In
a Mirror
“Someday, you’ll do your own face
and you won’t need me anymore,” Roberto says, smearing my face with base. One
thing he knows is that I can’t apply my own make up. He’s been my creator for
years and loves to hear me say how much I need him. I call him my fairy
godmother.
“I make you more beautiful every
time I do this,” Roberto announces, with a wave of his imaginary magic wand.
“Look and see.” He turns my head towards the mirror.
“Certainly not Cindy Crawford, but
close enough for a drag queen.” My green eyes stare eerily back at me from my
base-covered face. “I’m too pale, aren’t I? Maybe, I should go out like this
and really scare the shit out of them.”
“You’re impossible.” Roberto jerks
my head back, squinting his eyes and crinkling his nose. “I haven’t powdered
you yet. Don’t forget, you’ve got to be extra glamorous tonight.”
Extra glamorous is right. I have new
songs, new costumes, and I finally saved
enough money to fly my mother out to
watch me perform. Roberto arrived one hour earlier than usual this evening to
make me perfect.
“I passed out a ton of flyers about
the show today,” he says rummaging through his make up bag. “Where the heck is
that new eye shadow?” He can’t find what he’s looking for, so he stuffs his face
into the bag. “Even old what’s-his-face took a flyer.”
“Who’s what’s-his-face?”
“That cute man you dated for a
while, the one you used to say looks like that bully from high school.” Roberto
puts the bag down and swipes his hand to the bottom of it. “What’s-his-face.”
“Not Bruce?” I feel my color drain
under the foundation.
“Bruce. That’s his name.” Roberto’s
hand emerges triumphantly with the color. “I was just standing on the corner
and he actually said ‘hi’ to me. He never even says ‘boo’ when I see him, so it
took me by surprise. Well, I take that back, maybe he was horny. He always
talked to me when he was horny.” Roberto opens the eye shadow. “I swear, if you
hadn’t dated him, I’d do him. Now, close your eyes.”
“He used to hate me in drag. Jesus, do you really think he’ll come?”
“Oh, will you relax? Don’t be
getting your hopes up. Even if he is into chicks with dicks now, doesn’t mean
he’ll call you again. Stop squirming. I don’t want you being messy.”
“I’m relaxed,” I lie. The day Bruce
knew I was a drag queen was the day he ended our relationship. It was foolish
to think his attitude towards me had changed. But as long as I was pretending
to be a woman tonight, why not go a little further?
“I know what you’re thinking. Stop it. It’s not healthy.”
“What?”
“I know that look. If you don’t concentrate on your performance you’re
going to fuck it up.”
“Well, at least if I forget the words to my songs, I’ll look pretty doing
it.”
Roberto swipes the brush applicator
across the shadow. “Stop twitching,” he orders.
“You won’t forget anything. And
I’ll make you ugly if you don’t forget I mentioned Bruce. Just to be safe, I’ll
even say a few Hail Mary’s before you go on.”
“If you do, could you recite it in
Spanish? Otherwise, pick another prayer.”
When I was kid–during the summer
months–I would reluctantly accompany my mother on the weekly trips to her
mother and sister’s house in the Irish neighborhood of Boston called ‘Southie’.
I dreaded those Thursday morning visits more than going to gym class, but I
couldn’t skip out on them. Unlike Physical Education, there was no way to avoid
seeing my cousins.
My grandmother was always smoking
when we arrived. I could never tell if it was her second or third of the
morning–the pack was already open and the ashtray full of extinguished butts.
She and my mother made polite conversation as they waited for my grandfather to
arrive home from his night shift job at the post office.
Nana’s philosophy was that boys weren’t meant to hang around the house,
so every week, I was banished outside to play with my cousins. Before I went,
however, I managed to stick around to eat the only chocolate honey-dipped donut
that we bought as part of the weekly breakfast offering.
I tried making that donut last as long as a five course meal, but
ultimately it lasted about as long as it took Nana to smoke another cigarette.
I went out to face her other grandsons–her ‘have a good time’ still rings
mockingly in my ears.
Now, it was late afternoon, the sun
still strong enough to melt the dog shit that littered the sidewalks. My older
cousin Thomas and his gang of friends blocked the path to my grandmother’s
house.
“You wanna cross the street, fairy?
Then get on your knees and let me hear you pray.”
