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I first got Botox about eight years ago, at a med spa on a busy, ugly stretch of Highway 49 in Placer County, California. On my way there, I read a church marquee’s folksy but intrinsically terrifying warning about the perils of nonbelief in Jesus, and a bumper sticker that claimed “Guns Don’t Kill People Abortion Clinics Do.” Back then, I wasn’t aware of any Botox clinics near my home, in Nevada County, where land acknowledgments are made before art-house movie screenings, and bumper stickers are more likely to quote Mary Oliver or Osho. So close yet so far, Placer County, where Blue Lives Matter meets balayage, felt like the right location to artificially return my fortysomething face to a state of more conventional youthful attractiveness.
Now, in my mid-fifties, the level of torture I put myself through deciding whether to get that initial Botox treatment seems positively adorable. Several women I knew had gone to the same clinic, and I examined their faces to make sure the improvements they’d achieved were subtle yet significant. I interrogated the clinic’s receptionist about my provider’s credentials. I made an appointment three weeks in advance, unsure whether I’d ultimately show up for it. But I did.
The office was like an Airbnb run through a “women love this” A.I. filter—light floors, cream chairs, and textured neutral drapes. With some Fireside Vanilla Spice tea and an Elin Hilderbrand novel I could have curled up in the waiting room for hours. I filled out a form that included a prompt encouraging me to share other things about my face and body that I didn’t like. I crossed out the prompt and wrote, “Please do not ask me about the rest of my face or body because I will cry just do the gd lines pls.”
The practitioner was what I would come to recognize as a Botox nurse out of central casting: blond, thin, with C cups as solid as mixing bowls and enormous matching platinum wedding and engagement bands. Because of whatever she’d done to her own face, she was of indeterminate age. She’d had Botox, yes, but also possibly fillers and that fat-cell-destroying, double-chin-eliminator stuff. We had different aesthetics and probably had totally different tastes in media, friendships, and men. If she had an anti-aging motto, it was “Harness All Available Technologies.” If I had one, it was “Absolutely Do Stuff, but Make Sure It’s Subtle, Because Possibly Worse Than Looking Older Is Looking Desperate to Appear Younger.” The challenge for her, I imagined, was to avoid telling me that smoothing out my forehead was a joke considering that my entire face was in rapid retreat from its glorious past. The challenge for me, if she did say something like this—though of course she would have said it more nicely—would have been not to yell back something like, “Thanks, but I don’t take beauty advice from people with barrel curls.” But what united us was more important than what divided us. We both had been young once, and we both were out there, in modern America, trying to get some respect/dick in our chosen communities.
To her credit, she was restrained in her recommendations. She did ask if I was aware that I had some hyperpigmentation. I laughed and told her about the time my boyfriend’s father interrupted a quiet meal one evening with the abrupt observation, “You have a very dark patch next to your eye, do you know about it?” I said, “Yes, do you know about hormones?” Then we all went on eating.
This anecdote got no reaction. Botox nurses want you to add more expensive procedures, not tell them hilarious true stories. So, I was aware of this hyperpigmentation, she said. Did I want to do anything about it? Yes, of course I did. I wanted to eradicate hyperpigmentation from my face, my body, and the planet. I also wanted each of my breasts to weigh one pound less and be an inch and a half higher up on my chest. I wanted my hair to look like it came from Jimmy’s Sable Coat Emporium instead of Bob’s Discount Carpets. I wanted, roughly eight years from now, to go see “Nosferatu,” and, when the titular character extended his desiccated hand, to whisper to my friend, “Fun fact, I was the hand double for this film,” and for her to reply, “STOP, GIRL, YOU ARE GORGEOUS,” instead of laughing out loud. The nurse injected me. I paid.
Within seven days, my forehead lines were indeed gone, and I looked forty-one or forty-two instead of forty-six or forty-seven, because when you’re that age that’s what good Botox should do. I also felt a deep sadness coming over me like a storm, or, rather, blooming inside me as if I’d been injected with a toxin. I Googled “Botox depression” and found, inevitably, a suspected connection: apparently, since I couldn’t smile right anymore, people weren’t smiling back at me. I resolved never to get Botox again. Exchanging smiles seemed more important than attaining beauty: the thought of a fool.
Years later, I felt the same terrible feeling again and realized that those post-Botox doldrums had really been about relationship issues with my boyfriend. But in that case there was some unexpected good news: I could totally get Botox again.
