Girls who wear glasses

Giddy. That’s the only way to describe how I felt when I got the phone call this morning. “Your glasses are in,” said Kim, the cute receptionist at Washington Eye Associates. “I’ll be right over!” I grabbed my purse and ran next door to Sarah’s office. She was on the phone with Kim. Her glasses were in too.

I don’t think I’ve been this weirdly excited about glasses since the third grade when I got my first pair: round, bubblegum pink metal frames, with multi-colored specks across the top. They were called “Confetti” and I was damn proud of them. After months of squinting and sitting a foot away from the TV, I was going to be able to see again. And my nerdiness would be official. “I like books,” those cotton-candy glasses screamed. “I get straight As!” (Well, except for in PE, where I had a perpetual “NI—needs improvement” and was the bane of Coach Caruso’s life.). Unlike the other girls who were petrified of being called “four-eyes,” I saw my difference as a virtue. Each afternoon at recess, while they practiced their cheers and discussed crushes on boys named Joey and Mike, I sat on the sidelines reading Edgar Allen Poe stories with my equally dorky, equally bespectacled friend Greg. They may have had spirit, but we had the vocabulary of a 13-year-old at age 8.

Over the years my love for my glasses evolved with my personality. Like any other middle schooler, my desire for popularity and attention from boys grew more and more urgent. In 8th grade I discovered, through the magic of straightening irons, make-up, and contact lenses, that I was actually quite pretty under that frizzy-haired nerdy mess. So away went the glasses, to be worn only at home with my family. Within weeks I had my first boyfriend—Victor, a tall high school freshman with dimples and a really cool bike. That sealed the fate for my specs—and for the next few years I associated glasses with that dorky, friendless girl sitting on the side of the playground. My adolescent insecurities evidently causing me to forget that I had actually been quite happy during that time.

But it all changed junior year. An eye surgery prohibited me from wearing contacts for three months. I was devastated, convinced that they made me look unattractive. But something—or rather nothing—happened. My friends treated me the same. I still got asked out, and while I occasionally had to remove them during basement make-out sessions (for logistics, not aesthetics), my glasses just became a part of me. My newfound confidence had me laughing at the scene in How to Marry a Millionaire where Marilyn Monroe’s blind-as-a-bat character opts to spend her days bumping into tables rather than risk turning-off a potential suitor by wearing glasses. How silly, I thought, that a bombshell like Marilyn Monroe would actually think that a tiny pair of frames would dull her beauty. I started to really believe what I’d always kind-of known: that the things glasses symbolize—intelligence, wit—are not adverse to physical beauty. I began obsessively noting eyeglass-wearing role models like Lisa Loeb and MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, and basing my eye-wear selection after them.

It wasn’t until college, however, that I realized the ironically seductive power of those two delicate lenses. Subtler than a pair of stilettos and certainly more unexpected than a low-cut shirt, years of history had imbued them with an unmistakably erotic air. Consider the archetypes: librarians, teachers, schoolgirls. The sexiness is in the contradiction. Like my cigarettes, they became a prop. I’d pull them out for job interviews, exams, or those nights when I wanted to play the naughty librarian. To this day, the most attractive man who has ever hit on me did it on a night when I was sitting at the bar, smoking in my black plastic frames. “Those glasses are driving me wild,” he whispered in my ear. I turned my head and looked at him over the top rim. It was physical male perfection of the kind you usually see on the side of busses or the pages of glossy magazines. He was a friend of a friend that I’d been convinced would never look my way. I let him buy me a drink and later that night we proved Dorothy Parker’s famous couplet wrong—men do indeed make passes at girls who wear glasses…

__________

“Damn,” said the security guard when I walked back into the lobby this afternoon. I was wearing the new frames—red, metal, slightly cat-eyed. “You look fine in those! Like a professor or lawyer or something…Like a whole different person…” I laughed, but part of me knew what he meant. I do feel a little different when I’m wearing them—a little more confident, a little more secure. Maybe it’s because they now remind me what it was like to be that bookish 8-year-old girl who knew what she liked and didn’t really care what anyone else thought.