Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  CHAPTER 17

  Charm and Beauty

  WITHOUT A WORD TO ANYONE, SARALA HAD MADE THE APPOINTMENT, her long hair falling into a pile around the stylist’s chair. With a blow dryer, the hairstylist restrained Sarala’s dark curls, shaping them into soft wings that fanned out around her face, drawing attention to her high cheekbones, the whole arrangement set with a soft lacquer of hairspray. Sarala was unsure whether she could reproduce the effect, but, for the day, at least, it was enough to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror each time she passed.

  When Meena and Abhijat returned home that evening, Sarala revealed her transformation.

  “You look,” Abhijat said, after regarding her for a moment, “like Carol.”

  “I think it looks great, Mom,” Meena said.

  Abhijat excused himself to change out of his suit. As he made his way up the stairs, he permitted himself another peek at Sarala and admitted, only to himself, that it did, in fact, suit her.

  Upstairs, he slipped out of his jacket and returned it to its hanger. He stood for a moment in the large walk-in closet, which had, when they first bought the house, seemed to him excessively large. Pushed to the back were the bright saris Sarala no longer wore, her side of the closet now filled with matching jogging suits, Velcro tennis shoes, and holiday-themed sweaters. He ran his fingers over the saris’ thin, delicate fabric, then turned back to his side of the closet, removing his tie and returning it to its place among the others.

  At the dinner table, Abhijat looked down at his plate, scooping up a bit of the grey-green matter on his spoon and letting it slide off with a resounding splat. “What is this?” he asked, sounding weary, tired of it already, before Sarala even answered.

  “Green bean casserole.” She held up the photo from the cookbook. “I learned from Carol.”

  “Carol,” Abhijat said under his breath. He held up another spoonful, sniffing at it suspiciously.

  From across the table, Meena raised her eyebrows, nodding at him like a mother cajoling a toddler into taking a bite.

  He exhaled into the quiet of the room. “I don’t like you spending so much time with her,” Abhijat said. He had not failed to notice the NOT UNDER MY HOME sign that had appeared in Carol and Bill’s front yard.

  Meena watched nervously from her place at the table.

  “Surely there is someone more, more…” Abhijat searched for the word. “…edifying for you to spend time with.”

  Sarala didn’t answer. For her, it had become answer enough to say nothing.

  After she had cleared away the dinner dishes and returned the kitchen to order, Sarala made her way the few blocks to her neighbor’s house. “You should come,” Carol had said that morning with an encouraging smile.

  As she walked, Sarala noticed the new sensation of cold around her neck and found her fingers drawn again and again to the ends of her newly short hair.

  It seemed strange to Sarala, upon arriving, to find the driveway full of cars when she knew that none of the women there lived any farther from Judy’s house than Sarala did.

  “Look at you!” Carol exclaimed when Sarala came through the door. “You look fantastic!” Carol embraced Sarala, then stepped back to take in the transformation again. “I absolutely love it,” she announced.

  Judy’s living room felt crowded, full of overstuffed sofas that looked, to Sarala, as though they might burst were she to sit down on one. In the center of the room, a floral area rug sat on top of the wall-to-wall carpet.

  “Her husband got a huge promotion last year, and she’s just redone her living room,” Carol confided to Sarala. “That’s really the only reason she’s hosting. She just wanted to show it off to everyone.”

  Around Judy’s dining room table, Carol had arranged pink plastic trays into which she placed Styrofoam inserts, disposable wands for mascara, and sponge-tipped applicators for eye shadow. Beside each of these place settings sat a pink terrycloth headband, a sales ticket, and a pen. A pink runner marched down the center of the table.

  The women had congregated in the living room, where they sat, tiny plates of appetizers balanced on top of their wine glasses, trading in neighborhood gossip.

  Sarala watched as Carol, from her spot at the head of the dining room table, opened her pink case, its tiny compartments unfolding to reveal lipsticks, perfume samples, and eye shadow.

