Sheer, page 7
Day Three
Morning
Between typing sessions, I’ve been keeping up my daily skin-care regimen. Baggy cashmere sweatpants may have replaced my custom-tailored suits, but my face still gleams like a nominated actress’s cheeks at the Oscars. First comes my cream face wash laced with glycolic acid to annihilate any signs of fine lines, sunspots, and uneven texture. Next is a toner with lactic acid, another exfoliant, to brighten my epidermis and prime it to receive the potent vitamin C serum that I pat on afterward. It’s a little oily, that serum, and it smells horrific, like hot dog water, not that I’ve ever stuck my nose in the belly of a street vendor’s cart. That vitamin C destroys free radicals, though, and I can’t have those things damaging my complexion. Moisturizer comes after the vitamin C; I use a luscious cream infused with marine algae. Sunblock is the penultimate step, even when I don’t leave the house. The final touch is a tightening eye potion, to give the appearance of eight hours of sleep, as I haven’t enjoyed eight hours of consecutive sleep since high school.
I am tapping that potion beneath my eyes when I see it. Her toothbrush. It’s hot pink with white ribbing and the blue line across its bristles is nearly worn down. It leans against the side of its plastic cup, staring at me, judging me. I don’t know how I missed it until now. I guess I’ve been distracted—by the present or the past, I’m not sure.
Despite the faded blue line, the brush’s bristles are perfect, like her face. Small and tidy and immaculately clean. I can remember when I gave her the toothbrush. This was about two years ago now, in 2013. I wrapped it for her, like it was a gift. It was a joke, of course. A toothbrush isn’t a present, it’s a necessity. And yet it gave me pleasure to offer her this object. It’s the only thing of hers in this whole apartment, the lone physical sign that she was ever here.
I pluck her toothbrush out of the cup, hold it an inch from my lips, and try to breathe in her scent. Then I stick it in my mouth.
It tastes like minty paste, of course, and New York City tap water. I swear I taste her, too, as I run those bristles across my teeth. I imagine that the bristles’ scratchy roughness is her tongue, that she is licking my mouth clean. At first, sweetness consumes me as I think of her powdery essence, her delicacy, the way she looked at me with her tapered brown eyes. Then I remember her darkness, how she cast me aside and punished me in the worst way possible. All that sweetness on my tongue pickles into something vinegary and sharp. I spit her toothbrush out. I nearly throw it in the trash, but I am not quite ready for that, so I place it back in its cup and rinse my mouth out with cold water.
The eye potion is dry. Its effect is difficult to discern. Bluish dark circles still hang beneath my eyes. Every morning, I tap this stuff on, with a mixture of determination and hope. Hours later, I undo that work with a night of insomnia. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling as my mind churns and churns on Ellen and Amanda and the Board and the wreckage that my world has become. My life used to sparkle with possibility; now it is unrecognizable, so much so that I can’t tell if I still exist. Maybe I don’t want my dark circles to disappear. Maybe I need them to stick around. The truth is these dark circles are a symbol of time passing. They’re like her toothbrush—a physical sign that I am here.
Caroline Part One
Ambition, not insomnia, was behind the dark circles of my college years. Early 1990s New York was a stark and welcome departure from Paramus. Cafés, bars, and vintage clothing stores were everywhere you looked, their colorful neon signage a beacon of promise. My fellow classmates clomped around in distressed jeans and chunky rubber-soled boots and cropped baby tees, their eyebrows pin thin, their lips clay brown. Minimalism was the skin ideal. Faces were astringent bare. Grunge made a play for attention: flannel tied around waists, layered hair unwashed for days, the edges of eyes dark and tightlined and smudged. You were supposed to be clean and scruffy, to appear like you didn’t care, in a way that required considerable effort. Beauty and fashion embodied many contradictions.
