by Sacchi Green
She slid from beneath me, a strand of her remaining on my thigh. Fearing that I’d upset her with my probing, I kept my eyes clenched shut. I heard a zipper, a rustle. And finally, the creak of the bed and the relief of her warm body on mine. I opened my eyes to her clutching my hair-brush’s handle, as hot pink and transparent as I felt.
“Let me do it to you, I want to do it to you so badly, I want to do it, I want—” She dragged the handle between my legs. Do hairbrush manufacturers know, I wondered, what girls do up in their rooms with their creations? Do they have code names used in design meetings for products made in pretty colors that have soft gel handles? Do they wink and elbow one another as they discuss their brushes and their consumer base? Do they allow their own daughters to buy their “handy” masterpieces?
The handle’s curious ridges caught and released my clitoris; a finger running across the strings of a harp. My legs spasmed with each pluck. I wanted to ask Begonia to slap me there with the brush’s backside, or shove the handle into my mouth and into my cheek, but I knew she’d taunt. I couldn’t bear that sort of waiting. I stifled myself to get what I wanted most of all.
She rolled her eyes as I whimpered, its own sort of taunt. I wanted Begonia to hurt me, to bruise me on the inside with my hairbrush. Like we were girls again: new to this, trapped, and reduced to invention.
She took the sticky handle in one hand and my hip with the other. I rolled in the direction of the push, onto my stomach. The flat, transparent side of our new toy came into contact with my bottom, over and over. I choked out a small sob as it hovered over the backs of my thighs. I wanted to kiss the copper-flavored fingers that were in my hair, shoving me mouth-first into an accent pillow’s appliqué. She continued the beating, the pink paddle catching the ceiling’s light and throwing it elsewhere.
“All right?”
I nodded. Behind the throb of my own pulse, I heard a murmur: “Good girl.”
Begonia knew what she was doing; she always did. I was always the most open to her from behind. She held the bristles in her fist and allowed me to take my brush into me. The tensing of unseen muscle, the slippery acceptance of Begonia and whatever she offered. With my own hands pinned beneath my stomach and breasts, that was what I’d yearned for.
I knew she couldn’t hear me, but I screamed for her to go as deep as the hairbrush would allow. Finally, she pulled it out, shoving it back in with a sigh of her own. Begonia removed her hand so that she could watch. I obliged until her arms gave out and my body couldn’t do anything else but banish her.
Nothing was pink anymore; everything was red. My sight took on the color of the scarlet vessels in my eyelids. Though blinded, I knew Begonia was grinning, her cheeks flushed. I could hear it in her breath, those occasional giggles I associated with playgrounds. Hers was nothing like the gaunt faces of those ceramic dolls, sheltered from the sight of us.
She discarded the brush on the Minnie nightstand and sought me out with her mouth. When I first saw Begonia onstage, I’d grown light-headed: she was pulling her mouth into shapes I’d never fathomed, emitting alarming wails that one just doesn’t hear––and isn’t supposed to hear––in a hazy punk venue like Subterranean. I wanted to see who was making those sounds! I’d grappled around men three times my size to catch a glimpse. And there she was.
There I was. With a meek thrust of my hips, I gave out against her tongue. Begonia’s fingers, filthy as ever, went on to tease the fat brass bead at the end of the misplaced lamp’s chain.
FINE LINES
M. Birds
Alice Courtney is beautiful when she cries.
Sofía’s never seen anything like it, the way the woman can go from pleasantries to tears the moment the slate’s out of frame. Is that sort of pain always there inside her— is everything else just acting? Or is it all the same—crying on camera, laughing with her costar, smiling wryly at Sofía in the mirror. (“Make me look like Angelina Jolie, will you?”)
That’s why you never date actors, no matter how soft-skinned they are. They don’t know when to stop pretending.
“Cut,” Fernando calls. “Alice, that was perfect. We’re going to do one more for sound, okay? Whose idea was it to set us up by a fucking seaport? Reset.”
