It was an ugly piece of furniture, in all honesty. The hinges were rusted over, the paint was peeling at the edges after years of scratches from pencils, and fingernails were scrawled across the surface. It was a piece that did not quite fit with the rest of the knick-knacks I had carefully acquired over the years. Too dainty and ancient to match my awkward artworks and oversized brown couches.
There was a mirror at its center, so old that green dots had begun to form across the glossy surface. When I sat in front of it for the first time, I couldn’t recognize myself. The reflection was not the clear modern image I was used to seeing, but a rusted version, one that distorted my features to a point beyond identification. The drawers no longer opened smoothly, years of pulling and pushing made their place a home difficult to fill. The legs melted into claw feet, giving the entire piece a sense of desperation or hunger.
I wasn’t sure when it had been made. I guessed the 1950s from the style of decoration, but I could very well be wrong. I knew that it had been my mother’s, and before her it had belonged to my grandmother. It was an heirloom that had been a looming architect in my mind since I first laid my eyes on it. I remember the first time I realized that vanity would hold monumental importance in my life.
They had just moved it into my mother’s room, but I was drawn to it as something of my own. I wanted to play with it, play on it, something. But my mother warned me not to. Usually her warnings came from a hope for my safety, but this time it was clear that fear drove her words.
She told me that it was a very old piece of furniture, and that it used to be a desk. She elaborated that now it was something called a vanity, something that she would fill with beauty products to keep her from wrinkling, from being dull or anything less than perfect.
The more she spoke of it, the further it pushed me away. In fact, for the remainder of my life at home, I spent close to no time at all near the vanity. Any time I would work up the bandwidth to get near it, another warning would emerge from my mother’s mouth. She told me to watch what I ate near it, so as not to tarnish its beauty. She told me to be gentle with it, since it was so old. She told me that I must sit a certain way when I looked in its ugly mirror.
So, instead I filled my time with games invented by my brothers that ended with mud underneath my fingernails, pulled hair and a lack of tears watering the grass. I grew up with these games instilled in my mind, rather than memorized table manners and the knowledge of which product worked best in my hair. And I liked it that way. I liked that I could run faster than any of my brothers by the time my breasts came in. I liked that I rarely got catcalled when going to and from work. I liked that I could open pickle jars and kill spiders. I liked the amount of distance I put between myself and my mother’s vanity.
Even though all discussion of my inheritance ceased after I stopped shaving my underarms in tenth grade, my mother still insisted on giving me the vanity once I turned 25. I suppose the gift was a last-ditch attempt from her to help me get a move on in life, to move out of my beloved studio into a home with a yard for a dog, and an extra room for a nursery. My argument of ”a single sink and dresser being perfectly fine” for now went unheard amidst my mother’s glee at ridding herself of the ugly thing once and for all.
It hardly fit in my current apartment and seemed to leave a sour trail throughout the place. Even the name left a residue on my tongue. Vanity. How awful? Like a piece of old, rotting fruit.
It was made of mahogany wood that was then stained white with veins of gold. It had begun to crack when my grandmother gifted it to my mother. I remember her complaining that her mother never took care of nice things. She had attempted to patch the cracks, but they were already beginning to show again. I ran my fingers over the surface and wondered if I should try to patch them up again. It’s what my mother probably would have wanted. But soon they would splinter once more, so what was the point?
Sometimes, when I got home from a particularly long night where men were men and I drank too much and began to act like one, I threw my bra on it. When I woke up in the morning I would glare at it, that ugly confining thing, but I always put it back on before I left again. Just so no one would stare, or laugh or ridicule me for stepping out of line.
Despite my abhorrence towards the piece of furniture, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. An entire space in a room dedicated to presentation. Designed to make it easier to paint over any defining feature, to replace what are dubbed as flaws, in order to drain every ounce of beauty from the skin before we reach 30. This is what we strive for, what generations of women have strived for before us. I felt their pain through the old mahogany wood. Through the delicate pink flowers painted around the edges of the mirror. Through the reflection of the woman I saw staring back at me. I felt their beauty and elegance rushing through my veins, like a disease and a blessing simultaneously.
I watched as the woman in the mirror began to cry, and so I began to cry with her. Her pain was my pain and always would be. We cried for our own ugliness, for how ashamed of it we were. For the ways in which we had been taken advantage of, and the weakness that came with it. Our anger for the conversion from a desk, to a vanity, spilled out of our mouth in a silent guttural scream. For a moment I felt inhuman and then, suddenly, it was all over.
The pain was gone, and replaced with a feeling of peace that started in my chest and spread throughout my body. A peace to replace all of the fear, the jealousy and the lack of respect. It was a peace supported by the hundreds of women, who had owned the vanity before me. Who had looked past its ugliness to find a beauty, one that was desperately and utterly feminine.