Thomas had just turned sixteen and
already tipped the scales at 200 pounds. I’d managed to avoid him all day,
playing instead at the beach, listening to the waves and smelling the low tide.
He reissued his order.
“I said, let me hear you fuckin’ pray.”
I stuttered and found my voice. “Hail
Mary, full of --”
“He’s actually gonna do it,” an
unrecognizable voice said from behind him. Then, my cousin Keith.
“He said on your knees, you little
fag.”
I turned to escape back to the
beach. My third cousin, Gary, was suddenly behind me.
“Where you goin’? Nana’s house is
that way,” he smirked, pointing towards my salvation. “Let’s start again, Hail
Mary...”
I ignored the hot pavement as it
burned my knees, and I inhaled the stench of the shit. My concentration was
lost. I couldn’t remember the words. I closed my eyes and the tears stung as I
tried to hide them. The flies that had landed on the dog crap buzzed in front
of my face. My voice cracked and I imagined myself in the stifling heat of a
confessional.
I finished my penance.
“You tell your mother what happened,
fairy, and I’ll kick the shit out of you.
Understand?” Thomas’ black eyes
seared into me as I got up off my knees. I stared into his belly, hoping I
wouldn’t be as fat as him when I reached his age. My younger cousin pushed me
towards the sidewalk.
“You can cross now. Think it’s time
for dinner. Let’s go eat.”
“I’m starved,” Thomas said, winking
at his brothers. “I skipped breakfast. There’s never any good doughnuts left
when the fairy comes to visit.”
One year, there was a small cake
when my birthday fell on a Thursday. It wasn’t home made–I saw the Sara Lee box
in the trash can. The ten candles were shoved into the near frozen frosting.
Nana didn’t even remember that I was twelve. I closed my eyes, and made a wish.
When I opened them, my grandmother’s cigarette smoke mingled with the trail
from the now extinguished candles. Thomas, Keith, and Gary still sat across
from me. No answer to the silent wish.
Prayers. Wishes. They’re all the
same. Neither one seemed to help my mother much either. Her greatest wish was
to have a boy. Mom checked into the hospital at 4:30 p.m. on Friday the 13th,
and I was out and in the world by half past five. I joke with her, saying the
day gave us a good compromise on the boy-girl situation.
“All that nudging you used to do in there,” she said to me years later.
“You kicked me around the clock. I couldn’t even sleep without you moving
around.”
Guess I didn’t like what I saw in
there. I haven’t been inside a woman since.
“What are you laughing at?” Roberto
scolds me. “You’re squinting your eyes. Now I’ve got to redo this one. What’s
so funny?”
“Nothing, doll. I’ll behave.”
Roberto studies my face. He cocks
his head to the left and then to the right, while he sticks his tongue out and
runs it across the tiny wisp of a mustache along his upper lip.
“I don’t like this color,” he announces. “It’s too coppery. You look like a penny. I’m going to go back to the black and white shadows.” He reaches for the sponge wedges by the mirror and wipes off the offending eye color. “I don’t want your mother thinking I’m a lousy make-up artist. She’ll hate me before she even meets me.”
It still takes me by surprise that I
don’t look like my mother when Roberto finishes his handiwork. I’d like to say
the woman I see is just me in Technicolor, but I think I must resemble my
biological grandmother. She was Lithuanian, long gone before I was born. I
found out years later that I had no blood connection with the Nana we’d spent
visiting on all those summer afternoons.
“You mean, we’re only half cousins?” I asked, suppressing my delight when
my mother finally told me her greatest secret.
“Well, yes, since their mom’s my
half sister. My parents were divorced when I was three. Dad married Nana a few
years after that.” She curled her suddenly sweaty hand around mine. “Those
days, they didn’t give custody to the father. Aunt Nancy took care of me.”
Mom’s other hand clenched a tissue. Her fist was like a heart beating. “Every
so often, my real mother would come around. She always smelled like vodka and
cigarettes.”
She closed her eyes as if the light from the window had momentarily
blinded her, and then spoke softly, whispering more to herself than to me. “It
always caused a huge commotion when she was there. My father would be yelling
at her. She’d be screaming at him. My Aunt Nancy would rush me out of the room.
I could hear the fighting even outside.”
