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  “She called me shiny and vapid, can you believe it? What’s ‘vapid’? She said she wanted to talk to the rude one.”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “She meant you, of course.”

  “I’m not rude,” I insisted.

  “I know that, sweetie. People misunderstand.”

  I dragged my feet on the Ruga Potts thing, not sure at all that I wanted or needed her. Then we got a call from a salesgirl who reported that one of her customers had returned a tube of “After Dark” lipstick and demanded her money back. “Rancid!” the salesgirl cried.

  Just what Ruga Potts said would happen.

  We pulled every tube of that lipstick from the kits we had pre-made in the office and I called in any tubes that the salesgirls had left. Then I went to Mrs. Brightman’s rooming house after dinner and asked her if she would please tell Ruga Potts that I hoped to have a word with her.

  “Does she owe you money?” Mrs. Brightman demanded. “She owes me money.”

  “No, Mrs. Brightman. In fact, I hope to buy something from her. Tell her that.”

  Ruga Potts let me wait a good ten minutes before she came down. “Not here.” She sniffed, looking around Mrs. Brightman’s parlor. “We sit on front steps.” Ruga Potts didn’t have much conversation to spare and she said nothing more as she led the way to the front steps and sat down. I told her I was interested in buying her mother’s moisturizer and toner formulas. She stood up and headed into the rooming house, waving me back down when I scrambled up to follow. When she reappeared she had two shot glasses and a bottle. She filled them, held one out to me. I hesitated. “You’re here to do business, yes?” I bobbed my head up and down. “Neave. You are Neave?” I nodded again. “Neave, if you want to do business with me you should accept my vodka.” I held out my glass. She poured shots for both of us. “You should ask me to make cosmetics for you. That would make more sense. Be smarter.”

  “Why? It’s cheaper to buy a formula from you and take it to a manufacturer than hire you.”

  “Your manufacturer has already produced one rancid product. Give him another formula and he will cut corners and make you another rancid product. You need a chemist to oversee the process.”

  “We don’t have a chemist.”

  “I am a chemist. I can do some good for your other products as well, not just my toner and moisturizer which you would like to steal. You may find a bad chemist who understands nothing about the product, and who will make you bad moisturizers. Your lipsticks, they also need someone to correct. It would be helpful to you, I think, to have a knowledgeable person overseeing your manufacturer’s work. Correct?”

  “Doesn’t matter even if it is correct. We can’t afford that. Even my sister and I aren’t on a payroll. Not yet.”

  “If you want my formulas, maybe you have to hire me. I can cost very little.”

  “You can’t stand that job at General Electric, can you?”

  “I cannot.”

  “So you would cost very little?”

  “At first.”

  “Do you have to get permission from your family to sell them to us, seeing as these are family formulas?”

  “I have no family. The formulas are mine to sell or not. To make or not.” She set the glass and bottle down beside her on the step. “All those years of study at university and what I have that the Americans want is what my grandmother cooked on her stove. So strange.”

  “I have to talk to my sister.”

  “Tell your sister that I will maybe accept a monthly retainer for at least one year. And we talk about a raise after three months.” I knew that she was looking at Be Your Best as an escape hatch, a way out of the dingy rooming house and the stool where she perched at General Electric and colored in fighter plane engine designs.

  “I think we need her if we’re going to go to the next step, Lilly,” I said.

  “Well then. Go tell the witch she’s on retainer and we want that moisturizer now. Also the toner, and after that we need to get the lipstick right. We’re already on the roller coaster. Let’s let the ride go on.”

  Lilly threaded an arm though mine and bumped my hip with hers. I went back to Ruga Potts’s boardinghouse and we sat down side by side on the porch steps again. She accepted the piddly retainer figure on the condition that I promised to renew every month for at least a year and we would talk about a raise after three months. “Also,” she insisted, “I want at least one of the lipsticks to be packaged in little glass jars. My grandmother loved little glass jars.”

  I held out my hand. Ruga Potts shook it. That was how Be Your Best Cosmetics got scientific.

