I Am à la Mode
Natalie Scenters-Zapico
After Asco’s À la Mode (photographer Harry Gamboa Jr.), 1976, printed 2010, chromogenic print
Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.
—André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”
Using a No. 2 pencil I circle: the vein under my right eye, the scar from a sore on my upper lip, an arrow to show how my left ear sticks out more than my right. I want to correct all that prevents me from becoming divine. To appear to every man like a virgin apparition in the flesh, I powder my face to glow, pinch the saggy skin under my eyes until I cry. I repeat: it’s good to look sad, it’s good to look, it’s good.
I heat bobby pins with a lighter and use them to brand little loops across my wrists. I name the scars after angels: Michael, Gabriel, Rafael. I don’t want to die, I just want to look sad. I want to cry tears so perfect they are made of glass. I want to accentuate my sad eyes by taking a little black box filled with black clay, black as the dirt under my nails, and, using a tiny plastic pick, follow the soft curves of each lid until I reach my eyebrows. Then my lips. I dye them dark red to show that I am not well. I am sad and very sick and I can’t find where I’m bleeding from. I pull black pantyhose to breaking at each knee. Isn’t it sexy how with one finger I could break the very thing that’s keeping all my soft scars from your eyes?
I stuff each finger into a black glove and belt my man’s white stiff dress shirt for all the times my mother called me marimacha. I wear white because I want to be the girl my man falls asleep with, and dreams of strangling again and again but wakes up alive to each morning. I will ask my man, “Would you like sugar in your coffee?” I’ll climb on top of the kitchen table and say, “I am el rey and you are mi reina and all of this mi reynato.” My man’s brother will set up a video camera to record this, then he’ll stand in a corner, lean up against a wall with his hands in his pockets imagining me calling my man “mi reina” over and over again. I’ll print the three of us in this moment, my face caught uplifted in a blurry still.