I let her win.
“Look,” she said obstinately, “there’s a weight on my chest. No matter what I do, I can’t get rid of it. It comes down on me the minute I close the blinds to put the girls to sleep and stays there until early morning. I can’t breathe. I can’t sleep. Tindara says you can make it go away. ‘The woman who will help you is a prominent person who comes from a country overseas.’ That’s what she said. Exact words. She read the olive oil in my water and the coffee in my cup.”
She was rushing and fueled with adrenaline, eating up her words in strict Sicilian dialect. I barely understood anything, but I gathered she was convinced I was the one person who could help her. She stared at me with focused, transfixed eyes.
“I’m not leaving,” she said.
She looked wrinkled, tired, and ugly and that was all I could think—how ugly she was, with her small mouth and hairy chin, her rough skin covered in scars and freckles, wild hair graying prematurely, not caring about any of it. I searched for glimpses of the person she might have been before isolation and roughness, before the husband and the kids and the dumpster smell outside the window—and I saw a way out.
“I can make you beautiful,” I offered tentatively.
It was the first time America had come to my rescue. I was thinking about the Niki Taylor Cover Girl commercials I’d been watching in LA. “Beautiful is fresh, beautiful is alive” was the tagline and I repeated it with flair. I don’t know why I said it. I didn’t mean it like that, but when I uttered the words, she parted her lips with an imperceptible, feline smile. Everything in her body said yes.
“Do you think that will take the evil eye away?” she asked.
“I’m sure of it.”
Lay low, even out. Lay low, even out, my uncle’s motorboat had warned me, but there I was proclaiming cures for evil eyes, promising remedies, announcing makeovers.
—
Rosalia and Santino’s house was excavated out of the mountain. The rock walls sheltered the family from the dumpster’s stench. I walked up the creaking wooden stairs and stepped inside: a kitchen and living-room area with two mattresses on the floor for the girls, a small bedroom with a queen bed, and a bathroom. No doors, just strings of plastic beads hanging across doorframes. A faded pescheria calendar from the previous year hung over the fridge next to a crucifix with a dried-out olive branch from the past Palm Sunday. Rosalia grunted hello. She gave me water and showed me to the bathroom.
I’d filled my backpack with used beauty products I found in Alma’s bathroom: rusty tweezers, blunt scissors, an old electronic hair-pulling machine that made a mean sound, melted waxing strips, expired highlighting shampoo and conditioner. I bought a hair straightener from the “beauty” section of the alimentari. It was next to the nail files, between the hairpins and glittery jelly sandals—the whole of the beauty accessories available to islanders.
Rosalia sat on a stool inside her broken shower. Her crisp curls sizzled under the straightener, and when I pulled it away, they came off her head in clumps and I panicked. I did not know what I was doing. What if Tindara had misread the coffee cup and olive oil? I pictured her directing many evil eyes my way. I imagined altars of Italian Spam covered in pine needles as she howled at the winds and the gods from her cement terrace, agitating goats and pterodactyls, proclaiming revenge against the American impostor.
Santino’s bare feet dragged up the wood stairs. Rosalia shifted in her seat and covered her cleavage with a towel, defensively.
He peeked his head into the bathroom and snickered at his wife.
“You look like a crazy person. What’s for lunch?”
Rosalia got up from her stool and walked to the kitchen area—her fried hair flopping to one side. She threw an old bread bun on a plastic plate, opened the fridge, took out a shriveled sausage, and slapped it on the bread. She handed the plate to her husband. Santino glared at me and walked out.
—
The next morning Rosalia was waiting for me, leaning on the back porch door with burned hair—exhilarated.
“Something is happening. Last night before going to bed the pounding rocks on my chest only lasted a few minutes. We’re on our way.”
I thought about Niki Taylor’s hair blowing over the rooftops of the small Greek island village in the Cover Girl commercial. “Cover Girl: Redefining Beautiful.” I would turn our crumbling Sicilian island into a clean Greek Cyclades. I’d introduce Rosalia to the concept they told us about in health and PE classes: Looking good is feeling good.
We started over.
I sat her on the stool in the shower and patted her hair with conditioner. Now that it was moisturized it didn’t break under the hair straightener. Her frizzy curls began to unfurl on her shoulders in delicate waves. When the hair was straight we moved to the porch and she dried off in a sliver of sunlight that filtered through a crack in the mountain. Her usual mouse hue faded. The colors of the mountain began to blend into her hair and eyes. It was the first time she was letting the island into her body.
I shaved her and waxed her, focused like a scientist in a lab—the lab of infinite dark follicles. I pressed olive oil over her legs and thighs and tweezed her eyebrows in perfect arches. Her face transformed. I watched the angles of her eyes soften as she looked at her reflection in the mirror.
“Nobody has ever touched me with the intention of making me beautiful,” she said.
Her daughters came home, fishing rods dangling with hooked worms at their sides. They ran over to touch their mother’s face.
“Mamma, sembri una principessa!” they screamed. “You look like a princess!”
—
A small revolution broke out around town. Rosalia wore new clothes and walked with her chin up. The older women sat on stoops, dressed in black, hissing at her when she passed with her hips swaying. She used to walk straight like a piece of wood, but now there was this waving thing she did and everyone was suspicious of it.