As a means of distracting myself from the loneliness wrought by the semester’s end and a current state of unemployment, I have begun to shop.

I don’t buy much, but I do while away the hours trolling aisles and pillaging clearance racks. I check tags, feel fabrics and pick up items I do not need just to fondle their curves, set them back down and move on.

Tonight I wandered around the Wal-Mart supercenter with several vague projects in mind.

My apartment is a mess. The stacks of books and manuscript submissions have grown to towering heights. I haven’t seen my end tables, or kitchen counter in months. So I need cheap bookcases, filing cabinets or drawers. And also, I need finger paints and paper so I can sit at my newly cleared kitchen table and get my creative juices flowing.

I check out the bookcases but don’t see a color I like. I flirt briefly with a set of teal blue throw pillows for 12.99 before coming to my senses and walking away, having learned long ago that there are some things you’ll regret foregoing and others you’ll not remember in five minute’s time.

I also long ago learned that my artistic sensibilities require little more than a child’s brush set, plastic palette and bowl of water, so I make next for the toy department. I wheel my cart down each aisle, past dart guns and video games, action figures and Lego play sets but can’t find the Crayolas. When I ask Sherese, a Wal-Mart employee with heavily gelled bangs and fake eyelashes, where I can find the crayons and paint sets she tells me they no longer exist. “We used to stock them at the end of the Barbie aisle,” she says, “But the store stopped carrying art supplies about six months back.” She pauses, “nobody was buying them.” I do my best to look appalled and she tells me to check amongst the Barbie’s for stray materials so I u-turn and head for the neon pink glow.

There’s not much in the way of art supplies in Barbie’s world, but the opportunity to peruse her latest incarnations is never lost on this consumer. I used to love the girl. Perhaps I even need a new model to place on the mantle as a reminder of simpler times.  When I arrive in Barbara’s midst however, I find her markedly changed. She is automated, implanted with voice chips, or permanently affixed to zip drive sized plastic cell phones. Her body, if this can be fathomed, is now trimmer, less buxom but with hip and torso measurements as tiny as ever.

I pick up a pink box and press gently on the transparent plastic cover, just to hear it bend in upon it self and bounce back. It’s an unmistakable noise, this, impossible to miss even when obscured slightly by wrapping paper and bows. There was a time that I excitedly scampered to the foot of the Christmas tree checking for this noise, for Barbie’s presence in my yearly stash. Now she only depresses me. Cultural standards have shifted to make normative a female figure akin to that of this plastic doll. Boob jobs, ass jobs, tummy tucks and so on have made it possible to match her measurements and now that that’s happened, she’s changing again.

Perhaps ironically, the only item I leave Wal-Mart with this evening is a fifteen dollar full length mirror because, I reason, it’ll help widen the room and create illusions of space. And besides, despite Barbie’s patriarchal plot to dampen my self-image and by extension, my empowerment, I like looking at myself. In other words, I am completely narcissistic.

I suppose the fact that the sight of my own reflection is pleasing to me belies a childhood spent brushing Barbie’s hair and picking out risqué outfits for her to wear. Or maybe not. Maybe, despite what many mothers might say, playing with Barbie dolls is an empowering practice for girls growing up in an increasingly materialistic, image driven environment. Or was. Or is despite the impossibility of her plastic body. Or maybe we can’t say just yet. Maybe we’ve yet to see the full results of generations of girls who grew up with the doll.

True, Barb was always tiny wasted and pointy toed, but it wasn’t until the 70s that she expanded her wardrobe, moving away from poodle skirts and sweater sets and towards disco pants and bikinis. This was the era in which Malibu beach Barbie replaced the “Fashion Luncheon” and “Saturday Matinee” models of years past, thus catapulting the doll’s coolness factor and markedly expanding her popularity.

