Cherries In The Snow (2 page)

Holly was always like that. Some people are just wired that way. And it always made me feel slightly inadequate. I know she has this soft heart, but she has such an amazing front, it just dazzles you. I mean, Holly wore a black sequined cape to her mother's funeral. Between hymns I couldn't stop thinking,
‘Holly is wearing a cape to her mum's funeral. Why is Holly wearing a cape?' We never quite got her back. I still treasure my browny orange Kanebo from Holly's mother. One day I will give it to Holly. I have been too afraid to put it on. It sits on my self-assembled little altar in my bedroom over the fireplace I've never used. I light the candles at night, pray, and put on my Piglet. This is by Hard Candy, a lip stain. I wake up looking like I have been biting my lips. It's a meditation before I tuck away all worldly thoughts and climb into my goose-down bed.

‘Put on your Piglet.'

I look in the mirror and say it again. ‘Put on your Piglet.' It means something although I'm not quite sure what. My real lip color is long gone, the way other people no longer know their own hair color. I think it was kind of reddish naturally. So now it's just more red.

When I am in a relationship, I don't wear lipstick at all. I hate the smearing, the retouching, the constant throb of phoniness as you surreptitiously check the damage in your compact between kisses. I wear lots of mascara to compensate, different colors so I don't get bored. When I am about to break up with a guy, he has full warning because I start wearing lipstick again. I only wear matte lipstick in the red and pink color range: a good deep hot pink works well, none of that pale pink glisteny goo that makes me think of porn stars and infected vaginas. Your lips are supposed to make men think of your vaginal lips, inflamed with desire. But the way women plump their mouths now, it looks like their lips are giving birth. Lipstick doesn't have to make your mouth look bigger. It's all about the color and the shape. A graphic pink can be nice, but a World War II landgirl red is my favorite. I've been planning my pitch for a landgirl range. I hate pitching my ideas to my friends, but I have to. Grrrl cosmetics is, for better or worse, a democracy.

Vicki doesn't get it. ‘World War Two? That's depressing.'

I sigh. ‘That's when lipstick meant something to women. When it was the one luxury item sent by your sweetheart to uphold your spiritual well-being. There are so many little “necessities” now. The eyebrow gel, the self-tan. But back then, that red lipstick, with the seamed stockings smuggled in from France …'

‘I don't like red,' says Vicki. ‘It's too harsh.'

I ignore her. I am so used to ignoring her that I am astounded when she introduces me as her friend rather than as her colleague, although she only does that when she's drunk at one of the parties we throw from time to time. Our parties are the stuff of legend, so say the papers; Vicki gets them to say that. ‘Dahling,' she says on the phone, and I want to scream, ‘They can't see batted lashes over the phone!' ‘Dahling,' she continues, ‘I'll see if I can get you in, of course I'd love you to be there, but it will be tough,' or ‘No problemo!' And she winks – they can't see you! ‘It's done. Ciao!'

Our last theme was ‘The Devil Inside,' everyone with devil horns and neat little pinstripe suits. Holly actually had her pantsuit cut so that part of her ass was showing as her prosthetic forked tail popped out. Of course her suit was so expertly tailored that somehow, somehow it passed for class. Ivy stood to the side, then got drunk and sang and danced way too loud until I took her home. I didn't mind getting out of there: too many starlets and lawyers. Truly the red devil theme was rendered redundant by the crowd.

Vicki is the one who's good with the press and marketing, who can chat up the lawyers and starlets just right. Vicki is the one whose picture made the paper the next day, next to Holly's. ‘The hot girls behind hot Grrrl,' said the caption. Yeah, Vicki is the prettiest, no question. But Holly is the most stunning. Five foot three, with eyes flashing amber against her
dark skin, she looks like a convenient serving size of Catherine Zeta-Jones, only covered in tattoos. Not covered: her face, neck, and legs are bare; rather, she is dusted with them. The tattoos fall in the right places like an erotic scent. They settle there at the base of her spine, her shoulders, her pubic bone.

Holly and Vicki make a cute couple in the photo.

Ivy and I were out of the party and so we were out of the photo. I minded, just a little bit. I had spent a long time on my spangly red corset and on getting my hair the right shade of wash-in wash-out red. It didn't really wash out and I was left with cotton-candy-pink clumps for a month. It looked nice with my red mouth.

