That night, obsessed as I still was with my image in the mirror, I barged into the bathroom when Jamie was hurriedly changing in there. It was late, and I suppose she’d felt safe enough to eschew the extra safety of the stall. As it was, I walked in and she quickly pulled down her shirt, but not so quickly that I didn’t get a glimpse of a series of regular, raised bubblegum slices, all perfectly parallel, all the same length, stacked in a column to the left of her belly button.

“Please don’t say anything,” she said. I found that in fact I couldn’t. I turned around, my own stomach forgotten, and left her there.

10

At the moment of the truly unbearable, I once heard someone say, you can’t help but change form. In the old stories, there are two kinds of transformation: punishments and escapes. The brutal King Lycaon, who was turned into a wolf (hence: lycanthrope, if you’re keeping score) after serving his own son to Zeus at a feast; Actaeon the peeper, whom Artemis reshaped into a stag, bending his knees backward so his own hounds would rend him limb from limb; Medusa, who was once so beautiful, as the story goes, that Poseidon could do naught but rape her—which he did in Athena’s temple, after which slight the goddess punished the victim with an ugliness so profound that all who looked upon her turned to stone. (This ancient allegory holds.) On the other hand: the virginal Daphne, whom I think I’ve mentioned before, became a tree to escape her suitor; the virginal Pleiades were shaken out into stars to escape theirs; poor Io, “the horned virgin,” whom Zeus turned into a cow so his wife wouldn’t catch them out. (As if Hera, by then, really thought him above bestiality—she knew who she’d married.) You see there’s a pattern here: virgins transforming at the moment they would have been deflowered, or else, if they’re unlucky, at the moment just after. Is this the moment of the truly unbearable? Or is the threat of transformation merely another way to contain us, to keep our legs swaddled closed with fear?

In fact, there’s a third kind of transformation: one that seeks to change not only you but everything. A final, desperate effort to get that deepest desire. The Little Mermaid, Sandra Dee, William the Bloody. All of these threw themselves out for the love of another. For Sandy, it was just a makeover, but the Little Mermaid walked on broken glass to be loved, and ended in dissolution, sea foam smashed against the rocks. (She could have saved herself, if only she had been willing to cut out her foul prince’s heart. But alas.)