The perfume counter girl refused to look up from her arrangement of what Cherise called tattoo perfume, row after row of black and pink bottles decorated with tigers and hearts. The woman’s nails looked bright as Chiclets click-clacking against the counter as she rearranged the bottles in what looked like a strange game.
“What’s the prize if you win?” Cherise asked. She called this new tactic towards her goal of uniqueness “being friendly,” ingratiating herself with the people who worked at perfume counters.
“I work on commission,” the woman said as she grabbed a stack of perfume bottles created by a reality star and lined them up next to the others.
Cherise attempted to amp up her charm. “Of course I never learned Latin. Who did, right? But I wonder if the words ‘commission’ and ‘commit’ come from the same place. And if they do, are you essentially committing a crime by selling me things I don’t really need, just to make your commission?”
The girl behind the counter kept tapping her fingernails against the glass. “Is there something you’d like to smell?”
Cherise pointed to a glass bottle filled with golden liquid. The color reminded her of a boat that could sail across the ocean for days without seeing land, and maybe even the golden blonde head of the ship’s handsome captain.
“That’s got to be the one. Is it rare?” she asked the perfume girl.
“Ma’am, it’s Chanel.”
“Why you’re right. I must’ve gotten so caught up in the excitement of becoming unique, I forgot I actually used to do this for a living. Silly me.”
“I’m sure.” The woman behind the counter wrapped the glass bottle in tissue paper then placed the bottle in a bag with silk ribbons for handles. “So is this reinvention about finding Mr. Right, because nine times out of ten it usually is.” She scuttled her nails along the counter again. To Cherise they looked like ten miniature white-tipped tap shoes. “Who am I kidding? Isn’t everything we do about finding him?”
“Well, mine is waiting for me,” Cherise said as she grabbed the bag of perfume from the woman. The violet mint lodged itself between two other toes, constantly rolling around in her shoe. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
“Your shoes match your bag and you’re optimistic. That’s half the battle right there,” the woman said as Cherise left the store without looking back.
She knew what being made fun of sounded like. She’d always known, whether or not she walked through the world with her very pretty lips, even those weren’t enough to fit in. But the man who would call her mouth a symphony would never make fun of Cherise. He might tease her if she snorted a little when she laughed at old Marx Brothers movies or tickle her in bed if she overslept when it was his turn to make the kind of pancakes fluffy enough to layer crisp pieces of bacon between. Most of all, he wouldn’t touch the cuts on her legs that never had time to heal before Cherise scratched new ones into her flesh, sometimes so deep as she leaned into the turnstiles before getting on the subway, she cried out in pain.
The man who would call her mouth a symphony took his lunch break on a park bench only a few blocks from Cherise. She could just feel it as she threw the ribbon-handled bag in the nearest trashcan, unwrapped the tissue paper in mock surprise of its contents and doused herself in cologne. She tucked the cologne bottle into her purse next to her packs of violet mints.
“Of course you’ll know where my pulse points are,” she spoke towards the city street. “You always have and you always will . . . John.”
Cherise just knew the man who would call her mouth a symphony, and notice her obvious uniqueness, would go by the name John, like that president who married a smart brunette then had sex with dumb blondes or his son who rollerbladed all over town before marrying a smart brunette who dyed her hair dumb blonde. Cherise also suspected as she continued to walk back to her building that the men who thought about cherries and bananas also named their penises “John.” This didn’t sound very unique.
Yes, Cherise knew somewhere in her city, John ate a turkey club on a park bench during his lunch break and thought about her, wondering what sort of flower he would give her at the start of their first date.
“My boyfriend . . . well, it really feels silly calling a man nearing forty a boyfriend, though ‘man friend’ sounds like something a sailor would say, and John has never even sailed a paper boat across a pond,” Cherise said to the owner of the Italian deli eight blocks from her apartment as she continued in the afternoon sun to wind her way back home. “Like I was saying, John, my boy, no, my man friend, takes his lunch at noon. Since it’s nearing two or three and he won’t be home ’til six, do you have any recommendations for a little pick-me-up for our date tonight?” Then she pointed to her newly perfumed neck. “If this does the trick, of course we will be staying in.”
“I’ll wrap you up a cream cake. It’s just big enough to share.”
Cherise knew men liked to talk about cherries and bananas. Thinking about cream, especially a cake filled with all that froth, must turn them on even more. Even though she was understanding men’s secrets one innocuous word at a time, Cherise hoped her uniqueness would materialize as more than just the ability to say words like cherry and banana to excite John.
She asked the deli owner, “Can you please be sure to put your delightful confection in a pink box and tie it with butcher string? Since I was a little girl I dreamed of carrying home a pink box tied with butcher string. Something about the image seems so romantic. How can you not sense a feeling of potential clustering around a pink box wrapped in butcher string?”
“Miss, I think your lip is bleeding. You’ve got some nasty cut there. Who done that to you, anyway?”
“Would you believe me if I told you I did it to myself the way I do every morning?”
“Now why would someone like you be doing something crazy like that? I don’t believe it for a minute. Say, is your Mr. hitting you or something? If you tell me you bought the Neanderthal a cake when he’s smacking you around, I swear I’ll . . .”
