It could have been any numberof fever dream visitations—this was around the time I became a girldad. I don’t know what possessed meto bring the Styrofoam wig head home.It could have been Teresa Ávila, mypatron saint, her spectral presence,implicit as any bias, that came to hauntthe beauty school wig head Iliberated from the museum of trashbags that lined the curb on Fulton Mall.Museum. As in altar to the musesrising from objects appraised inan alien tongue. At the time,I would have called the wig head’sface sublime, fair, proportionallyideal. In a word, Beautiful, in that sensethe majority culture calls conventional.From the trash heap the wig headcaught my eye when a wailing firetruck scuffed my optic nerve and flamedthe halo of a migraine. I was waitingfor the late bus home under a duncecap of light. Teresa Ávila, of course,patron saint of headaches come to mockthe habit of mind I was inclinedto project onto the wig head. Namely,that beauty is the residue we findwhen color is stripped away. Thatinstead of color, I should praisethe thing that color leaves behind.*Security gates veiled the storefront.Dead leaves and papier-mâchéd junkmail clogged the doorway. That oldschool of beauty was defunct, emptiedof its mirrors and lamps. What’s leftwas mere edifice with a for-rentsign that read Bring your imagination.The vacant storefront reminded meof the graphic design studiomy mother owned in the late ’70s.She made her living as a commercialartist, art she made to sell. She was a sub-contractor for the Yellow Pages.The bulk of her business, she madedisplay ads that were in turn soldto plumbers, dentists, personal injurylawyers. She called it piece-work, a termI misspelled in my ear. A termwhich kept her in protractedlabor day and night, contemplatingbeauty at her tilted drafting desk.Each quarter-column adwas a stained-glass panel,colors illuminating pagesto transfix consumers and proselytizethe merchants’ creed. Her sidetable held T-squares, X-Acto knives,a cosmos of leads and markers.Her fingers blackened likea scribe’s, she brought forth uponblank pages of ginger,taxicab, sunflower. The flareat the center of my memory.It’s how the world lookswithout the filter of my eyes.Beauty as market share, ascoercive force. Beauty as capital,its source and its demise.*Beauty is, I’m trying to say, notthe muse but the regime. The dreameris the subject of the dream.Reputed to have been,like my mother, a great beauty,St. Teresa Ávila inspired in countlessmen a frenzy to reproduceher, the muse and mother of so manyinventions, so many versions of herit hardly matters what she looked like,only that the idea of her remains fruitful,beauty as ticket to the carnival of witnesswhere one finds funhouse mirrorsin every stranger’s eyes. Now that Ithink of it, I never heard my fathercall my mother beautiful,though I have no doubt he foundthe idea of her fruitful.*“You press the button,” Kodakclaimed, “we’ll do the rest.”The company’s twentieth-century dominion over filmprocessing and production meantthe childhoods of Boomers and GenX’ers the world over werehaunted by a woman named Shirley.I found her photo in the darkroomof my mother’s studio and learnedwithout being told how Shirley’sspectral presence, implicit as anybias, haunted birthdays, road trips,barbecues and weddings,by haunting the photos that woulddefine how these moments livedin our memories. For years,the “Shirley card”—named forthe first woman it featured—governed the development of everyKodacolor print. Technicians usedShirley like a tuning forkto “correct” colors in the photo-finishing process, an innocentstand-in for the skintones that would be offeredto the eye. Shirley, over the years,was many women with onething in common. I learnedfrom her without being told, to seein the key of her conventional beauty.*I’m afraid I looted this wighead to work out my owntheories and memes, to workout this dysmorphia the wig headexcites, and which beauty schoolsstill teach, that though I may becomely, perhaps, by their rubricsI could never be—nor find the historythat made me—beautiful unless I firstunlearn the beauty that is anassimilation, subordination to alifeless ideal. For the beautyof convention is lifeless evento those who believe itis attainable. If I could bethe forensic dreamer and breatheher alive, this Styrofoam prop,and give her the hue and tintof life like Greek statues rescuedfrom the whitewash of time,however ecstatic, my artwould nonetheless bea mortician’s paints. Some saythe pallor lubricates allure. Beautyas fugitive, indescribable. Beautyas a closed door.*There’s a meme that pitsa closeup of Bernini’sTeresa against a tabloidphoto of Lindsay Lohanblissed-out in her passengerseat after kicking itat da club. Her hoody,the posture of repose,the inglorious source of herslack jaw, all erodethe innocence I was taughtthat kind of beauty mustconvey. The symmetrybetween Bernini’s Teresaand Blissed-Lindsayis uncanny, as if it occursby accident and not bytemplated design—the samewoman multiplied, producinga public of one mind. Lohan’srepute as a troubledstarlet and the schadenfreudethat is her fortune cast bothas mute martyrs to beauty,both arrested in an attemptto take flight. Lohan bleachedto the bone in the blitzof the paparazzi’s light. Teresain the tradition of women whommen have imagined passive orwhom men have turned to stone.