Everything Will Be All Right

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Pearl contemplates herself. She is seventeen.

She has lifted down the full-length mirror from its nail on the wall and propped it longways beside her on the bed, so that she is lying alongside her reflection. She is naked save for a metal stud in her nose and a leather choker embroidered with beads around her neck. Her toenails and fingernails are painted green. What she sees she does not find entirely satisfactory. Her skin is chalky white with a tracery of blue veins, a disconcertingly intimate inner layer, not like the honey-colored surface of the girls’ bodies in the magazines. Her breasts are too rounded and womanly, tipped heavily sideways because she is lying flat; one breast (she cannot see this from here, but she knows it and hates it) sags lower than the other. She would like small breasts, with brown bud nipples, not blunt pink snouty ones. Her stomach is too wide and pale, though she can feel her hipbones satisfactorily if she presses across them (in a habitual checking gesture) with her forearm. She is not fat but stocky and compact; she would have liked to be gaunt and long. Yet even as she frowns at the detail of her body in critical scrutiny, she is also fascinatedly aware of this matrix of herself — breasts, belly, the little modest triangle of her pubic hair (she hates the way her mother’s hair grows high up her stomach) — as a configuration that generates desire. She is not thinking at this moment of the desire of anyone in particular but something undifferentiated, anonymous, vast. In the light of this effect, she contemplates her own body with awed surprise; it is a mystery beyond her control, a gift of power.

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