Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [111]
Ainsley pawed through them. “No,” she said, with the decisiveness of someone who really knew. “These won’t do. I’ve got a pair that’ll work, though.” After a search which involved much rustling in drawers and overturning of things on the bureau, she produced a couple of chunky dangly gold objects, which she screwed to Marian’s ears. “That’s better,” she said. “Now smile.”
Marian smiled, weakly.
Ainsley shook her head. “Your hair’s okay,” she said, “but really you’d better let me do your face for you. You’ll never manage it by yourself. You’d just do it in your usual skimpy way and come out looking like a kid playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.”
She wadded Marian into her chair, which was lumpy with garments in progressive stages of dirtiness, and tucked a towel around her neck. “I’ll do your nails first so they can be drying,” she said, adding while she began to file them, “looks like you’ve been biting them.” When the nails had been painted a shimmering off-white and Marian was holding her hands carefully in the air, she went to work on Marian’s face, using mixtures and instruments from the jumble of beauty aids that covered her dressing table.
During the rest of the procedure, while strange things were being done to her skin, then to each eye and each eyebrow, Marian sat passively, marvelling at the professional efficiency with which Ainsley was manipulating her features. It reminded her of the mothers backstage at public-school plays, making up their precocious daughters. She had only a fleeting thought about germs.
Finally Ainsley took a lipstick brush and painted the mouth with several coats of glossy finish. “There,” she said, holding a hand-mirror so that Marian could see herself. “That’s better. But be careful till the eyelash glue is dry.”
Marian stared into the Egyptian-lidded and outlined and thickly-fringed eyes of a person she had never seen before. She was afraid even to blink, for fear that this applied face would crack and flake with the strain. “Thank you,” she said doubtfully.
“Now smile,” said Ainsley.
Marian smiled.
Ainsley frowned. “Not like that,” she said. “You’ve got to throw yourself into it more. Sort of droop your eyelids.”
Marian was embarrassed: she didn’t know how. She was experimenting, looking in the mirror, trying to find out which particular set of muscles would produce the desired effect, and had just succeeded in getting an approximate droop that still however had a suggestion of squint in it, when they heard footsteps ascending the stairs; and a moment later the lady down below stood in the doorway, breathing heavily.
Marian removed the towel from her neck and stood up. Now that she had got her eyelids drooped she could not immediately get them undrooped again, back to their usual capable and level width. It was going to be impossible in this red dress and this face to behave with the ordinary matter-of-fact politeness that the situation was going to require.
The lady down below gasped a little when she saw Marian’s new ensemble – bare arms and barish dress and well-covered face – but her real target was Ainsley, who stood bare-footed in her slip with one eye black-ringed and her auburn hair tendrilling over her shoulders.
“Miss Tewce,” the lady down below began. She was still wearing her tea dress and her pearls: she was going to attempt dignity. “I have waited until I am perfectly calm to speak to you. I don’t want any unpleasantness, I’ve always tried to avoid scenes and unpleasantness, but now I’m afraid you’ll have to go.” She was not at all calm: her voice was trembling. Marian noticed that she was clenching a lace handkerchief in one hand. “The drinking was bad enough, I know all those bottles were yours, I’m sure Miss MacAlpin never drank, not more than one should” – her eyes flicked again over Marian’s dress; her