By that point, I knew about a Botox place in Nevada City. I even knew the owner, because we were former practitioners of the same type of yoga, which fell into some disrepute when its most prominent practitioner was revealed to be a sexual predator. I figured she’d done stuff to her face. I couldn’t place what, but I knew I admired rather than feared her approach. She informed me that, at this point in my aging journey, the lines between my eyebrows were deep, and that she could only do so much, and that—though she was more than happy to lay off on the suggestions—Botox at the corners of my eyes might also be helpful. “Visually,” she added, as if there were another arena in which we could operate together.
So I started getting Botox between my eyebrows, plus a very small amount—O.K., I’m lying, I have no idea if it was a small amount—on my crow’s feet. I’ve been doing this for about three years now. After I fought for a long time to save my relationship, it ended anyway, and I am glad it did. My ex was significantly younger than I am, and he began dating someone his own age. This felt depressing at first, until I started dating someone even younger than my ex. It’s not that I prefer younger men; I really don’t. They’re just the ones who hit on me. In any event, I am sure that my last relationship did not end, and that my new one did not begin, because of the presence or absence of lines on my forehead.
I am generally in what people like to call “a good place.” But this sense of well-being was interrupted not long ago when I was out of town, visiting friends in North Carolina, and realized that my Botox had worn off. It was close to Thanksgiving, a time of year when many people, myself among them, start worrying about being publicly impressive. I needed some more Botox, right away.
“You’ll never be able to get an appointment,” a friend I was staying with told me, after confirming that my Botox was indeed gone. “You might be able to get one at some shitty place where you come out with one eye closed and one eye open. But you don’t want that.”
My friend did not understand what I wanted. I am picky about wine, movies, jewelry, and colorists, but I had started to view Botox the way I have long viewed beer, coffee, and the gynecologist—which is, respectively, if it’s cold, if it wakes me up, and if it can scrape cells off my cervix, then it’s good enough for me. Look, if at some point there were a problem with my cervix, I would try to find a doctor on the cutting edge of women’s health, someone unlike the gynecologist I went to for most of my thirties, who mumbled and smelled of cigarettes and worked out of a dingy building in Los Feliz. Did I not mind having this man’s fingers inside me? I’ve had worse.
In the same spirit, I Googled some keywords, found a few Botox businesses in the area, and began to make calls. Some places said that they didn’t have appointments available for weeks. Others wanted me to fill out a form online and wait for a reply. (This enraged me, because whatever time it would take someone to process the form could have been better spent injecting Botox into my face.) I was trying the sixth or so Botox establishment when a woman answered the phone. “I want Botox now,” I said. She asked where I was. I said that I was near the university in Chapel Hill. Would I mind driving out to Durham at seven-thirty tomorrow morning? I said that nothing would delight me more. Then I went and bragged to my friend that I had a Botox appointment for the next day.
“Where?” she said.
“I don’t know, someplace in Durham.”
“Someplace in Durham,” she said flatly. “Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I got some numbers from the internet, and I called a few of them. The address is something something parkway.”
“You’re just going to get Botox from someplace you found on the internet.” She looked at me as if I had told her I was going to quit writing and start an OnlyFans, which, honestly, is not the worst idea.
That afternoon, I saw another friend, who suggested that we get breakfast the next day. I said I couldn’t because I had an appointment.
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, nowhere,” I said, not wishing to be chastised again. “It’s just, uh, an errand.”
“Where the hell are you going?”
Usually, in Northern California, if you are evasive people will back off. But this friend of mine is from North Jersey, and she was not about to let me not tell her something. She kept saying, “Where the hell are you going? Where the hell are you going?,” her voice growing deeper and more satanic with each repetition.
“I’m getting Botox,” I said.
“Oh, you don’t need to be embarrassed about that!” she said, then added, “I get Botox,” as if I couldn’t tell from looking at her face. “Where are you going?”
I guess I could have lied and said that I’d got a recommendation from someone, but my friend would have asked who, and she knows everyone I know in the area, so I was screwed.
“You don’t know?” she replied when I told her. “You can’t remember?”
I explained the whole situation.
“You’re going to get Botox from some person you found on the internet,” she said.
I told her I could muster no concern about my upcoming appointment. I felt judgmental of my friends’ judgments. Why did they consider locating a specific point on a face and then sticking a needle into it a feat that only very special people could pull off? This seemed indicative of their unhealthy fixation on expertise (as a result of which, I might add, their politics were more tediously credulous than my own). In this house, we believe that your Botox provider should be the Finest in All the Land.
“You win,” my friend said. “You’re so fucking based. Go get Botox from someone who probably started doing it a week ago.”
