We’re
having a teachers’ party. Ice cubes that tinkle around smoky liquid in fat
glasses, chips and dip, and cigarette smoke that hovers below the ceiling. I slap a jar of Ponds cream into my mother’s
palm with the precision of a surgical nurse. Tan fingers plunge into thick
white cream and sweep across her forehead, cheeks, and neck. She does not use
gentle upward strokes as recommended by McCalls,
but slathers it with vigor, daring a wrinkle to flaw the landscape of her
Sophia Loren bone structure. She tips her head back and coaxes outer lashes
into cat eyes with Maybeline’s Blackest Black mascara. She purses her full lips
and paints red, starting on the top lip and gliding right and left before
finishing along the bottom in a smooth arc. I put the gold tube in the drawer. The shade
is Vixen. I hand her a square of toilet paper. She blots and surveys her
reflection. I watch her face in the mirror. Long ebony hair, shimmering blue
eyes, cheek bones, lips, something else I can’t define but makes me think of
biting into a peach, juice dribbling down my chin.
She brushes my hair into a pony
tail, raking the bristles across my scalp and pulling my hair so tightly that
my eyes pull back at the corners and blur with tears. Our eyes meet in the mirror. If you want to be beautiful, you have to
suffer,” she says.
I tip toe through
the living room. Glasses and beer bottles cover every surface. Ash trays
overflow with cigarette butts, many with pink and peach rings of lipstick. A
man throws up in the kitchen sink. He wipes his mouth and stares at me. His
collar wears the same red lips from the toilet paper blot. Vixen.
Moonlight
streams through my window and across my covers. Maybe my mother was wrong. Maybe
beauty causes suffering.
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