Sofía runs out of the darkness, lugging her makeup kit. The lights are scalding, and she’s aware of dozens of eyes on her as she kneels in front of Alice, blotting up her tears.
She doesn’t say anything. Alice wouldn’t notice if she did. She’s still in the scene, and Sofía stares up at her vacant gaze while she powders away the shine.
“Back to ones,” the assistant director shouts, and Sofía goes back to the sidelines to watch the next take, leaving her whole heart—stupid, wasted organ that it is—there, beneath the lights.
The first time she sees Alice, her face is a reflection in a mirror. She is probably what—forty-five?—and looks younger than she does onscreen, and smaller. Most celebrities are tiny when you see them in real life, and Sofía has been on enough shows to know that the camera is capable of telling all sorts of lies to its audience, sweetly and wet-lipped.
Sofía is thirty, just starting out in the industry, and wouldn’t be anywhere near this film if Fan hadn’t gotten drunk at a mixer and pissed off the director.
“Are you the new girl?” Alice asks, barely turning her head. “I’m sorry I look so tired today. A bad canvas.”
“That’s really not fair.” Sofía struggles for a response. “If you’re a bad canvas, what chance does that give the rest of us?”
The older woman laughs. That laugh is the absolute worst—low and throaty and a bit shy. It makes Sofía feel like spring: all blossoming pink petals and damp grass.
“I bet you say that to all the old women,” Alice says, and Sofía orders herself to keep it the hell together. By and large, she does. The show is a success, and she leaves the wrap party with her heart in her throat and a sizeable chunk of her student loans paid off.
It’s about five months later—she’s just wrapped an indie shoot—when her phone rings. The number is blocked but the voice is completely, horribly familiar.
“Is this Sofía? It’s Alice, do you remember me? From Open the Door?” Her self-deprecating little laugh makes Sofía close her eyes. “I got your number from a producer, I hope that’s okay. I was wondering if you’d go to France with me?”
At this, Sofía’s eyes open.
“Sorry—what?”
“I’m starting on a coproduction in about a month. It’s not much notice, but I thought we worked well together. I’ve watched some of the footage and I look better than I have in years.” She laughs again, a bit embarrassed. “What do you think? Are you already spoken for?”
If Sofía had been spoken for she would have razed the earth to get out of it.
“No,” she says.
“No?”
“I mean, no, I’m not spoken for. Yes, I’ll go to France.”
“Well. That was easier than I expected.”
If this were a movie, it would be the first scene. Sofía saying ‘yes.’
They’re finished after three more takes. Sofía takes off Alice’s makeup, cotton pads swiping slowly over her skin. She never touches Alice’s face with her hands unless it’s to hold it steady or tilt her chin. Even then, she asks first.
“Look at these crow’s feet.” Tears are still drying on Alice’s cheeks. “Did you know that Elke is twenty years younger than me? Twenty. And I’m supposed to be her grandmother.”
Alice is past fifty now; that’s a lonely time to be a woman in Hollywood. There are fine lines around her eyes that concealer can’t hide, no matter how much Alice wished it did. Sofía spends her days staring into Alice’s face, and thinks she looks the same as the day they met. Alice is perpetually auburn-haired and laughing slyly toward the mirror. The lines around her eyes look like a scrawl of poetry.
“You’ve got an eyelash on your cheekbone.” Sofía picks it up with her cotton pad. “You have to wi
sh on it. Like this. You have to blow it off the back of your hand.”
Alice sighs but obediently holds out her hand. She looks at the eyelash for a long time before closing her eyes and exhaling. Sofía studies the perfect O of her mouth.
“Shall I tell you what I wished for?” Alice asks, opening her eyes.
“No.” Their faces are close together. “If you do, it won’t come true.”
If this were a movie they would kiss, Sofía thinks. The moment hangs between them like a held breath.
“All right, I’ll keep my secrets. But,” Alice smiles, “I will tell you if it comes true.”
It’s not meant to be flirtatious. Alice does not flirt, and she definitely does not flirt with Sofía. They’ve known each other for too long now, and Alice only ever dates men.
