The Fresh New Face of Griselda

by Jennifer Torres

  I turn around. Maribel is holding up a mirror for a woman who is making fish lips into it. Sugar Plum fish lips.

  “Oh, yeah. My mom must have sent her to pick me up.”

  Sophia still looks confused.

  “But shouldn’t she be gone by now? I thought she was supposed to be—”

  Of course. As far as Sophia knows, Maribel should have moved away to college over the summer. But there isn’t time to explain it all.

  “I better go,” I interrupt. “See you at lunch tomorrow?”

  “Yes!” Sophia’s voice rises to a squeak. “Can’t wait! Cute shoes, by the way. Oh!” She reaches down and picks a dandelion growing in the gap between grass and sidewalk. “Make a wish. Ready? One, two, three!” A flurry of cottony seeds floats between us before drifting away.

  My wish hasn’t changed since that afternoon last spring, when the sound of my heart thumping in my ears drummed away the sugary jingle of the ice-cream truck: that things go back to the way they were.

  Only now, for the first time, I feel like there’s something I can do to help that wish come true.

  When I get to the Crown Victoria, Maribel is handing the woman a business card.

  “That color really brings out your eyes, no kidding,” she says. “Give me a call when you’re ready to reorder.” She sees me coming. “Geez, there you are. Let’s get going.”

  Even before I buckle my seat belt, I pop open the glove box. I poke around but find only the owner’s manual and old receipts from the mechanic: oil change, tune-up, new tires. Everything in order. I duck down and check under the seat. She must have another one in here somewhere.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “One of those Alma booklets, like you had yesterday.”

  “An Alma booklet?”

  “Yeah, do you have one? I want to check something.”

  “You want to check something?”

  I sit back up and slap my hand down on the seat. “Quit repeating everything I say. Do you have another one or not? Can I see it?”

  “All right, all right. Geez, relax.” Maribel tosses her makeup satchel onto my lap. “In there. Take as many as you want.”

  I pull my seat belt across my chest. Grandpa’s car rumbles to a start as I riffle through Maribel’s bag.

  The booklets are held together inside a rubber band that looks as though it’s about to snap. I pull one out and flip to the advertisement I had seen the day before.

  The Spirit of Success! I read. Are you between the ages of 12 and 19?

  Not quite, but I will be soon. I move on to the fine print.

  If you’re under 18, get a parent’s permission and fill out the form below to become an Alma Cosmetics Junior Associate. Then, simply sell 500 tubes of Fairytale Collection lip gloss by December 31 to earn your spot in Alma’s Fresh New Face Challenge!

  A parent’s permission. Considering one of mine is hundreds of miles from here, and the other already hates the idea of her daughter selling makeup, getting a parent’s permission might be an even bigger problem than my age.

  “So, what, do you know someone who wants to sell makeup?” Maribel asks, tapping the steering wheel at a red light. “Tell them to call me. I get a bonus for every new associate I recruit.”

  “Maybe,” I tell her.

  I roll down my window and let the warm breeze ruffle my bangs and loosen my braid. I imagine five hundred tubes of lip gloss, lined up end to end. Five hundred glinting pinks and glossy reds and glimmering purples, all leading Dad back home, back to the way things used to be.

  Maybe.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The independent girl is a person before whose wrath only the most rash dare stand.

  —LOU HOOVER

  Our city is almost completely flat. On a clear day, you can look west toward San Francisco and see the rolling Diablo Range that in the springtime glows yellow with wild Spanish broom and golden poppies.

  But in summer, it’s too hazy to see much farther than the gray freeway overpasses at the edge of town. We’re driving that way, past the mall where we bought my shoes and the drive-through carwash where Maribel used to go once a week until her car stopped really being hers anymore. We drive by two bus-stop benches with posters advertising Dad’s old business, faded and peeling but still stuck there.

  Before long, I’ll look out my window and see a row of soaring cypress trees and then the proud and towering gates of the Valle del Sol Estates. Behind them are houses as huge, almost, as palaces, and Dad had made sure they had yards as green as parks. Maybe he hadn’t dug all the holes or scattered all the fertilizer or installed all the sprinklers, but he had designed and organized and overseen so that everything went according to plan.

