Amy’s expression became sympathetic. “They make it tough, huh?”
Theresa’s shoulders slumped. “Tough isn’t the word. Do you know that I haven’t been able to buy one single dress without altering it since I was the age you are now?”
“Yeah, I know. I ... well, I asked mom about it one time ... I mean, if it’s hard for you and stuff, and if ... well, if I might get as big as you.”
Theresa turned and placed her hands on Amy’s shoulders. “Oh, Amy, I hope you never do. I worry about it, too. I wouldn’t wish a shape like mine on a pregnant elephant. It’s horrible—not being able to buy clothes and being scared to dance with a man and—”
“You mean,
that’s
why you wouldn’t dance with Brian?”
“That’s the only reason. I just ...” Theresa considered a moment, then went on. “You’re old enough to understand, Amy. You’re fourteen. You’ve been growing. You know how the boys look at you funny as soon as you have a pair of goose bumps on your chest. Only when mine started growing they just kept right on until they got to the size of watermelons, and the boys were merciless. And when the boys were no longer boys, but men, well ...” Theresa shrugged.
“I figured that was why you wear those ugly sweaters all the time.”
“Oh, Amy, are they ugly?”
Amy looked penitent. “Gol, Theresa, I didn’t mean it that way, I just meant ... well, I know you never wore that neat sweat shirt I gave you last Christmas. It was way more
in
than anything you had—that’s why I bought it for you.”
“I’ve tried it on at least a dozen times, but I’m always scared to step out of my bedroom in it.”
“Gol ...” The word was a breathy lament as Amy stood pondering the everyday dilemmas her sister had to face. “Well, we could pick out something nice for tomorrow night if we got separate pieces, like a skirt and sweater or something.”
“Not a sweater, Amy. I wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“Well, you can’t go out for New Year’s Eye in corduroy slacks and a white blouse with an old granny cardigan over your shoulders!”
“Do you think I
want
to?”
“Well ...” Amy threw up her palms in the air.
“Horse poop
, there’s got to be something in this entire shopping center that’s better than
that.
” She cast a scathing look at the fashionless shirt Theresa had discarded.
Theresa found her sense of humor again. “Horse
poop
? I suppose mother doesn’t know you say things like that, just like she doesn’t suspect you dance on the living-room carpet?” Theresa knew perfectly well that at fourteen, Amy experimented with a gamut of profanity much worse than what she’d just uttered—she was at the age where such experiments were to be expected.
Suddenly the gleam in Amy’s eyes duplicated the one from her dental hardware. “Listen, what about the sweater? Don’t say no until you try, okay?” She splayed her fingers in the air and gazed toward heaven, theatrically. “I have
theee
perfect one.
Theee
most
excellent
sweater ever created by sheep or test tube! I’ve had my eye on it since before Christmas, but I was outa bucks, so I couldn’t get it for myself. But if they have one left in large, you’re gonna love it!”
A quarter hour later, Theresa stood before a different mirror, in a different shop, in a different garment that solved all her problems while remaining perfectly in vogue.
It was a lightweight bulky acrylic of rich, deep plum. The neckline sported a generous cowl collar that seemed to become one with wide dolman sleeves. Because it draped rather than clung, it seemed to partially conceal Theresa’s overly generous silhouette.
“Oh, Amy, it’s perfect!”
“I told you!”
“But what about slacks?”
Amy nabbed a pair of finely tailored gabardine trousers of indefinable color: soft, subtle, as if tinted by the smoke from burning violets. She stood back to assess her older sister and proclaimed in the most overused word of her teenage vernacular, “
Excellent
.”
Theresa whirled around and grabbed her sister in a compulsive hug. “It is! It is excellent.”
Amy beamed with pride, then took command again. “Shoes next. He’s got a good six inches on you, so you could stand a little extra height. Some classy heels. Whaddya say?”
“Shoes ... right!”
Theresa was pulling her head from beneath the sweater when she thought of the one last thing she’d need help with. “Amy, do you think I’d look too conspicuous if I tried a little bit of makeup?”
Amy’s lips were covering her braces as Theresa asked, but her smile grew crooked, and wide, then winked in the glow of the dressing-room’s overhead light fixture. “Well, it’s about time!” she declared.
