Reflecting Betty
By: Kayla Dunham
Tags: Body Dismorphia, Healing, Shame, Self Love, Fiction Friday

Reflecting Betty

Photo by Chalaphan Mathong on Unsplash

When Betty looked at her own face she couldn’t see past her dangling wattles. They were just terrible — ghastly — an unsightly way for cheeks to be. No man wanted a girl with great sagging cheeks that jounce when she walks.

She also felt her brown eyes, which sometimes seemed to border on orange if she were being honest, were too big relative to the rest of her face. She had given it a lot of attention and simply could not approve of how much of her face’s real estate was monopolized by eyes and cheeks.

She herself did not own a bona fide mirror, but she had discovered a reflective surface where she could see herself, if mildly distorted, in a bit of metal mounted on the side of her house. When it wasn’t acting as her mirror, it was mostly only keeping the garden hose in place in neat loops. She spent a great deal of time each day looking into this hose plate, turning her face this way and that, scrutinizing.

Betty was sure her husband Cogburn spent much of his days ogling the two women who lived next door. Now there was an arrangement! Two women with one man. And one of them had a son (by him?) who lived there, too, though he looked plenty old enough to have a place of his own. In spite of them possibly wallowing in an unholy den of sin, Cogburn couldn’t seem to get enough of looking at Freida and Wendy. Probably, Betty thought, because their cheeks didn’t hang down like a basset hound’s. Probably because they were always out, strutting around the yard with their slender legs uncovered.

Oh, to be beautiful. To be a sleek red-headed dame like Wendy, with properly sized eyes and a face made of finely drawn angles instead of one like a great wad of used up and discarded bubble gum. Or to be a luxuriant brunette like Freida, who walked with a delicate lady’s posture as though a rod were affixed to her spine, gingerly placing one bare, slender leg before the other. It really was no wonder Cogburn gawped.

Betty hated them both.

Staring at her own face in the shiny metal, she frowned. It made her cheeks droop further and she scowled. Droopy-cheeked, salt and pepper Betty with her apple body and her twiggy legs kicking out from poofed-up bloomers just couldn’t compete with the likes of Freida and Wendy. Cogburn, she thought, would probably happily trade places with that wild rapscallion next door, whatever his name was, leaving her behind without so much as a see ya in the next life, Betty, my dear.

Betty turned from the hose plate and found the man from next door standing on the other side of the fence, watching her. Startled, she uttered a small cry.

“What are you doing out here, looking at that hose plate all the time?” he asked with a voice that drawled some on the vowels.

She wished she could remember his name. She had always just thought of him as that guy.

“Umm,” she said.

“Wendy thinks you’re looking into it at your own face,” he went on, “like it’s a mirror.”

They stood staring at one another for a moment. Betty couldn’t think of a quick enough reply and she felt hot with humiliation. That guy, showing up, watching her gross, jowly face hating itself in the hose plate, and he didn’t even have the manners to pretend he hadn’t seen. He’d probably go home and have a good laugh with the detestably beautiful Freida and Wendy. She’d have to move away for the shame.

“Is that it?” he asked, “Are you looking at your face in there?”

She gave a small helpless nod.

“Wendy and Freida think,” he continued after a bit of a pause, “that you stand out here all day long looking at your own pretty face in the garden hose plate.”

“My… my pretty face?”

“They think it’s not right, the way you like to look at yourself. Vain. It makes them feel bad about themselves, you know, when they see you out here. They think I want to trade them in for you.”

“What?” she said, “But that’s silly. For me?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s on account of you being a better breed.”

She didn’t know what he meant so she stayed quiet. She shook her head in puzzlement.

“Of course, Wendy is a Rhode Island Red, which is a fine breed, but she’s already stopped laying. Plus, you know, her comb never really was on quite right for a Rhodey. I think her comb is fine, understand, but she’s tried a lot of tricks to stretch it. You’ve seen them advertised in the backs of magazines, I’m sure. Little apparatuses that clamp on and pull it up? To make it taller? Well I said to her, ‘Wendy, even if you get your comb taller, won’t it just flop over more?’ But that turned out to be the wrong thing to say, so I just let her do her stretching now and keep my beak shut.”

“Rhode Island Red?” Betty repeated, bemused.

“Right,” he said. “And Freida is no particular breed whatsoever, just a mix of this and that. Except sometimes when we meet someone fancier she says she’s a Barnevelder and most folks are too nice to say anything.”

“I see,” Betty said.

“The other thing is Freida’s comb got torn in a raccoon attack and it didn’t heal straight, and that’s been worrying at her a lot. I don’t think you can tell, but it drives her mad, thinking everyone is looking at her sideways comb.”

“I never noticed it.”

“Well, you wouldn’t unless you were staring right at it. It’s not very noticeable.” He looked at her for a moment and took a step closer to the fence and continued in a slightly lower voice, “But you can see now, can’t you, why they get upset to see you looking at your face all day? It’s sort of like rubbing it in, that they aren’t so pretty as you. You being a Mottled Cochin, I mean. And purebred by the looks of your wattles,” his eyes dropped to her wattles and lingered there before returning to meet hers. “It’s enough to distract a man from his day’s work.”

Her mouth was open slightly in surprise as she took this all in. She turned against her will to face the hose plate and gave her wattles a skeptical look thinking, Mottled Cochin? She turned back to him and said, “Do I, then? Distract you from your work, I mean?”

He barked out a raw, lustful laugh and winked. They stood for a moment facing each other.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I’d better be getting in.”

“I guess you’d better,” he smiled.

Betty couldn’t resist another quick glance into the hose plate as she walked to the open door of her coop. My wattles! Maybe, she thought, as she stepped onto the roost next to Cogburn and settled down against him, maybe that Freida and Wendy weren’t so bad after all. Maybe she’d better have them over some time. Anyway, she’d like a closer look at that comb.