  “Ladies,” Carol began, her voice ringing out over the chatter. “Let’s come find a seat when you’re ready.”

  Mirrors attached to the trays reflected the women’s faces back to them as they took their seats, each woman’s place indicated by her name written out in a flourishy cursive on the sales ticket that sat beside each tray. Carol began to speak once the women had taken their seats.

  “Everything begins with skin care. Whatever problem you have with your skin, we have something that can help. Oily skin, we have something for that. Combination skin, we have something. Even for those of you whose skin can’t quite make up its mind,” here she winked at one of the women, who laughed. “Now, let’s begin.”

  The women put on their headbands, their carefully arranged hairdos pulled back from their faces, and began to remove their makeup. Sarala had no makeup to remove, but she did as they did, slipping the terrycloth headband over her dark hair, applying cold cream to her cheeks and forehead, wiping a cotton ball dipped in eye-makeup remover over her lids.

  “Now, I am not here to sell you anything.” Carol continued with a gentle stream of talking points that Sarala found strangely soothing to listen to, Carol’s voice warm and inviting. “I’m here to teach you about good skin care. I don’t want to be your sales consultant. I want to be your best girlfriend who, when you run out of mascara on a snowy morning and don’t want to load the kids into the car to run to the drugstore or the mall, you can call me, and I will bring it to you. All I want tonight is for you to let me pamper you.”

  Once they had removed their makeup, the women around the table began to practice putting on their faces again, following Carol’s careful instruction.

  “And how is everyone’s face feeling?” Carol made the rounds of the table with tubes of foundation, assessing skin tone—“Lenore, I’m thinking you’re a beige number one”—and dispensing squirts of the appropriately matched foundation into the small indentation in their Styrofoam trays. “Marjorie, I’m thinking ivory for you.”

  At Sarala, Carol stopped, went back to her case, rummaged inside for a moment, and emerged with a darker tube of foundation than the ones she’d offered the rest of the table. Compared to the other well-used tubes, Sarala noticed, this one was nearly untouched. Carol squirted a bit into Sarala’s tray. “I think this will be just the thing,” she said.

  Carol moved around the table dispensing guidance, making adjustments, as one might to someone learning a new yoga pose. “You’ll want to hold the brush like so.

  “Now here,” she continued, “is a new lipstick that’s just come out for the spring season. I think of this as a very wearable red. You see reds all the time that look great on the shelf, don’t you? And then you bring them home and think, why on earth did I buy this? I can’t go out in public like this! And this is another one of the benefits of Mary Kay. We let you try it all before you buy it, so while it may cost a bit more than the drugstore brand, you’ll always go home with something you love and can wear the next day. Now Marjorie, you look skeptical.”

  Sarala’s eyes followed Carol’s to the woman beside her.

  “I guess I’m just not much of a red lipstick lady,” Marjorie said sheepishly. In contrast to the other women at the table, Sarala had noticed that Marjorie had comparatively little makeup to remove when the party began.

  “Until tonight!” Carol said, dabbing a bit of the new color onto Marjorie’s Styrofoam tray. “What do you say ladies, can Marjorie be a red lipstick lady?”

  “Try it!” they encouraged. Even Sarala found herself nodding along in encouragement.

  Marjorie applied a small b
it with the tip of her finger, then studied herself in the mirror. “It’s not as bad as I expected,” she decided.

  “Not as bad as you expected!” Carol laughed. “You look gorgeous! Your husband will be chasing you up the stairs tonight when you come home!”

  Sarala hadn’t before seen Carol as she presented, and it was mesmerizing. She was polished and well spoken, and she worked the room like a pro. For a moment or two she would engage in small talk, neighborhood gossip, and then, almost unnoticed, would swing back around to the latest shade of eye shadow or the fabulous deal on toner and night cream going on only for a limited time.

  Sarala had seen Carol, on show nights, emerging from her house in a dress coat and high heels, her pink totes in hand. Tonight she watched Carol from up close, her skin so smooth it might have been polished, navigating the table in her high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes.

