Women of Consequence

by Wolos, Gregory;

  “You pluck out your eyelashes?”

  Jenna doesn’t answer.

  “Because some people can’t grow them.” Laser’s monotone doesn’t harmonize with the buzz tracking across her lid. “Some people don’t have hair anywhere,” he says. Jenna tenses. There’s something beneath Laser’s words. She’d told him she was eighteen and would have forged a document to prove it. Does he suspect something about her or Annabelle? A wave rises and falls inside and a blush warms her cheeks. This morning she’d drawn her brows to match the arches over the green eyes of Annabelle’s Scaredy-Cat logo. (The tops were for tweens, and Jenna wouldn’t dare wear them. But seeing Annabelle’s eyes branding the chests of little girls never fails to steal her breath.) Did boys hurry home to their locked bedrooms after school, dreaming of her and Annabelle’s eyebrows?

  “Your parents going to like ‘em? They know you’re here?” Laser asks while he works. “They going to like you starry-eyed?”

  “They’ll be surprised. What’s not to love?” Her mother rolls her eyes at Jenna’s pink and purple wigs, as if to say, “I was young once.” Her father never seems to notice them. The stars will be a declaration. The stars are a way to see and be seen, and with them she’ll rise to the heavens with Annabelle Hadley.

  Before Annabelle, Jenna pulled clumps of hair from her Barbies and hid the dolls. After intuiting Annabelle’s perfect alopecia, she resurrected them, pulled out the rest of their hair, and moved the bald Barbies into her box of treasures. She could ask Laser: Do you do invisible tattoos?

  Jenna feels a cool blot on the first tattooed lid. There’s a whiff of disinfectant.

  “That’s a pad,” Laser says. “To stop the bleeding. Almost done. Ready?”

  “Un-hunh.”

  Jenna can’t remember the interior of the tattoo parlor. Did the walls display strange shapes, symbols, and creatures? Elaborately lettered slogans meant to last a lifetime? She’s forgotten the shop’s exterior, too, and its address. It would have been in her smart phone. There’d been bus rides through deteriorating neighborhoods. She might as well be deep in a forest, inside the witch’s house with Hansel and Gretel, the house made of candy and cookies; she’d left nothing to mark her trail home. She sees footprints on midnight pavement shining under ultra-violet streetlamps. Above, countless six-pointed stars twinkle in a deep purple sky. She squirms, and the buzz, tickle, and nip stop. “Whoa!”

  “Sorry.” If she asked, would Laser tattoo a drop of milk, two drops, leaking from her nipple onto her breast—like milky tears? How much would that cost? But the drops of milk might look like blood. A moist weight compresses her second lid.

  “Okay,” Laser says. “Just sit for a couple of minutes.”

  “Done?”

  “Done.”

  “I want to see.”

  “Wait.”

  Laser’s voice is very close and far away at the same time. She smells smoke. He’s smoking while they wait. She wouldn’t smoke, but she’s not against it. Annabelle Hadley smokes.

  “Do you know Annabelle Hadley?” she asks. “You know who she is, right?”

  “The rehab slut?” Jenna’s whole body frowns, but then there’s a glow like the illuminated footprints she’d envisioned outside the parlor. She sees beneath Laser’s words: She’s beautiful, he means! What does he look like—no tattoos? a face like a bull’s?

  “You’re not really eighteen.”

  “Next month. Sorry I lied.” Fifteen must be the legal age of something.

  “You live a long way from here, right? You needed directions when you called.” Smoke wafts into Jenna’s face. Her eyelids sting under the pads. “You need a ride?”

  “I guess. Can I see what I look like?”

  “In a second. You live in the hills, right?”

  “Way out. In a gated community. In a cul de sac.” She knows so little about her own neighborhood. Gated. And not half a mile from hers, another gated community. Maybe Annabelle Hadley’s girls, the ones who supply her hair, live there. Or maybe they live on Jenna’s block, safe behind her neighborhood’s gate.

  “I’ll drive you. Let’s get these off.”

  The pressure on her lids lifts, like tiny birds taking flight. Jenna squints. Laser has turned off the work light. The parlor swims in shadows. She exercises her lids as if they’re the drying wings of a new butterfly.