  On the weekends, he used to take me to the worksite to see how houses became houses: from a flat concrete slab to a peaked-roof wooden skeleton in just a few weeks. He showed me landscaping sketches of streets lined with crepe myrtles, their magenta blossoms like tissue-paper flowers. He asked if I approved. When I told him it was missing azaleas and verbena and mountain lilac, he sketched those in, too.

  Somehow, he even managed to get one of the streets inside Valle del Sol named after us. Zaragoza Court. When the whole project was finished and houses were ready for people to buy, the four of us—Dad and Mom and Mari and me—had posed for a picture in front of one of the street signs, one of our street signs. I was sure we’d live behind those cypress trees someday, maybe even on that street.

  All of it—the gates, the trees, the houses—are a blur across my window. And then they’re behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I finally ask. I hope she’s going to sell more makeup. I never liked going with her before, but now, if my plan is going to work, I need to learn everything I can from Maribel.

  “Tía Carla’s,” she says. “Mom wants me to bring you by so you can tell her all about your first day. She’s working late over there again.”

  Tía Carla, Mom’s sister, owns Belleza, a salon with two rows of black swivel chairs, each facing a gold-framed mirror that stretches from the gleaming wood floor to the chandeliered ceiling. If you stand in just the right spot, you can see a dozen different versions of yourself staring back out of the mirrors up and down the room. Tía Carla showed me once.

  Mom started helping out at Belleza a few hours a week after Dad moved. And then a few hours a day. And lately, even longer. She sweeps the floors and answers phones and brings clients fizzy water with lime wedges while they wait for their appointments. I don’t know if it counts as a job since Mom won’t take money from Tía Carla, just tips from the clients. “I’m not going to let my baby sister bail us out,” I heard her say, when Tía Carla tried to tuck a paycheck into Mom’s purse.

  So it’s hard to know why she’s at the salon all the time. I wonder if it’s because she wants to forget we’re living at Nana’s house, which, trust me, is really hard to do while you’re actually at Nana’s house.

  When Maribel and I walk into the salon, Mom is at the reception desk, pouring fresh water into a vase of irises. She puts down the pitcher.

  “There’s my sixth grader!” She gushes as though she were talking to a first grader. “I’ve been waiting for you!” A client whose hair is wound tightly in rollers glances over at me, smiles, and lifts her magazine back up to her face.

  “How was your day? How were both your days?” Mom turns to Maribel with her round, hopeful eyes.

  “Fine.” Maribel’s attention is already wandering to the far end of the salon where two clients sit under heat lamps. “Color processing?”

  Mom sighs. “Just Señora Lopez. Mrs. King is waiting for her curls to set.”

  Maribel narrows her eyes. “Heat can cause just as much damage to the delicate hair shaft as harsh chemicals—without the right product.”

  “Maribel, please,” Mom says. But it’s too late. She’s already headed over with her Alma catalog.

  About this time last year, Maribel was busy applying to colleges
all over the country. Most of her friends planned to attend schools nearby, but Maribel wanted to leave home. Her first choice was a college in Los Angeles. She wanted to study business. When she got in, she stuck her official acceptance letter to the refrigerator door and left it there for weeks.

  But in the end, it was Dad who went to LA instead. He and Mom asked Maribel to postpone university for a year or two, to take classes at the community college in town until they could afford to help her with tuition again. She refused and started selling makeup with Alma. “I don’t need anyone’s help,” she had said. “I’m going away to college. Even if I have to get there on my own.”

  Only, Mom is just as stubborn. She brought home registration forms from the community college and left them on Nana’s kitchen table. Maribel wouldn’t look at them, let alone fill them out. She and Mom finally stopped arguing about it when the registration deadline came and went. But worried lines still wrinkle Mom’s forehead whenever she sees Maribel carrying her makeup bag. Like now.

