Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel

by Bethany Maines

  “If you have something to say about the French language, I suggest you say it to me,” the Canadian said in English.

  “My girlfriend will kick your ass,” the blond Canadian added, and at this comment, Cashmere Sweater’s face went beet red.

  “What are you? Some sort of French lesbians?”

  “French-kissing lesbians,” the blonde corrected. She stuck out her tongue, which was pierced, and wiggled the stud.

  Cashmere Sweater looked apoplectic. For a moment Nikki thought Cashmere Sweater was going to attack the Canadians, but at the last second she collected her bags and flung herself away from the line.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said as she left. “I am above this.”

  “Well, that was just weird,” said Nikki to no one in particular.

  “Très étrange,” agreed the blonde, giving Nikki a smile.

  “Ladies,” Mrs. Merrivel said from the table, “if you’re done baiting the wildlife, perhaps we can move the line along.” The two Canadians giggled and presented their ten dollars to the Carrie Mae lady who was acting as cashier. Mrs. Merrivel signed their book with a flourish and handed it over. The girls left with a wave to Nikki, which she blushingly returned.

  “Well, Nikki, how did you like the speech?” There was a distinct twinkle in Mrs. Merrivel’s eye as Nikki presented her book to be signed.

  “Er . . . it was very interesting. My mother really liked it.”

  “Oh, good. Whom shall I make this out to?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “To Nell Lanier, L-A-N-I-E-R,” said Nikki, and then added, “my mother.”

  “Does she speak French, too?”

  “A little,” Nikki said, glancing around the table.

  “Languages must be more your thing, then? Didn’t you say you graduated in linguistics?”

  Nikki blushed. She hadn’t thought Mrs. Merrivel had been sitting close enough at the restaurant to hear all the details of her life.

  “How many languages do you speak?” asked Mrs. Merrivel, her pen hand hovering above the blank page.

  “Four, well, five if you count Latin,” Nikki said, wishing the conversation would end and Mrs. Merrivel would sign the stupid book.

  “Ah, Latin. I nearly flunked that class myself, but I appreciate that someone can understand it. Personally I always think it looks like garbled Spanish.”

  “All the romance languages kind of look alike,” agreed Nikki. “I suppose, being from California, that would be the one you’d think of first.”

  Mrs. Merrivel blinked and then smiled. “You’re quite right. I am from California. I don’t think I mentioned that, did I?”

  “You use some pretty common California speech patterns,” Nikki said, feeling like she’d finally managed to put the other woman on the defensive for once.

  “How exciting. Just like Henry Higgins,” Mrs. Merrivel said, and Nikki winced. Linguists were a little sensitive about anything My Fair Lady related. She glanced around, wishing that she could just get her book and leave now. Apparently the cashier agreed with Nikki, because she gave a polite cough and glanced significantly at the line of impatient people behind her.

  “Well, here you are, Nikki,” said Mrs. Merrivel, holding out the book. “I hope you win that starter kit.” Nikki nodded awkwardly and took the book.

  Exiting the book line, she found her mother deep in conversation about lipstick colors. Nikki stood waiting, while the Carrie Mae lady selling the lipsticks was arm-wrestled into accepting an expired “buy one, get one free” coupon for Nell’s purchase.

  “I put your name in for the starter kit drawing,” Nell said to Nikki as they walked away from the booth. Nikki tripped over her own feet.

  “I don’t want the starter kit, Mom,” she said, regaining her balance.

  “Nonsense. You didn’t get that job and you’ve got to earn a living some way. Tutoring and temping will not pay your bills forever. And you can make a real career out of this Carrie Mae thing.”

  “What makes you think I didn’t get the job?” Nikki asked defensively.

  “Because if the interview had gone well you would have told me.”

  Nikki writhed under the truth of the statement. “You can still look for a job, but this makeup selling stuff is a snap. I have a friend who sells candles and she always has loads of cash.”

  “I don’t want to sell Carrie Mae,” Nikki said, hearing the whining in her own voice, even though her mother ignored it. She glanced around the room, quickly calculating the odds at about three hundred to one. She could live with those odds.