Washington Square was a study in contrasts, too. It was a hub of caffeinated meetups and clandestine beer-sipping from brown paper bags that clashed with the verdancy of its vegetation, the gentle trickle of its central fountain. On any given walk, you could hear birds chirping and hungover teenagers groaning. Romance and seediness commingled in a way that I have never found in any other city. To my underdeveloped brain, the strain of danger only amplified the city’s illicit allure.
That first semester of college, I didn’t have time to loll around Washington Square. I was too busy juggling boring Econ and the Art of Communication classes with my Macy’s job. The store was an easy subway ride from NYU’s campus. I would exit the station and emerge into Herald Square, a blunt triangle of urban real estate overwhelmed with pedestrians. Men and women in suits, some of them clutching briefcases, strode toward their office buildings. Unlike in Paramus, where everyone strolled with purposeful leisure, a sense that they didn’t have anywhere else to be, in New York people sprinted, like metal balls shot out of a cannon. Within weeks of moving to New York, I, too, could sideswipe, tail, and cut off slower pedestrians like a veteran.
A billboard faced Macy’s when I first started working there. It featured a blond, blue-eyed woman and an African American woman with short hair holding an Asian baby, the three of them seemingly naked and wrapped in a pink-and-green blanket. I would stare at this fashion brand’s ad and wonder about the story behind this trio. The two women looked directly at the camera. Their gazes were unapologetic, almost challenging, as though daring passersby to question their arrangement.
The implied intimacy between these women gave me hope. Fashion campaigns are inherently aspirational, after all. The racial dynamics, though, confused me. A white woman and an African American woman with an Asian baby—how would that happen? Interracial couples were still not common, let alone a same-sex interracial couple with a baby of a third race. The people around me in New York were certainly more diverse than in Paramus, but this ad seemed to take things beyond the point of possibility.
One morning at work, I was washing some makeup brushes with baby shampoo, caressing their wet, sudsy bristles before placing them, one at a time, on a towel I had laid out as a drying surface. Crystal, the ringleader of my coworkers, was at another station in our area talking a brassy redhead into purchasing a trio of eye shadows that would make her look possessed. As I glanced up from my makeshift drying situation, I locked eyes, momentarily, with a woman striding through the bustling aisles and directly toward my counter. She had thick, straight hair the color of mahogany and smooth, tan skin that gleamed with health. If you’d given me a pushpin and asked me to stick it on a globe to signify her place of origin, I likely would have dumped it somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and prayed it made landfall.
As she drew nearer, I ran my hands down the sides of my pencil skirt, flattening them instinctively. There was an involuntary tightening in my rib cage, like something was pushing to escape and I was forced to hold it in. This woman’s face was unlined, but her bearing gestured at a maturity well beyond youth. She was directly in front of me now, the counter the only barrier between us. Her lips parted in a playful smile and her light brown eyes bore into me.
“Maxine, is it?” she said, glancing at my name tag, which was pinned mere inches from my right nipple.
“Yes,” I practically stuttered.
She smiled again at my obvious nervousness. Her lips were pillowy. I could barely tear my eyes from them.
“I was hoping you could help me. I’m in desperate need of another one of these.” She extended one of the brand’s lipstick tubes in my direction.
I leaned closer to read the label.
“Satin Persuasion. That’s one of our most popular ones.”
“Is it? That’s a shame. I thought I was too original to be popular.”
The exchange between Ted and Christine from senior year flickered before me. Sexual innuendo, I had learned, was the best way to convince a customer of her beauty. I didn’t have the freedom Ted did to be so blatant with women, not unless I was certain my words would be well received, and experience suggested they wouldn’t be.
I offered this customer a tentative grin. “I’m sure you’re very original.”
“How kind of you to say.”
The woman scanned my torso and hips and I warmed under her attention. Beads of sweat dotted my hairline.
“Let me get that lipstick for you, I’ll be right back.”
