MAKEUP
by Gary Moshimer
Reggie from Maine is cold stoned. He has jowls. Creepy. His slithery slippery blue lips waggle, dope escaping in twists. His eyes are milk, scanning me perversely from tips of my pink toes to crown of my black, black pride of hair. He holds out the bong and I take it, wiping it off. It is good for my seizures. Once I had one while Reggie was nosing around, and he felt up my chest to check my breathing. Gross. I take a drag like it’s life and hold it. Reggie counts on his stubby crazy fingers and giggles like a mad turkey, winking those weird eyes like they are the ugliest of storms. My lungs bud open, sizzle, and my head swirls a deep gray. I float, but not like the seizure kind, more like a life lost in ephemera. Out here in the common room Reggie falls timber like a huge stupid tree onto the plush sofa. There’s no one else to hear him. In the back room the corpses sleep with their everlasting dreams of glory. Our smoke lingers at the fancy ceiling.
Daddy picks me up because I can’t drive. The Jeep stutters, and a lashing rain scribbles words on the windshield. Against the glass we see our blue eyes, fierce and uncompromising since Momma died, unfathomable stormy lakes, waves that are just short of breaking shore and cries of despair. We light our cigarettes, mine slipping across my desperate red red lipstick, the same I used on Mrs. Billings. The blue smoke circles our heads; Momma has given us halos for living on without her. I didn’t do up Momma’s face because I would have painted her mouth to say one word: Why?
“Do anyone interesting today?” Daddy asks, words captured in a smoke bubble.
“Mrs. Billings.”
“Sadie Billings?”
“Yep.”
“Did you make her look beautiful?”
“She’s dead. I made her look troubled.”
“You didn’t.”
“I can fix it tomorrow.”
A raging wind throws the Jeep into the ditch and out. Mud spatters like a celebration. “Off road!” Daddy cries, his thick arms wrestling the wheel. Trees SNAP under us, thumping like heartbeats. Our heartbeats. Daddy’s red face cackles, fine with the things he does to us to relieve the stress which is like a collar of stones. When we are lost in these strange woods I have a seizure. The aura is an exploding sun under my lids. I twist, jerk with my short-circuited brain, big red tongue lolling like a dog’s. Daddy hits a tree while tending me. He always cries when this happens to me, his tears like the big diamonds that fell on Momma’s grave. As we sit there it grows dark and creepy. Branches reach for us, caress the Jeep with ghostly fingers. On the windshield appear the dead faces I worked on this week, their exaggerated mouths, powdered noses, penciled eyebrows looking surprised that there wasn’t more to life. Their poison breath clouds the glass. With broken bone fingers they scrawl their names and then my name. Kelly. Daddy navigates the way home, and without dinner I curl into my safe warm bed and sleep forever.
Reggie says his job is to break the limbs of corpses so they fit into the caskets. This is what he would like to do, the hulking bully. What he does, dressed in his moldy tux, is whisper into the ears of the back room dead, strange little poems he’s made up about crashing waves in Maine which retreat taking souls to the horizon. His fluttering lips spatter the waxy deaf ears. He strokes down arms, shifts and centers bodies. They are stiff, frozen in time which has stopped. He smokes his weed from Maine and lies in a casket, barely fitting. I close the lid and he makes a spirit moan. When he gets out he has an anxiety attack, and I give him one of my little bitter pills. He touches the face of Mrs. Billings, traces the weird anger I’d given her. I get to work making her happy.
There’s a new young mortician and in the back he wears crazy shirts and an earring. He’s preparing Mr. Phillips and you don’t really want to know what he does: it’s gross and also a secret. His black black eyes are upon me. Why does everyone see me as a body? My modest makeup heats and my red red lips flame. I wipe down Mrs. Billings’ face. How rubbery are the dead, especially the nose! I pet it like a still alive creature. This time I am careful with the foundation, the blush, the hint of glittery powder. I pencil the eyebrows as hopeful for a new world. Her mouth is an even line, solid like mine, neutral, ready for anything, bright and shiny and undead. I think of the history of the mouth: daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother. I picture it smiling, swinging children, coy, kissing men. How many men? And those eyes, not milky like now, bright blue and watching life go by and sparkling in the sun of full passing years. I touch my own tender lips and wonder how many lovers, kisses, smiles and frowns. How many years to go. And in the end who will paint them to be happy?
