GIRLS IN TROUBLE: A Story in Three Parts

2

THE salesgirl’s smile widened disingenuously, but Marjorie did not see this. It did not occur to her that the salesgirl had impeccable, well-honed instincts and knew that there was actually a possibility of a landing a commission here. How could she have known that Jeanie the salesgirl was actually thinking of the sharp alligator pumps that her friend Lisa in Shoes on the 1st floor had stashed away for her. “Maybe you’d like to see something on you,” the girl said silkily, lifting a delicate pencilled brow.

Marjorie licked her lips nervously. She had always been an outsider, a bystander, someone who was content to observe life from the sidelines. The thought of becoming a major league player, and something inside her sensed that was indeed what was about to happen, suddenly sent a ripple of apprehension inside her.

“Um,” she said. She watched the girl dip a little brush into the pot, lean forward and begin to smear bright pink lipstick on Marjorie’s cracked lips. “Let’s start with some lipstick, then. Lady Clarice is guaranteed make him wild about you,” she said softly, her breath warm against Marjorie’s face. “I swear by them, myself.”

Marjorie tried to peer at herself in the mirrored wall behind the salesgirl, but all she saw was the frightened look in her eyes. Still, after a while she could feel herself start to relax. God help her, she liked the feel of the brush against her lips.

When the salesgirl finished she stood back, critically assessing the job. “Look,” she said, and brought forward a hand mirror with a flourish and handed her a Kleenex. “Blot,” she instructed.

Dutifully, Marjorie held the square between her lips and lightly blotted. She looked at her reflection doubtfully. Her face looked funny. She wore no other make-up; she never did. The church she’d grown up in back in Jamaica had strictly forbidden it. Women who wore make-up were deemed whores, brides of Satan. She stared at her lips now. Her lips looked overdressed, like an over-decorated shop window at Christmas. They smelled fruity and felt strange and heavy, as if she’d borrowed someone else’s lips and stuck them in the spot where hers ought to have been.

The salesgirl, sensing Marjorie’s hesitation, quickly gathered the cluster of products she’d singled out for Marjorie on the counter next to the cash register. “Your lips look lovely,” she said, smiling encouragingly. “You’ll be gorgeous.”

She rang up the purchases and packed them into a paper bag with the store’s curlicue logo. “Remember, you have to use everything together for the complete, finished look now.”

“Um, but he will be, you know, um...”

The salesgirl accepted Marjorie’s credit card. She winked as she slid the delicate gift bag toward Marjorie. Then she tapped a blood-tipped nail on the counter and said, “Trust me, honey.”

~

Marjorie lived in a shambling high-rise apartment building across town. It was slightly run-down — the stairwells were filthy, the hot water a joke, the stove rusting with a non-existent backsplash — but it was rent-controlled so she put up with the many inconveniences, among them, the super, Mr O’connor, a dissolute and lazy old man who had a glass eye. The building was located across from a park with ancient shade trees and flowers that made a picturesque carpet of their pink and blue blooms on the grass in autumn, and although Marjorie herself never visited the park, she could sometimes hear the sounds of children’s laughter floating up to her when she bothered to open the window.

The bathroom in the tiny apartment was little bigger than a broom closet, and suffocatingly hot. A naked bulb burned steadily out of the Gothic stucco ceiling, generating even more heat. There was hardly enough room to even turn around; once you went in and stood before the mirror, the door had to automatically close behind you. Marjorie liked to spend time reading and pondering life in here. Someone had painted the walls a startling bituminous acrylic — probably the tenants before her, she correctly assumed — as if the colour black were a perfectly reasonable colour for bathroom walls to be painted. Added to that, the window above the old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub (whose cool white porcelain, along with the white of the pedestal sink brought the only welcome contrast in colour) had been sealed shut and painted over with the same black varnish, blocking out light from the outside world; a world of light and darkness, chaos and order, a world Marjorie now felt she could be part of.

Marjorie stood, wrapped in a bath towel, applying Lady Clarice mascara with a trembling hand, at the sink. It kept getting into her eyes and burning them.

Her eyes watered. She swiped at them with Kleenex, smudging the mascara even more. Marjorie looked in dismay at her reflection. The humidity had made her hair frizz. She was crazy to think that she could pull this off. She did not resemble Jeanie the salesgirl in the least.

All she looked like was a silly girl with raccoon eyes and a frizzy Afro from the humidity of the small room and the shower.

She flung the products into the wastepaper basket, scrubbed her face and then sat down heavily on the toilet, burying her head in her hands. She felt like crying. For the last few hours, she had carefully constructed and reconstructed the scene in her head about the moment she would meet Bill Glass: she would flutter breezily in through the door, the room would go still and there would be an audible gasp. He would be a whiteboy, of course, with that name and inflection of his voice. Unless he was an Oreo. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, either. She was through with the brothers, the hardcore black men who always mocked her lack of booty and her “speechification”. No, Bill Glass would be different. He’d be dressed sharply and rise to meet her with a wistful smile that was just tinged with desire. They’d order Manhattans like all the hip people did. It would be magic. She knew that she was being silly fantasising about someone she’d never met before, someone about whom she knew absolutely nothing. But still, she consoled herself, there remained that slight possibility that he might just turn out to be The One. She thought about the simple black cocktail dress hanging in the other room. She’d never worn it; it still sported the price tag and there was a light film of dust along the entire length of the delicately beaded shoulders. Marjorie had bought it two Christmases ago. She’d read in Glamour that a little black dress was a must-have and, even though she never went out, had gone out and put it on layaway.

Marjorie was 27 years old. She hadn’t been out with a man in almost three years. She was always excruciatingly shy around men and came off as standoffish even though she was in fact nothing like that. She simply could never feel comfortable around them, perhaps because she was self-conscious about being a virgin. She would often rehearse witty little conversations in her head but found herself tongue-tied and unsure of what to say when the date rolled around. She was wellread and intelligent; conversation should have been easy to come by. And by no means could she be considered ugly. Plain, maybe, but not ugly. No, definitely not ugly. But invariably, it was her lack of experience and gaucheness that would scare men off.

Marjorie was not bitter. She stared at her diamond-shaped face that seemed weary, reflecting the disillusionment the years had brought to her. She understood one simple fact: men weren’t drawn to women with indistinct faces like hers, faces that weren’t branded with drama and charisma. They pretended they were, but they really weren’t. The last man she’d gone out with had taken her to a movie. Things had gone well enough in the beginning. After, they had gone to a restaurant, where conversation was required. Marjorie had struggled to keep up her end, but her brain felt sluggish, her tongue heavy, paralysed. Her mind scrambled furtively trying to conjure up anecdotes she could relate. She was stumped. She only ended up answering his questions, sounding monosyllabic and dull. Then, for some reason she herself could not fathom, she blurted out, “I’ve never had sex before. Just thought you should know.”

After the appetisers were served, her date excused himself and when he returned, told her that he had been called away for a family emergency and the date had prematurely ended. Marjorie never heard from him again.

PART THREE: NEXT WEEK