  NEAVE

  What Technicolor Did for Us

  Over the course of that year we whiplashed between being sure we’d be tycoons and sure we’d be bankrupt. Ruga Potts had to go for two months without her full retainer fee but she stayed with us in order to escape the alternative, which was a drawing board at General Electric. Then a miracle happened, and it seemed to unleash a whole little stream of happy things.

  The miracle was Technicolor. Movie actresses started to appear on magazine covers in aquamarine eye shadow, rose-tinted cheeks, ivory skin, Chinese red lips, and a black slash of eyebrow. For a while Veronica Lake’s face was everywhere, creamy and pink, more blond than possible, more like a tropical bird than a human. Images like this unleashed a river of imitators who had no idea, really, how to get that flip at the end of the eyeliner. Back in 1937 everybody looked at cartoon Snow White’s Technicolor face and held their judgment. That was a children’s movie idea of prettiness on a cartoon princess. Also there was the feeling, persisting still in some circles, that only actresses and prostitutes put that much color on their faces. But the door had opened. In the war years the first starlets began being photographed with the exact same blue eyelids and rouged cheeks as Snow White, and the game slowly changed. Women flocked to department store cosmetics counters, the older ones uncertain and the younger ones delighted, everybody looking for the New Look and that look still so new that a whole lot of women were walking around with faces that looked like children’s crayon drawings of women rather than women with their natural charms accented. Well, Lilly said—we can help them with that.

  Lilly showed the salesgirls how to teach women to put a matte start on the lips, then the lipstick itself, then fixer powder, and a final color in pencil or angled tiny specialty brush: five products, each one presented as a necessary component of a coordinated regimen that had been formulated by Ruga Potts, who was proving to understand sales as well as ceresin. We had each and every one in stock. Lilly taught the sales force how to apply false eyelashes and put a foundation fixer on the face that was lighter than the natural skin before contouring with other brushes, deeper shades. Technicolor seemed to give everybody a sense of confident freedom with color. They wanted more and more of it. Gone was the norm of a single eye shadow lasting five years. Gone was the single tube of lipstick. We were in the money.

  The biggest sellers were lipsticks and nail polishes. Our packaging was beautiful—perfect little robin’s-egg-blue boxes bound up in blue cloth ribbon. Our bags were high-gloss blue, visible from a block away and very, very pretty. I painted every room in the warehouse offices the same pale blue. I bought two more desks and moveable walls to divide the workspace. We advertised for an assistant.

  We’d built up a head of steam and I was determined to use it. These kinds of moments didn’t last forever. They were windows of opportunity and we were supposed to fling ourselves through them before they closed.

  That fall Lilly decided that what I’d been wearing at salesgirl training events wasn’t up to our ever-improving company standards. Nothing that a shopping trip with her couldn’t correct, she said. She marched me through Jordan Marsh and then into Filene’s, then onward into smaller shops below Chinatown that carried warehouse-direct sales, me reluctant and she hunting methodically. Then she found it, an aquamarine sheath with a tropical-flower design so detailed that
the blossoms seemed to have been photographed onto the fabric. She pushed me into a changing room. It slipped on effortlessly, yet I could feel where it clung to my breasts and rear. When I stepped out to inspect myself in the mirror, the thing made me feel like there were bubbles in my chest. Lilly inspected me.

  “Fabulous! Good lord, girl, you should see it from the rear! It fits like … what was her name? You know, that girl who I always said was the best-dressed thing in the senior class? Sexy girl. She bought all those cosmetics from me back when I was at the spa? Who was she?”

  “Jenna Louise Bowles.”

  “Right. This dress makes me think of her, and she was the master at the head-turning effect. That dress, trust me, will turn a head or two.”

  Apparently my sister did not remember Jenna Louise’s fate, only her fashion sense. I felt my throat tighten around the image I saw in the mirror—someone who was me and not me, a piratical young woman in a Marais dress.

  I bought it.

  The next morning I told Lilly I wanted to test some new lipstick names. “Let’s switch out Night in Paris to something more like Wild Paris Night.”

  Lilly shrugged. Why not?