“No, I do it every day. Slap myself, cut myself, gouge the inside of my mouth with tweezers or the end of my toothbrush or even plastic straws if that’s all I can find when work gets too busy to lock myself in a bathroom stall and cry. And sometimes I punch myself so hard, a good body shot without flinching, I make myself sick. Then I’m hungry for the rest of the day.”
“Say lady, I don’t believe that fairy story for one second. You pulling my leg or what?”
Cherise thought of all the times she bled too much from cutting her thighs or poking her newest favorite sharp object into one of her lips. Years before, when Cherise had friends, one of them kept asking who was beating her up all the time and how she could possibly stay with that kind of monster. Her friend, one of those women who was unique without trying, and knew how to wear even brown mascara and make it look sexy and keep herself and her pet at an ideal weight, told Cherise she needed to get help.
“But there is no one to leave,” she tried to convince her friend while studying her brown mascara as they drank coffee at a café near the office where they both worked.
“So you are telling me you do this to yourself?” The woman’s brown mascara eyelashes flitted like a hummingbird.
“Yes, and I also eat a chocolate brownie at least once a day.” Cherise ordered another brownie from the counter barista.
“Well that, mon amie . . .” (Cherise’s friend was the type of woman who liked to pepper her conversation with French sayings no one really understood but everyone felt too inferior to ask her to define. Even all those years ago, Cherise made a mental note to never say “mon amie” when she moved to Paris.) “that is an entirely different issue. Eating too much chocolate means you aren’t getting enough love in your life. Simple. What isn’t so simple to figure out is your self abuse.”
Cherise wanted to tell her friend how she called her daily routine, the hard and quick slaps across her cheeks and lips while she gazed in her bathroom mirror, her
“first movement,” beginning her day the way a symphony begins, quick, spirited, bright. Feeling pain that early in the morning not only focused Cherise’s thoughts, it prepared her for the day. No one could hurt her, she figured, if she hurt herself first.
“No I am not pulling your leg,” Cherise said to the deli owner as she let thoughts of her old friends disappear. John was more important than any friend, anyway. “And I want a pink box.”
“We only have white boxes and tape,” the deli owner said as he placed a small white cake inside a matching box. “But this’ll look real nice on a plate. Your man friend won’t know what hit him when he comes home to not one, but two sweet treats.”
“But I only asked you for one cake?” Cherise said before the man looked up from taping the white cake box shut and winked. “Oh,” she giggled as the violet mint tumbled around in the shoe she nervously tapped on the tile floor, “you’re talking about me.”
As she opened her hands to accept the cake box, Cherise wanted to tell the deli owner, almost handsome in his blood-stained butcher apron, “Back in school they used to call me Banana,” but he walked away from her end of the counter to help another customer, leaving Cherise to comprehend the logistics of walking her blistered feet home while carrying a cake.
As he sliced deli meat far away from her, Cherise walked into the bathroom, pretending she wanted to adjust the cake box and her purse in private. Once inside the small white space, she untaped the cake box and thrust her hand deep into its bunny soft middle. Cherise brought the hand to her lips, smearing them in white, greasy frosting before rubbing the leftover oil into the newest cuts on her thighs. Her lips, still sore from her morning slap, stung as she licked the frosting off her mouth and swallowed.
John probably wouldn’t like cake, anyway. John was one of those men who jogged during his lunch break and ate salmon for dinner. Before tossing the cake and its box into the bathroom trash, Cherise rubbed the edges of every finger over the waxy cardboard, cutting herself three times in three different spots. As drops of blood fell onto the snowy expanse of the sunken cake, Cherise tried to remember that one fairytale about the girl with the fairest skin. She would ask John to tell her the story before he tucked her in that night, if he wasn’t too tired.
Cherise stared at the deli owner as she left his store, making the kind of deep, penetrating eye contact she only imagined being capable of pulling off. Only women with pretty, symmetrical faces, and not just very pretty lips, knew how to make that kind of eye contact. She knew she could never go back to the deli once someone discovered the cake in the bathroom trashcan, so she wanted to make her last appearance for the owner really count.
If Cherise wore a watch, she would have been the type of woman who only glances at her wrist if she knows someone is looking. Instead, she guessed at the time by the way the violet mint continued to dissolve between whichever toes the shrinking candy decided to settle against. It was already getting too late to shop for a new coat, bright green to match the high heeled shoes she would someday wear when she moved to Paris and legally changed her name to Banana. John loved green because all men love green. Cherise knew this the way she knew how to cut her arms and chest and thighs with even a dull razorblade without anyone at her office ever suspecting a thing.
Cherise made her way closer to her apartment. The sun floated lower in her city, the city that was really starting to feel like not just the bottom of the ocean, but the bottom of her own personal ocean she swam through, dark and unflappable with her red ballet flats and her split lip and new perfume.
She reached her apartment in time to catch the lobby elevator without having to push the button. Maybe John was waiting inside for her, home from work two or three hours earlier than usual? Maybe he brought a cream cake for them to share, and this time Cherise knew better than to stick her hand in the middle of dessert without at least asking first.
