Wherein I Reveal "Mystique"

I might have mentioned the neighbor girl who comes in to see me every now and then. She's named after an off brand of soda and she's got some serious home problems. She lives with her grandma; her mom hasn't contacted her in a couple of years, her dad's a deadbeat -- at one point they both had a "do not contact" order on them regarding her. She hasn't had parents in her life since she was three. I think her grandma doesn't feed her right. I know they fight. I' m sometimes conflicted as to whether to report it. Currently, their electricity is out for the next two weeks because the grandma didn't pay the bill and it was cut off. My personal nightmare with her is that one day she'll show up at my door in tears telling me she's run away from her grandma's house, and can she stay with me. I'm not sure what I'd do.

She seems to love me dearly. I don't know why, but I do know that I'm something of a stand-in mom for her. She comes over and plops down on my couch to tell me about school or the drama with her friends or how she's head over heels for Twilight. She likes Cleopatra eyeliner and bright blue eyeshadow. She's 14 years old. She tells me about her boyfriend and her drama with him. She came to me about the talk on periods and tampons. She hugs me several times in a row whenever she's here. She asks what I cook for dinner, why I load the dishwasher the way I do, what I buy at the grocery store. There's a sense of female responsibility that she seems to be looking for clues on. Sometimes she'll end the conversation by turning over her shoulder and saying "My grandma hit me in the arm yesterday." Other times she'll say, "Maybe I should have been your daughter." And she'll laugh, like she's trying to take the seriousness out of it.

I respond by trying to play the tropes she's looking for, because I really think she's just looking to play a role sometimes. Yes, I think she'd like to move in and have a "mother-daughter" relationship, whatever she thinks that means. But mostly, I think she just wants to pretend. She wants to rehearse the script. She'll grab my grocery bags out of my arms and take them up for me. She wants to put things away on the shelves, maybe so she just feels like she knows where it is. Sometimes she goes through my bathroom drawers -- not because she wants to steal anything, but to solve the mystery of what I'm about, what grown women keep in their makeup bags. So when she tells me she thinks she should've been my daughter, I say, "You know, I always wanted a daughter. I'd want her to be just like you." She comes in the door and I'll ask her, "So, how was school? How are you doing in math?" Or something like that. Once early in the morning when I was getting ready to go somewhere and I had my front door open, I heard her voice floating up as she was walking down the little alley to the bus stop: "Byyyyyeee Jooooooy...". I called back, "Have a good day at school, honey...". Because I don't believe she really ever hears that in her life. I don't think anyone ever told her to have a good day at school.

So, it probably shouldn't have surprised me when she came over on Thursday talking about her Spring formal dance this weekend -- tonight, actually, in about fifteen minutes. We were talking about her boyfriend, and what a flake he was for breaking up with her only to get back together just before the dance, so he could go with a date. Then she said, "I wish I had a flat iron, I want my hair to be straight for the dance."

Everything is code with her. She says "Oh, you like that kind of ice cream? Neat." That means, "Can I have some?" She's weird about food. But she also has evolved this way of feeling out whether you'll do something for her or not before she asks directly, probably so as not to get her feelings hurt. So, the proper answer to her "wish" was of course to say, "Well, I've got a flat iron. Do you need to borrow it?" And she told me that she would love to, buuuut, she doesn't really know what she's doing and she doesn't do a very good job. and of course the proper response is, "Well, I could do it, if you wanted me to." She jumped up with a big grin, OH YES, that would be great! And so we planned to meet on about 5:00 on Saturday to give her enough time with everything.

And then I realized that I'd basically formally contracted to do her hair and makeup. JP, please stop laughing now.

I wonder why she picked me, honestly. I rarely wear makeup. I don't have elaborate hair. Most of the time, it's pulled back. I do not look like the obvious choice to get this immense job done, the results of which buoy a young girl's fantasies about dances and looks and boys. I realized, frankly, that I had squarely put my foot right on top of a landmine.

Here's the even more hilarious part: I actually can do hair and makeup. I can do it quite well. I can do the edgy, runway type stuff and I can do the "natural" look (which involves even more product than the edgy stuff). I'm obsessed with fashion. I have a Vogue collection. (And W, and Allure...) I am one of those people who Keep Up With Things. I just happen to also live in jeans and a white t-shirt. For added guffaws, I even sold glamour for a while. I was a Mary Kay sales rep (yes, keep laughing), and I broke even in my business the first year (rare, normally it's three years to break even, turn the corner and turn a profit), was team leader and my unit's "Rookie of the Year." Yes, like the baseball card. I could make myself look like one of the women in the pages of the booklet that hawked our product. Trouble is, that's a lot of fucking work, and I just didn't want to. It makes me feel fake. These are not things that my girl could've known.

I'd like to think she saw my Vogue collection, including the Italian, French and now Spanish ones. Or maybe the Allure magazine sitting out in the open talking about "sculpting" with your normal shade of foundation and one two tones darker. I'd like to think she went through my bathroom drawers and found the massive stash of crap I have. But I don't think any of that is what happened. I think she thinks that there is some feminine mystique that older women have, that they know all the secrets, and that they will share it with you when the time comes.