When I touch Mrs. Billings’ hand the sun crushes my eyes and I go down again. I feel myself crashing through time, a mystified traveler, seeing my whole life in a series of movies, my husband, my children, my face aging in a thousand mirrors, fading, fading. When I come to the new man has his long arms around me, speaking words of earthly comfort in my little ear. My head throbs against his narrow chest, thunder in his ribs which is my life force, stronger for my ordeal. His cold hands search my face, drying tears.
“I saw my whole life,” I say.
“How was it?”
“I have children.” I don’t tell him he is the husband and father, the lover of my red lips, the giver of life and sorrow who will prepare me like his others, for eternity. He’s kind of creepy, but there’s the draw. He enfolds me in those competent arms like a flower. A paper unfurls before us with life’s instructions: pills to take, doctors to see, rivers to cross, purple mountains to climb, children to name, illnesses to endure, vows we take, until death do us part. I have felt his hands, his chest, the ringing of his gold chains which is a call for home which is his fragrant shirt with its dizzy patterns like falling chunks of sky. He lays me on the sofa, strokes my face, leaves me to rest while he goes back to his preparations.
He loves the way I do the faces of his charges; he has told me, using the word love which now tingles over me as I rest. In my dream all the dead have my face. They prance from the back and dance around me, reading my body with crooked fingers. One by one, turning to dust, they penetrate me, living their lives through me, collecting beats of my heart in their hands, counting off my years. Reggie, on his knees, calls out a tearful poem and chases them out, back to the slabs to await the dirt over my face.
Daddy picks me up and this time we drive into the river and out. Momma protects us, laying fish on the Jeep which we cook over a slow fire for dinner. The blue flames dance in our blue matching eyes. They leave a message in Daddy’s eyes, but it eludes me, melted into his grateful tears. He’s grateful for life, for the fish. We eat like we are starving, feeding souls which have areas of loss and loneliness. Our lips glisten, and in the window we are ghosts. I see Momma’s there too, looking in, nodding her head as we feast on her gift.
I’m all bonged-up when I start to touch Mrs. Billings’ face. A mask of rubber. I tweak her nose. It’s cute. I wonder all it has sensed: the essence of life, passion, the path of the clean, the scent of a lover. Hers is a fine face, and I have done it justice, soothed out the worry lines. I would like to do more as it waits for the afterlife. But right then she starts to talk to me. She is hoarse, used up. You can’t really trust what the dead say; they like to trick you with tall tales. “So,” she says. “I had four children, two boys and two girls. They were little devils, they liked to steal. Milk,honey, cranberries, watches. I beat them with a switch until they laughed. A white dove, my husband, killed by a man, showed up at my door. A note was furled around its leg. It said, ‘Leave them be, SHREW!’ I hit him with a broom and poof, he turned to dust. I swept him up, buried him in the back yard with my dog. Can you believe that?” Of course I can’t believe it. She’s an imp. I open her eyes; they twinkle like fallen stars. They have their own light. I do up her lips again with a half smile, mysterious, ready for her wake where mourners will pass in wonder that this beauty had graced the earth with sweet breath, given out nods and handshakes and smiles and caused molecules to stir. I see her as a young girl, standing in tall grass, her hair whipping. She is waiting there for someone. For something. What, she thinks, does life have in store?
It’s happened again. Daddy lifts me off the floor. During my trip I traveled to distant shores, met many people with masks of my creation, happy and sad. I bathed in a river and the droplets ran like diamonds. When the moon rose my eyelids were like velvet. Daddy says there’s an operation now, they implant something in your brain. I say, “Eeewww.” Brains. I wish I didn’t have one. It reminds me of the parlor. Once there was a kid who had a car accident and his brains splattered the windshield. At the parlor they put him on display with an empty head. So I don’t want to talk about brains.
This mortician, his name is ELVIS! WEIRD! He snakes a long arm around my shoulders at Mrs Billings’ wake. “You did a fine job,” he says, sliding a hand to my lower back and patting. All I can do is think crazy thoughts, of our future creepy children with arms touching the ground. Well, maybe he’s not so bad. Daddy says he probably makes good money. His face is long and kind, his hair slick like a cliff. He’s not bad looking, just nervous, those pale hands fidgety from being in the dead and knowing their secrets. On my back the fingers pitter, and I just let them. We look upon Mrs. Billings, sweet in repose as an angel, with the expression I created, papery eyelids violet like moths ready to flitter the way home. Behind us there’s a commotion, some of the women headed out the door with little bird chirps of disgust on their curled lips. This is Reggie’s doing. He has a thing for mourning women in black, whispers his poems and desires and promises in their powdered shell ears. He promises them eternal life. They run, afraid of life, afraid of the presentation of death. They can’t wait to get out of the black, into colors that deliver them to something better, free from mortality, adorning their worlds like wrapped gifts, drifting kites.
