I was 16, and she was 41, the day my mother got her first, and only, tiny pimple.
She came to me
pointing next to her nose, asking me what it was.
I had to look hard to see it.
“A pimple,” I said, rolling my
eyes.
She washes her face with water, and soap if she’s showering--she's done it all her life. She has never used a moisturizer, ever. She owns one lipstick which she bought for my wedding, 29 years ago, and the tube is almost full. She is 81 and her hair is heavy, and thick, and still mostly black. They want to thin it when she goes to get it cut.
Makeup: my mother calls it “war paint”; my mother has perfect skin.
* * * * * * * *
My grandmother’s lipsticks stood on her dresser in a brown plastic rack which was swirled to look like tortoise shell. They stood between a crackle-glass perfume atomizer with a strange, golden, pod-like bulb, and a hinged, pink, satin box in which she kept her pin-curl clips and metal rollers.
In the lipstick rack, each tube had its own little place where it fit standing up--a circle into which I dropped it after uncapping and twisting the tube to see what color emerged: Persimmon, and True Red, and Poppy, and Coral; Cinnamon, Sea Shell, Nude and Frost-Pink. I stood them there like soldiers at attention, ready to serve, waiting for her to go out.
My grandmother had perfect skin, too--white and soft, and smelling of roses. She washed each day with cold-cream--never with soap—spreading it on gently and removing it, always, with an upward stroke. She patted her face dry afterward. “Never scrub,” she told me, “Gravity doesn’t need help. Your mother, you know, is ruining her skin.”
I loved to watch her do her face: first the cold-cream, then a face lotion for wrinkles, then liquid foundation, then rouge for her cheeks-- “Ever so little,” she said. I sat on the tub handing her things from a plaid, vinyl-lined, cosmetics pouch. It had a zipper with a leather tassel and when I pulled it open all her pencils and pots were in there. She had a brown eye-brow pencil stamped Hollywood Arts, and black eye-liner which I loved to twist out, and out, to its very end, and a rosy-pink pencil for her lips with almost all the gold lettering rubbed off. For her eye-lids there were tiny pats of silky shadow: blue and green and gold and brown, but my favorite was a pot of shimmering white shadow cream which she smoothed along her brows and dotted at the corners of her eyes to “open them up and make them wide.” Finally, came loose powder: a soft, beige puff for her face, and a cardboard box into which she dipped it. The powder was nearly white and smelled like her.
My grandmother’s stockings came in slim, flat boxes. They came folded into tissue paper, perfectly creased, light as butterfly wings. Lifted out they held the shape of a woman’s leg—ankle, calf and thigh. Cocoa and bone, nude and black, she pulled them on--crossing one leg over the other, bending forward to tuck her narrow toes into the scrunched toe of the stocking, lining the seams up. Then with a deft and practiced hand she quickly eased the fragile net up her leg--pulled it over her thin ankles, dancer’s calves--over knee-caps pale as inverted porcelain; over thighs as slim as a girl’s—and I sat watching for the moment she would tug them up to the clips of her girdle, sliding smooth tongues of metal over rubber tabs.
* * * * * * * *
It’s dinner time; I can smell pork chops cooking. I can smell corn. I can smell the wet iron smell of the radiator and hear it clunk and hiss. I hear Willie and Charlie playing Zorro on his horsey, circling round and round on the braided rug downstairs. I can hear my father talking.
I am kneeling on the sink looking into the mirror. My new eye-brows are very black. My new mouth is very red. I am a new me looking back at the old me. I am six years old and someone I know, and someone I do not know well. The Halloween face paints are itchy on my skin. They smell like wax, but I don’t care; I am beautiful--I am princess beautiful--and I have never been beautiful before.
When my mother calls me for dinner, I walk downstairs slowly, my hand on the rail. I enter like Cinderella, late for the ball, everyone is already there. I take my seat and say--wearing my face, proudly, like a choice, mind made up,--“This is how I want to look when I am big.”
“Who knows,” my mother says, spooning out peas, “Maybe you will.”
* * * * * * * * * *
“Where are you going?” I ask her. My mother is leaning into the sink, peering at herself in the mirror with her lips in a tight, wide, oval putting on lipstick. It is very red. She finishes the bottom lip, turning her head a fraction of an inch as she presses her lips together making the color even.
“Hand me a tissue,” she says, still looking into the glass and reaching behind her towards me as if her image in the mirror might disappear before she like an eyelash if she looks away, or blinks. I hand her the tissue, and she blots, kissing the white Kleenex then handing me back the print of her lips.
I sit on the toilet seat, pleating her kiss. “Where will you be?” I ask her again, needing to know how far from here to there; how far I will have to run to get to her; how loud I will need to yell for her to hear me. She is putting on her bracelet now, a silver one with jet black stones.
“We’ll be at the Heishen’s. Just down the street.” She is doing the clasp of the bracelet, turning her white wrist to the light. I kick my foot against the radiator -- clang, clang, clang.
“Mrs. Ofterheidi is coming to stay with you,” she says. Then she looks at me, and her eyes say: don’t make a fuss. I want her to just stay here in the bathroom talking to me and not go out. I make a face.
“You can stay up an hour later,” she adds, as if making a bargain.
I am trying to be a big girl; but my throat feels like it wants to cry: she is going away from me. She frowns, leans over, kissing my hair where she won’t leave a mark. And then she stands up in her pointy, clickity shoes and turns away. She is already almost in the hall.
“Mama!” I say it quick; I run to her, “I need a hug before you go!” I know I sound like Willie; I am whining. I want to be Willie, so little he can hold on tight, and cry, and not let go, and nobody minds it. But I did that once—held on to her so she couldn’t stand up—and how mad she got, and my dad too, and how I couldn’t put any of it back the way it was before; I couldn’t put it back inside me.
She turns back again--leans over, hugging me. She is warm. She smells like lily of the valley. I love the smell of it. It comes from an aqua bottle with a golden cap. The bottle is shaped like a tower, and it’s cool and powdery on the outside when I hold it. You can’t see through the bottle, even though it’s glass. “Careful,” she always says. Tonight when she sprayed it on, she rubbed her wrists together then rubbed them onto me so that now, when she stands up, moving through the door and away from me, pulling on her coat, I can still smell her on my skin when I press my own arm up against me face, when I press my arm to my nose to help the tears stay in.
