My son, Ben, peers over my shoulder at the photograph in my hand. “I love that picture,” he says—and of course he does. All he sees is his peachy six-year-old self in the foreground, blurred with happiness and dancing with his little sister, pantsless and laughing. Who wouldn’t smile to see them? Well, someone wouldn’t—whatever that thing is in the background, hunched in its robe over a coffee mug. Even from here you can’t miss my scowl lines, like the angry stomp of a pterodactyl foot between the eyes. It’s the kind of face that would make you pedal your bike faster if you saw it in a window from the street.
Listen, I’m a feminist. I’m not vain. But I mind looking like a bitch.
Remember Dorian Gray? How he remained baby smooth while an old oil painting of him magically wrinkled up into oblivion? I’m like that, but on Opposite Day: Somewhere in the attic there must be a smooth portrait of me, my face a glossy bisque to reflect the contentment I feel inside. But my actual face looks as if it’s been pressed onto the front of my head after first getting wadded up like a Big Mac wrapper.
“I’m getting Botox,” I joke to my husband, Michael. “But not so I’ll look younger—just to prevent me from scowling at all of you.”
I am totally kidding—and then, suddenly, I’m not. What if I were physically unable to pull my face into negativity? Perhaps I would be paralyzed away from my own bouts of bad temper. Studies have proved this, or something like it: A facial expression doesn’t simply reflect your moods; it actually shapes them. Frown and you feel sad; laugh and your spirits lift. Is mood enhancement one of Botox’s promises? I can’t say, since I’m too proud and broke to consider it seriously. Also the word “botulism” unnerves me. Instead I choose a moisturizer from the mile of products at the drugstore, but massaging it into my rutted forehead just gives me a scattering of pimples.
Then, in the bath one evening, I suddenly remember the Old Farmer’s Almanac I paged through in the tub as a child—in particular, the ads for those old-fashioned “Frownies” beauty patches, a kind of Scotch tape for the face, which pulls your wrinkles apart in hopes they’ll stay flat. The company still exists, it turns out, the Web site offering smiling headshots of women and guarantees of happy results. Plus they’re cheap. I order some. You’re supposed to separate them at their perforations, lick them, and stick them to your skin. All in all they are about as high-tech as pebbles or cheese.
My family understands the beige triangle to be a symbol of my renewed benevolence. When I sigh one night over a pot of borscht, Ben asks if he can get me a Frownie the way you might offer aspirin to someone with a headache. My daughter, Birdie, her own face aglow with toddler sweetness, touches it with a serious fingertip and asks, “If I pull this off, then you’ll be grumpy?”
Well, yes, maybe. Because however bizarre this ritual may be, it’s working. Taped into placidity, I can’t really scowl. The more I don’t scowl, the more my family grins back. And here’s the only part of my strange experiment that isn’t crazy: The more the people I love most smile at me, the happier I feel.