue.

Your brothers treat you different as they witness the ways in which your body is laughed at and excluded in Toronto playgrounds. For a while, you have no friends.

Now you think their distance is forgivable, you know it is dangerous to associate with you, dangerous to have such proximity to ugliness.

In your twenties, you stumble on a diet that makes you feel new. Finally, there is something that you can control. Family and neighbours compliment you on your thinness and ask what you are doing to look so great. It seems thinness brings you closer to something that has value. It feels nice when you start to lose your baby fat. You feel powerful. Suddenly, it is as if you are interesting and men open doors for you, bus drivers wait for you when you are late, and sometimes even say good morning. It feels nice to feel wanted, to be noticed, and it doesn’t seem to matter that you start to love the feeling of control so much that you can’t remember the last time you were hungry.

Food stops being interesting and you are young and it feels like you are finally arriving at something wonderful.

When you are a month away from twenty-three, a boy treats you so violently that you come home sobbing, your chest heaving and you don’t know if you can stop. Mom kisses you and kisses you because she doesn’t know what’s happened. She tells you she loves you and that whatever happened, it hasn’t changed you.

“You are beautiful,” she says as if these words and her belief in your beauty can make you safe again. She points to the crookedness of her nose and smiles at you. See, we are still the same, she says.

But you want to pull your body away from her. You want to shout into her face that you are not the same. You want her to know what’s happened. You want to stitch all the violence together into something that she can feel. You want to tell her that you feel alone, that this place has changed you, made you feel like you belong to a completely different race than hers. And it feels dangerous to reside inside your body, dangerous to move through this territory and feel like anything can happen to you.