  Wild Paris Night outsold Night in Paris. By a lot. So I tried Silly Girl, Beautiful Fool, and Tomboy, and those did better than Camellia Lady. Most of the Tomboy buyers were high school girls, giggling fifteen-year-olds sneaking makeup into the school bathrooms to put on before homeroom. We priced it low and we manufactured it with less glycerin than the lipsticks we sold to their mothers. Nothing a fifteen-year-old girl loves has to last longer than a few weeks, and it had to be cheap enough to buy with babysitting money. We could do that.

  I kept going, pulled along by the feeling I’d had when I looked in the mirror that afternoon and thought of the Marais dress. I wanted to come up with something windblown and a little scary, something that sounded like the way Jenna Louise’s rear end had looked as she swung down the high school hallway in a snug cocoon of skirt. Something so powerful it could swing a line of heads toward it in its wake. I’d felt those bubbles in my chest. I knew what was what. That quarter we put out Dangerous, Witchcraft, Fast Girl, and then Vixen. Three of our salesladies’ teenage daughters showed up one day asking to be trained to sell. All by themselves, they quadrupled our high-school-girl sales in their first month. They held parties in classrooms after school or, if the school booted them out, they’d meet in somebody’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon and make each other up. This crowd wanted Vixen and Fast Girl, not their mother’s Blush Rose. We launched Tough Broad Red, Vamp.

  Sales on what Lilly and I called our “Hussy” lipsticks were twice what we used to get for the old Pink Dawn stuff. We started noticing Vixen on older women.

  “We’re on fire!” Lilly said to me. “Let’s put out something called Tramp and see what happens.”

  Tramp didn’t work, but for some reason Trampy Lady flew out of the kit bags and into every high school locker in town.

  “How about Unstoppable!” suggested Lilly. “Outlaw. Catch Me If You Can. I like that—the thrill of the chase. The bad girl! What do you think?”

  I considered. “How about Runaway?”

  We sold Runaway and Catch Me If You Can so fast it was hard to keep it in stock.

  Just a few short years ago we’d thought a brand was something you put on a cow. Now Be Your Best was moving from a kitchen-table-in-a-warehouse business to a recognizable New England brand because it turned out there were lots of girls who wanted to be seen as Fast Girls even if they didn’t want to actually be one. We started to be known as what to wear for a riskily sexy look. Mom and Daddy noticed the shift in our fortunes. One afternoon a neighbor stopped our mother in the hardware store and asked her if her daughters didn’t sell that lipstick called Prostitute? Or maybe White Trash? I can’t recall. Even hours later she was so mad that her lips were like little pencil lines and spit came out the sides of her mouth when she said the p.

  We assured Mom our balance sheets would prove that the trashy-young-woman market was a chunk of the business but not most of it. We promised her that we did not sell a product named Prostitute or White Trash. We were not the trashy-girl cosmetics company, we told her. In fact, several ladies in her church group had recently agreed to give parties. We were in their living room at the time, asked to come over, supposedly, for tea on Sunday afternoon. Jane and Snyder sat woodenly on the couch. Nobody but Lilly looked relaxed.

  Daddy’s face was a white blank while Mom told us that she didn’t care what the other church ladies did, it was cheap, and though she didn’t like to bring it up, it was the kind of thing that would put a man off. Not the playboy men—the serious marrying men. Daddy nodded.

  “We’re making money, Mom. I think that makes us attractive.” Lilly smiled.

  “Attractive to weak men. Parasite men,” my mother went on. Daddy nodded again. “Men who want to use a woman instead of take care of her. I worry that you girls are looking … hard.”

  “Trashy,” Daddy added in a flat, dead tone.

  “Daddy!” Jane broke in. “That’s ridiculous, and you know you don’t mean it.” She crossed her arms, crossed her legs, and addressed us firmly. “Don’t talk to each other like that.” Out of the whole pack of us, Jane was the only one with enough moral authority to stop the conversation cold.