  “Refreshing as Rain, Alma’s bestselling protectant spray, helps repair breakage and replenish moisture lost to heat styling,” I hear my sister explain to the women under the heat lamps.

  I want to go listen, too, but Mom isn’t finished with me.

  “So? How was it? Who’s in your class? Did lunch go all right? I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up this morning, but I knew Nana would take care of you.”

  “Well…” Inside my backpack is the pink flyer Mrs. Ramos-McCaffrey gave us. I could take it out and give it to Mom. I could tell her not to worry. That I’ve figured out a way to pay for everything I need at school and maybe more. All she has to do is sign her name at the bottom of that Alma form.

  But I saw the look she just gave Maribel. Of course she’ll worry. I don’t mention it.

  “Logan’s in my class,” I tell her instead. “We gave him a ride this morning.”

  She brightens. “How is Logan? It seemed like the two of you were always missing each other this summer.”

  “He’s good. Except for losing Magdalena again.”

  Mom shakes her head. “Better find her before Nana does. Come on, I want Tía Carla to trim your bangs.”

  “Mom.”

  Most customers wait months to get an appointment with Tía Carla. I can walk in for a haircut whenever I want. Usually, I love sitting in her chair while she combs and cuts and whispers chismes about her other clients. But when Mom says she wants my bangs “trimmed,” she means she wants them hacked—so short I really do look like a first grader until they grow out to a normal length again.

  Mom has the same cherry-cola hair as Maribel, only hers falls just above her shoulders and never a millimeter longer. She was a reporter on TV before I was born. Once in a while, on weekend nights when Maribel was out and Dad was away, she and I would curl up on the couch and watch her old clips from Channel 4. “Good evening, I’m Sandra Zaragoza…” The way she strung them together, the big galloping syllables of her name sounded almost like magic words.

  Mom stopped working when I was born, and she didn’t go back. But she still looks camera-ready, and strangers in the grocery store still recognize her from television.

  She still has a voice that makes you believe you can trust anything she says.

  I follow her to a chair at the back of the salon and climb up. She whips a smock over me, pulls the rubber band off the end of my braid, and puts it in her pocket. She rests her chin on my shoulder, and our eyes meet in the mirror.

  “I mean it. I’m really sorry I wasn’t there this morning, corazón,” she tells me again, but this time in a whisper. She kisses my cheek. “I should have been. I just thought—”

  “It’s okay,” I interrupt. All of a sudden I feel as if I might start crying, and it’s the last thing I want to do right here, wrapped in a leopard-print smock. I change the subject.

  “Ms. Ramos got married this summer. She’s Mrs. Ramos-McCaffrey now. She went to Spain. She showed us some pictures.”

  “Hmm,” Mom said. She starts brushing my hair, smoothing out the crimps the braid has left behind. “Did you see Sophia? I bet she missed you at the pool this summer. I wish you would have gone when she invited you.”

  Not this again. I don’t know how to explain to Mom why I’d been avoiding Sophia. I can hardly explain it to myself.

  “I didn’t see her until after school. She had a doctor’s appointment. But we’re gonna have lunch together tomorrow.”

  “Good!” She squeezes my shoulders. “And, Griselda! Why don’t you ask her to come over after school?”

  Tía Carla’s reflection appears in the mirror before I have to think up an excuse.

  In old pictures, from back when she was my age, Tía Carla has red-black hair like Mom’s and Maribel’s. But I have never seen it that color in person. And none of the shades I have seen ever last on Tía Carla’s head for longer than a month. This time her hair is silvery blond with strands of pastel pink woven through. She pulls it back into a ponytail and nudges Mom out of the way.

  “So, Griselda, are we going with purple highlights today, or blue?”

  I smile.

  “Just the bangs, Carlita.” Mom is smiling, too, but her tone is warning. “And easy on the gossip.”

  “It’s networking, Sandra.” Tía Carla winks at me, then takes a pair of silver scissors out of a velvet-lined box. She spritzes my bangs and combs them straight down over my forehead. The ends tickle my nose, and, with my hands stuck under the smock, I squirm, trying to force back a sneeze.

