Another Picture Tells a Story

 We were at a party in Murph's basement one night. A nice gathering- until someone brought out the then-girlfriend's yearbook. I took it and said, I wanted to see what my baby looked like last year. Laura started crying. She threatened she would leave right then and there if I looked her up! She would never speak to me again!

Jeez, alright. I knew how pretty girls felt about bad pics of themselves. Yearbooks. Driver's license. Yeah, I got that. Her tears caught me by surprise, but women- whaddaya gone do. They do get emotional about silly things. I shrugged it off, but I have to say, it stayed in the back of my mind. 

Years later, Laura and I had long since broken up a brief marriage, and I was tending bar and breaking in a new bartender named Leslie. In chatting her up, I learned that she had gone to school with Laura and in fact, had lived next door to her. "Yeah, I remember that fat pig", Leslie said. 

"Fat pig"? I told her, I didn't think we were talking about the same Laura. But we were. The proximity of houses, graduation year., etc. My Laura was 5'7", 117 pounds, platinum blonde hair and quite good looking. I asked Leslie if Laura had stolen a boyfriend from her. "That fat pig- she couldn't get a boyfriend!" Leslie exclaimed. 

Well, she had gotten me.

"Did you know she had a nose job?" Leslie asked.

At this point I thought Leslie was crazy. As good looking as Laura was, she had a rather prominent nose. Kinda big, I guess, but true beauty is often flawed. If Laura had had a nose job, why didn't she have a nice, Roman nose? That's long been the goal of any rhinoplasty. "You'll see", Leslie said. "I'll bring the yearbook in tomorrow night." 

She did and it was, indeed, THE yearbook that had caused Laura so much distress several years earlier. The photo of her from just about one year before I met and fell in love with her, was one of a hulking, brown-haired girl with a nose like a misshapen Idaho potato. Oh, yes, I was shocked. Laura looked like her dad, or worse, her sister. 

The yearbook photo actually explained a lot about that night in the Murphy basement, as well as the inkling in the back of my mind about how in the five years I had been with her, I had only seen one childhood photo of her. That was a Christmas morning shot of her as a blonde, 4-year-old. It was taken from behind. I guess it was her, but I'll never know. Just so odd that with a half-brother who had a photography studio, that was the only family pic of her. My family is very well documented with school photos and parties galore. It was odd, but when you're in love, you overlook things that don't seem to matter. Still, the lack of photographic history had been in the back of my mind.

Obviously, I had met the real Laura that warm July night at a friend's party, not the one who had never, ever existed. Explained a lot, indeed. Actually, it explained everything about her and our whole relationship. Donald Trump hadn't publicly been invented yet, so I wasn't familiar with the term "malignant narcissist", but I had met, fallen in love with, and married one. Oh boy, did I!

It's still amazing to me that so many people kept her secret. Her dad had a restaurant, and I worked for him at one point and met dozens of people who knew her, as she had grown up in that restaurant and the one he had run previously, one we had spent a lot of time and money at. I couldn't recall anyone saying anything odd about her at all. Sure, it wasn't their place to out her to me, but people are people. They do the darnedest things. 

I can only speculate on what other work she had had done, right before I met her. She was all long, nice legs, a spankable bottom and nice, unassuming boobs when I first met her. There was no reason to not take her at face value. Yeah, she had had a nose job as part of the makeover, and it must have been expensive. Maybe her parents looked at the price list, saw a complete nose job was, say, 10 grand and asked for $5,000 worth? I don't know. I wasn't supposed to ever know. Had I not met Leslie, I likely never would have known.

When your body and your life is a lie, you tend to lie to yourself as much as to others. Leslie still saw Laura as "a fat pig" though she witnessed the result of the transformation. Two other classmates of Laura's, who didn't make the cut in this story, had referred to her with the same words as Leslie did. I don't respect that. None of us are the children we once were. They had her frozen in time. It must have been horrible for Laura. Many of the stories she told me of the abuse her older sister received in school, had likely happened to her. It doesn't please me to think about that. We didn't end well. Story for another day. I took the divorce pretty hard as she had been my first- only? - real love, but that ended the day she called me up and, in all seriousness, asked me to kill myself so as to spare her the indignity of being a divorcee. A widow was preferable for her. 

For the record, I did not accommodate her on that request. I'm here to tell ya. 

Once again, to thine own self be true. It helps you to be true to others as well.