Cherries In The Snow Read Free Page A

cotton case, full to bulging with lipsticks way past their sell-by date. You would think that, working with my oldest friends at a cosmetics company, I could apply my lipstick in front of them. But it’s like spending the summer at a nudist colony. It makes you long for modesty.
    My face is blank and here it comes. The rush of painting it all on. It feels like masturbation. I don’t want it to end. Do I think I’m beautiful? No. Do I enjoy my face? Yes. It’s the right one for me. It works, like a healthy body. It soothes me when I’m upset. I see my father in my features and I feel better.
    Mouth perfect, I blot with tissue paper and drop it into the toilet bowl, watching it float on its back in the water. I leave them everywhere, my lipstick blottings: in my notebooks, on Post-its, all over my receipts. Grrrl made real blotting papers, but I myself didn’t use them. They are too much like organized fun.
    I walk back into the conference room and Holly is asking: ‘What’s all this kohl in the drugstores at the moment? Styli Styl. The ones with the flat angled tips? They’re so cheap, but, damn, they do a good job. Do you think we could launch a more expensive one that works less well?’
    â€˜Favored tool of the ancient Egyptians,’ says Ivy.
    â€˜A return to old-fashioned values.’ I nod.
    â€˜There was a time,’ adds Ivy, ‘when women died from wearing makeup. Elizabeth the first got poisoned by her lead-based whitening powder. It ate away at her skin.’
    â€˜Her makeup ate her face?’ I gasp. ‘That’s one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard!’
    Ivy is very well read. As a teenager she dropped William Blake like the rest of us dropped Ecstasy. Now her facts come bubbling up and Holly looks at them as if they were farts, embarrassing to her. She turns her head or walks out of the room to get some fresh air, away from Ivy’s knowledge. It is something I love about Ivy. It is something that makes me question how Holly and I can be such good friends. It is something that makes me wonder how Ivy can still be with her.
    Vicki sides with Holly, nose wrinkled in the air as though she also smells the fart, as though we are uncouth, not them. I can see that though Vicki is straight as a die – she had a parade of winsome one-night stands, she even does Internet dating, proudly, proudly showing us her listing on Friendster, her holographic friends, her holographic love with graphic designers – she is competitive with Ivy for Holly’s affection. But Holly is Queen Bitch, and that’s all that matters to her.
    None of us really adheres to the Grrrl ethos. We tell our followers to look scuzzy, but we aren’t going there. We want to look pretty. We want to be fuckable. We want to get work and be loved. Ivy’s glitter, nothing else on, the purple discolorations real; Vicki’s Edie Sedgwick look, disaster socialite girl from farm girl; my mouth, everything else smoothing the way for that; and Holly’s immaculate makeup, flawless skin, glossy mouth, wide eyes.
    â€˜Anything else on the Grrrl agenda? Anything real?’ says Ivy.
    â€˜Can I raise an issue?’ Vicki answers, and she ever so cutely raises her hand. ‘It’s about Sadie’s lipstick blottings all over the place. I find them very distracting.’
    They are
not
everywhere. Yes, they float in the office toilet bowl like love poems thrown from a bridge to the river. If the markings are not perfect, I crumple them up. Whenthey are perfect bows, I let them float. It seems a good omen somehow.
    â€˜You find my lipstick blottings distracting?’ I look at the hot-pink chairs, the nuclear skyline painted on the wall, the Clash blasting from the surround-sound stereo Ivy blew part of her last trust-fund installment on.
    â€˜This is a makeup company,’ says Holly, jumping to my defense because Vicki will never stop being the new