  “Sit still. How short are we going?”

  “Just a little,” I say.

  “Griselda, I hate to see hair in your eyes,” Mom says. “A good trim, Carla.”

  “But not too short,” I add.

  Tía Carla swivels me around so I’m facing her. Then she starts snipping, humming as she works. Little bits of hair land on my cheeks, as soft as snowflakes. Finally, Tía Carla spins me back around to look in the mirror. “How’s that?”

  “Actually, Carla, if you could take just a little more—”

  But I am prepared this time. I hop out of the chair before Mom can finish. I unclip the smock, ball it up, and drop it in a laundry bin. “This is perfect. Thanks.”

  Tía Carla signals to an assistant to come sweep up the trimmings; then she and Mom follow me to the front of the salon, where Maribel is feverishly rearranging bottles. A stylist stands watching her with eyes wide and mouth half open.

  “See, if you put the mousse for curly hair up here next to the shampoo and conditioner for curly hair, your customers will be more likely to buy all three.” Maribel speaks as if she’s in a race to get the words out. “They’ll think they need all three to get results. Like, everything goes together. Get it?”

  When she doesn’t get an answer, Maribel looks up and asks again, “Get it?”

  The stylist startles and begins shuffling hair products.

  Satisfied, Maribel finally takes a breath. “Then,” she continues more gently, moving a basket full of lip balm and sample-size hair gel off a low shelf, “you should move all these little things up higher, put them over there by the register. It’s easy to spend a few more dollars when your wallet’s already open. And don’t forget to leave out some testers. People love trying stuff on.”

  Tía Carla raises an eyebrow. “Someone’s acting like she owns the place. Does this mean you’re considering my offer?”

  Tía Carla wants Maribel to go to cosmetology school if she’s not going straight to college. She offered to pay the tuition and even give Maribel a job as an assistant stylist when she graduated. She says Maribel has what it takes to run Belleza someday.

  “Still thinking about it, Tía.”

  Tía Carla is like an artist. To her, doing hair and makeup is like painting a picture or playing an instrument—like growing a garden was to me. It’s not that way for Maribel, though. She might say she’s still thinking about, but I can tell from her pressed-lip smile that M
aribel isn’t interested. She reminds me of the quote on the bottom of my Lou Hoover teacup. An independent girl.

  “Well, whenever you’re ready, you let me know.” Tía Carla hugs us both goodbye, and Mom says she’ll see us back at Nana’s later, after she’s helped clean up for the night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Well-educated people can seek help for themselves. They can help others.

  —LAURA BUSH

  The sky has turned pinkish orange by the time we get back. Nana is dicing tomatoes at the kitchen counter.

  “You just missed your dad, mija. Why don’t you call him back? Dinner won’t be ready for another fifteen minutes or so.”

  I look at the phone. “I better start my homework first. Then I’ll call him.”

  But after homework, it’s time to eat.

  Later, I glance at the clock as I’m clearing the dinner plates. I could call him now, but Mom will be back any minute, and I need to talk to Maribel without her hearing.

  I find my sister in our room, sitting at the desk and lining up a row of Alma lip glosses. I close the door, stand next to her, and one by one, turn over the boxes to read the names of the colors: Waltz With Me, True Love’s Kiss, Enchanted Castle.

  “What are you doing? Leave those alone.”

  “Just looking. Can I have a few more of these?”

  Maribel looks up at me and rolls her eyes. Then she goes back to her boxes.

  “You’re not even wearing the lip gloss I gave you yesterday. What do you want more for?”

  I take a deep breath. “To sell it.”

  She stops, puts the boxes down, and looks up at me again. “To what?”

  I pull the Fresh New Face entry form out from my back pocket and unfold it. I’ve filled in all the blank spaces—except for the one where a parent’s or guardian’s signature is supposed to go. “Sign this for me?”

  She takes it and reads. “Five thousand dollars?” she mutters. She keeps reading, and I almost think she might go for it.

  Then she hands the form right back. “Nuh-uh. No way. I’m not your parent.”