I’m doing Mr. Phillips. His wife says he always had a crooked smile, so that’s what I’m aiming for. Elvis is looking over my shoulder, his hand in my black black tangle of hair. Why do I let him? I don’t know. There’s something otherworldly about him, like he knows the secrets of my universe. His breath is aching near me, sweet and bitter like some kind of funeral flower. I wonder about his kiss, if it holds the fruit of knowledge. His proximity trembles my hand on Mr. Phillips, who maybe, in his death seat, can see how I struggle. I want to ask the breath to come home with me, where I will boil it pasta and show it my comforter which feels like the inside of a casket. Sometimes my medicine gives me weird thoughts and urges, like flying from a high building, or some minor risk. Just saying. But I turn around with my makeup brush and playfully tip his nose, and I do ask him, and his mouth opens and twists with pleasure like a bird in flight. “Tonight,” I say, a seductive tilt to my voice. His hands tighten in my hair like burrowing snakes, trapped. Then we are twirling about the room, chasing, bumping the bodies. He stretches me on a slab. We loosen just what we need to, because of the cold. His hands explore me like curious spiders and I shiver, my virginity lost in a prism, a tender clock counting, ready to strike a new season in my life. We are awkward, panting, cursing, as the dead watch us with frozen smiles, recalling their first times. We sink to earth with Reggie pounding the locked door. “What is going on in there? Did someone come back to life?” “Yes!” I cry.
I sit on my comforter that feels like a casket, brushing my long long hair. The moon is at mywindow and illuminates me. In the mirror I am transparent, bone and pulsing blood. Momma sits next to me, herself my age. We are trapped in time, in fact, ageless in this moment forever. Something burns inside me, something taken, something given. “Momma, I was a participant. I needed.” My lips are blurred because of him. Almost a bruise. It was not all him. I blame the death in the room, the desperate need for a fire of life. Momma touches my tummy, knowing.
At the clinic the holy water rolls off our necks like pearls. They chant at Daddy, “Daddies don’t let their babies kill babies!” I feel Daddy trembling, and he is a brave man. Then I am on my own, and I block everything out until it’s over. I don’t know what they did. I lay like a bloodless body, embalmed. Cries off the cold tiles. Then I’m out and Daddy is taking me for ice cream, like when I was little. Strawberry with a mountain of whipped cream and two cherries, not one. The red of the cherries is like my swollen and violated blood. The cold sinks to the empty spot and we do not speak. About us ordinary lives go on and they don’t know. In the crowd Momma stands, watching, perhaps ashamed. On the way home we don’t go off road. We don’t need to: it happens in the Jeep, our tired blue eyes pouring water, filling the vehicle until we gasp for air and any solid bit of life to cling to. We are in the womb and I ask the tiny shrimplike thing, “Would you be a boy, or a girl?” Daddy carries me into the house. In my room I claw up the carpet like I’m scaling a cliff face, up from a well of terror. It’s sucking me down, down. Emptiness beats inside next to a pinprick. Then I have the big one, Momma holding my head, Mrs. Billings stroking, Daddy whispering.
“It will be okay.” I’m in the operating room and the drill sounds like the dentist. They’re poking around my brain, each point triggering a different memory. The thing they implant makes me taste toast with jam on a summer morning.
Reggie’s on the porch with a baggie of weed. He hands it to me. “Aren’t you coming back?”
“No.”
“What will you do?”
“I have a job at Macy’s, doing the living.”
“I hate the living.”
“I hate when they speak.”
“I miss you, Kell. The new girl makes them look like clowns. She has no respect.”
After he leaves I fill my tiny pipe, transport to a new world. Momma sits on the bed, Her hair has kept growing, and it’s wrapped around her like a shawl. She says, “I know a nice man at Macy’s.”
“I don’t want a man.”
“Sure you do. It’s time you start life, away from the dead.”
