Sheer, p.5
Sheer, page 5
There are girls who, upon recognizing their gayness, would avert their eyes in gym locker rooms and avoid sleepovers because they worried another girl’s body might incite impure thoughts. I was not one of them. The way I saw it, I had purchased myself a golden ticket to a theme park of girl-on-girl fantasies by way of my maquillage business. Sally needed flushed cheeks for her pre-necking milkshake with William. No problem. I’d rub shimmery peach lipstick into her apples—my signature move—and a couple of hours later, I’d rub myself off as I imagined that I was the one sucking on her olive neck. Angela wanted a wide-eyed gaze for a sunset picnic with Jack. I’d fluff her eyelashes like down pillows in a five-star hotel, stare into their gray-green depths, memorize every glint and shadow, the better to imagine them scanning my naked body with unadulterated lust as I came for the third time later that night. And so on and so forth.
My town’s Catholicism was the perfect double-edged sword. It was part of the reason for my secrecy, yes, but it also provided me an ever-believable cover for not pursuing a boyfriend like the male-crazy teens in my high school. I was a good Catholic girl, who abided by the tenets of my shaky faith and didn’t gallivant with boys. No parent or teacher questioned my lack of heterosexual desire; they saw it as a symptom of my piety.
There were three girls who never entered my fantasy realm: Stacy, Christine, and Karen. Not because they were unappealing, but because they were my friends. It would have been the equivalent of sexual attraction to a cousin or a sibling.
We had this gym teacher in high school. Yes, I’m aware this is a cliché. No, it doesn’t make what I’m about to say untrue. We had this gym teacher in high school, Coach Parker. She went by Coach, not Ms. or Mrs. the way non–physical education teachers did. Coach Parker was a large woman. She was over six feet tall. Her shoulders were very broad, to the extent that I wondered where she purchased her jackets and sweaters. Her hair was cut in a choppy bob, not quite as short as the hair of those Automat women, but short enough to arouse suspicion in early-1990s Paramus. Then there was Coach Parker’s walk: clunky steps, each one heavier and more awkward than the last, her hips wide and tight. Coach Parker walked like she was trying to crush humanity beneath her size-eleven shoes.
Behind her back, the girls in my class did not call her Coach Parker. They called her Coach Pecker. As in, “Coach Pecker wants to stick it to Lisa’s mom” or “Coach Pecker has a hard-on for Mrs. Lewis,” etc., etc. Every time a girl would say this, my stomach would clench. I knew I looked nothing like Coach Parker. I walked like a ballerina by comparison. My hair was long. I wasn’t the same as her. Except that I was.
It was softball season—again, a cliché; again, not untrue here—and our gym class was divided into teams. This was probably sophomore year. I was on Christine’s team. Stacy and Karen were in the field. Christine was up to bat, and I sat on the bench. By this point, Christine’s curves were so luscious, even mothers and grandmothers eyed her when she walked down the street. She was not so well endowed athletically, though. She swung and fully missed two easy pitches.
Coach Parker came up behind her to help Christine out.
“You hold the bat like this,” she instructed as she wrapped her arms around Christine and showed Christine where to place her hands on the bat. “Your stance is off.” Coach Parker moved her hands from Christine’s bat and down to Christine’s hips, which she pivoted to the correct angle.
The titters started on the bench beside me. “Coach Pecker wants Christine.” “Watch out, Christine—Coach Pecker has the hots for you.” It was Karen who made the murmurs official. She marched over to the home plate from her spot at first base.
“Get your hands off her!” she snapped. “You dyke.”
It was the first time I heard this slur. Not the last, of course. How did Karen know this word? Where had she learned it? I didn’t need anyone to tell me its meaning. Part of me ached for the obvious intention behind Karen’s word choice and for what it boded in our friendship. I was that word, too. If Karen ever found out, she’d call me the same thing. Another part of me wanted to distance myself from Coach Parker for the purposes of safety. If I stood too close to her, people might sense a hidden resemblance between us. A third part of me wanted to scream on Coach Parker’s behalf. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was helping an athletically challenged student—she was doing her job. Male coaches patted their students on the back or chest or shoulders all the time and no one said a word.