In 2006 the U.S. census reported that the average age of patients receiving invasive and non invasive plastic surgery is 42.6 years old. The girls coming of age in the 70s then, are the same girls who are now turning forty, prime plastic surgery age. So maybe there’s a correlation between Barbara’s budding popularity in the disco days and the onslaught of image based body modification that’s subsumed our culture over the last ten years. And if this is so, and if Barbie’s waist and cup sizes have only shifted more in the direction of impossible since then, what can we expect from generations to come? In many parts of the country, breast augmentation has become a standard gift to young women graduating from high school. An ABC news article I recently perused titled, “Why Are Parents Buying Their Girls the Gift of Surgery?” follows Lulu Diaz, an eighteen year old who receives a Jaguar upon graduation eve but wanted breast implants instead. Her parents dutifully swapped Jag for boobs. “This is a gift of love from us,” Lulu’s mother tells the interviewer, “And we see a difference in her.”

Just as cultural norms have shifted to allow Barbie a cell phone and an even smaller waist, the gifting of silicone implants upon a young woman’s eighteenth birthday or high school graduation has apparently become a standard rite of passage, replacing the tired new car or trip to Europe tropes. Indeed, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, where the number of breast enlargements among all age groups has increased by 300% in the past decade, the number of breast enlargements within the eighteen and under age group has risen nearly 500%. 

When I get home I prop my new mirror up against the door and set about hanging it up. I place it first where I think it most needed, facing the sofa, up against the front door. The effect is a living room that seems nearly twice its actual size. Later though, when I settle onto the sofa with a container of takeout and the book I’m reading, I find I can’t focus. My own reflection is so relentlessly there and it’s not that she’s displeasing per sea, but I get up and take the mirror down anyways.

Later, after I’ve hung it in the bathroom instead, I strip down and stand butt naked in front of it, surveying my body. I rarely see myself in one piece, the only mirror I frequent being the one above my sink which cuts me off at the waist. I look at this new streamlined reflection, the one I paid fifteen dollars to gaze at regularly, and am surprised by the chorus of critical voices that start subtly to hum in the back of my mind.

Knobby knees.

Scrawny arms.

Scraggly.

Boyish.

Boobless.

I squint, trying to transition from the segmenting perspective gifted to me by the media, by the “male gaze,” to seeing myself as a whole, my body as a unique and precious gift. The disconnection persists.

One year ago today, I woke up at five a.m. pulled on sweatpants and tied back my hair and walked into the kitchen of my mom’s house. It was dark outside. The lights were on and she was there. So were Judy and Unkie, he at the coffee maker, she at the counter, reading over admission instructions. The tea water was on. Judy’s patterned purse was set up on the counter, overflowing with books and bills, papers and eyeglass cases, and the mason jars of iced tea she’d made the night before. Next to it was a duffle bag with Mom’s stuff in it.

 Judy drove. We checked in at six. Unkie sat outside the pink curtain of a partitioned room while Judy and I watched mom peel her clothes off and don the blue paper Johnny in what was to be her last independent act of dressing and redressing for months to come. We waited then. I rifled through the magazine rack and found there, to my amazement, a children’s story she’d read to me over and again when I was a little girl. Ms. Nelson and the Mysterious Case of Viola Swamp. In it, mild mannered Ms. Nelson cannot handle her unruly class and devises a plan. She disappears, pretending to be off sick and returns disguised as her own replacement, one Viola Swamp, an ugly, putrid and stentorian substitute teacher who is so vile that the class learns to appreciate Ms. Nelson who returns in two weeks time as herself. The uncanny parallel between this story and the painkiller induced transformation my mother would make in the months that followed her surgery was, of course, unknowable to us then, so I handed the book to her where she lay, stretched out lengthwise on the gurney, awaiting anesthesia and operation, and she read it aloud to all of us.