Would the story be the same if she weren’t under constant scrutiny, if there weren’t cameras on her every waking moment?
Wishful thinking, maybe. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The cameras aren’t going anywhere. Neither is Sofía.
* * *
Their second film together gets Alice a Golden Globe nomination. Sofía does her makeup for the ceremony, then goes home to watch the show with a girl she met at some awful lesbian dance. When the camera cuts to Alice in the audience, Sofía tries to stop her heart from glowing red-hot with affection, shining through her skin.
“That’s the white chick you work for? I thought she’d be younger.”
Alice doesn’t win, but no one looks as good as her that night. No one. Even the idiot press write up some articles about “aging fabulously” with Alice’s face plastered all over them.
Sometime around midnight, after Sofía has just gone to bed, her phone rings.
The number is blocked.
“Hmm, Sofía?” Alice’s voice is soft.
“Alice? I’m sorry about—”
“Hush, I’m not calling to—to commiserate. It’s an honor to be nominated, isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?” Alice laughs, and that laugh in Sofía’s bed is not the association she needs to maintain a professional relationship.
“I just wanted to thank you for—tonight. Everyone was so complimentary. And I wondered . . . ” Alice sighs, a sigh that Sofía feels through the phone, ruffling the hairs on the nape of her neck. “I wondered if you wanted to do this sort of thing again. There’s awards season first, and I’m supposed to go to Prague in April, and I’d like it if—” Alice stops abruptly. “I’m sorry, I’ve had some champagne.”
Sofía has got to be rational about this, reasonable. Gorgeous women don’t just call her up and ask her to go to Prague with them. There must be some downside to all this, some risk.
Her bedroom is glowing, the ember in her chest shining out through her throat.
Oh. There’s the risk. Right there.
“Are you asleep?” Alice asks quietly.
Screw the risk, Sofía decides. She’ll take it.
They’re in Dubai, filming a terrible midlife crisis romance, when Alice asks Sofía why she decided to go into makeup.
No one’s ever asked her that. Not even her family. Maybe they just assumed it was a natural progression from chola cat’s eyes and big hair to putting gloss on celebrities.
Since Sofía’s never been asked the question, she’s never told this story.
“My mamá was glamorous. Real old Hollywood glamour. We didn’t have money or anything, but she sure looked like we did. She had this tiny bottle of perfume, what was it—Fleur de Rocaille. She used it so sparingly, just the tiniest drop every day. I don’t think she ever finished it.”
Even halfway across the world, Sofía can still smell that damned perfume. Lilac, mingled with the scent of whatever her abuela was cooking, and her brother’s Old Gold cigarettes, and the rot behind the walls of the bathroom.
Her mamá made mundanity seem beautiful.
“When she got sick, I was maybe—seventeen? For a while she could do it all herself, but then she got so tired. I started working it out, you know—how to make her skin glow during chemo, how to make her eyebrows look natural. And when I was done she would look in the mirror and smile, maybe for the first time all day. Even at the end.”
Alice is watching her in the mirror. Sofía wonders if this is the part of the movie where she’s supposed to cry, the big moment where she reveals her tragic story and breaks down. But thinking about her mamá doesn’t make her sad. Angry sometimes, but not sad.
“I know it’s all a trick, right? Women and makeup. I know that what we look like shouldn’t matter as much as it does, and it shouldn’t have mattered to my mamá when she was dying for Christ’s sake—”
“You don’t have to explain it,” Alice interrupts. “It made her happy.”
“It did.” Her mamá wasn’t a saint (and had briefly thrown Sofía out of the house after finding her in bed with her first girlfriend) but most of the bad bits fade. The good bits linger like Fleur de Rocaille.
“Why did you go into acting?” she asks. Alice laughs the way that makes Sofía feel like there’s no gravity; she’s out in space and everything is starlit.
“It’s down to my first husband, really,” Alice says, looking fondly into the middle distance. “He said that I was only really good at two things: pretending to be someone else and lying. And I thought, well, he knows me best.”