These three parts, deep identification, self-preservation, and indignation, seemed in opposition to each other, still their result was the same: they reaffirmed that I needed to hide who I was. My desire, and the beautiful pleasure it gave me in the privacy of my bedroom, was never going to change nor did I want it to. This same desire—and beauty—was not something I could ever share publicly. It was not something I could share with my closest friends.
Coach Parker dropped her hands from Christine’s hips and stepped back, away from Christine, whose face was bright red. Coach Parker was trembling, with anger or shame, I wasn’t sure. Karen stood there, hands on her own hips, and glared at Coach Parker.
“I think we should end class for today,” said Coach Parker, with more grace than I would have managed in a similar situation. “You’re dismissed.”
Coach Parker strode away briskly in the direction of the school’s parking lot. I stood up from the bench and joined Karen and Stacy, who gathered around Christine.
“Are you okay?” asked Karen.
“I’m fine,” said Christine, whose face had returned to its normal shade.
“I can’t believe she touched you like that. What a dyke,” said Karen.
Stacy was silent, just as my father had been at the Automat. I followed her lead.
“She was adjusting my stance,” said Christine. “I don’t think she meant it that way. I wish you hadn’t made a whole thing out of it.”
“Oh, she definitely meant it that way. Just look at you,” said Karen. “You can never be too careful. My mother says women like that are everywhere, in the places you’d least expect.”
* * *
—
My makeup business continued to occupy me through the fall of junior year in high school. On a Saturday afternoon, I was walking to this girl Trisha’s house, makeup Caboodle in hand. The leaves had started turning. A soft breeze rustled the trees’ burnished plumage and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I was distracted by an enormous puddle from the previous night’s rain and was so focused on navigating around it without soaking through my sneakers that I failed to notice my mother, who rounded the corner of the street adjacent to the one I was crossing.
“Maxine!” she called. “What are you doing here?”
My head swiveled toward my mother. I had told her I was spending the afternoon at Christine’s house, yet I was on the street where Trisha lived, completely in the opposite direction from Christine’s place.
I halted once I crossed the street and my mother bustled toward me.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at Christine’s?” she asked.
A sparrow chirped from a nearby tree. It fluttered down and landed on the sidewalk. Then it hopped into the sizable puddle around which I had detoured. The bird splashed with abandon before it took off into the air. I wished I could fly away with it.
“I am,” I said, with no further explanation.
“So you lied to me? What are you doing here?”
My mother’s gaze migrated from my flushed cheeks down to the pink Caboodle clutched in my right hand. Meanwhile, my eyes made a beeline for her clumpy mascara and overzealous bronzer. I desperately wanted to suggest that she employ a lighter touch when it came to her daily face and that I was exactly the person to help her do this.
“I didn’t lie. I was at Christine’s earlier. Then Trisha called Christine’s house. She needed help with something.”
“Trisha Daley? Are you even friends with her?”
My mother, who had to be dragged to a PTA meeting by the ends of her hair, really picked her moments to swan in with intimate knowledge of my social life.
“We have Trig together.”
“So you decided to up and walk a mile to Trisha’s house to help with her homework? You must think I was born yesterday.”
After a few more rounds of verbal bobbing and weaving, I confessed everything to my mother regarding my business and the covert trips I had been making to various girls’ homes. Initially, I thought the intrepid nature of my endeavor might win her over because she seemed, if not pleased, then less angry than I had feared. Her mouth, coated in a red that was far too warm for her pink-toned complexion, didn’t curl into a smile, but it didn’t settle into a reprimand either. I detected a tiny ember in her eyes. Was that pride cutting through her normally steely gaze? My mother and I had never been sympatico on creativity; ever since our disagreement over that Alexander’s mural, I had steered clear of philosophical discussions. And I had kept my makeup enterprise a secret from her out of concern that she’d feel threatened by my earning power. Perhaps I’d underestimated her.
