My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [51]
I don’t need a trainer right now; I need an esthetician.
And a dermatologist.
I peer at myself more closely.
And a cosmetic dentist.
And a hairdresser.
I glance over at the pile of discarded dresses behind me.
And possibly a seamstress.
As soon as I put all my clothes away, I sat down with my address book and began making calls and booking appointments. I figured that anything I got done would need time to settle in, so I planned a solid week of beauty rivaling anything you’d see on the now-defunct Extreme Makeover .102 Granted, my “journey” didn’t include a team of therapists standing behind me spouting positive affirmations because really? I already know I’m worth it. Also? No knives. I’m far too young103 for anything requiring stitches or general anesthesia.
My rigorous week of beauty boot camp is over and now I have six throbbing red bulges in my forehead from Botox. My lip’s not only inflated as big as the twelve-foot rigid raft I’d so admired, but also severely bruised from Restylane injections.
When I woke up this morning, Fletch actually screamed when he saw me. And then Maisy jumped out of bed and hid when she heard him because she hates conflict, so I had to give her all kinds of love and encouragement to coax her out of the closet. And then I saw myself and screamed and Maisy hid all over again.
The bruise starts out all purple and blue at the upper inner tube presently taking the place of my lip and has blossomed to the exact size of a fist across the right side of my face. The contusion begins to yellow about halfway up because I got injections in the nasal-labial folds around my mouth, too.
In the unbruised parts, my face is like corduroy, with alternating red and white stripes running up and down from microdermabrasion. Normally my skin isn’t so sensitive, but my face was terribly tender from having my mouth pried open for so many hours earlier in the week, first for the tooth bleaching and then with the new veneers. By the way, I can only drink room-temperature liquids at the moment, and I have to breathe through my nose because my gums are the consistency of a flank steak.
Did I mention the hair? My tour is eighties-themed, so I had hair extensions put in to better embody that time period. What I didn’t realize is that for the first week, all five hundred individual extensions feel like grains of wild rice digging into my scalp and that it will hurt so much, sleep’s pretty much impossible. So, even though I haven’t actually been given two black eyes, the deep, exhausted shadows replicate them nicely. Couple that with the eyeball redness and lid irritation stemming from the prescription lash-growing medicine I’ve been applying, and there’s officially not one part of me from the chin up that’s better than when I started.
Suddenly having strangers wondering if I’d put on a few pounds doesn’t seem so bad.
You know what? This is exactly why producers made all The Swan ugly ducks live in apartments without mirrors during their treatments. I’m seriously hideous right now. What’s funny is I wanted the enhancements to make me all pretty and polished and Real Housewives, and instead I’m much more scabby and bruised and Flavor of Love. Argh.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the dealership today,” Fletch says, wincing every time his eyes light upon me. “We could wait until you’re less”—he waves his hand across his face—“whatever you call this.” He doesn’t say “terrifying”; he doesn’t have to.
“Are you kidding me?” I say. “We must go. Next weekend will be too late.” Today we plan to trade in the ten-year-old, dented, Maisy-scented104 SUV that I’m stuck driving, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m getting my first car. I mean, yeah, I’ve had a license for twenty-four years and I’ve owned plenty of other automobiles, but I’ve never once been the one to decide what I’ve gotten. The locus of control went straight from my dad to my husband.
Okay, technically I never actually wanted