‘It's so hard,' went on Vicki, ‘a red mouth.'

‘Not if you know how to do it properly,' I tut.

‘I meant …'

‘I know what you meant.'

For the record, here's how to do it properly: To start, pick the right shade. Blue-reds make your teeth look whiter, but they also make your skin paler too. Browny brick-reds flatter olive and black skin, but bear in mind that the darker your lipstick, the more sparingly you should apply it. My favorites: Earnest by Delux, Cranberry Lemonade by Fresh, Black Honey by Clinique, Cherries in the Snow by Revlon, and, of course, Grrrl's own Literary Lolita. Absolutely avoid lip liner – it never fails to bleed until you're left with a circle and no lipstick. So just use lipstick, but not with a lip brush and certainly, most certainly, not from a tube. You dab it onto your finger, then dab it onto your mouth, blot twice, and do it again. Then you use the lip brush just to get the corners, to get the Cupid's bow exactly right.

When you wear red lipstick, especially red lipstick that's taken ten minutes to apply, you don't want to kiss lest you rub it off. I swear to God, I think I sabotage my relationships
because I miss the red mouth so much. Without it, I feel like I am losing me. There are those kiss-proof lipsticks, but they make your mouth feel so dry that you wouldn't want to kiss. They feather around the middle and bleed in the corners. That's what they look like: dried blood. In my goth phase I would have loved those, but they weren't on the market then and I haven't listened to the Cure since I was fifteen.

Ah, Robert Smith, with his black mascara and squiggly red slash. How I loved him. I shake myself from my reverie and resolve to screw the Grrrl democracy and come back to the landgirl line with Holly in private.

Vicki is stretching to stay awake, still flicking through
Allure
. ‘ “A war rages,” ' she reads aloud. ‘ “Does black mascara make your eyes look smaller or bigger?” '

‘Oh,' I say with a sigh, ‘
that
war.'

Sometimes I long to be back in college, trapped in an unwinnable discussion about Sartre. I used to lie awake at night and cry because I didn't write ‘The Raven' by Edgar Allan Poe. Now I catch myself holding back tears because I didn't think of Piglet by Hard Candy. Of course I know the answer, so I raise my hand.

‘Here's the deal: With a light touch it makes them bigger, but you can only do one layer. Green and blue are excellent, aubergine too. Avoid brown, a mistake I made for years, which rather than making them look natural, brings out all the red in the whites of your eyes.'

‘I thought brown mascara was our big push for fall,' says Ivy. It's true, I couldn't understand why we were bothering with a brown mascara, but I was thrilled with the name I came up with: Sexy Rabbi. Ivy rolls the tube back and forth in front of her. ‘Where does that leave us?'

‘With a bunch of piggy-eyed followers.' Holly snorts.

Holly can be callous about our devoted customers. She
thinks they're all crazy to use our jaundicing products. She only uses Nars herself. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom although I don't need to go. I just need to stand in front of the mirror and be alone with my makeup for a few minutes. I reach into my hand-me-down black Gucci bag with its bamboo handle (Holly left it on my doorstep with a note that said ‘Its life with me is done. Have it if you want.') and pull out my little cotton case, full to bulging with lipsticks way past their sell-by date. You would think that, working with my oldest friends at a cosmetics company, I could apply my lipstick in front of them. But it's like spending the summer at a nudist colony. It makes you long for modesty.

My face is blank and here it comes. The rush of painting it all on. It feels like masturbation. I don't want it to end. Do I think I'm beautiful? No. Do I enjoy my face? Yes. It's the right one for me. It works, like a healthy body. It soothes me when I'm upset. I see my father in my features and I feel better.

Mouth perfect, I blot with tissue paper and drop it into the toilet bowl, watching it float on its back in the water. I leave them everywhere, my lipstick blottings: in my notebooks, on Post-its, all over my receipts. Grrrl made real blotting papers, but I myself didn't use them. They are too much like organized fun.

I walk back into the conference room and Holly is asking: ‘What's all this kohl in the drugstores at the moment? Styli Styl. The ones with the flat angled tips? They're so cheap, but, damn, they do a good job. Do you think we could launch a more expensive one that works less well?'

‘Favored tool of the ancient Egyptians,' says Ivy.

‘A return to old-fashioned values.' I nod.