*Who wouldn’t want to bea white woman in ecstasy?Is ecstasy representable in anyother form? I’ll have what she’s having,the lady at the neighboring tablein the diner says in that famousfilm by Nora Ephron.In a quiet moment of reflectiononce, my father mused, “How dougly people make love?”What I took from that, more thanthe distastefulness of the comment,was a glimpse of my father’sempowered self-image. I don’t thinkI’ve ever called myself beautifulexcept in defiance.*When Jane Fonda plays SaintTeresa as Barbarella,her confessor, male, earlyfifties, tucks her in beneaththe rubber sheet of hisexcessive pleasure machine,intending to torture herheteronormatively, flood hernervous system with dopamineuntil she’s mad, but sheabsorbs it. Her tolerance forecstasy exceeds his capacityto deliver it. What will she donow that man is insufficientto the task? Eventually,my mother left my father,a move incomprehensibleto me because it made herhappiness independentof our observation.*As birthday gifts go, my fatherunwrapping a studio photographof her nude displayeda logic that escaped me then andescapes me now. It was the ’70s,is all I can say. Meeting sight-lines from the open door ofmy parents’ boudoir,the gallery-sized picturefacing my dad’s side of the bed—the driver’s side if it were a car—announced his Duchessto a generation of houseguestsperusing the livingmuseum of our three-bedroomranch home. In the photo,my mom faces forwardwith her left shoulder cantedgently toward the camera. (It’s notthe same posture exactly, butPrince’s self-titled albumcover evokes tangled associationsand gives me conflicting shivers.)Her right hand’s armadilloedin a silver gauntlet. A swordgripped, tip-down in a postureof surrender so that the cross guardunderscores her collarbone, a Jesuspiece that could make her an actualmartyr. The blade, surgical, is a flashof light from a cracked door. Whetherit is being drawn or sheathed,it hums with inertia like a train rail.But what I noticed as a kid wasthe way her chin curtseyed to meether left shoulder as if refusingsomeone’s touch or, given herlowered lids, transformingsurrender into ecstasy—a wordI could have only used in ironylike the scraps of costume armor,the courtly incongruity of it, givento her in a pretense of protectionfrom what.*This was not my mother,unless the staging was her idea, anallusion to Caravaggio’s SaintCatherine of Alexandria, the martyrkneeling beside the wheelthat failed to break her,holding the swordthat would take off withher head. Or could it be a moresubtle reference to JudithSlaying Holofernes byGentileschi, the artist who,instead of relenting,instead of giving upher insistence that hertestimony was true,endured thumbscrews thatwere meant to break herresolve, break her refusal to recant,her refusal to exonerate herrapist in court, as instead, shechanted through the pain,È vero, è vero, è vero?(It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.)My mother could have been jammingthis beauty signal by ironizingthe violence of an art historyin which, as an artist, at any rate,she could not exist.What if, thinking of Gentileschi,I imagined my mom drawingher sword from the stoneof vengeance? Would the mash-upmake for a gothic soul aesthetic,rip a rabbit hole in the Westernrules of seeing wide enoughto hold a wonderland of color?My mother became an artist,I believe, because she wantedto wield beauty as a transitive verb.Gifted, she became her gift becausemy father Midas found herbecoming. He called her redbone.High yellow. The color of parchment,the legal pad I scratch on likea gilt manuscript. The nicotineon his fingertips stainingeverything he and I hold dear.*I learned without being toldto love the fictions womenportrayed in the moviesmy father loved. TamaraDobson as CleopatraJones, who gives a boylike me a dollarto protect her musclecar purring at the corner.Vonetta McGee hauling bagsof cash, on the lam.Yet, neither Vonetta,Tamara, Teresa,Lindsay nor eventhe idea of the realEgyptian queen Jonesbears in her fictionalname bears evidenceof flex or perspirationthe way Bernini’s Teresais veiled in a humorlessmystique, a fake-ID faceageless as the obsidianthat cracketh not. I want toimagine the wig head alive,like an African mask. I wantto imagine my mother’s inner life,not because she’s a woman,but because the fictionof her I have inheritedcannot imagine me. Genderas occlusion. My mother is a mirrorin which I cannot appear.*My mother’sbeauty replaced herface. I almost said“my” face—mercy—as if I could knowlife through her eyes.It troublesme that I’ll never knowwhat she waslike before she made meme. A stranger like the busdriver I only knew throughthe mail slot of her rearviewmirror, whose alto guidedmy routine home.Why did I keep it,the wig head I held in my laplike an infant? Notas maidenhead or patronsaint. More thangorgon or ornamentor effigy, but to summonmy love for what, I suppose,by beauty I must meanall that is woman in me.