“Now, just a minute, Amy,” Theresa said as she noted the gleam in her sister’s eye. “I haven’t decided for sure ...”
But that evening, something happened that crystallized the decision. She was in her room, the door open as she was examining the new sweater, when she felt someone’s eyes on her. She looked up to find Brian in the doorway, studying her. It was the first time he’d seen her bedroom, and his eyes made a lazy circle, pausing on the shelf holding her pewter figurine collection, then dropping to the bed, neatly made, and finally returning to Theresa, who had quickly replaced the sweater in the closet.
“Have I managed to change your mind about the dance yet?” He crossed his arms and nonchalantly leaned one shoulder against the doorframe.
Theresa had never been honorably pursued before; it took some getting used to. It was disconcerting, having him peruse her bedroom, which seemed an intimate place to come face to face with a man. She’d turned toward him, and he remained very still, one hip cocked as he lounged comfortably and kept his eye on her.
Do I look him in the eye? Or in the middle of his chest? Or at some spot beyond his shoulder? Twenty-five years old and acting less self-confident than I’m sure Amy would act in this situation.
She chose the middle of his chest.
“Yes, you have, but don’t expect me to dance as well as Amy.”
“All I’ll expect is that at some point during the evening, you’ll at least look me in the eye.”
Her unsettled gaze flew up to his, caught a teasing grin there and dropped again, flustered.
“So this is where you hide away.” As he moved farther into the room, he nodded toward the shelf. “I see The Maestro had joined the others. I envy him his spot, looking down on your pillow.” He stopped close before her.
She searched but could find not a single reply and swallowed hard, feeling the blush creep up.
“Jeff was right, you know?” Brian teased softly.
She raised questioning eyes to his teasing brown ones.
“R ... right? About what?”
“The blush camouflages the freckles. But don’t ever stop.” With a gentle fingertip he brushed her right cheek. “It’s completely irresistible.” Then he turned and sauntered off down the hall, leaving Theresa with her fingertips grazing the spot of skin he’d so lightly touched. It seemed to tingle yet. The touch had been petal light, but she’d felt the calluses on his fingertips. Both the sensation and his teasing had left her with a light head and a fluttering heart.
That night, late, Theresa tapped softly at Amy's door, then went in to announce, “I’m going to need your help learning how to put on makeup, and I’ll have to borrow some of yours, if you don’t mind.”
Amy’s only answer was a beam of approval as she dragged Theresa farther into the room and shut the door with a decisive click.
They did a trial run that lasted till the wee hours. Sitting before a lighted makeup mirror in Amy’s room, Theresa experienced the full range of giddy adolescent give-and-take she’d missed out on when she’d been at the age of puberty. The makeup session brought a twofold benefit: not only did it free the butterfly from the chrysalis, it also brought the two sisters closer. Given the disparity in their ages, they’d had little chance to share experiences of this kind.
Amy began by experimenting with foundation colors, trying a rainbow of skin tones on various sections of Theresa’s face until the redhead declared, “I look like a Grandma Moses painting!”
Assessing, Amy corrected, “No, more like her palette, I think.” They shared a laugh, then went to work finding the right hue that skillfully camouflaged the freckles and gave Theresa a new, subdued radiance.
Next came the eyes, but as Amy bent over Theresa’s shoulder and peered critically in the mirror at the blue grease they’d smeared on one freckled eyelid, they burst out laughing once more.
“Yukk! Get if off! It feels like lard and looks like I took a beating.”
“Agreed!”
Next they tried a green powder-base eyeshadow, but it made Theresa look like a stop-and-go light, so off it went, too. They settled on an almost translucent mauve that had so little color it couldn’t clash with the skin and hair tones that needed to be catered to.
The first time Theresa tried to use the eyelash curler, she pinched her eyelid and yelped in pain.
“This is like trying to curl the hair on a caterpillar’s back!” she despaired. “There’s nothing there. I hate my eyelashes anyway. They have as much color as a glass of water.”
“We’ll fix that.”
But the tears rolled from beneath her abused lids, and it took several long, painful minutes before Theresa got the hang of the curler, then learned how to brush her lashes with a mascara wand. The results, however, surprised even herself.
“Why, I never knew my lashes were so long!”
“That’s cause you never saw the ends of ’em before.”
They were a total wonder—quite spiky and alluring and made her whole face look bright and ... and sexy!