I’m just lucky that Finnegan’s Funeral Parlor has an opening. There are two of us, because this place seems to have whole families of the dead, mothers and fathers and children and babies. What has happened in the world? There are prosthetics for the violent deaths, noses and chins, eyelids. With clay we build a baby from scratch, put it in a little casket, mourn with hits of weed from Maine. We name her Suzy. My partner’s name is Alex, but he’s going to be Alexis. He’s getting operations, taking hormones. On break I make him up pretty, especially his big gorgeous green eyes. I make them look bigger. I make his lips full. I want to kiss them. I braid his long blonde hair and run it over my mouth. I taste it, suck. I think I desire him as a her. I know I can swing that way. We admire our beautiful faces in a mirror. It’s warped, so we get the idea to make each other into ogres. Before we leave we do that. We have warts and crooked noses and hooked chins. We laugh so hard that I take him home with me, and Daddy is scared and won’t open the door.
“Daddy, it’s me! This is Alexis, my girlfriend!” I boil them pasta. Daddy is flushed, like he has a fever. He does. He starts to cough. He puts his head on the table. Alexis is so strong, she carries Daddy to bed. We put a cool cloth on his head. It sounds like he’s breathing through a straw, whistling. I call an ambulance. It’s getting dark and the flashing lights dazzle our teary eyes. Our weird noses and chins cast scary shadows on the wall. Daddy’s tired blue eye leaks a tear like a crystal, and I pick it up and sprinkle it on his chest like fairy dust. For a miracle. In the ER Daddy’s eyes are collapsing stars, black holes. He is dying.
Daddy has made it known he wants to be cremated. From a photo I make him a young man, proud husband and father with a sharp, friendly chin, daintily threaded lids that have closed happily against many ends of days. I brush his hair a hundred times; it has grown thick but dull since Momma died. But strangely, his mouth has grown a friendly smile, on its own, like a new fresh flower, one that greets her, without me touching it. Daddy won’t be able to grow in the earth on account he’ll BURN in our furnace.
The whole town is at the wake, seeing as he sold everyone insurance. Alex/Alexis runs a long nail down my spine, which jolts as I touch Daddy’s perfect face. I want her immediately. Downstairs. There’s a bed in the back. Or we could do it in a casket. But first I must greet Daddy’s line of mourners, hand out official tissues. What I couldn’t do with these sad and runny faces. I would sew their mouths shut and ask them to get the fuck out. Don’t they know we’re all better off dead. I’ve seen utopia during my seizures, the reason for them–to get off this earth. I don’t want to stop having them. I want to see the beauty through the chinks.Come and find me.
We slide him in, flames roaring. At what temperature? 2000 F. is what. We watch through a tiny window. Fire licks, changes colors, does a crazy dance, makes squealing sound. Fuel is Daddy, releasing fireworks which form demons and angels and whatever else is held in him. Secrets leap as curling sprigs of ash. Everything is a tornado in there, destruction. The white bones start to rise until they too are consumed and there’s just a little mountain of Daddy. “Goodbye,” I say, but heat from the door lashes my eyes before they can leak.
Alexis comes to live with me in the big lonely house. In every dim corner are spirits, the people we’ve worked on, whispering our names. Sometimes they leave their faces, our faces, behind like shed skin or souls. In bed she clings to me, trembling, and we try to make love as girls, but really all we do is kiss, no hands wander below, she is still healing. I cup her small breasts, the nipples straining like trunks of a plant. I see myself holding onto them as they grow through the ceiling and into the heavens where I meet my baby sitting on a ray of sunlight. She has strings of white hair, falling out, blue eyes so hot they’re liquid, cups of poison. She holds an angry expression, one I could not begin to create, it’s so fierce. I’m not welcome here. Her body begins to disintegrate, arms and legs falling, head twisting and coming apart like puzzle pieces. I descend through the hole in the roof, back into the arms of Alexis, who laps up my rivers of hot tears and trembles with me.”I saw something.” I say, but fall into sleep. But I wake after an hour. I go out for some air, my legs like noodles. In the grass I find the baby’s human face which can look a million different ways.
The blue flames dance in her eyes. Alexis and I have done a thousand faces with every emotion. Each day before our walk we make each other up differently. You wouldn’t recognize us more than once. You might want to write down all our faces. Someone may ask you someday if you know the world, really know it. To get into heaven you will be asked, have you really known mankind? And you can answer that it is kind, heroic, unhappy, trustworthy, ecstatic, wary, inquisitive, regretful, patient, angry, determined, tired, suffering, loving, sensitive, misunderstood, beautiful, uncompromising, needy, thankful, full of wonder, lit from within, secretive, empowered, bitter, truthful, sad, melted as the clay we’re made of. Write this down, people, as we float along changing forms, somewhere between life and death. To go on, you will need to know.
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