Cherries In The Snow (15 page)

Do I have a butt like a pig? Or is it just a random playground insult, rude word du jour? Montana has tapped into my worst fear. I clutch the message in my hand as I sit on the toilet, but now I can't pee. My pig butt squashes damningly against the cold seat. I turn on all the taps, like I did when I was a little girl, but I am too crushed to squeeze anything out. I sit there, thinking, the taps running. ‘I am so likable.' I inflate my likability, as my bladder strains, casting myself as a cross between a
Sesame Street
host and the baron-shagging nun from
The Sound of Music
, visions whirring in my mind of me leading Austrian schoolchildren in a round of ‘My Favorite Things.' I am on the mountaintop in a dirndl, and all twelve von Trapp children have Montana's face. I can't remember the words so I make them up:

When your cooch hurts

From too much sex

When you're feeling fat

I simply remember my favorite things …

I catch my reflection in the mirror, singing, naked, with a scarf around my neck. I fear Montana can see the specifics: not just that I am a lady who spends time with Marley, her father, but that I am a lady who hugs and kisses him, who has sex
with him, lots of different kinds of sex. I imagine her keeping a tally of the times he has gone down on me, the times we have done it doggie style, the times I was on top. I sit there and think and think and I must be there for some time because suddenly the door creaks open.

Montana. In a pale pink nightgown. Clutching a Barbie. Pointing the Barbie at me as she demands, ‘What are you doing?'

I crush the message tighter in my hand. The pee comes flooding out. Montana stands and watches. I don't know whether to wipe or not. Just get up and run. I am frozen there.

‘I'm peeing.'

‘The faucets have been running forever and then you started singing. It woke me up.'

‘Oh, I'm so sorry.'

She doesn't move. Marley and I had decided that I would leave, early that morning, before she could see me, that we would work my presence in with great sensitivity. But she catches me, her blond hair shining in the dark like a flashlight.

‘I was talking to your daddy last night, and we talked for so long and I got so tired, I couldn't even make it home. I had to sleep on the sofa.'

My nipples have grown stiff by the drafty window.

‘I see.'

‘Would you like some breakfast? Some toast? A plum?'

‘It's the middle of the night still.'

‘Of course it is. Silly old me.'

She stares at me, a human lie detector dressed in a pink nightgown. I shift on the seat, which I am starting to fear I might never leave, and say timidly, ‘I'm going to get up now.'

Montana turns on her heels and walks back upstairs. I raise myself very slowly as though I am under arrest. ‘Thank you,' I
say to her departing shadow, then I creep back into bed with Marley and stare in horror at the ceiling. I feel, not for the first time in my life, like a doormat. Every time I close my eyes I see the glow of her golden hair.

How could Montana be the child of Marley? The mother. God, the mother must be Claudia Schiffer. The abs-of-steel yogi. The businesswoman beauty. A tear slides down my face and settles in the dip of my collarbone. Marley turns over and puts his arm around my waist, his head on my chest.

‘I love you, baby,' he murmurs. I don't know if he's thinking about me or Montana. Me. Me. It has to be me. Montana, I assure myself, is no baby. It's hard to believe she ever was. I picture her, wrapped in a blanket and cradled in Marley's arms, saying, ‘I would like a plum. I would like it sliced.'

I lay awake the rest of the night and creep out at seven as we had planned. I hail a cab back to my place and crawl into bed. I wake up at three in the afternoon, confused and heavyheaded. That night I go out dancing with Vicki. We had planned it a week earlier and I can't get out of it. When I see how she is dressed, I wish I had tried harder. She is wearing ballet slippers, a tutu, and a white mohair sweater, her hair filled with tiny barrettes from the drugstore. She hops and skips past the velvet rope, and then she hops and skips on the dance floor, then some fool hoists her up and she hops and skips on the podium.

Montana would eat her for breakfast, I think darkly. I have on red lipstick even though I'm not single. In the bathroom, under the evil fluorescent light, it really does look like blood, dry and morbid. Vicki is peering delightedly at herself in the mirror, putting on more sparkles, rearranging her barrettes. I ask if I can borrow her pearly pink lip gloss and she shrieks, ‘Of course!,' shoving it in my face as though it was a bottle of smelling salts with which she hopes to revive me from a
fainting fit. I edge away from her and wipe off my lipstick. I have to go through a fat wad of tissue to get it to come off. Eventually my lips are bare and I pat them with the cotton-candy gloss. I open my eyes as wide as I can, mimicking the expression that greets me across the desk when I arrive at work each morning. And Vicki has never seen a Shirley Temple movie. Extraordinary.