The powdered blush proved an absolute disaster. They swabbed it off faster than they’d brushed it on, deciding Theresa’s natural coloring couldn’t compete with added highlighting, and decided to stick with the foundation hue only.
Theresa had always worn lipgloss, but now they tried several new shades, and Amy demonstrated how to skillfully blend two colors and accent the pretty bowed shape of her sister’s upper lip with a highlighter stick.
With the makeup complete, Theresa appeared transformed. It was a drastic change but one that made her smile at Amy in the mirror.
Yet, Amy wasn’t totally pleased. “That hair,” Amy grunted in disgust.
“Well, I can’t change the color, and I can’t keep it from pinging all over like it was shot out of a frosting decorator.”
“No, but you could go to the beauty shop and let somebody else figure out what to do with it.”
“The beauty shop?”
“Why not?”
“But I’m going to look conspicuous enough with all this makeup on. What would he think if I showed up with a different hairdo, too?”
“Oh, horse poop!” Amy pronounced belligerently, jamming her hands onto her trim hips. “He’ll think it’s super.”
“But I don’t want to look like ... well, it’s a date.”
“But it
is
a date!”
“No, it’s not. He’s two years younger than I am. I’m just filling in, that’s all.”
But in spite of her protests, Theresa recalled Brian’s teasing earlier this evening and admitted he’d seemed fully amenable to being her escort.
Several minutes later, standing before the wide mirror at the bathroom vanity, she caught her glistening lower lip between her teeth in an effort to contain the smile of approval that wanted to wing across her features. Then her lip escaped her teeth, and she smiled widely at what she saw. She liked her face! For the first time in her life she genuinely liked it. It seemed a desecration to have to cleanse the skin and remove the radiance from the creature who looked so happy and pleased with herself.
As she forced herself to turn on the water and pick up the bar of soap, it seemed as if tomorrow night would never get there.
__________
BUT NEW YEAR’S EVE DAY
arrived at last, and Theresa managed to get an eleventh-hour appointment on this busiest day of the year in the beauty shops. In the late afternoon, she returned home the proud possessor of a new haircut and of the simple tool required to achieve the natural bounce of ringlets on her own: a hairpick.
The beautician’s suggestion had been to simply shape the hair and stop trying to subdue it but to soften it with a cream rinse and let it bounce free, with just a few flicks of the wrist and pick to guide it into a halo of color about her head. Even the redness seemed less offensive, for with the light filtering through it, it looked less brash.
While she hung up her coat in the entry closet, Brian called from the living room, “Hi.”
But she avoided a direct confrontation with him and hurried down the hall to her room with no more than a “Hi” in return.
And now everyone was scuttling around, getting ready. The bathroom had a steady stream of traffic. Theresa took a quick shower, then went to her room and was applying a new after-bath talc she’d ventured to buy. It had a light, petally fragrance reminiscent of the potpourri used by women in days of old. Subtle, feminine.
She paused with the puff in her hand and cocked her head. On the other side of her bedroom wall was the bathroom, so sounds carried through. She heard a masculine cough and recognized it as Brian’s. The shower ran for several minutes during which there were two thumps, like an elbow hitting the wall, while images went skittering through her mind. There followed the whine of a blow dryer, then a long silence—shaving—after which he started humming “Sweet Memories.” Theresa smiled and realized she’d been standing naked for some time, dwelling on what was going on in the bathroom.
Crossing to the mirror, she assessed her devastatingly enormous breasts and wished for the thousandth time in as many days that she’d been in the other line when mammary glands were handed out. She turned away in disgust and found a clean brassiere. Donning it, she had to lean forward to let the pendulous weights drop into the cups before straightening to hook the back clasp of the hideous garment. It had all the feminine allure of a hernia truss! The wide straps had shoulder guards, meant to keep the weight from cutting into her flesh, but the deep grooves dented her shoulders just the same. The bra’s utilitarian white fabric was styled for “extra support.” How she hated the words! And how she hated the lingerie industry. They owed an apology to thousands of women across America for offering not a single large-size brassiere in any of the feminine pastels of orchid, peach or powder blue. Apparently women of her proportions weren’t supposed to have a sense of color when it came to underwear! No wistful longing to clothe themselves in anything except antiseptic, commonsense, white!