MASCARA
Somewhere outside
the women’s restroom at Miami International Airport ,
probably near the security gates through which I must pass before boarding my
flight, Gary is
looking for me. Minutes before, I’d spied
him stumbling down the terminal hallway with the foot-dragging sloppy walk he
gets when he’s tired, and so I had dodged into the Ladies while hiding behind a
gaggle of flight attendants.
I stare at my face
in the mirror, shutting first one eye, and then the other, noting how bright
the whites of my eyes look in contrast to my sunburned face. The remains of mascara have settled into tiny
wrinkles blooming under my eyes, tracing maps to new territories of age. I stretch out my tongue as far as it will go
and waggle it around. My face glows a stunning, skin-shrinking, two-days-tourist
red, closely matching the shade of my outstretched tongue. Against the stainless steel of sinks and
stalls and mirrors around me, I feel like a canned tomato – pulsing with red
juices, trapped among metal. Will I
still stick out my tongue when I’m 40? Turning 30 ten months ago obviously
didn’t stop it. My immortality
evaporated in a poof of smoke, but there’s my tongue, still zipping through the
air, stained redder by a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop.
When I hear the
door opening behind me, I retract my tongue and put on a grown-up face. A middle-aged woman with sensible shoes and a
heavy gait stomps by me heading toward the stalls. Several other women follow her; another
flight must have landed. I dig in my
bottomless beach bag, pushing aside sunglasses, a still damp bathing suit and
my boarding pass until I find the bar of hotel soap. I need get the rest of this mascara off my
face. It’s so just not me. I rip the paper off the soap and lather up,
thrilling to the feel of cool water as I rinse the suds and mascara and Florida
sweat.
Although I suppose
I should worry about wrinkles and skin cancer, I’m smugly pleased with my
sunburn. Just at the turning point of
pain, it makes every movement through the air feel a delicious, breezy relief
from the furnace of heat pouring off my body.
The whispering of nerve endings enflamed by the sun feeds a tactile
need, as the light seeping under my skin nourishes the soul (if, OK, also
damages the body). People need vitamin
D, I kept saying to Gary
on the beach yesterday. Gary , currently wandering out there in the
sterile airport hallways, can go back to DC pale as a ghost, free from the
cancerous lesions on which he persisted in lecturing. He can haul that umbrella and lawn chair and
baseball hat and sunglasses and long sleeve shirt and sunscreen and sit
cowering under the boardwalk like a vampire fearing the wrath of daylight. Red is quite becoming on me just at the
moment, at 8 a.m. at Miami International.
Maybe that’s something else that’s changing.
The first thing I
thought last night when I realized Gary was proposing was, well thank God, I’m
wearing mascara. I’m not one usually
prone to wearing make-up – part of that awkward group of women who never
learned how to apply it properly, and so end up looking like we’re a) not
wearing any makeup or b) streetwalkers – but since Gary and I had gotten
dressed up to go out to dinner, after pouring myself into the flowered skirt
and the tiny black tank top, mascara and a little Fire & Ice red lipstick
were de rigueur. I did, after all, know
he was walking around with a ring in his pocket. (Is that a ring in your pocket or are you
just happy to see me?) I’d spent an
unusual amount of effort trying to look sufficiently girlie on our Florida
vacation.
The setting was
romantic; I should give Gary credit for that.
We stood on a deserted moonlit beach in South
Beach , strolling along by the Atlantic after a fancy meal and wine at a trendy Cuban
restaurant. The waves crashed to the
shore sending mists of spray into the air.
A brisk breeze stirred the sand and lifted little whitecaps on the
ocean. The landscape was straight off
the cover of a Harlequin novel, although Gary
is no flexing Fabio and I’m not known for my heaving breasts.
The downside: the
surf roared so loudly, I couldn’t hear what Gary was saying. And, truth be told, I wasn’t paying that much
attention. Gary tends to repeat himself,
so I often tune in and out to see where he is in the midst of his particular
harangue. I’ve become good at inserting
appropriate comments that re-state his last emotion sympathetically. “Wow, that must have been tough.” “I can see how that would make you angry.” “I
know how stressful your job can be.”
However, I’ve found I can free up a lot more mental space if I don’t
attend to his every breath. I can float
along on the flow of tone of voice without getting too hung up by the
minutiae. Gary is a sales guy; he can talk. He’s got that charming patter down. The first
run of one of his stories can send me rolling in the aisles with laughter. But the day-to-day complaints about Larry and
Jane and Jeanne and the rest of his superiors and how much better things would
be if he were in charge – it gets old fast.
Sadly, vacation doesn’t interrupt his thoughts on the general lack of
appreciation for his special soul.
So on the beach,
the scenery had captured my attention.