She tried to smile. “After he
remarried, I didn’t see my mother until I was ten. All that time, Nana just
told me I was a good for nothing Lithuanian. Even up until I was sixteen, she
didn’t let up. I used to call myself the South Boston Cinderella.”
I held my mother’s hands. They were
icy cold. I gripped them harder, trying to warm them. “Seriously? What’d she
do? Make you clean the floors?”
“Just about. I wasn’t worth much in her eyes. Once, she slapped me across
the face so hard my lip wouldn’t stop bleeding. I don’t even remember what we
argued about, I think maybe I stayed out too late. Since I was always so
clumsy, she told Grandpa I fell down the stairs. I didn’t dare say a thing.”
Her fingers tightened over my hands. “I got used to it, didn’t care after
a while. You couldn’t mistake me for Irish, not with her and my father’s kids
next to me. The more she called me names, the more it reminded me of who I
really was. My father was my only saving grace. Since he’s gone now,” she
paused. “There’s no reason to go over there anymore.” Then, she laughed.
Quietly. Surprisingly. “When your father proposed to me, I showed her the
engagement ring. She told me it was a piece of shit, and that I should wear
it,” she tapped the side of her nose twice, “right here, so people would notice
it.”
She sat with me for several hours that day, relating these stories of her
childhood, hardly stopping to take a breath, as if she were afraid that pausing
would make her lose her courage. When she was done, she looked at me, searching
my eyes for understanding or acceptance, perhaps both. When I told her that she
made me happy just because she granted my wish not to be Irish, she sat back,
winked her eye and tweaked my nose.
“You little piece of shit,” she said.
“Shit,” Roberto says looking over my shoulder.
“What, did you mess the eyes up again?”
“No. I think I forgot the lip liner.” He moves the cosmetics around on
the table.
“It’s sticking out of your pocket.”
“Oh. Sometimes I’m such a blonde.”
“Sometimes?” I laugh.
“Don’t go there, girl, or I’ll smear your lipstick.”
That’s something I wear more of than my mother ever has in her sixty
years. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I started and wound up three nights a
week lip synching to Barbra Streisand and Shirley Bassey’s Greatest Hits.
It was probably when Roberto and I became friends–never lovers–just
instant sisters. He was a big drag queen then.
Dolled up every weekend it seemed, until he just gave it up one day. I
ask him continually if he’ll join me on stage at least once, but like tonight,
I always get the same response.
“When you stop looking pretty, that’s the day you stop. I was never that
good.”
“Sure you were,” I defend, like a true sister, but Roberto was dead set
against getting back into a dress. “Once a drag queen, always a drag queen.” I
chide.
“Yes, yes, but I was
strictly an RTV.” That stood for recreational transvestite, a term which ceased
to apply to me when I stepped out on stage for the first time. Roberto snatches
the pencil from his pocket and starts sharpening it. “I’ll do it if you wear
this great beaded gown I saw at Macy’s.”
“No way, beaded makes me look fatter than my Aunt Nancy with her human
maraca arms. Besides, I can’t buy off the rack, anymore.”
“Excuse me, Ms. Thang,” Roberto laughs. “Look up,” he instructs
stretching his lips and pointing the sharpened pencil towards mine. “I almost
forgot. Anita Martini is a big star now.”
Anita Martini, that’s me, the “star attraction”. Roberto christened me
one night when I loudly declared my need for one more cocktail. Suddenly, I
realized he’d turned the conversation away from himself. He grinned and traced
my lips with the pencil.
“Don’t say anything. You’ll mess my work.”
I wish I knew when I was a kid that staying silent would give me some
extra cash. If I could’ve lip synched on the streets of South Boston and in
high school– when the names reached their peak–maybe the humiliation would’ve
disappeared.
Once in gym class,
Papalardo, who I tried my hardest not to dream about late at night, was elected
co-captain for the football game, along with David, my former best friend from
grammar school. I waited to be chosen for a side, my eyes searing holes in the
ground. Finally, there were just two of us remaining, and I kept my gaze
riveted on the girl’s feet next to mine. They were stuffed into a size five
sneaker, the sides straining against the pressure, the laces threatening to
untie themselves.
Papalardo looked over at us, surveying us like we were the last slab of
day old meat at the deli counter. “Just girls left,” he spat to David. “You
choose.”
I prayed silently, anticipating
David’s answer. My eyes tied and untied the shoelaces.
“Debbie.”
