When You Are Not Pretty Enough

She was one of the regulars at Mme. Mareschal’s Cafe “les Arcades.” She took a hot cocoa on the morning of each market day — Thursdays and Saturdays and even Mondays. She had one of the best placements in market, just across the street from the street perpendicular to the rue Leon Blum. I gave some of her mentholated honey candies to a girlfriend in my medical school class for her birthday. She found them exotic, like me.

“Wow, those candies are like a high or something. I mean, they could clean your fingernails. “

I liked them so much I bought a few to treat myself, an amazement because I never really had been a candy person.

Mme. Mareschal once invited us both to share soup with her, after she closed for market day and dismissed the regular patrons.

I found out that she had a daughter about my age. I was naive enough to ask what her daughter was studying. I was shocked by her answer.

“My daughter is so beautiful she doesn’t have to study anything.”

I was shocked, and did not answer, but let her keep talking.

I asked about majorettes in France.

Her daughter was basically a baton-twirler. She did not march in front of a band — she marched to recorded music. They had troupes and competed with each other. It was a beauty contest, with young women who walked in time, presumably demonstrating a minimum of fitness.

I did not answer her back, nor tell her she had offended me.

I could only sit there and remember that time, when I had been about ten or so, when I tried to straighten my hair and put on some lipstick in the giant window of the ladies’ restroom of the Boston Public Library.

She told me my Father did not like women who spent a long time fussing over their appearance in the ladies’ room.

She told me that some women are pretty enough to get by on their looks. I wasn’t, because I just looked exactly like her. Well, she said I could get by because I did pretty well in school.

Maybe, just maybe, this was proof she was right.

I just carried on.

I didn’t even miss the taste of mentholated honey candies.