  She followed her mom around to booth after booth, collecting free samples and carrying Nell’s purchases. The circuit of booths had almost been completed when a small gong sounded over the buzz of voices.

  “All right, ladies,” a cheerful Carrie Mae lady said from the stage. “It’s almost time for the starter kit drawing.” There was a renewed hubbub from the crowd, and the Carrie Mae lady shushed them. “If you’ll all gather round, I’ll have Mrs. Merrivel give the ticket drum a spin. You all have your tickets, right?”

  Nell produced a small blue ticket stub and handed it to Nikki. She peered at the ticket over the mound of packages in her arms and read the number 91724. Nell’s aggressively perky handwriting was scrawled across the ticket where she had filled in Nikki’s name and phone number.

  “Come on number 82563,” Nikki prayed, picking a random number.

  “That’s not our number,” said Nell sharply.

  “Must have misread it,” mumbled Nikki.

  Mrs. Merrivel cranked the ticket drum and, inside their wire cage, the little blue pieces of fate whirled like snowflakes in a snow globe. Reaching into the cage, she wiggled her hand about dramatically, and Nikki felt the crowd tense. Finally Mrs. Merrivel withdrew one blue ticket and handed it to the MC.

  “The winner of the complete starter kit is the holder of ticket number . . .” The MC paused dramatically. “Number 9-1.” A pause, to allow a few groans. “7.” A few more groans and Nikki’s palm began to sweat. “2.” Rising excitement from the crowd. Nikki was feeling faint. “And the last number is 4!”

  Nikki stared at her ticket in disbelief.

  “That’s right,” said the Carrie Mae lady, “Number 91724!”

  Nell grabbed Nikki’s hand and inspected the ticket.

  “91724! That’s it!” Nell shouted. “We won! We’re the winners.” She was dragging Nikki toward the front of the room, her hand clamped over Nikki’s in a viselike grip.

  “It looks like we have a winner, folks,” the MC said with a giggle. “But don’t let that disappoint you. We’ll be giving away plenty more prizes.”

  Nikki and her mother were ushered onto the stage. Someone took their packages from them. There was a pause for a photograph as Nikki shook Mrs. Merrivel’s hand while holding a franchise certificate.

  “I look forward to hearing of your progress. Feel free to call me anytime,” Mrs. Merrivel said before walking off. Nikki’s eyes followed her of their own volition, watching her gliding stride with suspicion. Two effervescent Carrie Mae ladies took her place, distracting Nikki with their help. Nell hovered in the background, rubbing her hands together in delight. Nikki felt a little sick, and she had a sudden desire to be back in the peaceful sunlit restaurant, with Z’ev twirling his knife to reflect the sunshine. The moment now seemed the very essence of peace and quiet. Nikki signed some paperwork and was given a name to contact when she returned to the States. But even then she wasn’t allowed to leave. Twelve women had purchased their starter kits that night: Nikki was lined up next to them and photographed until her jaw ached from smiling.

  “Can we go back to the room now, Mom?” she asked, when she was finally allowed offstage. “I have a bit of a headache.”

  “Yes,” Nell agreed, clutching the silver gray starter kit. “Let’s go up to the room and look at what we’ve won.” She led the way out of the ballroom and up the stairs.

  “I wonder,” said Nell. �
�What were the odds of your winning that drawing?”

  “Lots to little, I suppose,” Nikki answered.

  “Stroke of luck, though, all the same,” said Nell.

  “Yeah, real lucky,” agreed Nikki as the elevator doors opened, although her tone suggested the opposite. Nell was used to ignoring subtleties, however, and probably didn’t trouble herself over this one.

  THAILAND I

  Going the Distance

  The next thing Nikki remembered was Val kicking the couch.

  “Wake up, Red. You ain’t no princess and this ain’t Sleeping Beauty. Time to go to work.”

  Nikki struggled upright and stared, befuddled, around the room. Sunlight streamed through the windows. A blanket had been tossed over her sometime in the night.