  “Here.” Laser hands her a mirror. Why had she thought he wasn’t tattooed? The backs of his hands, his thick arms, even his neck are nearly black with arabesques, figures, and obscure lettering. But his face is square and flat, as if it had been squashed into a large glass cube. A gold ring pierces his septum and hangs over his upper lip. The hair he’s pulled back into a ponytail is threaded with silver. His eyes are small and black, and his teeth are very white, even though he smokes.

  “Crazy wig,” he says as Jenna stares at her new self. At first she can’t see the change—the light is dim, and her lids retract like a baby doll’s. She closes one eye, and there it is! A beautiful star, etched in thin lines of ink and blood. She switches eyes—the second star is as beautiful as the first. She flutters her lashless lids, and, the stars twinkle—perfect under Annabelle Hadley’s Scaredy-Cat brows. She giggles, and bats her stars at Laser, who nods and flashes his teeth. He looks at her closely, admiring his work. He examines her so thoroughly, she feels him inside of her.

  “I’m an artist,” he says.

  Jenna remembers the bills folded in the pocket where her phone should be and tugs them out. “Thanks,” she says, and holds the money toward Laser, half-expecting him to refuse it. But he doesn’t; the bills disappear into his tattooed hand. He steps back and takes in all of her.

  “Nice eyes. Crazy wig. It’s gonna be dark. I’ll take you home now.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Jenna stands for the first time in an hour. Figuring out the bus would have been a drag, though she could have showed off her stars. Her legs are weak. Laser takes her arm; his fingers test the firmness of her tricep. His touch is as gentle as the pressure of his tattooing tool had been on her eyes—she feels like one of those fancy Easter eggs.

  “Annabelle Hadley,” he snorts. “Loser.”

  Jenna is charmed by what she knows lies beneath his words.

  “Wait,” Laser says. His face is inches from hers. His attention is on her stars. “You’re still bleeding. Got to put the pads back on.” Jenna has an urge to wipe the oil glistening on his flat nose with a sterile towelette.

  She waits, gripping the frame of the door she’s been led to, as Laser dabs at each of her eyes. It stings. She smells antibiotic cream and tobacco on the fingers that swab her lids and lay fresh gauze over them. Tape adheres to her forehead and cheeks. She worries—silly, she knows, after tattooing—about the instant of pain when the tape is stripped. And won’t her Annabelle Hadley eyebrows be marred?

  “I’ve got to lock up. Don’t want to get robbed,” Laser says, and leaves her, sightless, at the door that surely leads through a back room to an alley where his car, maybe a pickup truck, awaits. She hears the grating and clanging of metal—Laser is dragging the steel barriers across his shop front. The parlor feels empty and frigid. If she could see, her breath would be visible. She remembers there’d been someone in the shop when she’d arrived, someone who left after she closed her eyes. Just a voice. Maybe it was somebody clean, the tattoo-less figure she’d confused with Laser. It’s nice to think of Laser having a friend.

  He’s back. Jenna anticipates his touch; his cigarette breath warms her face. She hears a deep sigh. If this were a fairy tale, Laser would be devoted to her service. She might be a distressed damsel—she’d lost the royal infant the queen had placed in her care! Together, she and her protector must find a child to replace the missing baby. They could look in one of the gated communities, where there are plenty of children. Jenna sees herself elevating a fresh, cooing, squirming i
nfant before Queen Annabelle Hadley. Even if Annabelle guesses the child isn’t her own, nobody will mind. Behind Jenna, Laser would be kneeling with his square head bowed.

  “Ready?” Laser asks, as if he knows what Jenna is imagining and has the story by heart. She paws the air for him. What will he say when she reveals her smoothness?

  Fiji Mermaid

  Fiji smiled and nodded, but rolled her eyes behind her dark glasses at her dinner date’s joke. “‘Trusting Cripples,’” he’d called the service that had matched them. The actual name was “Trusting Couples, Inc.,” and the agency specialized in bringing together those with minor, non-disfiguring or dangerous physical, emotional, or psychological challenges. Fiji had profiled herself as an “achromat”—someone not only acutely sensitive to light, but also completely colorblind. “My spectrum covers all the shades of gray between black and white,” she’d noted.