It was later, after the softball was
headed directly into my chest that Papalardo sneered at me. “Did you catch the
ball, sissy, because you were afraid it was going to hit you?”
All the pride I had in ending the
inning evaporated. I tossed the ball at his feet and ran to the dug out.
It didn’t take much to get Papalardo
to touch me, and I admit there was a certain thrill knowing that the only way
it would happen was when he was beating the shit out of me. Whatever the
reason-the way I walked or because he cheated off my paper and I had the wrong
answers-the confrontations never surprised me. One day, after I was left
picking up the pieces of my Captain America book covers, he and his henchmen
wiped their hands on their jeans and calmly walked away.
“Why’d you go and beat him up, Pap?”
his accomplice asked.
“He pisses me off. The faggot looks
at me funny.”
“Look straight at me,” Roberto instructs, holding one of my fake
eyelashes. “I wish you knew how to put these on. It’s the only thing I hate to
do.”
“I suppose I could learn. But what if I don’t need you anymore?”
“Oh, don’t start that again.” Roberto applies the glue to the lash and
sticks the fake on top of my own. “Ugh, these piss me off,” he says as the lash
sits haphazardly on my lid.
“Why don’t we skip them tonight?”
“Anita, all the mascara in the world won’t show your own lashes under
those lights. Give me a second.” He adjusts the fake. “There. One down. I’ll
learn to get these on right the first time yet.”
“Practice, practice. Just like you told me the first time I wore pumps.”
“You were born in pumps. No one had to teach you.” Roberto takes a step
back. “Jesus, I’m dying for a cigarette.”
“Not in here, you’ll set my hair on fire.” I blink my eyes.
“You don’t have to test them. I’ve got so much goddamn glue on those
lashes, they’re not going anywhere.”
“I wasn’t testing them.”
“You were too.” We both start laughing.
“This” he says sucking in his cheeks. I obey and Roberto brushes my face
quickly with the Wild Raspberry blush. “Fabulous. You should look so good as a
boy.”
I agree with him. I’m thirty seven and there’s not a crows foot in sight.
Hell, I can still pass for twenty-four. Roberto says its because of the
moisturizing make-up remover.
“Do you really think I’m that
young?” I asked a guy once after we played the age game one night in a bar.
“Why shouldn’t I?” He handed me a
beer. “So, tell me something interesting about you.”
“I’m a big old drag queen.”
“You are not.”
“Why would I lie?”
He took a step back and looked at my face.
“It comes off,” I added, rubbing my beard.
Son of a bitch still came home with
me.
Roberto plops my already styled wig
on my head, pokes at a few banana curls and then surveys his handiwork one last
time. He pats the tiny bead of sweat that dares to materialize on my forehead,
and then blows me a kiss. “You really are too beautiful,” he repeats. “Have a
great show. Where’s your mother sitting? Should I check up on her?”
“I got her a table up front. You’ll
recognize her, she doesn’t look a thing like me.”
“Very funny. I’ll just stay in the
back. You can introduce us later.”
Roberto reaches for his cigarettes.
“Out.” I point to the door and toss
him a book of matches. I don’t smoke but I’ve accumulated a hundred matchbooks.
“I’ll see you after the show.”
“Break a heel, Anita.”
Roberto shoves the cigarette between
his teeth and waves it up and down. I mouth a silent good-bye to his reflection
as I take another look at myself in the mirror.
I lack a sense of comfort with my new song set, plus I’m distracted by
who will be in my audience. For a moment, I imagine Bruce. I’ll thank him for
coming and he’ll say it’s nice to see me. Then Papalardo. I’ll look at him, bat
my eyes and pucker my lips. He’ll offer me a tip and I will walk over to him
and whisper if he really likes it when the boys look like girls. I’ll see Irish
Nana sitting in the back row with her grandsons. I’ll tell her there’s no
smoking while I’m on stage, then ask her to describe what a goddamn Lithuanian really
looks like. I’ll blow my cousins a kiss, nod my head and then launch into my
new song, Shirley Bassey’s ‘My Life’.
“Funny, how a lonely day, can make a person say, what good is my life?
Till I look around and see this great big world is part of me and my life.”
My dressing room is quiet. I take a deep breath, smooth the front of my
gown, stand up, and press play on the CD machine. I listen to Shirley’s loud,
brash diva voice.
My own soars above the recording.
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