It is the job of the fifth-grade girl to master all things Ew, Gross. She must seek out Ew, Gross tirelessly; she must react to Ew, Gross with melodramatic shrieking, squirming, eye-shielding, and simulated gagging; she must embroider Ew, Gross in the retelling. The fifth-grade girl has reached the border of a state adjacent to puberty, and on a clear day, she can see the grimy spires of the ultimate Ew, Gross — sex (eeeee-yew) with a boy (blurrrkkk) — glimmering on a distant range. But until she reaches the precincts of that dark city, years from now, urban legends regarding wayward booger-snots must suffice.

It is also the job of the fifth-grade girl to learn how to use a microscope in science class. Mr. Birch carefully explained all the dials and mechanisms, warning about the dangers of smacking a lens down onto a slide cover, but I didn’t listen (nobody ever listened to that poor patient man at the front of the room in his brown pants, so overwhelmed by the sonic wall of fifth-grade girls that he gave up extolling the virtues of distilled water and fled into seminary the next year, and we wept real tears at the announcement, for who else but a man of God could have sympathized with our operatic swoons backwards from a dead yellow perch in a tray?). No — we watched Mr. Birch’s mustache for signs of approaching “that’s enough, ladies” (which never came), but we never really listened to what Mr. Birch said, and we certainly didn’t now. We wanted to get started sticking stuff under the microscope — bits of notebook paper, drops of spittle, a sunset-colored hair plucked from Red’s head without permission — and we resisted his attempts to keep order, jostling with our elbows to get into position, put our eyes down, and see how things worked. At last my moment came, my chance to gaze upon the wonder and mystery of the human skin, fixed onto a slide back in the fifties and packaged with the doggedly uninformative lilac-tinted filmstrip we’d watched the day before, The World Inside Of Us.

Ahead of me in line to view one of the nations of the world inside of us, Reine peppered Mr. Birch with questions about the skin sample’s origins without heeding his answers — it came from a person? Like, a real one? Like, a dead person? A real dead person? What did he die of? Ew, did you know him? — but I tuned her out and thought about the skin and the infinite properties of the universe and how all over my body cells lived and died and whatnot. Reine looked into the microscope, stood up straight and grimaced, looked again, wailed, “Ewwwww, guh-rrroosss!” and stepped aside. My turn came, and I leaned over. There, in a backlit circle that reminded me of a museum display a million miles away, I saw another planet, a landscape of wavelike flaky hills and fissures in the same lilac atmosphere as the filmstrip. Like most things seen under a microscope, it looked silent and secret and boring and somewhat gross. I stood up and arched a brow at Mr. Birch.

“That’s skin?”
“That’s skin.”
“Oh. Well…gross.”

I went back to my seat. Reine whispered to Demi, “I can’t believe we got to look at dead people.” “Just one dead person,” Demi shuddered back. Woods and I stared at the backs of our hands and exchanged a “no way” look. At the microscope, Red muttered, “Hey, that’s — ew, gross.”

But we did not know the half of Ew, Gross. Not until health class did we begin to see so much as a tiny stitch in the elaborately sewn hem of the vast, oily, hairy, unpredictable garment of Ew, Gross that the epidermis represented. Miss Scott, chosen against all education-major logic to Vergil the twitchy and easily shocked fifth grade through the myriad horrors of impending pubescence, took the same boot-camp you-don’t-know-what-pain-is-you-maggots approach to the health sciences as she did to P.E. — an overkill tactic, really, because health class already filled us with dread and despair. The classes met in a dank, musty afterthought of a room in the lower level of the gymnasium. It smelled like a popped blister, and the tower of broken leftie desks piled floor-to-ceiling at one end threatened to topple and kill us all if provoked by a vigorous cough. We loathed that room and its buzzy lights, and what we learned in it inevitably terrified us to the point of sleeplessness (the previous unit, a sort of X-Treme First Aid course which introduced the unwelcome concept of disarticulated limbs into our lives, had also included a tourniquet application clinic so unsettling that I’d told my activity partner just to let me bleed to death and put an end to it), but we could handle that kind of Ew, Gross. It involved gore, so we tried to meet it unflinchingly. Sebum, on the other hand, took us without a fight.

On the first Wednesday afternoon of a new marking period, the fifth grade filed down the clammy corridor leading to The Doom Room. Towards the back of the pack, Red and I walked together and speculated as to what awaited us — scurvy? Menorrhagia? An audio tour of the intestines? We all took our seats. Miss Scott perched on the desk, leafing inscrutably through the teachers’ manual for What’s Happening To Me?: Questions And Answers About Your Changing Body. Behind her, affixed the blackboard, hung a map-style pull-down something-or-other, probably portraying a human system which we would have to memorize. We eyed it warily and started whispering. “Heart. Bet you a dollar.” “Nuh-uh — did cardiopulmonary last year. Reproductive organs.” “No way, that’s sixth grade. Food pyramid.”

