The Fine Art of Being Looked At

I spent my prepubescent years collecting baseball cards and Cubs stats, hanging posters of Ryne Sandburg and Mark Grace across my walls and being a less-than-mediocre ball player myself. In school I was friends with boys and girls alike, but the guys were more fun to talk to, they were mean about more fun things, and they acknowledged I knew a little about baseball. For Christmas seventh grade year, my blond homeroom buddy who sat right in front of me alphabetically, Robert Cagle, got me an Ernie Banks figurine, which I placed at the center of my shrine to all that was baseball.

In all those years Cagle and a lot of other boys and I were friends, I don't believe any of them looked at me once. And now, all these years later, I must accept that my baseball obsession was a facade of the flimsiest kind: all I wanted was to be looked at, be my gorgeous friend Stacey Barbaro with her Julia Roberts mouth, to be desired.

Heavy stuff for twelve years old, and I credit Lala for developing both my horniness and obsession of all things pretty at an early age. From the time I was born I was destined for Greatness, according to her, and above all that meant Beauty. And it was no small challenge to be raised along with a blond, blue-eyed future model, someone who, wherever we went, people commented on her adorableness. Strangers off the street, in the market, on the playground, looked at my stepsister Dezi's face and just had to say something. Meanwhile I was inconsequential and only noticed by way of comparison (the silent question in all their eyes: why is that one brown and big, while this one tiny and white?).

Friends now, my husband, my mother, might roll their eyes, Brooke, you're so beautiful, they'll say. But here's the trick I never meant to play: I'll never believe it. Not out of false self-deprecation, not because it isn't polite for a Southern woman (really, any woman) to admit that she's beautiful, but because I will never forget the longing of those baseball years, a time when the only time I was looked at was when I stared in the mirror and asked, When? When? When will anyone ever love you, eyes-nose-mouth-brows-forehead-face? At the time I was developing an awareness that I was supposed to be somebody in this life, that this was what meant the most to me, I was pretty homely.

One of my early 20s' favorite poems was Stephen Dunn's "Beautiful Women," in which he expounds his theory that there are two kinds of beautiful women in the world: those that are beautiful and have always been so, and those who live a double existence, as they are beautiful now, but once weren't--thus they live inside the shell of their former selves and look out to you, grateful man, with humility, gratitude, and pure love. Brock introduced me to this poem because he believed that I didn't believe I was beautiful, and wanted to prove that I was. "See?" he said, "you're this kind." Every other woman he'd ever dated was born a princess. Seriously, I'm talking pageant winners and prom queens and cheering captains and daddy's girls. Perhaps he intuited that I'd gone for years unlooked at, because when he looked in my eyes and didn't look away, I wanted to sink to the ground. Oh, I'd been looked at in that sexy way before...oh, lots of times. But Brock was telling me something different with his gaze. It was not objectifying at all, or I didn't see it that way. The gaze asked, Who are you? How did you become this person standing in front of me? He couldn't have known I'd waited twenty-three years for a set of eyes to ask exactly these questions.

This subject comes up because being looked at, or not, is something I still struggle with. Last weekend we went to a friends house to watch the big LSU v. Bama showdown. Late as we usually are, I walked ahead of Brock into the already sardined living room and every last one of the fifteen people looked at me and said, "Wooooooo." Because these acquaintances all knew I was an LSU alum, they assumed I was coming to cheer against their team, so this woooo-ing was only semi-contemptuous. But what really paralyzed me was knowing that fifteen sets of eyes were on me at once. What is it like to be any one of them right now? I wondered. What are they possibly perceiving about me at this moment? These questions have almost nothing to do with looks, I tell myself. I wonder if they can possibly know that I try to be a good person always and slay myself when I'm not.

Of course, it is about looks too. If they think I'm beautiful, they'll more likely to think of me in these honorable ways, because the eyes are capable of so many lies.

I can imagine a different scenario at a party where I know only a few of the guests. Everyone's got a glass and small groups take up respective corners--the typical scene. If I've showered and spritzed and painted that old desire will come drum-beating through my belly again: I want to be looked at, I want to be looked at. And if these looks aren't happening, I can imagine how unhappy it would make me. Maybe I'll have an extra glass or two so that it's easier to lead my body and face with my loud voice, and people will have to look (though obviously not for the reason I want them to). Although at this point in my life I've captured the ultimate gaze from the man I love, the desire for simply being looked at still remains. Along with the simultaneous desire to not be looked at, which comes along with the weight of knowing oneself, and hoping others can't see that person--that you--right now.

But this isn't what being looked at should be about at all. It should be the purest of maneuvers. You, Brooke, in the laundry room, being humble in your humility. You, Brooke, so dedicated to doing things correctly that you take the extra moments to turn Brock's gold-toe dress socks right-side-out. In your humility you don't need him to know the lengths you go to for his happiness. Meanwhile, there should be a great good camera in the sky capturing all of this. Here is Brooke, world, if you want her. If she's not good to look at, you can just turn away.