‘Wow!' says Vicki. ‘You look great! You should always wear your makeup like that!' That ‘always' carries with it so much office gossip and resentment that I wipe the gloss right off and reapply my Cherries. It feels like I am applying a life force. I breathe a sigh of relief.

The whole time I'm out with Vicki I'm thinking, this is time I could be spending with Marley. We wouldn't even have to be doing anything. I'd just rather be lying stock-still watching him breathe in his sleep than in a club full of people I don't know doing dances I can't remember. I get home at 1:00 A.M. but wait up until 2:00 so I can call my dad in England. He is brushing his teeth. I hear him spit and rinse. I hear Mum snoring in the background.

‘I am in love, Papa.'

‘I have been in love with you since 1978.'

‘From the very second I was born?'

‘It's the truth. I lost my parents so young. When I had you, I had a blood relative forever and ever.'

Cradling the phone between my ear and my neck, I wipe my makeup away with a cotton ball. ‘Did you and Mummy want another child?'

Dad closes the bathroom door. ‘I did. She didn't.'

‘She didn't? Was it because of me?'

‘She didn't want to lose her figure,' he whispers.

‘She lost it anyway.'

‘Don't tell her that.'

‘She deserves to have lost it.'

‘Be kind.'

‘Dad, I know, but it's hard. It's really bloody hard sometimes.'

Sometimes when I am trying to think of names it helps to go shopping and look at my makeup out in the world. Every single time I walk through the door of Sephora I get scared that the Grrrl counter will be gone. Then when I see it's still there I get scared to see that exists – living and breathing like a monster come to life. Ah ha, inspiration already: a range of makeup stitched together with nuts and bolts sticking out of the packaging. I'll call the line It Lives! Holly should go for that, even though there aren't any sexual undertones. Oh, wait, all the cleavage in vampire films, the penetration of the teeth puncturing the neck. There
are
undertones. Somehow we could make the lipstick design incorporate cleavage. Although that would make it look even more like a penis. All the better for Holly to brag about.

I have my suspicions about Holly's famed sex life. The giveaway is that she finds novelty sex toys amusing. You know: cakes in the shape of an ejaculating erection, gummy boob candy, flavored condoms. Strippers – she thinks strippers are hilarious and will hire them at the drop of a hat. She sent a ‘cop' to the office for Vicki's birthday not long after I started working at Grrrl. He tried to grind in my lap. I gave him such a fierce look that he backed off. I felt guilty – he was obviously just an unemployed dancer, probably gay too – but I couldn't help it. I found it so depressing, so unfunny and unfun. I
guess Ivy wasn't exactly down with it either. She hid in the bathroom.

I decide to make this a quick trip to Sephora so that I can get back to the office and pitch It Lives!. I'm supposed to start getting bonuses soon, for coming up with ideas for new products, on top of the names. I need those bonuses. Even though I have a real job now, I find myself more broke than I've been in a long time. Unfortunately, I have something in common with Vicki: we are the only two of the Grrrl group who can't call home and ask for a loan. I don't know that I could ever do that anyway. My relationship with Dad is too precious to put him under that kind of pressure.

The girls (and gays) shopping in Sephora seem to be neatly divided into those whose bank is being broken by their purchases and those for whom it is a drop in the ocean. A lemongrass-scented drop in a skin-softening ocean. So what's new on the shelves?

I get pissy at all the new lines that hit the shelves week after week. They pop up like fungi. Something called Pop. One called Pout. Pixi. All such cutesy, cutesy names, all anti-Grrrl ethos. Does that make us special or does it just mean we're out of step? They're pretty and glossy, glittery, glam. Little girls gather around to coo. We've got to get a preteen line on the streets pronto.