Miss Scott stood up, told us to settle, and with an evil smirk whipped down a full-color cross-section of a pimple. We all slammed into our chair backs with a unison thunk, speechless. “This,” Miss Scott announced in a tone which implied that we had won an award, “is a zit.”

I had heard of zits, of course. We read about them in young-adult novels and tried with furrowed brows to understand what the mentions of them in Seventeen meant. Some of our mothers called them “roses” and “strawberries” and “blemishes.” Older sisters picked at them and sighed; older brothers shaved around them. But we hadn’t really started to get them yet ourselves, or to notice them and care if we had, and we had certainly never seen a lurid cartoon rendering of a bloated pore sacked by seething bacterial Huns. Miss Scott launched into her “fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy face” monologue, but we heard nothing and took not a single note on what she said. We just sat there and tried not to hyperventilate as we contemplated the impending ruin of our complexions. Well, Pip wrote down the part where Miss Scott said not to eat French fries, because Pip’s father, a doctor, could probably write Pip a note for that. The rest of us stared in Clockwork Orange fashion at the pustule and vowed to build a time machine the next day at lunch. Ew, Gross is all well and good, until it threatens to take place on your face.

Puberty came and went, and I managed to limp off the field at the end. I had several relatively acute problems with my appearance at that time — a mousetrap designed by Alexander Calder and installed in my mouth as orthodonture, an unfortunate perm that resembled an enraged muffin — but I had good skin. Serious acne skipped me altogether, and even the more minor bumps and whiteheads only erupted semi-annually. I’d gotten off comparatively easily, and as a result I ignored any and all conventional wisdom about the care and feeding of my skin, because I didn’t need it. I ate French fries and chocolate. I leaned my chin on my hand. I left my make-up on overnight sometimes, and when I did get a pimple, I popped it with merry abandon.

Now, ten years after it all should have ended, at an age when I should start buying stock in Oil Of Olay, I have skin so youthfully wretched that I consistently get carded buying cigarettes. Right now, a reluctant look in the bathroom mirror reveals the following unairbrushables:

1. A strawberry rising like the bud of a devil’s horn on the left side of my hairline
2. Castor and Pollux whiteheads on my left cheek, strategically positioned next to the resident mole so as not to escape notice
3. A scraped-looking red blemish just below my right nostril
4. Another, identical scraped-looking promontory in the shadow of that same nostril
5. A giant reservoir of angry pimple-in-waiting on the right side of my chin, biding its time until I have a date before making its pustulent entrance and resisting all attempts to speed up its life cycle via hot washcloths
6. The Little Dipper where my glasses rest on my nose
7. A Mt. Rainier poking its majestic head through the cloud layer of my right eyebrow

Twenty-nine years old, and I look like the one-armed man from The Fugitive mugged me with a hole-punch. How did I get here? I eat better than I used to as an adolescent — no chocolate, not too many French fries. I try to drink as much water as I can. I don’t touch my face unless I absolutely have to. I don’t wear foundation make-up, ever, and whatever other make-up I wear, I make sure to wash off. I only pop in an emergency. I would blame smoking, but I’ve smoked for many moons, and it’s never broken out on my face before; I would blame PMS, but it doesn’t seem to follow any pattern save that of consistently annoying me. I’ve tried everything. Tea tree oil, calamine lotion, soap with heavy metals in it; moisturizers cheap and pricey, light and heavy, mass-market and specially mixed; steam; cucumbers and carrot juice; benzoyl peroxide; Vitamin E; Ivory; prayer. Nothing’s working. My face is a time-lapse photo of a Jovian moon, and as with a Jovian moon, you can see my eyebrow pimple from space.

But it’s not the spots themselves that bother me. Zits come and go, largely unnoticed; everybody else has their own zits to worry about. I just don’t understand — why now? Why so many of them, so large that I fear amputation constitutes the only solution? At twenty-nine, you shouldn’t have to worry about acne; you should worry about wrinkles. I want to worry about wrinkles instead. I want to firm and tone and smooth. I want to spend hundreds on department-store creams and spackle the lines on my face with a putty knife. I don’t want to feel yet another behemoth on the bridge of my nose, smothering capillaries in its bosom and cackling, slowly morphing into a Mike’s Hard Lemonade head, answering my phone. I’ve gotten too old to point my chin at the mirror and mutter “ew, gross” through clenched teeth.

August 5, 2002

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