  “This corner dark enough for you?” Dem, her date asked. Dem, short for Demetrius. “They called me ‘Demmy’ when I was a kid,” he’d said after they’d settled at their table. Dem . . . Demmy, Fiji thought—he sounded like one of her many “speech impediment” dates—through “Trusting Couples” she’d met and slept with stutterers, lispers (“th-” and “slushy”), and “Elmer Fudders.” Dem’s speech was fine, but his profile for “Trusting Couples” listed two flaws: a “compromised heart” and a “distinctive and private pattern of birthmarks.”

  Because “Trusting Couples” clients tended to be insecure perfectionists who both over-estimated and over-compensated for their often undetectable defects, they were, on the surface, almost always more attractive and accomplished than the “unmarred” general public. The agency protected its members from outsiders seeking to prey on their good looks, healthy bank accounts, and vulnerability by requiring that all “conditions” be documented. Fiji, for her part, had sat through an eye exam, shrugging away as an optometrist pointed around a color wheel.

  Except for her cumbersome dark glasses, Fiji knew that she and Dem were both magazine-ad beautiful: slim, toned, and cleft-chinned. His hair was a mass of fair curls, while hers cascaded to her shoulders with the sheen of black satin. They were a couple that turned the heads of the less imperfect.

  “You’re my first ‘colorblind,’” Dem smiled. His teeth were white and even.

  “I think I’m the only achromat in the system,” Fiji said. “I’ve had ‘bad hearts’ before.” She chose not to mention the “distinctive and private” birthmarks.

  “‘Achromat,’” her date nodded. “When I first saw that on your profile I read it as ‘acro-bat.’ I couldn’t figure out how that was a condition. I thought maybe you needed to hang upside down, like a bat. ‘Acro-bat’—that’s a double pun, right? Now I can’t get ‘gymnast’ out of my head when I look at you. All I see is flexibility. Like Cirque de Soleil.”

  

  An achromat from birth. This was the identity Fiji had slipped into years earlier like a second skin—the lie that had gained her access to the handsome, needy “Trusting Couples” men to whom she was now addicted.

  Like most lies, Fiji’s had its roots in a truth: her discovery in college that she was red-green colorblind. One night, while flipping through her roommate’s physiology textbook, she’d stopped at what she thought were pictures of abstract paintings. Each was composed of colorful bubbles: they were Ishihara tests for colorblindness. Fiji saw nothing in the bubbles when she should have seen digits, like her roommate, who spit out numbers as she flipped the pages: “74, 19, 41—you don’t see them?”

  Fiji had been dismayed to learn that there was something wrong with the stunning green eyes her mother had told her would “break boys’ hearts.” “Mine did,” Mom had said, not long before she died. She’d lain in her hospital bed, her head on a thin pillow, and fluttered purple lids as if ashes had been blown into her special eyes. Pink lines threaded their whites, and their irises were the color of dying grass.

  Those faded eyes haunted Fiji—and so did the invisible Ishihara digits. What else might be lurking in the pretty bubbles that she couldn’t see? The night she’d discovered her deficiency, she’d stared at the test pictures until she was bleary-eyed. Nothing. And then, as her eyes were about to shut from exhaustion—an epiphany: Colors were a prison!

  Hadn’t she heard something like that about words? That naming an abstraction—an idea, a feeling, a passion—confined it? A named feeling was like a bird shot in mid-flight: it might drop within reach, but the price of accessibility was death. Fiji’s red-green limitation was a gift: Ishihara tests would forever remain oceans of infinite possibility.

  Relieved and energized, Fiji kept turning pages. Each bubble-field, void of numbers, thrilled her now—she imagined herself swimming through a Macdonald’s Playland pit full of bright plastic balls. And she bumped into a miracle! ACHROMATOPSIA. The condition leaped out from the very first paragraph following the Ishihara tests. Complete colorblindness! In the wink of an eye, Fiji envisioned her future—and it was colorless. Could there be a more original and unfettered way to see?

  Because the rest of the world was color-drunk, it had taken Fiji years to transform herself into a practicing achromat. She’d needed to think colorlessly, and had removed pigments from her environment where she could: her dark glasses cloaked the world in shadows; she decorated her apartment in black and white, and eliminated colors from her wardrobe; she adjusted the filters on her television and computer monitors so their screens mimicked an achromat’s world.

