Rouge

“Well”—she wipes her eyes—“you know your mother and I were friends, of course.”

I think of visits with Mother over the last years. Always awkward whenever it was just the two of us. Always the radio way up in the car, even if it was a song she hated. Always a movie on full volume in the house. Always a restaurant where she knew a waiter and could banter with them instead of me. Usually she’d recruit Sylvia to join us for at least one lunch or early dinner. Mother would silently sip champagne from under the vast brim of a black hat that shadowed her pale face. Sylvia, hatless, melasmic, beaming with toadyism, would have a salad and sparkling water. Fill the silence with light, boring chatter. Inane comments about her book club. What she’d heard on NPR the other day that was so true. What she’d read in O magazine that she was internalizing—that Oprah just gets it, doesn’t she? And this restaurant—such a cute place. Just look at those cocktails going by! Of course she much prefers to eat her calories, hahaha. Mother would just nod absently. As if she’d left her body just as I’d left mine. And our souls were both floating elsewhere, this silly woman’s voice the only thing holding us down.

“I want to help where I can,” Sylvia says softly. “I really do.”

We both watch Anjelica bat at the red jar with her white fluffy paws. Sylvia, was my mother crazy? Did she ever bring you to a spa on the other end of the cove? An opulent glass house, right on the cliff’s edge? Did she ever introduce you to two beautiful twins clad in the most elegant jet? Who could be thirty, who could be teenagers? How about to a lady in red?

I look at Sylvia in her tan capris and Breton top—a marinière, Mother would have called it. She would’ve approved of this outfit, I know—a classic—but to my eye, Sylvia just looks like she’s going sailing on a very dull boat. Diamonds like little pinpricks of rich in either ear.

“You know,” she says, “I was thinking about what you asked me the other day. About your mother getting a little…”

“French?” I offer.

Sylvia nods. “Toward the end of her… toward the end. And there was something else.”

“What?”

“Well”—Sylvia laughs—“it’s a little embarrassing. But she kept coming into our little shop. After she sold it to me. It was like she’d forgotten she’d sold it or something. I’d catch her behind the counter or with the customers. Being her usual self. Maybe more than her usual self.” She laughs again. “I’d catch her staring at herself in the mirror. You know your mother and her mirrors. Forget about her five million boyfriends,” she says loudly, no doubt for the benefit of Tad in the bedroom. “That mirror was the affair of a lifetime.” She smiles at Mother’s wall of cracked glass. “Anyway. We sorted it all out in the end.”

“I don’t understand. How could she forget she’d sold it to you?”

“I’m sure she didn’t actually forget, Mirabelle. Probably just seller’s remorse. Not that she had anything to be remorseful for. Your mother was never much of a saleswoman, as you know, and the shop was in excellent hands. She knew that, of course. She just had to learn to let go.”

She looks at me meaningfully. “So what do you say? Do we have a… deal?” When she says this, she glances over at Mother’s windows. I keep calling them windows, but they aren’t really. They’re a wall. A ceiling-to-floor wall of glass wrapping around the living room and the dining room and the kitchen. I see a hunger in her eyes at the sight of all that ocean, which I know she can’t see from her own apartment facing the street. I hear the scraping sound of some kind of tool in the bedroom. Tad most likely. I look at the red shoes gleaming by the front door. Didn’t I kick them off in the bedroom?

“I don’t know, Sylvia.”

“What?”

“I’ll need to think about it.”

“Well, forgive me for saying this, but you don’t have much time, do you?”

The red shoes wink at me by the door.

“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t.”





9


Evening. I’m in the living room, staring at the red shoes by Mother’s front door. Just sitting there. Shining there. Almost like I never wore them last night. Never walked along the shoreline, then along a dirt road to the house on the cliff’s edge. We hope you’ll come back, they said. A visitor would be coming, they said. Someone important. Very important to my mother. Who? I think of those strange jellyfish swimming in that massive tank. The woman in red waving at me from the landing of the grand stair, beneath the blazing chandelier. Shouldn’t go back to that house. Was it a spa? Some cult or pyramid scheme too, probably. Rich eccentrics peddling red jars. For the face, dear, for the face. Unlike you, I need all the help I can get. Mother was such a sucker. Probably they were going to try and sell them to me. Mother knew some very strange people, it’s true. People who wore gloves in the summer. People who owned rare exotic pets. People who always smiled at me with far too many teeth. Pointed and white and shimmering.

We know so much about you, the twins said. And that shudder I felt. Deep in the pit of me. What do you know?

All a scam, surely.

Sylvia’s long gone. Left in a huff after I told her I’d think about her offer. From the door, I told her again. I told her thank you, and she waved back at me like she was batting away a fly. Tad’s just left too, after a day of handymanning around the apartment. This is so satisfying, I heard him whisper to the walls, running his hands over them lightly.

Today, I did some things myself. Didn’t I?