I crouched down to search through the cabinet. Lipstick was a reliable bestseller for every line. It was a staple for most women that defied economic downturns and flash-in-the-pan trends. One of the top brands in recent memory had started with only ten lipsticks; two years later it was everywhere. I hadn’t been exaggerating Satin Persuasion’s popularity. Its rust-brown color hit a sweet spot between neutral and smoldering, and it had been a nonstop hit since it was released a couple of years back. We were out, of course; we could barely keep it in stock. I stood up empty-handed.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “We don’t have any left. If you want to give me your name and number, I’d be happy to call you when more come in.”
“That would be great.”
I handed her a pad and pen and watched her write her information. She held the pen delicately but firmly. I wondered what that same grip could do to my body.
“Here you go.”
Caroline Walters. That didn’t help my pushpin placement one bit.
“Thanks for your help, Maxine.”
“Max,” I said. “People call me Max.”
“Do they? Well, Max, feel free to use that number to call me when you get it in—or even before then.”
Had I heard her correctly? Sensing my confusion, she continued, “Since you couldn’t take care of my initial request, not that it’s your fault, perhaps you could make it up to me with a drink. On me.”
A tickle began in the depths of my stomach and spread to the rest of my organs. My field of vision blurred at the edges. It was as if someone else had wrested control of my body’s remote and was pressing random buttons with glee. Get ahold of yourself, Max, I thought. This woman wants to have a drink with you.
“That sounds nice,” I said, intent on understatement.
“How about tomorrow?” Caroline asked. “Unless you have plans with someone else.”
The next day was Friday. I usually spent those evenings sipping grain alcohol on the fringe of some dorm party. These forays always ended early, either with me in my twin bed beside Jeannette’s empty one or worse, in the hallway, a pink ribbon tied around our doorknob. My only sexual experience was in the vivid onanistic fantasies that had begun in my teens. Here I had a real-live woman beyond my most hyperbolic imaginings asking me for a drink. I did not have plans with anyone.
“I’m free. Just let me know where and when.”
“The bar at the Plaza Hotel, eight p.m.”
“See you there.”
Caroline flashed her full-lipped smile and strode away.
I wasn’t sure if Caroline’s overture had been a proper come-on or merely an act of politeness. Perhaps she had taken pity on my inadequate salesmanship. Luckily, Crystal cleared up any uncertainty. She sidled over, glanced pointedly in the direction in which Caroline had walked, then turned back to me.
“Daddy got you this job, right?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“My boss told me we hired you because your dad called in a favor. What is he, some corner office dude?”
“He’s an accountant,” I said.
“An accountant.” Crystal looked me dead in the eye. “Does Daddy the accountant know his darling girl is a dyke?”
Needles of cold pricked my skin.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell,” she continued, and smirked at my lack of reply. “So long as you don’t give me a reason to.”
Then she brushed past me, purposely butting my shoulder.
People in my adult life—straight people—have asked me, “Why aren’t you out professionally? It’s 2015. Who cares?” A lot of people still care, in fact. And they certainly cared back then. They cared enough to threaten you with discrimination or much, much worse. That fashion ad I walked by every morning wasn’t aspirational—it was delusional. While I would never change my sexuality, I can’t pretend that it hasn’t been a liability and I refuse to make myself vulnerable to others. Crystal taught me that crucial lesson at a young age: if you don’t want to get punched, don’t lower your fists.
The way I saw it, Crystal’s remark gave me two choices. I could stick around and be her sucker or I could quit. Later that day, I called my dad from the phone in my dorm room to tell him the news.
“Maxine, I pulled real strings to get you that job. I can’t believe you quit. How does that make me look?”
I twirled the gray cord of the phone’s handset around my left wrist so tightly, it started to cut off the circulation to my hand.
“I know, Dad. I’m really sorry.”
“Are you at least going to tell me why?”
My left hand was getting paler and paler. It was starting to lose feeling. I wished I could tell him the truth, that my coworker had discovered my liability and threatened me with it. If I told him, her threat would lose its power.
I remembered that middle school meal at the Automat, how my mother’s disgust had chased away those two women while my dad sat there silent. Had his wordlessness been a form of agreement with my mother? Or had it been an unspoken disapproval of her reaction?
