Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [33]
When Cherylanne is done, I have to sit up straight while she takes my picture. She always takes pictures of her work. She keeps them in a special scrapbook decorated with pictures of makeup products: compacts and lipsticks and creams and blush and brushes and pencils float across the cover. So far I am her only customer. I wonder who she will do when I move, and the question is like a pin in the balloon.
“Okay, you can turn around and look,” she says. Well, I have on two-tone green eyeshadow and bright-red lipstick. My eyebrows are black and long as the Mississippi. My blusher looks like a twin slap. Obviously, Cherylanne is having an off day.
“Well,” I say. “It’s good.” One. “I really like the dark-green color.” Two. “I could pass for twenty.” Three. And then, I can’t help it, I say, “But I sort of look like a stop-and-go light.”
“Well,” she says, “you don’t know fashion at all. This is the English look, and it’s very popular.” She begins untying her robe, the flush of her displeasure moving into her cheeks. “Whether you can appreciate it or not,” she says, a little under her breath like she is having a conversation with herself, “I have a real gift. I can bring out the best in everyone. I do my mother’s makeup every time she needs to look good.”
“I didn’t say you don’t,” I say. “I know you’re good. Just, sometimes I have to get used to it.”
She is on her bed, looking away from me. Then, turning back, she says, “I mean, look at those spit curls. Exactly alike.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s what I mean. I know you’re good.”
She is silent, staring now at her feet. White sneakers, yellow pom-poms on them. Then she looks up and asks me, “Do you think you’ll ever come back here?”
I wait a while, then tell her what I know is the truth. No. We don’t do that ever, go back. You remember a place for a while, and then it fades like you’re going blind, and then you start making it up. You know you’re getting things wrong, but you make it up to not lose it all. And it’s like the places want to try, too. They jump into your head, a scene every now and then, like the too-bright light of a camera: your hallway, here, flash: don’t forget. The line of bushes in your front yard, here, flash: don’t forget. All of it fails. All of it fades.
“Well,” Cherylanne sighs. “Do you want some angel food cake?” Sometimes it seems to me that the only thing in the world is people just trying.
We are in Cherylanne’s bed, our voices drunk sounding, showing how near to sleep we are. “The man puts it in the hole and moves it around,” Cherylanne is patiently explaining. “When he does it long enough, sperm sprays out. And that’s what makes the baby.”
“That makes me puke,” I say.
There is a long pause, and after a yawn Cherylanne says, “Sex is a beautiful mystery you can’t understand until you do it with the one you love.”
Well, it sounds to me like the man has all the fun. The woman must just lie there, thinking about what to make for dinner the next day, and the man moves it around until he gets some sperm out, which, according to everything, he enjoys quite a lot. And all this done pure naked, everything hanging out and unprotected! How would you ever be comfortable? How could you not be embarrassed forever? And then the next morning, the man right there, knowing everything that happened the night before.
“Do you really think you’ll like it?” I ask. “Marybeth Harris says it hurts like crazy for the woman. Her cousin did it and told her everything. She bled from down there, and it wasn’t the curse, it was just from getting hurt!” Silence. “Can you imagine?”
Nothing. I rise up on one elbow,