In the morning, I reported to the clinic. The Botox provider summoned me from the waiting room quickly. I might have preferred a delay, some suggestion of the place being in demand. She had a vast, smooth forehead, and the “Finding Nemo” lips that result from too much filler, or from lip-line Botox injections that give the mouth an assertive, daffy outward pop. Her eyebrows seemed to be pulling her eyes open by some invisible string. Her age was a complete mystery and may be forever lost to the sands of time.
She wanted to take photos of my face. I tried to avoid this, but it did not seem to be optional. I needed to do it to get the thing I wanted. She took photos while I dissociated. She asked if I wanted to have filler injected into an enormous line on the right side of my mouth. I said that I didn’t like the line any more than she did, but that I didn’t see any possible future for it aside from intensifying in visibility to myself and others. She asked how many units of Botox I usually got. I tried to look it up in my e-mails and receipts from previous clinics but couldn’t find the number, so I told her that the injections usually cost about four hundred dollars. She asked if I knew that it was National Botox Day. I said that I did not. She had me fill out a form that would potentially get me some sort of discount. I filled it out and was rejected. She asked if I was a member of some other Botox-discount program. I said, “Please inject me with Botox now.” She injected me. I don’t mind getting Botox shots at all. It feels good to do something that I know works. The treatment cost about six hundred dollars, which was the first evidence that I had got more than my usual amount.
When Botox hits, it’s so good. You look in the mirror and you’re, like, “Hello, you beautiful doll.” It seems significant that the most popular anti-aging intervention works at one’s own line of sight. Does Botox make you look younger to the average viewer, who sees you from all angles? Possibly not. But, to the viewer in the mirror (you) who looks mostly at your eyes, Botox seems like a miracle. We walk around with an image of our faces in our minds. As we get older, the mental image grows further apart from the reality. Botox brings the two slightly closer together again.
Someone recently asked me why I bother getting Botox knowing that at a certain point it will no longer help me look younger. I wanted to give an earnest reply but couldn’t manage anything other than sarcasm: Why get a stent in your heart if you’re just going to die someday? Why have a child if it’s just going to grow up and move out of the house? I liked my younger face. We had a good life together. That face is dead now. At times, my grief about this loss is as overpowering as anything I’ve felt over a death or a lost relationship. There is the invisibility that middle-aged women speak of, but the moments of visibility aren’t that great, either. I used to ask men for directions, and there would often be a look in their eyes like, “This is my lucky day.” Now it’s more often, “Why doesn’t this bitch know where she’s going?”
The worst, though, are those moments when I kind of forget that my face doesn’t look the way it used to, and I see myself in a mirror by accident, or in a photo, and I think, That can’t really be me. I am supposed to endure all this with dignity, silence, and maturity, and yet, as you age, especially if you’re suddenly single, or even if you’re not, you realize the best way to get the sort of attention and support that would help you face aging with grace and maturity involves remaining youthfully alluring. Botox is a reasonable tool in a world where a lot of things we do not want to be true are true anyway.
Soon after I left the clinic, I got a text asking me to rate its service. I hadn’t taken note of the name of the place, and now, for the first time, I did. Let’s call it Pretty by Patty.
“Pretty by Patty,” my friend mused when I told her. “Wow. What was Patty like?”
I said that Patty was probably very pretty in her world but perhaps not the ideal in mine. I also said that she seemed to have given me quite a lot of Botox, as I had parted with more money than usual. We went to lunch. On the way, I called my first friend, the one who’d told me I wouldn’t be able to get an appointment. “The place I went to get Botox is called Pretty by Patty.”
She said, “I’m on the other line. You’re an idiot. Bye.”
For a few days, I could not see or feel any changes in my face. I refer to this as the “it didn’t work” phase. I was with a friend in New York City when the Botox hit. My forehead stiffened and went numb, like it was made of concrete that had suddenly set. I ran to my friend and explained that I’d got Botox from someplace in North Carolina that I found on the internet, Pretty by Patty, and that the entire top third of my face now felt like it was sitting in a chair that had been nailed to a wall.
“How many units did you get?” she asked.
I said that I had no idea. I said that I had essentially let Patty have her way with me.
My friend looked at my face with an expression of deep concentration. “Frown,” she said. “Frown!”
“Wait, I’m not frowning?” I said. I put my hand on my forehead. I couldn’t feel it; amazingly, it was still there. “Am I frowning now?”
“Not really, no,” she said. She shrugged. “I mean . . . you look great.”
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. “God damn,” I said. “I really do.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