I think she got lucky I read a lot -- which extends itself to fashion -- and that I didn't turn her into Tammy Faye.

She showed up at about 4:20 instead of 5:00. Her hair was still wet. My bet was still on "mystique" and trading secrets, so I planned to feed into that. I pulled out everything I owned. Every piece of makeup, every pomade, all the heavy equipment. When her eyes lit up, I knew I'd guessed right. I put everything down on the kitchen table, turned on every light and lamp in the kitchen. I had Miles Davis playing from before she came in, and I'd lit a really smelly candle -- you've got to have atmosphere for getting ready for something important, but she would've probably preferred Fergie, or something. I let her paw through the makeup, which for reference's sake covered the whole freaking kitchen table, who knew??, while I actually sorted through the things I thought were important. We did make up first, and I always presented things as a choice. I might think she looks good one way, but ultimately it's about what she thinks is good on her, and I was prepared to execute whatever Twilighty-vampire look she decided she wanted.

To my surprise, though, she took my suggestions. Of course, it helps to be skilled in rhetoric. So, when you tell a 14 year old their eyes would look "awesome" with this color, you plop down a bag of cotton balls and eye make up remover and ask if they'll let you put some on just to see what it looks like, she'll probably say SURE. As I went along, I told her everything I was doing. Makeup is artisanal. It always looks better when it's done with the hands or with really high quality brushes, like painting a picture. I put three colors on her eyes -- antique gold on her lids, framed with a nice shade of jade in the crease of her eye and then a thing called Moonstone on her brow bone, which is sort of a creamy white color. I explained how the jade in the crease will sit on top of her eyes when they're open, like a picture frame, and how you wanted some kind of deeper neutral on your lids, and it almost doesn't matter what, because anything makes your eye color seem more intense, and you wanted a really light color on your brow bone because it's the "highlight." Then I blended everything with a brush so it looked smooth. Her reaction in the mirror was one that I'll probably not forget as long as I live. She was, quite simply, delighted. I told her we could do anything else with any color I had (which is basically every shade of everything), as long as we followed that pattern. But she didn't want to touch it.

While she put on mascara, I asked her if she wanted to do bronzer or if she wanted to do foundation. I figured she wanted the pale look -- she was really pushing hard for that a few months ago; you know, vampires and everything. She picked bronzer, probably because of how it looked. Oh, and because she was jealous of the rich girls in school who'd been going to the tanning bed for the past six weeks in preparation for the formal. So I told her how to use bronzer, and I showed her how to tap it off the brush, to sweep it over her forehead, cheeks and nose, and her chin, how you wanted to put some down your neck, too, so it looked real. She loved it.

I did her hair while she was drinking a pop. I blabbed about everything I was doing there, too, putting some serum in it for shine, because when it was flat ironed it could look dull. I rubbed that in. I put in something to keep down frizz; I let her play with the bottles while I put it in. I blowdried her hair, told her she couldn't just hit it with a flat iron unless it was dry, that would extra-fry it. I did exactly what she told me to do with her hair. Normally it's really curly, and she doesn't like it. She's also dyed it black (vampires). So it was a glossy straight "do" now, thanks to a few products and a flat iron. I sprayed it with some styling wax, sprayed my left hand fingers with the wax to put it on the ends of her hair. She seemed fascinated with the hands-on stuff, but that's really where the trick is. I explained to her how it was different from hairspray. It smells great, so I was sure she'd like that. There's something about going off smelling great from a salon that keeps you perked up all the while you can smell it.

Last, we decided what to do about lipstick. She loves gloss, which she should for her age. I had glosses, of course. But I also offered to "make" a gloss out of a lipstick I had, if she wanted to. She was fascinated by that, so that's what we did. She picked out a lipstick in "shell", which is the only thing I have close to a girly-pink color. So I took the lipstick, rubbed it all over the side of my hand (highly fascinating) and put a few dabs of a clear lip gloss on top. Then I took a small brush and sort of mixed the whole thing together on my hand. I brushed the solution onto her lips once, and asked her to check it in the mirror to make sure she liked it first. Then I layered it on.

She grinned the whole time. We checked the mirror front, back, sideways to make sure she liked everything. She seemed really happy. We like salons because of the human touch, because of the art of dressing up. She looked like the young teenager I've always seen her as, rather than the new-goth she likes to dress up as. I told her I thought she was beautiful. I took her picture:



Her grandma just swooped by to let her hop out of the van and show me her dress. It was a beautiful, long navy halter dress with silver shoes. Both her and her grandma were smiling. I'm glad I did it. I don't have a daughter, and I'll probably never get the chance to do that again. When Dante has his formal, it will be a matter of getting his braids done and getting the Man Uniform that the tux represents.

I hope she has a good time. I hope for that one moment at the kitchen table, at least, everything was perfect.

-- DV