“It wasn’t the right fit,” I said, employing a phrase I had once overheard my mother say to my father as explanation for ditching his coworker’s wife’s bridge club.
“You’re nineteen. That’s not for you to decide.”
“I promise I’ll find another job.”
“Maxine, if you’re serious about this whole beauty thing, then act like you’re serious about it. I’m giving you a chance to see how it’s done working for the best brand in the world.”
The best brand in the world that couldn’t make foundation look good on fifty percent of the women who walked into Macy’s. Some experts they were.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
A few more rounds of apology later, my dad and I said our goodbyes. I unwound the cord from my wrist and watched as my flaccid hand turned pink with the rush of fresh blood.
* * *
—
The evening of my drinks with Caroline, I contemplated my reflection in the dorm room mirror. It was barely tall and wide enough to frame my entire body: long, pale legs; bony, narrow hips; a chest that couldn’t fill out an A-cup bra. I didn’t know much about New York’s upper echelons back then, still I was wise enough to realize that wearing jeans to the Plaza Hotel was not a great idea. I had one black dress with me. My mother had purchased it over the summer and thrown it into my suitcase for school, so I had “something to wear on a date with a nice boy,” as she had put it. Well, I was going to wear it on what appeared to be a date, so I guess I was meeting her halfway.
The dress was modest in length. It hit an inch above my kneecaps. The neckline swooped down beneath my clavicle and the arms had cap sleeves. It was nothing I ever would have chosen for myself, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
My hair had darkened in young adulthood to an ashy-blond shade that played off the depth of my brown eyes. I had added light drama with a thin line of chocolate next to my upper and lower lashes that I smudged with a cotton swab. I’d rubbed a peachy lipstick into my cheeks and had coated my lips with a clear balm before daubing a bit of the same lipstick on them. Then I’d blotted my lips lightly with a tissue to make the color appear like it had partially worn off.
One afternoon, I had caught some warm whiffs of a girl in my Econ class and had asked her what she was wearing. She had pointed me in the direction of a little shop in the Village that sold essential oils. I had purchased a vial of musk, a few drops of which I dotted behind my ears and on my neck. My skin tingled beneath the fragrant oil.
I rode the subway up from Washington Square and arrived at the Plaza Hotel ten minutes early. The bar’s absurdly wealthy patrons were too intimidating, so I lurked outside near the entrance. A light November breeze raised the hairs on my arms, or maybe it was the prospect of seeing Caroline. It occurred to me then that she had no idea how old I was. Because of my height and the way I carried myself, I was often mistaken for someone in her mid-twenties. I didn’t know what I would do if the bar’s servers carded me.
Caroline materialized at exactly 8 p.m. If possible, she was even more stunning than she had been the previous afternoon. A black, satiny camisole with a lace inset at the bust clung to her torso. Slim black cigarette pants with sharp creases down the front were crisp on her legs. Her shiny hair was pulled back into a low ponytail.
“How polite of you to wait outside for me,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure where you’d want to sit,” I tried.
With a wry smile, she pulled the door open.
“You look amazing, by the way,” she whispered as she walked into the bar ahead of me. A lush, floral scent trailed in her wake.
Two rounds of double whiskeys later, we were at Caroline’s sprawling Flatiron District loft and she was telling me, again, how amazing I looked as she unzipped me out of my black dress, kissed me deeply, and ran her hands up the insides of my thighs. By the time her hands reached their intended destination, my skin screamed with anticipation. She maneuvered me across her dark apartment, navigating around dining chairs and sofas, then pushed me onto her bed, removed my underwear, and took my virginity along with it.
Afterward, we lay sprawled on Caroline’s bed. Her sheets were as powdery soft as the skin on the small of her back, whose mesmerizing curve I ran my fingers across, back and forth, back and forth like a pendulum. In the flickering light from the votive candles Caroline had lit, her skin had the rich glow of polished wood.