“You’ve been lying to us this whole time while you’ve had people paying you to do their makeup. You may as well be selling yourself,” said my mother. “I have never been so disappointed in you, Maxine. This is not how I raised you to behave.”
My mother had read Cosmopolitan when it first debuted. She had heard of female fiscal independence, though she didn’t practice it herself. As suspected, my ambition really irked her. She was not pro–female entrepreneurship, certainly not for a teenage girl. A proper woman was obedient—she could make her own money, yes, but she did so within the preexisting structure that was available to her. She was savvy, not rebellious.
“I’ll speak with your father about this,” she chided.
That’s how my first business went under. The pain seared me. It wasn’t the unearned money that hurt, rather it was the end to the exhilarating high of creative autonomy. I couldn’t be my true self like my friends. Through my entrepreneurship, I had expressed that self in the safe, accepted medium of makeup. Now that outlet was gone. I wanted to take that goddamned Caboodle and hurl it at the ground, watch its contents shatter until there was nothing left but a mess of colored powder and cream, as useless to the world as my independent spirit.
I look back on that moment, with the benefit of age and time, as a crucial lesson for my future professional vector. Success requires perseverance and, above all, self-conviction. No one, not an investor or a colleague or a parent, will ever care about your artistic vision as much as you do. To manifest your ideas, you must exist in a continuous battle against naysayers, bolstered only by your personal faith.
At the time, such wisdom was not at my disposal. I was a teenager, with all the raging hormones that entails. How dare my mother, a woman who hadn’t made so much as a dime since marrying my dad, question my desire to build a business. She was obviously jealous. My father chided her for her lack of profession, meanwhile her teenage daughter possessed more moxie than she ever would. She didn’t want me to have something she herself couldn’t grasp.
On that afternoon, I erected a wall against my mother, to insulate my still-forming identity from her hostile incursions. To this day, that barrier has never come down.
Vigorous Heterosexuality
The impenetrable wall between my mother’s beliefs and mine was fortified by my father. As an adult, I wonder what drew these two people together in holy matrimony. I rarely saw them behave affectionately toward each other. They practiced nearly polar approaches to life: my father prioritized quantitative reasoning and discipline; my mother was, I can see now, both an unabashed sybarite and a conformist.
My teenage mind harbored zero interest in my parents’ mutual attraction. Like most adolescents, I was only concerned with myself. After my mother informed him of my business, my dad called in a favor with a colleague in the cosmetics department at the GSP Macy’s, which had taken over the old Bamberger’s store. I heard my parents argue about this one night while I sat on the stairs and eavesdropped.
“Why does she need a job at all? She should be focused on her schoolwork,” said my mother.
“It’s good that Maxine was pursuing fiscal independence,” said my father. “She was just too independent about it. A job will teach her responsibility.”
“I don’t want my daughter touching other women’s faces. It’s unclean. Who knows what kinds of women she’ll meet there.”
The way my mother said this, I question now if she had an inkling of my sexuality. Why did she think the Macy’s makeup department would be a hotbed of woman-on-woman activity? Perhaps she had seen the term “lipstick lesbian” somewhere and taken it at face value.
“That’s ridiculous. Maxine wants to work. She should do it in a supervised way.” My father paused here. “At least one woman in this family is pursuing a career.”
“If I didn’t have a child to raise and a home to clean while you’re at the office every day, maybe I’d have a career, too,” said my mother.
My father snorted. “I highly doubt that.”
“Hire a housekeeper, a cook, and a babysitter and then we’ll find out,” said my mother, knowing my father would never call her bluff.