Around the corner from Pop, Pixi, and Pout, are Nars and Vincent Longo. Here the
Vogue
girls graze, reading the labels on the backs of the products as though checking the calorie counts. At Shiseido the packaging is sleek and so are the customers, dressed in black pants and crisp white button-downs. At Fresh, naturally slim girls who don't cover their freckles with foundation try fig perfume on the inside of their wrists. I round the corner to our counter, my stomach in knots in case it isn't there anymore. As I do so, I hear braying laughter.

‘Oh, my God, that's too much!'

The Grrrl stand is still there, and picking up and reading the names of the products is a short man, perfectly muscled, with dyed blond hair. He has a face that is one chromosome from handsome but another from simian, like Ben Stiller. He is a small, blond, braying, gay-ing Ben Stiller. He turns to me.

‘Have you seen this?'

‘What?'

‘The name of this face powder is Heroin. And see this lipstick? It's called Ass-Slappin' Pink.' He cannot contain his mirth and hands the lipstick to me so that I can share in the jollity.

‘Actually, I wrote it.'

‘What do you mean, you wrote it?' He puts one tiny hand on a tinier hip. In the other he carries a Magnolia bakery box. ‘I don't understand.'

‘I work at Grrrl. Our office is around the corner. I'm the woman whose job it is to come up with all the names for the makeup.'

‘Shut up!' He shoves me in the collarbone. ‘You are a genius!' People turn to look. I do a small wave. ‘A genius!' he continues. ‘I'm such a huge fan! I stop by here every week to see what new names you've come up with. Here, take my card.'

I look at it: David Consuela Cohen.

‘Awesome. Well, I'd better get back to work,' I say graciously.

‘But I want to take you to dinner.' He whines the offer as though he's asking to be allowed one more hour of TV.

‘Today?'

‘Not now, silly billy. Sometime soon. I'm only in town for the week. I live in Los Angeles.'

He pronounces ‘Los Angeles' with a Spanish accent that comes out of nowhere.

‘What do you think I do for a living? Go on, guess. No, I want you to guess!' He moves one hand up and down his tight green T-shirt, at the breast of which I notice the Vivienne Westwood insignia. His jeans have at least sixteen pockets.

A clown? A go-go dancer? An extra from Deee-Lite's ‘Groove Is in the Heart' video?

‘I don't know.'

‘I'm a fashion publicist, silly! I represent Petro Zillia, Imitation of Christ, and Miss Sixty. Among others. Do you need representation?'

‘Oh, no, it's okay, we do it all in-house. Vicki Arden.'

‘Ugh. That stunted little bitch. Excuse me.'

‘You're excused.'

‘What I mean is, do
you
need representation?'

‘Me. What for?'

‘I could get you a spread in
Interview. Paper's
“50 Most Beautiful.” You're a cutie!'

‘Thank you.'

‘You'd look great in Petro Zillia.'

I have no idea what this looks like. ‘Thank you?'

‘Listen. I want to get back to the showroom and send you some stuff. To keep. For free.'

‘Okay. Thanks.' I hand him my card.

‘What size are you?'

‘A six or an eight.'

‘Oh. We generally only carry a four. But I'll see what I can do. Shoe size?'

‘Eight.'

‘That I can. do. Ooh! The woman who makes up the names for Grrrl. What a thrill!'

‘Bye.' I back out of the store slowly, facing him, as you're supposed to when being menaced by a shark. He turns away
from me and goes back to picking up the makeup and screeching with laughter.

When I get back to the office, Vicki and Ivy are at the conference table eating pizza. After all this time it still smells vaguely of paint. I don't know how anyone can eat in there. Vicki has taken two slices of pepperoni and added a raspberry licorice to make a happy face on the pie. Ivy is mopping the pizza grease up with a napkin before she eats her slice.

‘What are you doing?' I ask incredulously. ‘Are you … are you dieting?'

‘No!' she says defensively.

‘Okay.' I throw my hands up. ‘Where's Holly? I have a great idea. No. Wait. I just had another. I have two great ideas.'

‘No clue. She was supposed to be back here at one-thirty. We have a conference call to Paris at two o'clock.'

Speak of the devil, Holly swans through the doors as though entering a saloon. Although there's just one door, she pushes it as though it's divided into two. She's wearing a sheer white blouse beneath which her lacy cream bra is clearly visible. She has on gold vertiginously high heels with a diamond ankle bracelet. Uncharacteristically, her linen skirt is wrinkled.