  Sarala tried not to count how many of the women there had signs in their yards opposing the collider, but with the public hearing only a few days away, the whole thing felt a bit like the elephant in the room, an idiom Sarala had come to appreciate.

  Upstairs in her room, Meena relished the quiet, working methodically, peacefully through her pre-calc homework, calmed and encouraged by the careful process through which, if she followed each step precisely, she would arrive at a reassuringly correct answer. Lately it seemed her ears were filled always with Lily’s chatter about the Academy and her constant questions about Meena’s own application, which were becoming tiresome and increasingly difficult to deflect.

  “You should have your father help you with it,” Lily suggested.

  But Meena said she didn’t want to bother her father while he was so preoccupied with the super collider.

  “I’m sure my mom would be happy to help look over your essays, like she did for me,” Lily offered.

  “No, that’s okay, I’ll be fine on my own,” Meena assured her, but the truth was that Meena’s letter about the Academy was by now buried deep in the Nicolet landfill.

  Lily’s other recent favorite topic of conversation was the issue of the super collider, and for Meena, their conversations on this matter were even less enjoyable.

  Meena had privately begun to sympathize with the opponents. She didn’t understand the science behind the collider any more than they did. But she had the luxury of a father to trust, to know that if it were a dangerous thing, he would not allow it to be built under his home, under her school. Many of the opponents, however, did not have the benefit of someone else’s knowledge to lean on. Here, she echoed Dr. Cardiff’s thoughts on the issue, for he seemed to Meena to be a reasonable and compassionate person.

  “I think I can understand why they’re so afraid,” Meena confessed finally.

  Lily looked her as though she’d been struck. “Honestly, Meena, you sound like my mother.”

  Abhijat had intended to spend the evening in his study, working, as was his habit, but he found himself unable to concentrate, a steady parade of intrusive thoughts interrupting each time he looked down at his notes. First, his thoughts were of the collider—the hearing, the letters to the editor, the growing number of signs in his neighbors’ yards. Then he found himself thinking about what he’d said to Sarala at dinner, how he’d taken his frustration over the issue of the collider out on her, unfairly. Carol was not the problem, he chastised himself. She’d been a good friend to Sarala, for years now.

  Unable to focus, he wandered into the family room and turned on the television, an indulgence he rarely allowed himself. A bad habit, a poor use of time, he’d always argued.

  He ought, probably, to apologize, he thought.

  “Well, all I know is that I don’t want this thing running under my house,” Sarala heard one of the women at the far end of the table saying. “I don’t care what it is.”

  Carol caught Sarala’s eye and gave her an encouraging smile.

  “God only knows what they’re really doing over there in that Lab,” Judy said as she lined the bottom lid of her eye, her mouth open a bit, tongue snaking around as she concentrated.

  “You know, Judy,” Carol interrupted, handing her a new color. “You might try something in a smoky blue. To bring out your eyes.”

  “I heard it’s something to do with nuclear waste,” a woman across the table from Sarala said.

  Carol pressed on. “Now take a look at this blush, ladies. Would you believe it actually works on every skin tone? Honestly. Give it a try. I’ll pass it around.”

  Sarala tried it. She looked around the table at the other women. It did, in fact, suit them, but on her own face, it looked pearly and strange. She wiped it off with a cotton ball.

  “We’ll be another Three Mile Island if we let them have their way,” Judy continued, undiverted.

  “Well, according to that map in the paper, it’s not supposed to run under our house,” Marjorie joined in, “but honestly, I’ve thought about selling either way. Before, I didn’t take much notice of what they did there, but the more I learn, the less I like it.”

  “Someone has got to put a stop to this,” said Lenore.

  “You know, if you want to speak at that public hearing next week, you’ve got to sign up by Wednesday,” Judy noted. “Otherwise you can write a letter. But I think it’ll be important to be there. For them to see us there in person.”

