Rouge: A Novel

Chapter 1 1
2016

La Jolla, California

After the funeral. I'm hiding in Mother's bathroom watching a skincare video about necks. Cheap black dress that chafes. Illicit cigarette. Sitting on the toilet amid her decorative baskets, her red jellyfish soaps, her black towel sets. Smoke comes tumbling out of my mouth in amorphous gray clouds. I blow it out the window where the palm trees still sway and the alien sun still shines and the sky is a blue that hurts my eyes. There's a Kleenex box made entirely of jagged seashells at my back-probably she never once filled it with Kleenex. There's her mirror over the sink, a crack running right down the middle of the glass. Whenever I look at myself in that mirror, I look broken. Cleaved. There's the perfume she wore every day of her life on the marble counter, the Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick in its gold-and-black case. A little cluster of red jars and vials on a silver tray. For the face, dear. For the face, I can hear Mother saying to me. Need all the help we can get, am I right? Cynical smile of the beautiful who know they're on the downhill slope.

Yes, Mother, I'd say. But not you. You don't need any help at all.

I don't look closely at any of it.

Instead I stare at my phone, where the skin video plays. My eyes are dry and they are focused. Focused on Dr. Marva, who is telling me in her reassuring English accent all about my poor, poor neck. The video is actually called "How to Save Your Own Neck." I've watched it before. It's one of my favorites.

Dr. Marva's soft yet firm words fill my mother's bathroom.

"We don't take care of our necks," Dr. Marva is saying sadly. And she looks quite sad in her white silk blouse. As if she is grieving for us and our poor necks. "They often get neglected, don't they?"

She looks right at me with her golden eyes. I find myself nodding as I always do.

"Yes, Marva," I whisper along. Yes, they do get neglected.

"Which is quite a tragedy," Marva observes. "Because the skin there is already so thin."

Didn't Mother always tell me this? The neck never lies, Belle. The neck is truthful, deeply cruel. Like a mirror of the soul. It reveals all, you see? And she'd point at her own throat. I'd look at Mother's throat and see nothing. Just an expanse of whiteness shot through with blue veins.

I see, Mother, I always said.

On my phone screen, Marva shakes her head as if this truth about necks is one she cannot bear to speak. "What atrocities," she whispers, stroking her own neck, "might bloom here? Redness, of course," she intones. "A brown pigment, perhaps. Thinning, atrophied patches. Essentially," she adds with a laugh, "a triumvirate of horror."

As Marva says this, she tilts her head back to reveal an impossibly smooth white column of flesh. Untainted, unmarred. She strokes the skin softly with her red-nailed hands.

As I watch her do this, I begin to stroke my own neck. I can't help it.

A flash of Mother's throat appears again in my mind's eye. Smooth and pale just like Marva's. Always some pendant to show off the hollows. Then toward the end, this sudden fondness for jewel-toned glass, stones cut in the strangest shapes. An obsidian dagger. A warped, dark red heart. The way she'd clutch that heart with her fingers. Look at me on video calls like she was lost and my face was a dark forest, a mirror in which she barely recognized herself.

Dread fills my stomach now as I stroke my own neck. Not at the memory of Mother, I'm ashamed to say. But because I feel the skin tags, the unsightly bands here and here and here.

"Your poor, poor neck," Marva whispers, shaking her head again as if she can actually see me. "It could really use some tightening and brightening, couldn't it?"

Yes, Marva. It really could.

Knock, knock.

Sylvia. I can feel it. Her little knuckles rapping on the door. Then the saccharine tone I hear in my teeth roots. "Mirabelle?" she says. "Mira, are you in there?"

Terrible to hear my name spoken by that voice. I think of Mother's voice. Rich, deep, accented with French. I was only ever Mirabelle when she was angry. She never once dignified Mira, though it's what I mostly go by these days. Belle, she always ca...