  I was mad for three days. Lilly had forgotten the whole exchange before she closed my parents’ door behind us on our way out. Our parents had never hurt her and never would. That was my territory. I was the one lying awake at night wondering about whether what Mom said was truer than I wanted it to be, wondering if my fate was sealed, thinking about Jenna Louise. Fast girl. Whore. Bitch. Cunt. Lilly was going to keep putting on her respectful and attentive face, but nothing, nothing my mother said mattered to her. Also, she’d turned down more than a half dozen proposals of marriage over her dating career and she’d been wearing Vixen when the last one happened. So much for men not taking fast girls seriously enough to propose to them.

  “They’re not actually hussies, the girls who wear this lipstick, Mom,” Lilly had said. “They wear the lipstick because they think men want hussies, and the fact is, men do. They pursue them like mad. You can’t blame the girls.”

  “And what do the girls want besides wanting the men to want them?” our mother had demanded. “Do they want a home and a man who respects them? Then they’d better rethink their behavior, because that’s not what that kind of woman gets in the end!”

  “Actually, getting caught at last can be more fun than being chased.” Lilly laughed.

  “What are you saying?” The color rose up a bright, angry pink on our mother’s face. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, Mom, come on. It’s harmless fun. A little lipstick, a great dress, and guys chase that rippling skirt right into a beautiful restaurant, where they tell you how stunning you are looking this evening.”

  “This is very serious, Lilly. It is not a game. Things happen to girls.”

  Lilly rolled her eyes in my direction and I knew she was thinking but not saying that of course things happened to girls; that was the point: to elude, to entice, and finally, to be captured. And then have something happen to you.

  My mother’s idea of proper courtship was a measured, chess game–ish affair. The breathless, twisting pursuit had no charms for her because she didn’t see the chase leading to a candlelit room, pleasant flattery, or a cinematic seduction. Her idea of a chase leaned more toward the baying hounds, the pinned animal finally on the ground, its body gripped in the teeth of the captor. And who will marry such a girl, she was thinking. Imagining what was in my mother’s head put those images firmly into my own. I struggled back to the more pleasing images that were in my sister’s mind.

  “Some of those dresses I see, and some of that paint on their faces, they deserve what they get,” our father said. Which made me really mad.

  “We’ve got to go,” Lilly said, pulling me toward the door before I co
uld collect myself enough to speak. “We’ll come for dinner on Sunday, Mom. We promise.”

  I stayed upset, of course, but Lilly whacked me on the rear and said, “It never occurs to Mom or Dad that not all the girls are thinking about a kitchen with linoleum counters. Some of us have other things on our minds.” She rolled her eyes. “Momma and her church ladies, forever lost in the garden of primrose boredom. Daddy and his Neanderthal ideas. I mean, so, so dumb.”

  Plunge ahead, I said to myself. Paddle fast.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  Pursuit

  Five ships in pursuit of one; five swift ships with a combined force of 2,128 pounds of metal against the Cat with her 488. Basil Le Cherche spent an hour at the masthead with one arm coiled around the rigging and the other training his best glass on the approaching ships. He ordered the Cat, with her shallow bottom and experienced crew, into a foggy series of sandbanks and islands close to the coast, treacherous to the hulls of the larger pursuers. There he had a lead thrown every hundred yards to mark depths and he set the crew to build a raft designed to hold lanterns spaced at exactly the intervals of the Cat’s cabin lights. When night was thick about them he used the starless dark to cloak them as they slid past the last in the sweeping line of Henri Le Cherche’s ships. Safely beyond them he ordered the decoy raft dropped over the side. While it was lashed at the Cat’s side they unfurled its sail, lit its lanterns, and cut the whole floating deceit loose while they darkened their own lights and headed briskly into deeper waters. The judge’s forces saw the raft’s carefully placed lanterns and pursued the flimsy little decoy. Before the Cat was an hour away they heard the rending cracks of a mast going overboard—one of the pursuers hitting a shallow bank and coming to a halt that cost them masts, as well, hopefully, as her hull. They heard cannon fire and saw the raft’s twinkling lights vanish one by one as its attackers’ cannon fire reached it.