  “Oh, come now, ladies,” Carol said smiling. “Don’t let’s spend the whole evening talking politics. It’s not good for the complexion.”

  Sarala was surprised to find that her lip was trembling, and she blinked back the tears that had leapt to her lashes more quickly than she would have expected, tears that hovered there as though held back only for the time being, certain to return the moment she let her guard down. She thought of how Abhijat and his job were at once the reason they were here in Nicolet, as well as the reason she might never feel entirely at home here.

  Carol caught Sarala’s eye and gave her a small smile of encouragement. “Now then,” Carol continued, and Sarala was grateful for the way the women’s heads swiveled back in her direction. “Really big for spring this year is the smoky eye.” Carol leaned into the light of the chandelier that hung over the dining room table so the women might admire her own eye makeup. “I didn’t quite do a smoky eye tonight, but I did the dark blue, which is a nice kind of baby step toward the true smoky eye.

  “Are there any questions?” Carol paused and looked around the table. “Now, as you finish up, I’m going to go around and write down everything that’s on your face. Whatever you’d like to start with is fine with me.”

  Sarala blinked at how seamlessly Carol had moved into the sales portion of the event. The other women began taking their headbands off, rearranging their hair in the mirror, admiring the lipstick or rouge they had tried, and fishing in the purses that hung on the backs of their chairs for their checkbooks.

  The women began to gather their purses and pink plastic bags filled with their new purchases. Carol turned to Sarala as she repacked her tote bags. “Why don’t you let me give you a ride home?”

  “Thank you. I think I will prefer walking, though,” Sarala said. She thanked Judy and collected her purse as the rest of the women said their goodbyes.

  Outside, the air was cool. Again she felt the cold creeping in around her newly bare neck. Sarala walked through the neighborhood, most of the houses lit from within by the dancing blue light of a television in the family room.

  Until the discussion of the collider had intruded, it had been nice to be out of the house for the evening. Sarala imagined the quiet that would hover over her home when she returned—Abhijat closed up in his study until late into the night, Meena busy upstairs with her schoolwork, which she never seemed to need help with anymore. Sarala wondered sometimes how Meena felt about the collider, if she thought about it at all.

  She was glad that Abhijat had never asked her thoughts on the collider. She wouldn’t have liked to tell him.

  Her own home stood on the co
rner, dark but for a light in Abhijat’s study and one in Meena’s room. Sarala looked up as she neared it. The feeling of belonging nowhere pressed down upon her. The sky was dark but for a bit of light pollution coming from the center of town. She belonged neither with those women, nor, lately, it seemed, with Abhijat, from whom she felt keenly aware that she was drifting further and further.

  Instead of going inside, Sarala kept walking. She thought of Abhijat’s mother, of her own mother, a continent away, past a deep blue sea. She wondered if they, too, had grown far from their husbands, even while wanting nothing more than to go on loving them.

  She wanted to be a woman who counted her blessings. Who thought each day of how lucky she was to live in a beautiful home, in a pleasant town, with a child and a husband she loved. Here, the tears she had held back in Judy’s dining room returned, and since she was now alone and in the dark, she let them run quietly down her face. She didn’t cry, exactly. It felt, instead, like they just leaked out of her.

  Maybe everyone was secretly unhappy, she thought.

  When Sarala returned home, she was surprised to find Abhijat in the family room watching television. He had startled, hearing her come through the door, jumped up, and turned off the television, as though he’d been caught doing something unseemly.

  Standing in front of the now-dark television, he composed himself. “How was your evening?” he asked.

  “Just fine,” Sarala said, and he noticed, with a twinge of shame, the note of surprise in her voice as she answered. She was surprised by the question, he realized. Surprised to find him interested in her activities.

  He should apologize, he thought again.

  “And your evening?” she asked.

  “Oh, fine,” Abhijat answered. There was a thick, strange silence between them. “Meena’s upstairs,” he offered. “Schoolwork.”