‘There was a time,' adds Ivy, ‘when women died from wearing makeup. Elizabeth the first got poisoned by her lead-based whitening powder. It ate away at her skin.'

‘Her makeup ate her face?' I gasp. ‘That's one of the most romantic things I've ever heard!'

Ivy is very well read. As a teenager she dropped William Blake like the rest of us dropped Ecstasy. Now her facts come bubbling up and Holly looks at them as if they were farts, embarrassing to her. She turns her head or walks out of the room to get some fresh air, away from Ivy's knowledge. It is something I love about Ivy. It is something that makes me question how Holly and I can be such good friends. It is something that makes me wonder how Ivy can still be with her.

Vicki sides with Holly, nose wrinkled in the air as though she also smells the fart, as though we are uncouth, not them. I can see that though Vicki is straight as a die – she had a parade of winsome one-night stands, she even does Internet dating, proudly, proudly showing us her listing on Friendster, her holographic friends, her holographic love with graphic designers – she is competitive with Ivy for Holly's affection. But Holly is Queen Bitch, and that's all that matters to her.

None of us really adheres to the Grrrl ethos. We tell our followers to look scuzzy, but we aren't going there. We want to look pretty. We want to be fuckable. We want to get work and be loved. Ivy's glitter, nothing else on, the purple discolorations real; Vicki's Edie Sedgwick look, disaster socialite girl from farm girl; my mouth, everything else smoothing the way for that; and Holly's immaculate makeup, flawless skin, glossy mouth, wide eyes.

‘Anything else on the Grrrl agenda? Anything real?' says Ivy.

‘Can I raise an issue?' Vicki answers, and she ever so cutely raises her hand. ‘It's about Sadie's lipstick blottings all over the place. I find them very distracting.'

They are
not
everywhere. Yes, they float in the office toilet bowl like love poems thrown from a bridge to the river. If the markings are not perfect, I crumple them up. When
they are perfect bows, I let them float. It seems a good omen somehow.

‘You find my lipstick blottings distracting?' I look at the hot-pink chairs, the nuclear skyline painted on the wall, the Clash blasting from the surround-sound stereo Ivy blew part of her last trust-fund installment on.

‘This is a makeup company,' says Holly, jumping to my defense because Vicki will never stop being the new kid. Even though I have been with the company mere months …

Holly gathers her notebook and pulls her stiletto-booted feet off the table. The boots go all the way up her legs, stopping at her thighs just beneath her hot pants. They are ridiculous. A fisherman/hooker. She makes them look great.

‘Oh, yeah,' she says as she pulls her hair into a clip, ‘Isaac called.'

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

‘You gonna call him back?' she asks casually.

‘Fuck, no!'

But the truth is, I don't know.

‘Yes, you are.'

I point at the fruit I bought for breakfast. ‘It depends. Is this a mango or a papaya?'

Holly rolls her eyes. Marine Escort, a Fresh eye powder now discontinued, flutters from her lashes to her cheekbones. ‘You eat it all the time. How can you not know the name of your favorite fruit?'

‘That isn't good, is it?'

Isaac Isaac Isaac. The man with the biblical name who gave me the twenty-first-century computer on which I cannot write.

Isaac and I met in the parking lot at a Springsteen show. I couldn't find my car or my purpose and had intended to ask Springsteen to help me, at least with the latter, but I was seated so far away from the stage, I could barely see the Boss over the Earth's curve. Isaac, being who he is, had the best seat in the house.

‘Have you ever been to Elaine's?' asked Isaac, from the backseat of a shared limo into Manhattan, my ears still ringing from Springsteen's third encore. I couldn't remember where I'd left my car and Isaac persuaded me to leave it there and go with him. ‘Oh, you must have dinner at Elaine's. I'll take you.'

What I should have said then, what I realize now is: If I had wanted to go to Elaine's, I would have already gone. There were any number of middle-aged suitors who would have taken me.

When I met him, I was still working reception at the Crunch gym on Lafayette. Men there tried to pick me up because I was so unworked out, so uninterested in triceps, biceps, and quads, my soft arms writing down credit-card numbers and handing out locker keys with a barely disguised sneer. Seeing me amid all those aspiring hard-body actresses was, I guess, like going to Sweden and seeing an ugly person. Their interest was captured. But I rarely returned it.