In a humming, wined and dined way, I was standing with the waves weaving
around my calves, splashing the water around with my toes, a windy tune playing
through my mind. Gary came up and would have taken my arm, but
I was holding my shoes, one on each hand like a flipper. I shrugged him off to frolic in the sea foam,
to wave my arms (and shoes) and spin under the moonlight. He chased me down with that particular brand
of forced hilarity, caught my arm just a bit too hard and installed me under
his shoulder so he could steer me up the beach, away from the water.
We flopped down on
the sand and he said “I feel like I’ve eaten a whale and then been splashed by
its mate” while picking at the soggy laces of his shoes. I nodded without comment. Party-pooping, whining about wet shoes and
being too full to walk, came as standard fare with Gary .
We watched the
moonlight reflect off the water. Some
clouds were rolling in from the south, blocking out most of the stars in a
haze. Once I finally put down my shoes,
he took my hands and started to speak, looking deeply and slightly to the left
of my eyes.
At this point, the
wind blew a blast of sand straight into my cornea. I pulled my hands away from Gary and spent a few minutes struggling to
remove the small boulder from underneath my contact lens. Gary
pinched his mouth up in that way he has, as if I deliberately meant to blind
myself. He cracked his knuckles,
staring out over the water. After the
waves of saline tearing out of my eyes slowed, I rubbed off most of the raccoon
effect of my running mascara.
Once I had settled
my eyes, I said I was sorry. For what,
I’m not sure. Gary smiled graciously and then latched back
onto my hands. He started talking again,
speaking quickly, as if he had an appointment to keep. Finally, I realized: good god, this is it,
he’s actually proposing. And I started
to cry.
I couldn’t have
seen that crying coming. What rolled
toward me was this: here’s this man that I’ve shared a bed with for the last
year, here he is, sitting on a moonlit beach, talking about how much he loves
me (and god knows, it’s nice to hear you’re lovable) and how he wants to marry
me (he chose me! someone chose me!). I
just caught the mood and burst into tears, the happy contestant. Maybe I’ve spent too much time as a
bridesmaid – three weddings in the last year.
Marriage spreads like a disease, an easy fever to catch. Or maybe it was turning 30.
In any case, I had
the mascara on anyway, stretching my eyelashes out to abnormal clumpy lengths,
so I felt a certain obligation to follow through with the pageant. Through some sort of miracle, I even lucked
into the pretty kind of crying, where the tears just slid down my face like (of
course) diamonds, not my usual yapping, gasping, snotty sobs where I end up a
swollen mess.
Which is
interesting when I think about it, since I spent a great percentage of the last
six months thinking about how to break up with him, how, even when we were
sniffing around jewelry stores, I was thinking, eventually, I’m going to have
to stop this, I can’t do this forever.
But sometimes it’s like the tide carries you farther and farther down
the shore, and you start to forget just where you wanted to swim to at first. I bet drowning is like that, where you forget
that you have to swim.
Now I’m cowering
in the Ladies Room. After I finish
rinsing my face, I give my hair a cursory comb and peer at myself in the
mirror. Do I look any different having
been engaged? What is the opposite of
engaged? Disengaged? Unengaged?
What do I call Gary
now? The person formerly known as my fiancé?
Hiding in the bathroom, with Gary
out there with the ring, probably isn’t a good time to think about this.
There’s a good
chance that Gary
wants an explanation, which I had been rather hoping to avoid until I could
formulate something better than “I just can’t do this any more.” All I know is that I woke up with a start at
6 am, went to the lobby to get our free donuts, came back, ate half my donut and
then sat there watching the weather channel.
Gary
stumbled toward the shower. The weather,
as predicted, is flawless outside; it always is the day you leave. I watched the woman in front of the weather
map while she waved a hefty 2-plus carat diamond in front of a cold front. I looked at her hand and then I looked down
at my left hand. The sapphire, properly
lighted, showed its translucence, that ripe color of deep twilight that moves
in right after the sun sets. This woman,
with her fashionable suit and perfectly coiffed-hair, and I, were part of the
same club, women of substance, women with men attached to them like
anchors.
I licked the
sugary donut goo off my fingers and walked over to the dresser, looking for a
napkin among the flotsam of spare change and ticket stubs. I found one from the bar last night. They had given us a free glass of champagne
when we came in bubbling with our engagement news. Later in the evening, Gary had been explaining something about
sales ratios – the napkin was covered with graphs and numbers. I wiped my fingers, and then noticed on the
other side of the napkin Gary
had doodled a big goofy rounded heart and written my name – with his last name
– in the center. I stared at the heart
for a long time. On top of assuming I’d
take his name, he had spelled my middle name wrong.