  “Work?” she repeated, realizing she hadn’t washed her makeup off the night before and regretting it.

  “Right. Work,” Val repeated mockingly. “Thailand, remember? We have to go rescue the girl. Don’t want to be late for your first mission. Hurry up.”

  A far too short while later, Nikki was following Val through the sprawling warren of LAX, occasionally tripping over the carpet or her feet or nothing at all. Her head was splitting and her eyes felt as if they’d been taken out, rolled in dirt, and then put back in the sockets. She kept her sunglasses on for most of the airport process, taking them off only when the luggage screener demanded it. He’d run the glasses through the machine and quickly handed them back without any comments and with a carefully expressionless face.

  They waited at a bar for their flight to board. Nikki had turned down the offer of a screwdriver so firmly that Val had laughed. Nikki grimaced, but stuck to her guns and had straight orange juice.

  “Here ya go,” said Val, passing Nikki an envelope full of papers.

  “What’s this?” she asked blearily.

  “Background on our missing girl.”

  “Not much of a girl,” said Nikki, staring blankly at the pages. “She’s thirty-two.”

  Val was digging through her pockets, ignoring Nikki, looking for something. She had just found her cigarettes when she noticed the No Smoking signs. “Damn,” she swore at the signs, and then turned her attention back to Nikki.

  “Where’d you read that?” She twitched the top sheet out of Nikki’s hand and scanned it.

  “I didn’t,” said Nikki. “They showed a piece on her during training.”

  “Why?” Val asked, reaching for the cigarettes again, visibly struggling under the no-smoking policy.

  “We were learning about the kind of causes Carrie Mae supports. Lawan is a major crusader against the sex trade. She founded a free health clinic and she works with a scholarship program for children born into brothels.”

  “What a saint,” commented Val dryly, and switched to playing with her lighter. Nikki noticed that Val was drawing suspicious looks from the militant nonsmokers at the bar.

  “They say she’s dating one of the top kickboxers in the country,” Nikki added, hoping that gossip would interest Val more than facts.

  “Sounds good,” Val said. She had noticed her audience now and her lighter fiddling became more flamboyant as she took out a cigarette and put it on the table.

  “Do you always bait the wildlife?” Nikki asked, quoting from someone, but unable to remember who.

  “We all have our hobbies,” said Val with a grin.

  “So if you could find something that irritated people without causing cancer, you’d do that instead?” Nikki asked with a laugh.

  Val nodded. “Maybe.”

  “I think you just like causing trouble!”

  “Maybe,” Val agreed with an impish smile. “You should try it sometime. You might like it.”

  “I’ll stick with my own passive-aggressive habits, thanks,” Nikki said as her cell phone began to sound its familiar tune. Why she had assigned a Rolling Stones song as her mother’s ring tone she never could remember. She pressed the Ignore button, hoping that her mother would take the hint and not call back. Val raised an eyebrow at her.

  “My mom,” said Nikki by way of explanation.

  “Why don’t you tell her where to get off?” asked Val.

  “I can’t do that. She’s my mom.”

  “I would,” Val said, leaning back in her chair.

  “That’s because she’s not your mom. Eventually, I am going to have to speak to her again and, really, I just don’t want to fight.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What, like in an alternate universe where I have the perfect mom?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Val, picking up the cigarette and putting it in her mouth. The hyenas at the bar began to move. Val put the cigarette back down, and the hyenas relaxed.

  “Well, I’d like her to actually be supportive, for one thing. I mean, she says she wants me to succeed, but then she does everything to get in my way.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Val.

  Nikki tried to think of a concrete example, something that was more than just overtones and implied expectations. “Oh, like one time, in high school, I needed to lose five pounds, which I did by sticking to a diet and working out more. When I told my mom, she said, ‘That’s great!’ and then made brownies.”

  Val had been taking a sip of her drink and snorted with laughter, dribbling Bloody Mary down her chin. “Not while I’m drinking, Red!” she exclaimed, grabbing for a napkin. Nikki pondered her mother and handed Val a napkin.