Morning
Between typing sessions, I’ve been keeping up my daily skin-care regimen. Baggy cashmere sweatpants may have replaced my custom-tailored suits, but my face still gleams like a nominated actress’s cheeks at the Oscars. First comes my cream face wash laced with glycolic acid to annihilate any signs of fine lines, sunspots, and uneven texture. Next is a toner with lactic acid, another exfoliant, to brighten my epidermis and prime it to receive the potent vitamin C serum that I pat on afterward. It’s a little oily, that serum, and it smells horrific, like hot dog water, not that I’ve ever stuck my nose in the belly of a street vendor’s cart. That vitamin C destroys free radicals, though, and I can’t have those things damaging my complexion. Moisturizer comes after the vitamin C; I use a luscious cream infused with marine algae. Sunblock is the penultimate step, even when I don’t leave the house. The final touch is a tightening eye potion, to give the appearance of eight hours of sleep, as I haven’t enjoyed eight hours of consecutive sleep since high school.
I am tapping that potion beneath my eyes when I see it. Her toothbrush. It’s hot pink with white ribbing and the blue line across its bristles is nearly worn down. It leans against the side of its plastic cup, staring at me, judging me. I don’t know how I missed it until now. I guess I’ve been distracted—by the present or the past, I’m not sure.
Despite the faded blue line, the brush’s bristles are perfect, like her face. Small and tidy and immaculately clean. I can remember when I gave her the toothbrush. This was about two years ago now, in 2013. I wrapped it for her, like it was a gift. It was a joke, of course. A toothbrush isn’t a present, it’s a necessity. And yet it gave me pleasure to offer her this object. It’s the only thing of hers in this whole apartment, the lone physical sign that she was ever here.
I pluck her toothbrush out of the cup, hold it an inch from my lips, and try to breathe in her scent. Then I stick it in my mouth.
It tastes like minty paste, of course, and New York City tap water. I swear I taste her, too, as I run those bristles across my teeth. I imagine that the bristles’ scratchy roughness is her tongue, that she is licking my mouth clean. At first, sweetness consumes me as I think of her powdery essence, her delicacy, the way she looked at me with her tapered brown eyes. Then I remember her darkness, how she cast me aside and punished me in the worst way possible. All that sweetness on my tongue pickles into something vinegary and sharp. I spit her toothbrush out. I nearly throw it in the trash, but I am not quite ready for that, so I place it back in its cup and rinse my mouth out with cold water.
The eye potion is dry. Its effect is difficult to discern. Bluish dark circles still hang beneath my eyes. Every morning, I tap this stuff on, with a mixture of determination and hope. Hours later, I undo that work with a night of insomnia. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling as my mind churns and churns on Ellen and Amanda and the Board and the wreckage that my world has become. My life used to sparkle with possibility; now it is unrecognizable, so much so that I can’t tell if I still exist. Maybe I don’t want my dark circles to disappear. Maybe I need them to stick around. The truth is these dark circles are a symbol of time passing. They’re like her toothbrush—a physical sign that I am here.
Caroline Part One
Ambition, not insomnia, was behind the dark circles of my college years. Early 1990s New York was a stark and welcome departure from Paramus. Cafés, bars, and vintage clothing stores were everywhere you looked, their colorful neon signage a beacon of promise. My fellow classmates clomped around in distressed jeans and chunky rubber-soled boots and cropped baby tees, their eyebrows pin thin, their lips clay brown. Minimalism was the skin ideal. Faces were astringent bare. Grunge made a play for attention: flannel tied around waists, layered hair unwashed for days, the edges of eyes dark and tightlined and smudged. You were supposed to be clean and scruffy, to appear like you didn’t care, in a way that required considerable effort. Beauty and fashion embodied many contradictions.