I listened as Gary fussed around in the
bathroom, blowing his nose, flushing the toilet. I heard the clank as he pulled out the mirror
he brings with him so he can shave in the shower. I heard the rattle of the curtain rod rings
as he pulled the shower curtain aside to turn on the water and set the
temperature. He likes the shower set so
hot that it is virtually impossible for us to shower together, although early
on, we tried. We couldn’t find a
temperature that didn’t scald me and freeze him. When he finally stopped trying to muscle his
way into the shower with me, my showers stretched from 10 to 15 to 25 minutes
until he started complaining about the lack of hot water. I liked to stand and let the water wash off
my thoughts in privacy, no applause necessary.
The weather lady
with her flashy diamond walked off camera.
I tired to imagine her at home, swearing at her husband like a harpy
sent straight up from hell. But all I
could see her doing was folding laundry, sorting socks and putting them in neat
piles, having used the correct brand of detergent and stain removers.
I took off my ring
and rolled the band between my fingers.
Then I buried it into the remaining donut half until only the sapphire
poked up out of the glaze. I put the
donut back on its Styrofoam plate and left it on top of the TV. Abandoning the rest of my luggage, I grabbed
my beach bag, took the key to the rental car and slid the door closed behind me
as quietly as possible. I ran down the
stairs, started the car and squealed out of the lot. Although I knew Gary was still in the shower, sudsy and
unaware, I skidded to a stop at the first red light and checked my rearview
mirror to see what pursued me.
I hadn’t figured
on him making it to the airport so quickly.
His flight, our original flight, doesn’t leave until 2 pm. After returning the rental car, I had to keep
myself from sprinting toward the ticket counter. I switched onto the 9:25 am flight, which,
mercifully, had seats left. If you get to
the airport early enough, they let do things like swap flights. The airline representative had been happy to
help, and even made a joke about how I surely didn’t need any more sun.
Maybe the vitamin
D went to my head. What am I doing? I’m too old to be a runaway. I’m too old to be hiding in the
bathroom. It’s just cold feet. I’ll have the rest of my life to work things
out with Gary . The rest of my life. Until now, I’ve drifted through my life,
bobbing along on the currents of other people’s desires. I can continue to float, numbly, and wait for
decisions, life rafts or sharks, to tell me what my life is.
I stare at my red
face and listen to the rush of water down pipes as another toilet flushes. Whatever I do, I need to get out of this
bathroom.
I push open the
restroom door and immediately see Gary
coming out of line at the coffee stand, coffee (cream, 3 sugars) and croissant
in hand. I hesitate to approach him,
even on good days, before he’s sufficiently caffeinated. But today, the best defense is a good
offense. I crunch my legs into motion and jog up behind him. I tap him on the shoulder and start speaking
before he even turns.
“Fancy meeting you
here.”
He sets the coffee
and pastry down on a table and pulls me into an awkward hug.
I stand stiffly,
arms at my side and answer, “getting coffee.
Oh, and returning the rental car.”
“Coffee. Ha ha.
Very funny…what the hell, I come out of the shower, and you’re gone. All
that’s left is half a donut with the ring stuck in it. How the hell am I supposed to take
that?” His eyebrows pull together and
his nostrils flare like a bull.
I knew he’d find
the ring; Gary
loves donuts. I bet he ate the other
half.
I shrug. Right now, I can smooth this over. I can apologize. I can make this work. I can put the ring back on and I can be Mrs.
Gary. We get along. We have OK sex. Our families have met. I’m 30 years old. This is what people do. Grownups don’t have scenes in airports. Grownups don’t expect perfection. Grownups understand that you’re not in love
every single minute. Sometimes you just
have to go with the flow, follow the path that’s laid out in front of you. As Gary
always says, relationships necessitate compromise. I finger the shredded remains of the napkin
in my pocket and say, “I had a change of heart.”
I have a flash of
Aztec sacrificial altars, radiant virgins roped down before anointed
priests. “I’m sure you’ll manage to find
a suitable replacement.”
He lifts one
eyebrow and studies me briefly. “Now I
know we need to talk. Something’s really
not right here, is it?”
I shrug.
“No, really, I can
tell you’re upset. I know
you. I can always tell. I’m good at being able to read people that
way. I can tell you’re upset. I know I’m upset. Imagine me, getting out of the shower and
finding nothing but a ring. I was
worried, I thought maybe something had happened, I didn’t..” Gary babbles when he’s nervous. I call it his sales guy tic. Usually, I let him wind himself down to a
comfortable rut.
“You ate the
donut, didn’t you?” I interrupt.
He stalls for a
minute, startled out of his routine. “Uh, yeah.
I ate it on the cab ride over.
Which wasn’t cheap, by the way.
Definitely not in our budget.”
“I can’t marry
you.” The words hang in the air. I think if I reach out I can almost trace
them with my fingers, glowing in a neon green.
