“Yes.” And now her voice is cold. “Two minutes to get out here.”
So I put on the white dress. There’s a folded piece of paper in the pocket. That picture of Tom I tore from Sky so long ago. I stare at his glossy face. Smile though I feel strange. He looks different than when he’s in person. But that’s how pictures are sometimes, right? It’s Tom, of course. I fold it up, tuck it back in my pocket. Put a sweater over the dress, though it’s hot and it itches and it doesn’t cover everything. Not my neck or my hands or my face. All I have to do is look at your face, Mother says, and I know everything. I can read you like a book, remember? Every page.
* * *
When I come out in the dress and sweater, I expect Mother to scream, but Mother is smiling. She looks like Vogue magazine. Like she stepped out of the movies she watches to cleanse from Ladies Apparel. She’s wearing the black Saint Laurent suit today. Lips shining with her best red and her hair a soft wave. White sunglasses on her head, the lenses big as a bug’s eyes. There’s a gold chain on her neck with a gold Nefertiti head.
“How sweet you look,” she says, not looking at me. Looking through me, it feels like. There’s Bryce beside her. He doesn’t look anything like Tom Cruise today, not even close. He’s a completely different man. Very tall. Glasses. Beard. Small, bloody, watery eyes. Something spidery about his long legs and arms. He’s wearing a look on his face like he expects something from me. My apology. That’s when I know I hate him. Creep, I think.
My hands are behind my back so Mother won’t see the scratches on them. Though she has to see the bruise on my forehead is worse. But she doesn’t at all. She keeps glancing at herself in the mirror behind me, nervous. Checking her hair, her jacket, her best red. Checking that Nefertiti’s head hangs from her neck exactly like it should.
So I reach out my hand to Bryce the Creep.
“Sorry,” I say. “For yesterday.”
He doesn’t smile at first. He just looks down at my hand like it’s a bug. And Mother doesn’t tell him to stop being a baby like she would to me if I did that. She just stands there, looking at Bryce like she’s nervous. She doesn’t scream at the sight of my scratched-up hand either. Finally, he takes my hand, shakes it, but he doesn’t hold it back. It’s like I’m holding something dead.
“It’s fine,” he says. But he’s lying. Now I know what Mother means when I’m lying and she says, Do you see your face? Because I see the lying in his. I want to ask Bryce if he sees his face. I want Mother to ask him that. But Mother is looking at herself in a gold compact now. Sometimes her best red smears beyond her mouth corners and she needs to check. On the back of the compact, there’s a picture of a lady also looking at herself in a compact. She’s checking her best red just like Mother is.
Any minute now she’s going to snap the compact shut. Really look at me and scream. She’s going to notice my forehead bruise, so much darker now. The cuts and scratches on my neck that my sweater doesn’t cover. She’s going say, What the fuck happened? She’ll be so mad, she’ll say fuck. And I’ll have to deny everything, like Tom Cruise said. But she’ll read my eyes and she’ll know the whole story. Tom’s kiss. The bracelet with Father’s eye lying in the dark soil of Alla’s garden. The crushed stolen roses under my bed in the black sack. Probably I stink of their alive perfume. But Mother doesn’t notice, even though she’s snapped her compact shut. She’s looking at Bryce the Creep mostly now, his lying smile.
“Mother has her audition today,” she says to me. So that’s why she doesn’t see. On audition days, Mother sees only herself, her dream of herself in what she calls that other world. Far from Ladies Apparel. Among the lights and palm trees. “Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.” And suddenly I’m angry about Mother not seeing. When usually she sees a button missing on a dress, a loose thread on a sweater. What the hell is this? Mother will say, poking at the hole where the button was, holding up the loose thread like evidence. What happened? What did you do? Do you know how hard I work to buy you these things?
But Mother’s just smiling now. “All right, Sunshine, we’re off. We can’t stay and wait for Grand-Maman today, okay? But you’ll be fine.”
She’s not asking me. She’s telling me.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll be fine.” My face is full of lying, but she sees nothing. Not even when she leans in close to kiss the air by my cheek and I smell her dead perfume. Thank god, I tell myself. Which god, I don’t know. Between Mother’s and Father’s gods, I picture a wide black space full of stars. That’s the space I whisper up to. Maybe there’s a god there, too. My own.
* * *
Find a pestle and mortar, Tom said to me last night. His eyes were shining in the dark. Blue-green then red then blue-green again. Your mother has one in the kitchen. She likes to think she’s a cook.
What’s a pestle and mortar? I asked.
And Tom smiled his white smile. It’s a tool, my dear mouse. You’ll use it to crush the roses.
It takes me forever to find it in the kitchen. I have to open all the cupboards and drawers. Turns out Mother hid it under the sink, behind a carrot juicer that she bought a long time ago. For a week after she bought the juicer, we drank nothing but carrots because Mother said it was good for us and also it might make us beautiful. Then it turned our skin orange and Mother was frightened. So much for that. The mortar and pestle is a black heavy bowl of stone that comes with a rock for crushing. I can’t remember Mother ever using it. The sky is still bright though it’s evening now. I bring it to my bedroom and put it under the bed with the roses, which are really starting to smell. I have just enough time to hide it before Grand-Maman arrives.
When she comes in the door, she looks at me and I know she sees everything. Her eyes take in every cut, every scratch. She sees the dark bruise on my forehead, and that’s where her eyes stay.
“Que s’est-il passé?” she whispers.
“Nothing.”
But Grand-Maman knows it’s not nothing. “Is it that man? The new one? The producer?”
I hesitate. Look at Grand-Maman’s face. “Yes.”
And then Grand-Maman’s eyes go like I’ve never seen them go before. Soft and hard at the same time. Like she’s going to cry, but then her eyes say never. “Je le savais. I knew something.”
And her hands holding mine are shaking.
“I’m going to go to my room and play records now,” I tell her. You’ll need to play them loud, Tom said, to cover the sound of the crushing.
Grand-Maman looks down at our held hands. My tan hands and hers white with tan spots. All the jewels on her wrists and fingers. All the shimmering gold and pretty colored stones. I picture her young, beautiful, holding out her white, spotless hand for each shiny thing the men give her.
“Go play records,” she says.
* * *