“John!” she called as she unlocked her apartment door and shuffled in. Her red ballet flats almost felt comfortable as she zigzagged them across the carpet. Cherise smiled wide enough to open the wound on her lip, just to taste a bit of her own iron as she shut the door behind her without locking it, then set down her red purse, heavy with her new perfume and her violet mints.
“John!” she yelled even louder, walking through the small living room towards the bedroom where he must be waiting for her the way men who think too much about cherries and bananas always wait.
No one was in Cherise’s bedroom, bathroom, living room, adjacent kitchen with its seldom-used stove. She even opened the refrigerator and peered at the small single-serving cans of vegetable juice and a can of pickled beets. Months ago, Cherise was convinced those two ingredients would make the perfect, unique Blood Mary if she ever decided to invite someone over for brunch.
Cherise checked her front door to make sure she left it unlocked. John, of course a lawyer, was running late. Jammed up talking about the kind of torte that was not chocolate or multi-layered. Thinking of tortes made Cherise hungry for the cake she left in the deli trash. She wanted to slap her face so she would stop thinking about how she wasted that perfectly good cake and how the deli owner would think she was crazy when he discovered her secret.
“At least he’ll believe the part about how I slap myself in the face?” she spoke to her empty apartment. “At least he’ll believe me.”
Cherise spritzed more of her new perfume across her neck and wrists and even down the front of her thin flowered dress. She removed her ballet flats and tossed the tiny, almost dissolved violet mint onto the floor before placing a new mint on her tongue.
As the sun set in what looked out her window like a city view framed only for her, Cherise scanned the sidewalk several stories below, waiting for John to catch the scent of her new perfume, her violet mint, her waiting blood, in the confusing elixir of every other perfume and ballet flat and bloody unknown secret.
Cherise left all the lights out in the apartment, hiding like a surprise in the dark until she thought she heard the sound of the front door opening. She closed her hopeful eyes tight, dug her nails deep into her already bleeding thighs, and waited.
LADY OF ARSON
JARRET MIDDLETON
Memphis is so fucking hot it’s driving everybody mad. Planes hit the tarred lanes and slowed before a watery fresco of clouds the color of cold cream and orange all billowed into a storm wall. The airport played Tamla and Stax classics on internet radio but robots recited reminders about suspicious bags and characters and toddlers wailed like murder and nobody remembered the good shit like Rufus Thomas, Mable John or Eddie Floyd anymore. A brunette aged halfway into life tapped her foot at the public end of the security gate of Memphis International’s west terminal anticipating the 737 that would bring a tall gentle introvert named Jonathan through the crowd to kiss her.
Jonathan was her high school boyfriend. She was fond of their young lust, a season canonized forever by the permanent impressions made upon each other. They stayed friends through the first year of college, but seasons change. When she packed and made the forty minute drive home to Millington, like she had most weekends, Jonathan went to Illinois for business school and she did not see him again for twelve years. It was easier for her to think of it as a sweet young boy working like hell to get out of the south. Jonathan never said a word about leaving, but she did not blame him. She was glad, though, as she was now, when he started to come back. In the mitigated distances of adult lives they were closer now in Chicago and Memphis than they might have been across town or in the same bed. Lovers again, excitement enwrapped her body and all her thoughts the entire day that led to being with him again. She was nervous and negotiated with cleaning and laundry, making right angles with coasters and books on tabletops in her apartment, running any errand she could think of until she ended up there, at the gate, waiting for love to enter her world.
While she waited for one man another turned behind her, delayed by a recognition. The short, furrowed man was per
turbed, scowling shadow-cast between the teardrop skull of the Asian at the Euro exchange and stacks of display luggage. As he stood there his concern deferred to reticence, he pinched his fingertip in the bun of his mouth, turned his back in thought and recoiled back around, practicing a confrontation. A tall corridor of light filled the atrium with heat and his agitation grew into movement until he stood beside her. He gurgled up a “you” from his throat exactly in that way you never want to hear. She turned around, quiet and confused.
“I cannot believe it is you. You unbelievable monster.” He laughed in disbelief. “To be honest, I never thought I would actually find you. But here you are. I’ve got you now.”
The proximity of this random accusation scared her. She looked with longing through the security gate for Jonathan. Her chest began to shake and her voice quaked, but she stayed confident as she told him that she did not know who he was or what he was referring to, but that she would not stand there and be attacked.
The man was angrier now that they stood face to face and she watched as he struggled to re-introduce reason back to his livid point of view. “I don’t know your name,” he said, “but I recognize your face, from the sketch they showed me. I never forgot it.”
He paused as though she should know what he meant, and she glared back and shrugged.
“You burned down my house. Seven years ago. Everything I lost was because of you.”
She was less assumptive, perhaps because of his insistence. Her mouth was open with awe when a hand encroached like warm liquid around her neck. It broke her dumbfounded stare and cast her flinching and spinning around to Jonathan smiling down at her. They embraced and she felt enveloped in safety, the previous viciousness she just faced dispersed like a figment. Jonathan straightened from their hug and raised his eye to the man standing with them.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 18