I suppress a giggle as the words, liberated into sound, break apart and
scatter like Day-Glo sparrows. There,
I’ve said it. There’s no going back
now.
I cross my arms in
front of my chest and squint my eyes.
“You know, Gary ,
that’s interesting. How did you know I’d
be here? Why didn’t you think I’d just
left to walk on the beach?”
“Well, you left
the ring…and took the car. I just
assumed that…”
“…that I was
leaving you?”
“Well, yeah. And if you were leaving, I thought you’d go
to the airport. So I came to find you.”
“To stop me.”
“Yes.”
“From leaving
you?”
“Yes. Look, Maddie, what’s with the 20 questions
here? I’m here now, and you’re not
leaving, and we can talk this out. We’re
good at talking things out, like we have before. You know you just get ridiculous some times.”
“So, you knew this
was coming, but you figured, hey, you’ll talk and I’ll stay?”
He shifts his
weight from foot to foot, and then picks up the coffee cup off the table,
taking a sip. “Well, yes, that’s the
plan.”
“Why?”
“Christ, Maddie,
because we’re getting married. Because I
told my parents last night. Because it’s
what people do. Because I need you.” He
pauses, and then adds, “I love you. Of
course you know that.”
“You need me.”
“Yes.” He sighs out a noisy exhale and rolls his
eyes.
“Gary , what’s my middle name?”
He leans forward,
shoving one hand in his pocket, while he waves the coffee cup with the
other. “Your middle name? What is this a
pop quiz? What has that got to do with anything?”
I grab the coffee
out of his hand and shove it in the trashcan next to us. Our eyes meet for a moment, equally
aghast. “Just answer the goddamn
question! WHAT IS MY MIDDLE NAME?” Over at security, a guard looks up at my
raised voice.
“With an e?”
“Yes, with an e.
OK?”
“Wrong. There is no e at the end. There has never been an e at the end. For the last year, we’ve been dating and you
don’t even know how to spell my name.”
“Jesus, Maddie,
it’s a little thing, I forgot. It’s been
sort of a tough morning, running around in cabs after my crazy fiancée.”
“The whole last
year has been a series of little things.
I bet you can’t name my job title.”
“I can too,
dammit. You’re the Supervisor of Form
Creation.”
“Forms Production
Team Leader.”
“Jesus, Maddie,
you’re nitpicking. An ‘e’, leader,
supervisor, it’s all the same thing. You really need to relax. Our relationship
is not about an ‘e.’”
“No, it’s
not. But it should have been. All along, I should have said something. But I just stood there and nodded like a
bobble head doll. My god, I’m an
idiot. This is all my fault.” I pivot on my heels and swing away from him. My eyes skim over the bustle of busy
travelers until they land on the digital clock between the board of arrivals
and departures. I am 30 years old. I am running out of time.
I turn back to Gary . His hair is combed and still wet from the
shower. On his jaw line, a cluster of
hairs stick out where he missed them shaving.
And at the corner of his mouth, his million-dollar smile waits to burst
forth with generous forgiveness for the excess of my foibles.
“I need to catch
my flight.” I heave the straps of my
beach bag farther up my shoulder. Gary ’s eyes widen and
bulge as his hand comes up to grab my arm.
Then his eyes flick over my shoulder to focus on the movement at the
security desk. His arm comes back down
and hangs with his fist clenched at his side.
“Bye Gary .” I turn and start walking. Behind me, I hear Gary sputtering, rooted in place,
“Flight! You can’t do this to me. You can’t
just walk away. It’s not fair.”
I walk forward
toward the guard who has watched our conversation, politely, from the corner of
his eye. He’s a tall man, a little round
around the middle, with a feathery blond mustache. I can feel Gary watching me and the guard watching me
walk away. The windows show blue sky
without a cloud. A plane floats by,
suspended in the air, leisurely climbing to altitude away from Miami .
On the plane, I will think about packing up, about calling my mother and
calling off the engagement party she started planning last night. I will think about growing old alone, about
the prospect of being a cat lady with a propensity for stealing the neighbors’
baseballs when I’m 80. I will think
about all the things I should have said, to Gary , and Rick and John and Matt before him,
and my father and his belief that “children should be seen but not heard.” I will sit on the plane and think about how
much easier it is to make a change than to anticipate that change for so
long. I will think about cutting my
hair, because I’m a woman, and that’s what we do when we lose a man, through
accident or design. I’ll sit in the
window seat and think about these things.
But as I pass through security, all I want to do is gain the good grace
of the guard, his blessing for my flight.
As I hand my boarding pass to the security guard, I grin up at him and
say, “Great weather for flying, isn’t it?”
He nods his head slowly, with the hint of a smile around his eyes and
says “Go on ahead, Miss.” And so I
do.