  When Fiji’s employers accommodated her demand for a darkened environment by allowing her to work at home, she found herself marooned on her very own achromatopsic island— the “original and unfettered” lifestyle of her own invention. But often, late at night, she’d remove her dark glasses and gaze at her green eyes in the bathroom mirror. Eyes to break boys’ hearts, her mother had called them. Then she’d lie in bed, feeling her eyes glow like emeralds behind her closed lids, and she’d touch herself, while reds and blues and yellows streamed around and through her.

  

  By the second bottle of wine, both Fiji and Dem had become confessional.

  “I have a cat named Yin,” Fiji said. “I named her Yin-Yang at first because she’s black and white—unless they lied to me at the animal shelter. But really, she’s only got one little white spot around one eye. Mostly, she’s black. She’s just a Yin.”

  Their conversation shifted easily from topic to topic. Each knew the other’s job from their “Trusting Couples” profiles: Dem worked in “computer services”; Fiji, fluent in Russian, translated foreign correspondence for a pharmaceutical company. Dem brought up the subject of “lying.”

  “So, most of us ‘Trusting Couples’ members started out as liars, don’t you think, before we got honest enough to confess our flaws? I could hide what I didn’t like about myself in my made-up stories. I used to tell people I was a sitcom baby—I’d pick an old TV show from twenty years ago—Family Matters or Who’s the Boss? or something, and I’d say to a date, ‘remember the episode when there was a scene with a neighbor’s baby? Well, that was me!’ How could they check?” Fiji caught the sparkle of Dem’s eyes through her dark glasses an instant before he closed them to take a swallow of wine. He put his glass down, and looked up, grinning.

  “What about you? I’ll bet your closet’s full of old lies. How about your name—‘Fiji’?” One sweat-darkened curl was pasted to Dem’s forehead. “That’s an island-name, not a person-name. You’re hiding something, right?”

  Fiji, slightly drunk, searched for the beat of Dem’s “compromised” heart in his flushed cheeks. She ran her fingers through her hair, snagged a nail, and waved her hand to free it. She adjusted her glasses, tapping the lenses, confident in their opacity, and pointed the finger with the bad nail at her date, who held up his hands.

  “Don’t shoot, Masked Man!” he laughed.

  “
Fi-ji—” she purred. She made a V with her fingers. “Actually, there’re two lies. My given name is Sarah. I used to tell people in my Russian classes in college that I was adopted from mother-Russia when I was a baby. That’s lie number one. Then I told them that I was so sad when my adoptive mother died the year before I graduated, I changed my name—here’s how it went: ‘Sarah’ sounds like ‘sorrow’, which means the same thing as ‘grief,’ which, if you say it backwards—because I swore to myself I’d be the opposite of sad—it comes out something like ‘Fiji.’ That’s lie number two.”

  “Whoa—” Dem scribbled with his finger on the tablecloth. “‘Fiji’ isn’t anything like ‘grief’ backwards!”

  “Enough like. Not exactly. Besides—it’s a lie, as I said—it’s lie number two.”

  “So you’re not a Russian orphan.”

  “No, but my mother did die before I graduated.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I never knew my father—I’ve learned to depend on myself. So, for all intents and purposes, now I am an orphan who speaks Russian, at least.”

  “And what about ‘Fiji’?”

  Fiji paused. Knowing how much to share with a “Trusting Couples” date was always an issue.

  “I made ‘Fiji’ up for myself when I moved to the city to work,” she said. “I named myself after the island. I’ve never been to a tropical island, but I like the idea of them. The ocean, sunsets, blooming flowers—they’re a challenge to the way I see things. I’ve covered my walls with black and white pictures of Pacific islands. They give my imagination a workout, just like when I read about colors in books—I have to figure out how to visualize them. How’s my red-gray different from my blue-gray and yellow-gray, and so on. And poetry? ‘My love is like a red, red rose?’ What’s red? My spectrum is white-gray-black. That’s my rainbow. My imagination doesn’t work like yours or anybody else who’s got colors. We can’t see the world the same way.”

  “Why are your island pictures in black and white? Wouldn’t they look that way to you anyway?”