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.