MacGuffin.

The summer my mother turned pretty.

MacGuffin: “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance” - Merriam-Webster

“My whole life, I’d just wanted to be pretty,” my mother said, eyes looking far away. “I never got any attention for most of high school.”

“Because you had no hips,” I said jokingly, referring to what I had come to understand as my mother’s core childhood trauma: The color guard girls saying she couldn’t make the team, twirling various batons and flags because she didn’t have hips.

“Correct. But when I was seventeen, a man fell hard for me. It’s the first time I remember thinking, finally, I’ve become pretty.”

The first fact omitted from this initial telling of the story was that my mother’s father had a shotgun stashed in the entryway closet in their house, and the whole neighborhood knew it, as would any boy at my mother’s high school since she lived only a handful of blocks away. The second fact was that the man who fell hard for my seventeen-year-old mother was thirty. I was first told this story when I was sixteen. It came up again when I was thirty-one. My eyebrows raised as high as they could go.

“He wasn’t with you because you were pretty,” I told her then. She sighed, that skeptical look on her face. “He pursued you because he thought you were an easy target. But unlike all the boys at your school, he didn’t know your father had a shotgun waiting behind the door. Until, of course, he did.” She laughs.

“I was distraught for weeks, wondering why he cut contact like that. But yes, turns out my father took things into his own hands.”

“You look disappointed about it.”

“He didn’t have to chase him off like that. And he was a nice man. Handsome too.”

“If I had come back here on a random day of my junior year of high school, introducing a thirty-year-old man to you as my boyfriend, you would’ve called the cops.” She waves me off.

“Things were different back then. And you’re my daughter. I never imagined I’d have a daughter who was so against being pretty despite being beautiful naturally.”

I’ve begun to lose my appetite, my own father serving as an unwilling witness to this conversation as he clears his plate and starts flipping through YouTube videos on the TV hanging above the kitchen table.

“I’m your daughter. You’re supposed to think I’m beautiful and want me to marry the best man on the planet, which you do.” I point to my father, “and he is supposed to chase off any man that comes near me because all men know how all men are, as he does. But it is really just a song and dance to delay what he sees as inevitable and natural. Because under male rule, women are not people; they are resources. And they are all raised from birth to go on this wild goose chase, trying to attain beauty when, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter at all. It’s a distraction. It’s like… some massive cultural MacGuffin. Something important to you, so important it’s the North Star of your entire life, but meaningless to the audience. It’s not what this story is about.

“Our fathers - our most direct overseers within the system of male rule - know that beauty doesn’t matter. Because men will put their dicks in anything, so having one want to put their dick in you in particular is hardly a compliment. It just means the appropriate measure of opportunity presented itself. You chase beauty your whole life, thinking it will give you value when in reality this story is about your god given destiny to be consumed by men at school, at work, at home, on the street, and even in death. You could replace beauty with anything, and it would have zero impact on the overall story. Women could get up any time they wanted, break the fourth wall, and change this. But over and over again, we do not from mother to daughter over and over forever,” I say, bringing my impromptu metaphor to a close. “So this is me breaking that fourth wall by myself.”

My father turns up the volume on the TV to disrupt the conversation.

“And now we’re back to talking about feminism,” he grumbles.