Washington Square was a study in contrasts, too. It was a hub of caffeinated meetups and clandestine beer-sipping from brown paper bags that clashed with the verdancy of its vegetation, the gentle trickle of its central fountain. On any given walk, you could hear birds chirping and hungover teenagers groaning. Romance and seediness commingled in a way that I have never found in any other city. To my underdeveloped brain, the strain of danger only amplified the city’s illicit allure.
That first semester of college, I didn’t have time to loll around Washington Square. I was too busy juggling boring Econ and the Art of Communication classes with my Macy’s job. The store was an easy subway ride from NYU’s campus. I would exit the station and emerge into Herald Square, a blunt triangle of urban real estate overwhelmed with pedestrians. Men and women in suits, some of them clutching briefcases, strode toward their office buildings. Unlike in Paramus, where everyone strolled with purposeful leisure, a sense that they didn’t have anywhere else to be, in New York people sprinted, like metal balls shot out of a cannon. Within weeks of moving to New York, I, too, could sideswipe, tail, and cut off slower pedestrians like a veteran.
A billboard faced Macy’s when I first started working there. It featured a blond, blue-eyed woman and an African American woman with short hair holding an Asian baby, the three of them seemingly naked and wrapped in a pink-and-green blanket. I would stare at this fashion brand’s ad and wonder about the story behind this trio. The two women looked directly at the camera. Their gazes were unapologetic, almost challenging, as though daring passersby to question their arrangement.
The implied intimacy between these women gave me hope. Fashion campaigns are inherently aspirational, after all. The racial dynamics, though, confused me. A white woman and an African American woman with an Asian baby—how would that happen? Interracial couples were still not common, let alone a same-sex interracial couple with a baby of a third race. The people around me in New York were certainly more diverse than in Paramus, but this ad seemed to take things beyond the point of possibility.
One morning at work, I was washing some makeup brushes with baby shampoo, caressing their wet, sudsy bristles before placing them, one at a time, on a towel I had laid out as a drying surface. Crystal, the ringleader of my coworkers, was at another station in our area talking a brassy redhead into purchasing a trio of eye shadows that would make her look possessed. As I glanced up from my makeshift drying situation, I locked eyes, momentarily, with a woman striding through the bustling aisles and directly toward my counter. She had thick, straight hair the color of mahogany and smooth, tan skin that gleamed with health. If you’d given me a pushpin and asked me to stick it on a globe to signify her place of origin, I likely would have dumped it somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and prayed it made landfall.
As she drew nearer, I ran my hands down the sides of my pencil skirt, flattening them instinctively. There was an involuntary tightening in my rib cage, like something was pushing to escape and I was forced to hold it in. This woman’s face was unlined, but her bearing gestured at a maturity well beyond youth. She was directly in front of me now, the counter the only barrier between us. Her lips parted in a playful smile and her light brown eyes bore into me.
“Maxine, is it?” she said, glancing at my name tag, which was pinned mere inches from my right nipple.
“Yes,” I practically stuttered.
She smiled again at my obvious nervousness. Her lips were pillowy. I could barely tear my eyes from them.
“I was hoping you could help me. I’m in desperate need of another one of these.” She extended one of the brand’s lipstick tubes in my direction.
I leaned closer to read the label.
“Satin Persuasion. That’s one of our most popular ones.”
“Is it? That’s a shame. I thought I was too original to be popular.”
The exchange between Ted and Christine from senior year flickered before me. Sexual innuendo, I had learned, was the best way to convince a customer of her beauty. I didn’t have the freedom Ted did to be so blatant with women, not unless I was certain my words would be well received, and experience suggested they wouldn’t be.
I offered this customer a tentative grin. “I’m sure you’re very original.”
“How kind of you to say.”
The woman scanned my torso and hips and I warmed under her attention. Beads of sweat dotted my hairline.
“Let me get that lipstick for you, I’ll be right back.”
