Beauty Sleep, and: The Ugly Duckling Who Remains An Ugly Duckling

34 Denise Duhamel Beauty Sleep When Prince Charming descended on Snow White, she brushed his kiss away like it was a fly. Rolling over, she finished her dream, and began a new one. Once in a while she talks in her sleep: suffragette, ERA, Anita Hill. Historians have recently brushed the dust from her Timex alarm clock. They tell us it's set for quarter to "safe." The Ugly Duckling Who Remains An Ugly Duckling She has oily skin when she is young but doesn't grow up to be a model. She had no waist then and has no waist now. Her face is covered with a light down, her oversized lips spit when she talks. Her skinny legs look lost on her long wide feet as she waddles home after a night school class. You might guess that she turns out to be a genius, that she discovers something no one else knows or makes millions of dollars using her hunches on stocks, but some ugly ducklings don't get even that. Sometimes she pretends she's a swan, and glides through a minute or two towards the end of her day until she smashes into another ugly duckling doing the same— their grocery bags full of Doritos, Nuprin and Major Video rentals ruined in the muddy puddles. ...