Pygmalion
By Elizabeth Rosen
Photo by Andres Herrera on UnsplashPamela has had enough. Enough of these stories of men making ideal women, carving them from stone, kissing them from sleep, erasing their beauty marks. Enough of this Stepford Wife shit and plastic surgery. Kim Kardashian’s big butt breaking the internet was the last straw.
Our turn, Pamela mutters to herself, and brings out her high school yearbook and all the old copies of People’s Sexiest Man of the Year and her favorite Rom-Coms and gets to work.
For her base, she takes Kevin Smatters, who was the Danny Zuko to her Sandy Olsson in their tenth-grade production of Grease! She likes the height and always did prefer slender/wiry to big/buff. Liked the way he held her in his arms in the finale. But Kevin wasn’t a smolderer. She wants a guy who can sizzle.
For this, Pamela turns to the page in her yearbook where the smoking hot smoking boys who cut classes and hung out behind the gym to watch the girl’s track team run past were pictured. Etienne LaGrosse had a look that could stop you dead. Sloe-eyed and sly, a glance that said I know you want me and a shrug that said it’s all the same to me. Exactly the right mixture of you won’t regret it and you won’t forget it. Pamela takes a pinch of Etienne’s confidence and rubs it into the Kevin’s blank chest.
Flipping through her People magazines, she lifts Antonio Banderas’s brown eyes and replaces Kevin’s pale blue ones. She cribs Chris Hemsworth’s day-old stubble and smears that across the Kevin’s chin. She likes Will Smith’s laugh, the belly ho-ho-ho, so she throws that into the mix and copy-and-pastes Ryan Reynolds’s sense of humor into the thing. She adds Ryan Gosling’s deadpan delivery for good measure.
She takes down her mortar and pestle and begins to crush up a potent mixture of Tom Hanks unshowy intelligence, Kurt Vonnegut’s humanitarianism, and a pinch of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s don’t-fuck-with-me-I-know-about-ten-to-the-eighth-power-more-than-you. She adds some pine nuts to give it the right texture, and a hint of Drakkar Noir for the nostalgia it raises in her. She dumps the whole thing into the Kevin and shoves it into the freezer to set.
When she pulls the Kevin out the next morning, he blinks his Banderas eyes at her and tests out his Etienne smirk. Pamela walks around the Kevin thoughtfully, her chin in her palm. He’s missing something, for sure, she thinks. Maybe a little Tom Hiddleston would fix the problem? Or Justin Trudeau?
The Kevin rubs its perfectly Australian stubble. It tells a Dad joke sardonically. It suggests that some of Michael B. Jordan’s stunning pecs might be the thing it is missing, or possibly his terrifically bright smile. But Pamela thinks not. She has to sleep on it again, and packs the Kevin back into the bundt-cake tin, sliding it back into the freezer to keep it fresh until she can figure out what is still needed.
It comes to her in the night, of course, as part of a dream where Oprah is interviewing Johnny Carson about his favorite bits – comedy, not bodily – and as soon as he says Carnac the Magnificent, Pamela startles awake, knowing. She goes straight to the kitchen and pulls the Kevin out. It’s the mystery of Charlize Theron that is the final missing bit. Who is she, after all? A chameleon, an unafraid bad-ass. Definitely the missing ingredient.
Pamela takes a healthy quantity of Charlize and dabs it behind the Kevin’s ears and on all its other pulse points so there is no mistaking the Theron-ness of this updated, ideal, best version of itself.
The Kevin squeezes itself free of the icy bundt-cake pan, swipes its dashing bangs from its forehead, holding Pamela’s gaze the whole time, then breaks into a perfectly-pitched version of “The One That I Want.”
Bang on the money. Pamela takes his mildly freezer-burned hand and leads him, still singing, into the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind them and thinking to herself that the Kardashian butt has nothing on her Kevin.