I crouched down to search through the cabinet. Lipstick was a reliable bestseller for every line. It was a staple for most women that defied economic downturns and flash-in-the-pan trends. One of the top brands in recent memory had started with only ten lipsticks; two years later it was everywhere. I hadn’t been exaggerating Satin Persuasion’s popularity. Its rust-brown color hit a sweet spot between neutral and smoldering, and it had been a nonstop hit since it was released a couple of years back. We were out, of course; we could barely keep it in stock. I stood up empty-handed.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “We don’t have any left. If you want to give me your name and number, I’d be happy to call you when more come in.”
“That would be great.”
I handed her a pad and pen and watched her write her information. She held the pen delicately but firmly. I wondered what that same grip could do to my body.
“Here you go.”
Caroline Walters. That didn’t help my pushpin placement one bit.
“Thanks for your help, Maxine.”
“Max,” I said. “People call me Max.”
“Do they? Well, Max, feel free to use that number to call me when you get it in—or even before then.”
Had I heard her correctly? Sensing my confusion, she continued, “Since you couldn’t take care of my initial request, not that it’s your fault, perhaps you could make it up to me with a drink. On me.”
A tickle began in the depths of my stomach and spread to the rest of my organs. My field of vision blurred at the edges. It was as if someone else had wrested control of my body’s remote and was pressing random buttons with glee. Get ahold of yourself, Max, I thought. This woman wants to have a drink with you.
“That sounds nice,” I said, intent on understatement.
“How about tomorrow?” Caroline asked. “Unless you have plans with someone else.”
The next day was Friday. I usually spent those evenings sipping grain alcohol on the fringe of some dorm party. These forays always ended early, either with me in my twin bed beside Jeannette’s empty one or worse, in the hallway, a pink ribbon tied around our doorknob. My only sexual experience was in the vivid onanistic fantasies that had begun in my teens. Here I had a real-live woman beyond my most hyperbolic imaginings asking me for a drink. I did not have plans with anyone.
“I’m free. Just let me know where and when.”
“The bar at the Plaza Hotel, eight p.m.”
“See you there.”
Caroline flashed her full-lipped smile and strode away.
I wasn’t sure if Caroline’s overture had been a proper come-on or merely an act of politeness. Perhaps she had taken pity on my inadequate salesmanship. Luckily, Crystal cleared up any uncertainty. She sidled over, glanced pointedly in the direction in which Caroline had walked, then turned back to me.
“Daddy got you this job, right?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“My boss told me we hired you because your dad called in a favor. What is he, some corner office dude?”
“He’s an accountant,” I said.
“An accountant.” Crystal looked me dead in the eye. “Does Daddy the accountant know his darling girl is a dyke?”
Needles of cold pricked my skin.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell,” she continued, and smirked at my lack of reply. “So long as you don’t give me a reason to.”
Then she brushed past me, purposely butting my shoulder.
People in my adult life—straight people—have asked me, “Why aren’t you out professionally? It’s 2015. Who cares?” A lot of people still care, in fact. And they certainly cared back then. They cared enough to threaten you with discrimination or much, much worse. That fashion ad I walked by every morning wasn’t aspirational—it was delusional. While I would never change my sexuality, I can’t pretend that it hasn’t been a liability and I refuse to make myself vulnerable to others. Crystal taught me that crucial lesson at a young age: if you don’t want to get punched, don’t lower your fists.
The way I saw it, Crystal’s remark gave me two choices. I could stick around and be her sucker or I could quit. Later that day, I called my dad from the phone in my dorm room to tell him the news.
“Maxine, I pulled real strings to get you that job. I can’t believe you quit. How does that make me look?”
I twirled the gray cord of the phone’s handset around my left wrist so tightly, it started to cut off the circulation to my hand.
“I know, Dad. I’m really sorry.”
“Are you at least going to tell me why?”
My left hand was getting paler and paler. It was starting to lose feeling. I wished I could tell him the truth, that my coworker had discovered my liability and threatened me with it. If I told him, her threat would lose its power.
I remembered that middle school meal at the Automat, how my mother’s disgust had chased away those two women while my dad sat there silent. Had his wordlessness been a form of agreement with my mother? Or had it been an unspoken disapproval of her reaction?