  “I’d really like her to not judge my dates by their cars. She’s so independent. I mean she owns her own home and all of her money is her money. You’d think she wouldn’t care what my boyfriends were making. She says she just wants them to be ‘good enough’ for me. But really it’s all about the money. There was this guy I was totally in love with, and she hated him. I swear it was because he drove a beat-up old Ford truck. But at the same time, it’s like she thinks I have to be dating somebody. Dating a poor guy is still preferable to dating no guy. Being single just isn’t an option.”

  “Your mother has issues,” said Val. “Did she just miss the whole feminist thing or what?”

  Nikki shrugged. “I guess.”

  “All right, what else?” Val asked. “What else would your perfect mother do?”

  Nikki shook her head. Thinking about her mother just made her already splitting headache worse. She thought about Val. She was tough, independent, and divorced—a lot like Nell. But unlike her mother, Val seemed not to need Nikki to do anything but be Nikki.

  “Mostly I just want to be left alone,” said Nikki with a sigh.

  “So, tell her. Find a nice way to say it, but tell her.”

  “There’s a nice way to tell your mother to back off?”

  “Hmmm. OK, maybe there isn’t, but, really, do you want to have her calling you every day for the rest of your life?”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal when I was living with her.”

  “Well, now you’re not. So you’d better do something. You have to stand up for yourself.”

  Nikki shrugged uncomfortably. “That’s easy for you to say. She’s not your mother. She may not be Perfect Mom, but she’s the only family I have.”

  Val flipped her lighter a bit more and eyed her cigarette. Nikki watched the lighter and drank her orange juice.

  “Never had any family myself. Deadbeat dad. Mom was pretty much out of the picture. Bounced around between relatives.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Nikki, surprised by Val’s revelation.

  “I don’t tell you this to get sympathy,” Val said acerbically. “I’m just explaining. I never had much family and never really missed it. It’s always been Me and Self, and generally I like it that way. Don’t get me wrong—I like having somebody. You do reach a certain point in life where an empty house at the end of the day starts to look like the seventh ring of hell.”

  “Why don’t you find someone nice and have a couple of kids, then?” suggested Nikki, interrupting Val’s thought process.
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br />   “Kids? Me and kids? Together? Like at the same time? Is that really something you can picture?” Nikki smothered a smile and shrugged. “And I don’t date nice people. Nice doesn’t really work for me. Besides, I could already have had six husbands and how would you know?”

  “No pictures around the house. No one but the company has called you. And, um, you’re kind of prone to violence.”

  “Well, aren’t you an observant little person,” said Val, narrowing her eyes to slits. Then she waved a hand through the air as if dismissing Nikki’s speculations. “Poor logic, though. I’m prone to violent outbursts whether I’m getting laid or not. But my point was—before I was derailed by the ludicrous idea of me procreating—that I just think it’s a little weird when I run into people like you who get hung up on their families.”

  “Thanks so much,” said Nikki dryly. “Nice to know that I’m the weirdo in this partnership.”

  A smile cracked across Val’s face. “Well, it couldn’t be me.”

  “Don’t you ever get hung up on anyone?” Nikki asked. “There isn’t anyone who can make you do stupid things?”

  “I’m a grown-up. I can do stupid things all on my own,” Val said, sternly, but there was a sparkle in her eye that belied the toughness of her attitude. “But yeah, there are one or two people who skew my decision-making skills.” A faint smile hovered on her face, and for a moment it looked like she was going to say something, but then she shook her head.

  “Look, all I’m trying to say is that I’m probably not the best person to listen to on the family thing. If you’re happy having your mom call you whenever she feels like it, then rock on. If it works for you, then what do I know?”

  “But I’m not happy about it,” Nikki protested.

  “Then tell her to take a long walk off a short pier.”

  “It’s not that simple,” answered Nikki, laughing.

  “Yes, it is.” Val flicked her lighter and watched the flame burn for a moment. At the bar the hyenas tensed, but didn’t move. “I may not know about families, but I’ve been around the block a time or two. And ultimately, it’s always that simple. That’s your problem. You overcomplicate things. You have to exist right here, right now.”