Alice has been married twice. Three years to an actor (deceased) and six years to a writer (still friends.) Sofía could have learned all this from a quick Google search. There are other things she knows that she likes to think are private— secrets between her and Alice alone. She knows the way that Alice likes her coffee, and the stupid things that make her laugh. She knows Alice just started wearing glasses, and likes modern poetry but not Shakespeare (“There have been other writers throughout the fullness of time—some of them were even women.”) She’s been to Alice’s home, sat in her bedroom, held her Emmy, petted her dogs. She knows that Alice is terrified of becoming irrelevant, just as much as she is openly furious about Hollywood’s treatment of anyone that isn’t a straight white man.
Sometimes Sofía wishes she didn’t know as much as she did.
Alice knows that Sofía has never been married, has drifted through a series of girlfriends that never seem to stick. (Alice does not know that Sofía’s last girlfriend shouted that she’d “never live up to Alice fucking Courtney!” before slamming the door behind her. Alice does not know that Sofía hasn’t been in a real relationship for the past two years.)
“Make me look like Penelope Cruz, all right?” Alice asks, and Sofía would say yes to this a million times over. Even if she had known how it would turn out, she would still say yes.
“I’ve got something for you,” Alice says as Sofía is cleaning her brushes. It’s Alice’s last day on set; the film will wrap within the week. “In my bag, will you get it?”
Sofía reaches into Alice’s massive handbag to find a small box.
“What is this for?”
“Don’t you know?” Alice smiles enigmatically. “Our anniversary. Ten years since our first film.”
Ten years? That can’t be.
“I can see you doing calculations in your head. Yes, it’s true. Can you believe it? We’re old women now. Well, not you.” Alice eyes the package in Sofía’s hand. “Open it.”
“I didn’t get you anything.”
“Don’t even think on it. It’s not much but—it’s probably silly.”
Sofía opens the box. Inside it is a glass bottle filled with an amber-colored liquid. The air suddenly smells like lilac.
It’s Fleur de Rocaille. Mamá’s perfume.
Alice is watching Sofía intently. “It’s from the 1950s. I thought that might be her era. I’ve been assured it was stored correctly.”
“It’s—” How does that sentence end?
It’s the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given her. She feels like laughing and crying, and in a moment born of pure hysteria and aching gratitude, she put
s her hand on Alice’s face.
Alice’s skin is warm. Her lips part as Sofía kisses her, and there is a hint of tongue against Sofía’s upper-lip—
—before Alice says, “No.”
Sofía pulls away so quickly she almost falls over. Alice is flushed, looking at the floor. She has lifted a hand to her mouth but is not touching her lips.
“That’s—not why I gave you that. Not so you would— you don’t have to—”
“Oh my god, I am so sorry,” Sofía begins. This is what dying must feel like; all the blood in her body has turned to dust.
“Don’t apologize. I should have thought—”
“No, it’s my fault.”
“You—you are much younger than me.” Alice still isn’t looking at her. “I’m essentially your employer. It isn’t a good idea.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sofía says again.
“Please stop saying that.” Alice looks up then, not at Sofía, but into the mirror. “I’ve gone horribly red. I think I’ll—just step outside for a moment. Until—to collect myself.”
Then she’s gone. And Sofía is kneeling on the ground holding a bottle of perfume in her hand, wishing that the world would end.
Alice is very polite afterward. That’s almost worse. They part ways with a handshake, and Sofía resists the urge to drive into oncoming traffic.
Alice doesn’t go to the wrap party, and Sofía doesn’t see her for three months.
She’s just gotten back from her brother’s when the phone rings.
Sofía’s had a couple of glasses of wine that night, but now she realizes she hasn’t nearly had enough.
The number is blocked.
“Alice?” she says as she answers, desperate to be right.
There is a nervous laugh on the other end, and Sofía thinks she might faint or throw up.
“I’m so sorry to call like this, I—I’ve been thinking about—”
“About?”
“Um. You.” Alice clears her throat. “And how we never said a proper good-bye. I handled it all terribly but I think perhaps I was too hasty before. I—panicked, really and I was hoping . . . ”