“It wasn’t the right fit,” I said, employing a phrase I had once overheard my mother say to my father as explanation for ditching his coworker’s wife’s bridge club.
“You’re nineteen. That’s not for you to decide.”
“I promise I’ll find another job.”
“Maxine, if you’re serious about this whole beauty thing, then act like you’re serious about it. I’m giving you a chance to see how it’s done working for the best brand in the world.”
The best brand in the world that couldn’t make foundation look good on fifty percent of the women who walked into Macy’s. Some experts they were.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
A few more rounds of apology later, my dad and I said our goodbyes. I unwound the cord from my wrist and watched as my flaccid hand turned pink with the rush of fresh blood.
* * *
—
The evening of my drinks with Caroline, I contemplated my reflection in the dorm room mirror. It was barely tall and wide enough to frame my entire body: long, pale legs; bony, narrow hips; a chest that couldn’t fill out an A-cup bra. I didn’t know much about New York’s upper echelons back then, still I was wise enough to realize that wearing jeans to the Plaza Hotel was not a great idea. I had one black dress with me. My mother had purchased it over the summer and thrown it into my suitcase for school, so I had “something to wear on a date with a nice boy,” as she had put it. Well, I was going to wear it on what appeared to be a date, so I guess I was meeting her halfway.
The dress was modest in length. It hit an inch above my kneecaps. The neckline swooped down beneath my clavicle and the arms had cap sleeves. It was nothing I ever would have chosen for myself, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
My hair had darkened in young adulthood to an ashy-blond shade that played off the depth of my brown eyes. I had added light drama with a thin line of chocolate next to my upper and lower lashes that I smudged with a cotton swab. I’d rubbed a peachy lipstick into my cheeks and had coated my lips with a clear balm before daubing a bit of the same lipstick on them. Then I’d blotted my lips lightly with a tissue to make the color appear like it had partially worn off.
One afternoon, I had caught some warm whiffs of a girl in my Econ class and had asked her what she was wearing. She had pointed me in the direction of a little shop in the Village that sold essential oils. I had purchased a vial of musk, a few drops of which I dotted behind my ears and on my neck. My skin tingled beneath the fragrant oil.
I rode the subway up from Washington Square and arrived at the Plaza Hotel ten minutes early. The bar’s absurdly wealthy patrons were too intimidating, so I lurked outside near the entrance. A light November breeze raised the hairs on my arms, or maybe it was the prospect of seeing Caroline. It occurred to me then that she had no idea how old I was. Because of my height and the way I carried myself, I was often mistaken for someone in her mid-twenties. I didn’t know what I would do if the bar’s servers carded me.
Caroline materialized at exactly 8 p.m. If possible, she was even more stunning than she had been the previous afternoon. A black, satiny camisole with a lace inset at the bust clung to her torso. Slim black cigarette pants with sharp creases down the front were crisp on her legs. Her shiny hair was pulled back into a low ponytail.
“How polite of you to wait outside for me,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure where you’d want to sit,” I tried.
With a wry smile, she pulled the door open.
“You look amazing, by the way,” she whispered as she walked into the bar ahead of me. A lush, floral scent trailed in her wake.
Two rounds of double whiskeys later, we were at Caroline’s sprawling Flatiron District loft and she was telling me, again, how amazing I looked as she unzipped me out of my black dress, kissed me deeply, and ran her hands up the insides of my thighs. By the time her hands reached their intended destination, my skin screamed with anticipation. She maneuvered me across her dark apartment, navigating around dining chairs and sofas, then pushed me onto her bed, removed my underwear, and took my virginity along with it.
Afterward, we lay sprawled on Caroline’s bed. Her sheets were as powdery soft as the skin on the small of her back, whose mesmerizing curve I ran my fingers across, back and forth, back and forth like a pendulum. In the flickering light from the votive candles Caroline had lit, her skin had the rich glow of polished wood.
