loving your inner velma
by cathy james

Left to my own devices, I have the innate fashion sense of a 1972 elementary school librarian—that teacher who was cloned in schools across America.

She wore beige spongy-soled shoes, a twill blue just-below-the-knee skirt, and a brown pilled sweater. She lived at school—we all knew this to be true—and the most eye-catching object to ever grace her person was the pearl and rhinestone brooch her mother left her. This look was destined to be my fate, but thanks to the early adult life intervention of Selena McCall, I was saved. She was my best friend in college in the early eighties, those unenlightened days when I dressed to attract men because I’d been brought up to think I was supposed to. In my case it didn’t seem to matter because I failed at it miserably. I could not have attracted an escaped convict who’d spent the last fifteen years looking at nothing but a hairy, check-kiting, b&e felon named Pork. Though it seems funny to me now, at the time it bothered me.

Having a best friend who was both extraordinarily gorgeous, smart, and unabashedly friendly with everyone was a little frustrating. It was hard to find anything wrong with her. She was like the title character from Something About Mary. I couldn’t possibly hate her. She was too gracious, warm, courteous, and fun to be around. Still I never got over the feeling that if we’d both been born two hundred years earlier, I’d be filling her coal scuttle and bringing her tea as she reclined in a copper tub full of hot water, reading a decadent French novel.

I loved going places with Selena after work. Waiters tripped over one another to serve this lovely, long-legged, Southern blonde. I got free meals and desserts, and the best seats in all kinds of establishments just because I was hanging out with Selena. I basked in her residual beauty and desirability by association. I used to get a kick out of walking into a new place with Selena and counting how many stares she got. She seemed oblivious to the attention, and I felt invisible. I could gawk right in the faces of men, but they stared at Selena like deer trapped in headlights. I could have mooned them all, and no one have noticed until the initial trance created by her beauty wore off.

She was the Malibu Barbie and I was frumpy Midge. If we had been in the Scooby Doo gang, she would have been Daphne, and I would have been Velma. Even Velma’s voice is less attractive than Daphne’s.

Selena was your favorite Hooter’s waitress and Barbie rolled into one kind of pretty. I looked at my Winona-Ryder-as-a-twelve year-old/discount-Marjorie doll/chicken-stand-drive-thru-girl face in the mirror and wondered, why not me?
The whole thing was mostly a matter of self-perception. I wasn’t ugly. I just had a completely different look. She was sexy, savvy, and elegant. I was goofy, quirky, and eccentric. (Try finding a man who seeks those qualities in a personal ad sometime.)

Ironically, we were exactly the same size, down to our feet. Except for her magnificent mane of blonde hair and enormous blue eyes, physically we were eerily similar, but it never felt that way.

Selena and I both worked at Macy’s, and she always showed up for work in little black things: V-backed sweaters, short skirts, elegant jackets, silk blouses. When we went shopping she flocked to the cropped beaded cashmere tops while I pilfered through the marked down khaki shorts and striped cotton blouses that looked like what my mom wore to pull weeds in her garden.

After a while I learned to shop by holding up outfits and asking myself, “Would Selena buy this?” One of the beautiful things about Selena was that she never once made me feel like the Velma in our relationship. I did that on my own. She was Atlanta-big-city-sophisticated while I was six months off the farm in Alabama.

She was patient with me as I navigated my way through life’s simple things like how to got through a toll booth, opening up a checking account, and purchasing kitchen wares. I wondered, when do people learn to do these things? In high school I was feeding calves and helping my mom make jelly while Selena was parading down the football field as homecoming queen and getting free Cokes at the concession stand from boys who tripped over their feet wanting to meet her.

We used to go to Highlands, North Carolina, a resort town where her parents had a summer home (the very concept of which did not even exist inside the fringes of possibility in my family) and pretend we were moneyed tourists. Selena and I would go downtown and peruse the boutiques and antique houses. She barely flinched when I let out a “goll-ee” or “shee-it.” She was actually a descendent of mountain people. I guess that explains her down-to-earth personality. I felt right at home listening to her grandmother talk about growing okra, cleaning bathroom grout, and dressing dog wounds. I would sit there watching Grandma McCall drain bacon fat into a pan for the dogs and wonder what glitch in the McCall gene pool could have produced someone as refined as Selena.

I must point out that our friendship did not consist of me flailing my hands up over my face to protect others from my hideousness each time we went out in public, or me tripping along behind her praising her poise and charm. I kept my fear of inadequacy pretty much to myself. When you have a goddess for a best friend, you don’t want to annoy her with adulation. How embarrassing for the both of you.I genuinely liked being with her. Maybe I hoped some of her would rub off on me, like germs from a holy relic.

Part of her beauty was her class and self-confidence. She never slumped or picked at her nails. She carried a sense of grace about her and people picked up on it
I was about thirty years old before I can say I genuinely felt as pretty and confident as I perceived her to have been all that time. Nothing changed in me except how I viewed myself. If anything, I looked a lot better in those college years, but I was either too timid or too stupid to let myself feel good about it.

Selena rarely pointed out anyone’s shortcomings, something a person with little confidence like me could appreciate. It was one more point in her radiation of goodness that made her seem prettier than she probably was in reality.

Once, before each of us had children, and life was made up of the freedom of time we can now only dream of, she told me she wanted to show me a place that she and her sisters went to when they were kids. We jumped in her Honda and she drove us up into the mountains near Highlands. We trekked through blossoming, spring-filled woods to a rapid stream in the middle of an untouched landscape. Wild crocus flowers in yellow and purple bloomed along the ridge of the bank and the rocks in the stream were round and slick under the cold running water. We took off our shoes, rolled up our jeans, and stood in that frigid stream. Neither one of us had bothered with hair or make-up, but standing there in the water, laughing under those sun flushed trees sprinkled with new buds, we were both lithe, lovely, and painfully young in a way that I can fully appreciate only now. We were both at our plainest, stripped of any pretension in the wide open outdoors. I can still see how beautifully ethereal she looked standing barefoot in the water, but for once I didn’t feel like Velma. I just felt like a best friend, and I saw then that most of what made her seem so pretty wasn’t on the outside at all. How grateful I was for a friend to stand in a stream and laugh with me—both of us radiant and alive.

You grow into your sense of self, and other people are drawn to you. For me, having a best friend who was overloaded with style, grace, and beauty wasn’t intimidating as I got older, it was a wake-up call. The concept is simple, really. Learn to love your Velma and she will eventually begin to radiate. Soon you won’t be able to tell the difference between her and Daphne. Best friends shouldn’t notice stuff like that anyway.