Being Ugly

My husband is always telling me how beautiful I am. Love is blind, I know, and as I usually ignore his compliments, he asked me recently if I was unaware of my good looks. I had to answer honestly that he is the only person who has ever told me that. I have always looked at my photographs over the years and assumed that I take a good picture, because what I see in the mirror is not beauty.

My early memories of myself I will describe as skinny, with orangy red hair and dark (almost black) freckles all over my neck and arms. I inherited my dad's complexion, his full lips and nice teeth that were dazzling white and perfect. Smiling a lot showed off my only good feature. The entire family of seven uncles, three aunts and dozens of cousins were aware of how I hated the freckles, and occasionally someone suggested a cure or at least a remedy. I tried them all. Somehow my mother came up with a few dollars to send away for a jar of Stillman's freckle cream. She said if it even lightened them just a little, she would consider ordering more. Reluctantly, I had to admit they were darker, if anything. Looking back now. I realize some of the remedies were so ridiculous they were just having fun thinking them up, like getting up before daylight in summer and bathing my face in dew from the grapevine leaves. The most absurd one, my Uncle Marvin offered. He suggested I eat a chicken foot while sitting on the floor behind the door while everyone else ate the good pieces of chicken. Mama always threw away the feet, but she boiled one for me. I gnawed on the thing the whole dinner hour, and I can testify there was not one morsel of food to be found on it. At age six I decided I was just stuck with the freckles and gave up. In high school pancake makeup was all the rage, and , although they still showed through, I felt they were a little lighter. When I was a freshman in college, I looked in the mirror one day to find they had gone completely.

High school was a trying time, but socially it was better than grade school. I was friends with everyone in my class, close friends with some, and through 4-H club in the neighborhood I had very good times. The hard work of growing tobacco left little time for play, but during the school year I loved every day of school. All grades were in the same building. If a teacher didn't show up for a lower grade, I was sometime asked to substitute. The only criticism I ever got from the teachers was for talking too much. One of my teachers told me how fortunate I was to have red hair, because, she said a person with red hair already has a personality. People remember you!

Then, I felt a little better about the hair. My figure was OK, but again I failed to get my mother's looks. Instead of small hips and ample bust, I got just the opposite. The top was easy to fix, and since I weighed only a hundred pounds, the hips were not a great problem. About the time I went to college strapless gowns came in style. Only the girls who could support the strapless bras could wear a strapless gown. About the time the freckles disappeared I figured out a way around that. I worked in the health center, college infirmary, where they kept adhesive tape of all widths on hand. One roll was as wide as my hand, used to tape cracked ribs of the football players.

I borrowed a strapless bra from a friend. Before putting it on, I took a piece of tape about 8" long and taped each bust toward the center, crossing the tape in front. Such cleavage!. Then, to keep the whole bra from falling down, my friend taped it all the way around. With a couple of pairs of old nylons stuffed in the sides I looked like Marilyn Monroe, and I could do the jitterbug with not a care in the world! Getting the tape off after the dance was awful.

In high school I felt very secure, not pretty, but smart. In college, I had little time to socialize. I had enough dates to develop conversation skills. I do not recall any guys ever telling me I was attractive. The styles always seemed to be for girls with thin hips, so I began to wear a tight Playtex rubber girdle to make me look thinner. In summer it was miserable. One day in September I was helping in the infirmary with the athlete's physicals, getting their height,
weight, and temperature. Thinking there was a lull in my duties, I stepped behind a screen to pull the girdle loose a bit to let some air in when it slipped out of my fingers with a loud pop. When I emerged from behind the screen, there stood the last of the guys, laughing. "I can't believe you are wearing one of those horrible torture instruments", he said. "If you had on a red skirt, you'd look like a thermometer, anyway!"

With a life void of complements, I have always felt so lucky to have a soldier boy fall so completely in love with me when I was 23. I had not begun to feel like an old maid, yet, but I was seriously considering moving out west where the pickin's were better. Elder Alma Sonne, a church authority at one of the conferences was a good friend of Dr. Brockbank, state supt. of education. He was going to speak with his friend about a job for me in Salt Lake. He even said I would easily find the right husband with my good looks. Maybe I was better looking than I thought, and had only met shy boys in college. Still the memory of the remark made by one of the boys in my high school could bring me back to earth. He said, "If you were as pretty as your mother, I would take you out!"