Within the week, I had a part-time job behind the counter of a big-deal brand that shall remain nameless. Mom sat next to me as I called each of my “clients” to inform them that I would no longer be available for private makeup services. I had been demoted from managing my own schedule, rates, and aesthetic to being at a company’s mercy. Gone was the sense that I was making other girls beautiful through my talents. I was now a cog in a large machine, shilling for products that I didn’t respect in service to a corporation’s bottom line.
I worked at Macy’s on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The gig had a dress code, so on those days, I would rush from my last-period Biology class to the nearest girls’ bathroom. In the grubby stall, the smell of bleach mixed with urine in the air, I would change out of my sweater and jeans into a collared black shirt and a black pencil skirt, both of which my mother had purchased for this job. I had a plastic name tag, too, rimmed in silver, that I would attach to the shirt’s chest pocket with a safety pin. The store wanted us to look “neat and presentable,” but still “warm and appealing,” per the guidelines I received, which translated into combed and brushed hair, mascara, powder blush—gag—and an abhorrent cotton-candy lipstick that they insisted all the saleswomen wear for the sake of uniformity. I refused to walk even the few short steps through the bustling school hallway and out to my mother’s waiting car with that pink on my lips. My coworker Linda had to hand-apply the lipstick to my mouth every time I showed up without it.
“Oh honey,” she would cluck, as she swiped that disgusting stub across my lips. “Must we go through this every time?”
“This lipstick makes me wish I was color-blind,” I’d retort, which always made Linda laugh.
The Macy’s cosmetics department was a swirling hive of activity. The fluorescent ceiling lights emitted a heat that rivaled the burn of UV rays. All those metal, plastic, and glass stations conducted and refracted that warmth. They turned the entire floor into a blazing hellscape. Within minutes of my shift, I was sweating beneath my black button-down shirt. Droplets meandered across my back, collected in the cups of my bra; occasionally, an errant drip would make its way to my anklebone. Then there was the noise on that floor. Customers’ voices and salespeople’s coos of enticement had nowhere to land on those hard surfaces. Instead, they ricocheted endlessly from edge to edge. It was like we were trapped in a massive pinball arcade game, bright lighting, unexpected pings, and all. The prize wasn’t a high score, though. It was the possibility of eventual escape.
Linda, witty and good-natured, was one of the best parts of that experience. While I’m sure she initially saw me as a spoiled brat whose Daddy handed her a cute job, in the end, she understood me better than most other people in my life. Linda was in her early thirties, a single mom who stitched together a series of part-time gigs, including waitressing and office temping, to work around her young son’s schedule while earning enough to keep the lights on at home. Linda’s ex-husband was a total loser, as she described him, a guy who had chased her assiduously throughout her twenties, only to leave as soon as he impregnated her a few months after their wedding. He hadn’t stuck around long enough for Linda to divorce him. She had no idea where he was, and there were no alimony checks in her mailbox.
Before she was married, Linda had worked at a salon a couple of towns over, cutting and coloring hair and offering makeovers. She was the first person I had met who made a living from the one talent I possessed. That said, Linda and I had very different tastes. She was a child of the 1960s and harbored an abiding love for winged eyeliner and decadent eyelashes. Petite to my five-foot-eight stature, curvy where I was narrow and flat, raven-haired where I was flaxen, she was my visual foil, and my verbal one, too. I had a tendency toward dry rejoinders and my small-talk skills were nonexistent. Linda could chat a dog away from its food bowl. She would talk, talk, talk her way through a trail of customers during our shifts. By the end, she’d have racked up more than I managed to sell in an entire month.
Linda realized this from the outset and so she tasked me with inventory checks and general organization—putting bottles and vials back in their rightful places after customers had futzed with them, stacking the wipes and cotton pads we used when testing out products, for example. Still, she knew it was a disservice to shield me from front-of-house duties, not least of all because we earned a bonus based on our individual sales. Every so often, she would make me deal with a customer even if she was free.
