The night they told me, I barely slept. And when I did, it was uneasy. (This letter contains no Reasons, so if you’d like to skip it, Iz, go right ahead. Honestly, I’m not even sure who these words are for: you or me.)
In a dream, I sat on the edge of my parents’ bed, alone in their room. My stomach burned. And my throat, too, like lava. I could feel my tongue forming words, and while I sensed their urgency, I couldn’t hear them. Something fell from my hands, landed on the carpet with a dull thud. I looked down and noticed my bare feet—how had they grown so old? I wondered.
Rising from the bed, I saw those old feet sink into the carpet. I kept a close eye on them, because they weren’t mine, and you just can’t trust someone else’s feet.
Like a rusty freighter on the Atlantic, I drifted across the room. It took hours, days, years even. By the time my hip nudged the edge of my mother’s vanity, I’d come to terms with my old age. Raising my head by inches, I saw the red wood of the vanity’s curved legs, the cabinets with those shiny brass handles, and resting on top, my mother’s makeup tray. Normally, the tray was full of her favorite perfumes, blushes, eyeliners, and concealers. But just then, it held only one item: her lipstick. The very lipstick she’d used on my one and only makeover.
In the dream, I could feel the vanity’s tall mirror looming. I must look up, I thought. I’ve spent a lifetime, crossed an ocean to look up.
I looked up.
I laughed, cried, laughed.
I am not me, I said to the ocean, to the old feet, to the face in the mirror. And it was true. In the dream, the reflection staring back was not my own.
It was my mother’s.
I raised my chin, my eyebrows and hands. I watched the chin, eyebrows, and hands of my mother in the mirror. I opened my mouth. Her mouth opened. I winked. She winked back. I spoke, she spoke.
Mary can’t possibly understand what I’m trying to say, we said.
Fine, we replied. She’ll understand this . . .
We picked up the lipstick. Calmly, we removed the cap and drew on our face. A Ferris wheel. Fireworks. A diamond ring, a bottle, a record. As soon as we finished each one, the drawings disappeared. We drew faster, a thousand things, each one more indistinct than the last.
The final drawing was more methodical.
In the mirror, our hands and face came together to paint the sky. Left cheek first, one decisive stroke. We drew the two-sided arrow, brought it to a point at the bridge of our nose—then the line across our forehead. The third brushstroke mirrored the first: an arrow on the right cheek. We drew a thick line from forehead to chin, and finally, a dot inside both arrows.
It disappeared, so we drew it again. And again, and again, like some sad automaton, doomed to an existence of unvaried motion.
Finally, it stuck.
We dropped the lipstick to the floor, where it splashed between our old feet. Our face was old, too, all the blood drained away.
The war paint is our only color, we said.
The next morning, I woke up in a sweat.
From my bedroom, I could hear Dad down the hall, talking in low tones. I got up, and without even bothering to put on pants, crept toward my parents’ bedroom. Their door was cracked open just enough to see inside. Dad sat on the edge of his bed, talking on the phone. His voice sounded tired, and even from my limited vantage point, I could see the outlines of dark rings under his eyes. I could see that he was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. He said good-bye, then hung up and sat there for a second. I pushed open the door.
“Hi, honey,” he said, turning sideways. “I didn’t know you were awake.”
“Dad,” I said simply. It was enough.
He began talking, using words that made no sense at all. “She had to leave.” I stood in the door, half-naked, holding my breath, rearranging what truths I thought I knew. “It’ll only be for a while, until she figures things out.” His words were oblong, misshapen. They fit into none of my known boxes, so I was forced to create a new one. In red pen, it was labeled GROW UP. “She wanted to say good-bye, but this was for the best.” As he talked, I stepped inside this new box, pulled the lid shut over my head, hugged my knees to my chest, screamed my guts out, surrendered myself to all the worst things from all the worst places.
“Mim? You okay?”
My box melted. “Am I okay?” I stared at him for a second, unable to buy . . . any of it. Across the room, I saw Mom’s vanity—the tall mirror, the red wood, the curved legs. My heart sank when I saw the makeup tray. I swept across the room, careful not to look at my feet. The dream was still too close.
“Mim, put on some clothes, let’s talk about this.”
The makeup tray—usually full of her perfumes, blushes, eyeliners, concealers—was empty. All of it gone, save one item: the lipstick. It sat on the tray like unwanted leftovers.
“Mim,” said Dad.
I grabbed the lipstick off the tray and turned for the door.
“Mim.”
But I was gone.
Back in my room, I stood in front of my own rarely used mirror, recalled the war paint from my dream, and began.
And it felt good.
I do not know why.
For the next two months, we stayed in that house, during which time a number of things happened, including but not limited to (1) I found the words ten easy steps to a ten-day divorce left in the Google search bar of the family computer, and (2) my parents were divorced twelve days later, compelling me to wonder which of the “easy steps” my father had botched, and (3) Kathy, who had once waited on us at Denny’s, started coming around the house, and (4) I received no less than one hollow-sounding letter a week from my mother, assuring me that all was well, that I would be seeing her soon, etc., etc., which led me to (5) beg Dad if I could live with Mom in Cleveland, to which he responded (6) Out of the question, to which I responded (7) What the hell is going on, to which he (8) married Kathy and moved us way the hell away from Mom, bringing us to (9) when Mom’s letters stopped, her phone was disconnected, and I was left 110 percent alone in this world, an island unto myself, a sad, lost little person living in one mosquito-ridden sweat storm of an ass-backwards state.