Two hours later, they took her off. It was just me and her and the white walls and fluorescent lights and we’d been there before but this time, we cried and I remember that so clearly, watching her be wheeled away with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Judy, Unkie and I went to the cafeteria. Nobody ate. Later, while they walked around, I tried to sleep on a sofa near the oversized fountain that ornaments the Yale lobby but a security guard came and told me to sit up. After seven hours of waiting and wandering, Judy went home to walk the dogs. Four hours after that, after mom had been under anesthesia and lamplight and knife for eleven hours the phone rang in the empty waiting room where Unkie and I sat and they said that she had made it through.

And I am grateful for that. I am grateful for everything, truly I am.

I am grateful for the surgeon who came to see us after that and said I did the best I could and then, They will come back. I am grateful that when we were finally let into the ICU to see her she smiled through her haze and mouthed the words I love you. I am grateful that, weeks later, when her stitched up stomach split with the pressure of hematoma and blood spurted out onto Judy and I and infection was feared and drains were implanted and fistulas were forecasted and food was forbidden, she fought on. I am grateful, truly I am.

But she is 3,000 miles away from me now, standing here in front of a mirror so separate and segmented. And it was six months ago that she drove me to the airport- even though I was supposed to drive myself - because we couldn’t bear to lose the hours together before I boarded a plane and was gone again.

 She’s shrunk since then though I can barely imagine her being any smaller.

 She tells me she is one hundred and three pounds to my one hundred and twenty something and still skinny body. Her doctor’s say that she is so thin that her body is eating away at the delicate musculature that lines the space between her skull and her skin. So she is plugged in every night to a machine that channels, through a silver dollar sized hole above her left breast, nutritional supplements straight into her heart. This is different from the TPN we hooked her into last summer night after night at eight p.m, sharp, which fed milky food up through a blue capped line in her arm that dangled there unused during the daytime, clicking against its red capped twin every time she moved.

 She tells me, It’s tricky, this body stuff and I press the phone hard against my ear because she sounds so far away and ask her, How so?

Well, you know, she says, It’s hard to believe it’s a big deal. I’m just being vain, I suppose, but when I was your age and biking with JR or jogging every day, I could eat anything I wanted and never gain a pound and who wouldn’t want that body back again?

That is not, I say, the body you have now. I say this and maybe I am looking in the mirror when I do.

A week ago, I turned twenty-four. I went to Disneyland with a friend and laughed and pointed and jumped up and down in anticipation of Buzz Lightyear and felt like a child, though perhaps I always do.  Perhaps this is my saving grace, perpetual childishness. If so it will serve me, I am told by a girlfriend who jokingly reminds me that where men only grow increasingly attractive with age, women begin to lose their looks after twenty seven. You’re in your peak years, she tells me, It’s all down hill from here. At least I’ll still have my superior wit and cunning, I say and she agrees halfheartedly.

At first, my mother’s doctors tried all sorts of rag tag experiments to figure out why she can’t gain weight. She ate butter by the stick to see what would happen. Sundaes and splits and whatever else might pack on pounds. None of it worked. They then suggested TPN, the same permanent intravenous nutrition she had last summer, albeit through a different type of port. A Hickman port.

Using the Hickman, she has learned to hook herself up, which means that she will be able to carry on this way, feed herself this way, for however long she needs to. My priority now is the hip, she tells me, Got to get my strength up for that.

She is referring to the hip surgery she wants to have this July and I cannot fathom the idea of it. Perhaps because it seems a physical impossibility, her little body sent out and sliced open once again. Perhaps because the idea of this scares me so much that for a moment my breath catches in that sweet spot between my sternum and my heart and whispers there, of possible problems, posing all the questions she can’t afford to.

Because Wal Mart did not carry the Crayolas I wanted, I go to a special crafts store instead. There I buy a plastic palette, a pad of watercolor paper and three rows of brightly colored paint. I then sit at the kitchen table with these items for hours, dabbling and dabbing and using up reams, producing only images of winding roads and women’s bodies. I return to the mirror and stand there, holding up my paintings and comparing the bodies I’ve rendered to my own reflection. Everything is curvy in my work, soft where the angles of my own anatomy are not.

Clear and concentric and comforting in ways that real life cannot be.