After finishing beauty school, I rented a studio apartment on the Westside that overlooked an abandoned public pool. At night, on my second-floor balcony, I’d sit and wonder about the missing diving board, replaced with an orange traffic cone, as if that could stop someone from leaping headlong into hard cement. It was a lonely place, and Sabrina only visited during the rare times when she was single. She’d come over and shadow me throughout the apartment, like a child who was afraid she’d stop existing if someone wasn’t there to see her.
“You ever do makeovers on women who look hideous without makeup?”
She was sitting on the lid of my toilet with two Coronas between her thighs, one for each of us. We had the radio on an oldies station, the type of music our mothers played when we were little girls and they would drive us through the mountains in summertime.
“Sure,” I said, smiling. “But after I fix them up, nobody can tell.”
“I guess only they can.” Sabrina checked her reflection in the mirror, smudging her berry lip liner with her left pinkie. “And of course you.”
We went to a bar on the edge of the city, near a highway overpass. Neon signs hung in the foggy windows. We played a couple games of pool and drank shots of cheap tequila. Every now and then Sabrina danced over to the old-school jukebox and flipped through the records, the light flickering over her face, her reflection a floating bust on the glass. I sat at the bar and watched a group of men circle around her. They held their beers close to their chests and waited for an opportunity to move in like vultures.
“We’re going outside for a cigarette,” Sabrina said.
Two pale-faced guys with broad shoulders and thick necks stood behind her, nervously casting glances my way, as if afraid I’d ruin their fun.
“But you don’t smoke,” I said.
“I picked it up,” she said. “Just now.”
I watched through the front window as she stepped outside and flopped against a parked minivan, twisting her hair around her fingers, her smile all teeth. The men stood next to her, packing their smokes. Neither was in her league. But Sabrina had a way of talking to men like she was a gift, an offering of an expressive pretty face and a girlish giggle. It didn’t matter who it was, so long as they gave her attention back. After a while, I couldn’t watch her anymore. I swiveled around on my stool and tried to catch the bartender’s attention. He eventually came by, a white washcloth over his shoulder.
“That your sister?” he asked, glancing out the window.
“Not my sister.” I looked at Sabrina tossing her hair back, the cords of her neck forming a chute to her collarbones. “My cousin.”
“I knew you two were related.” He poured tequila and set it before me. “You look similar.”
“Not really,” I said and swallowed my shot.
When Sabrina hobbled back inside, she could hardly stand in her wedged platforms. The men guided her by her wrists. She swayed between them until they released their grips and Sabrina leaned over me, her perfume gone rancid with hints of rotten fruit, something that belongs in the trash.
“Corina, Corina. Having fun?”
I glared at the two guys beside her. They were far less drunk than Sabrina and beaming with pride, as if they had already gotten her into a cab headed for one of their apartments.
“Let’s get going,” I said.
Sabrina squinted at me. Tiny wrinkles had begun to form around her eyes and lips. “You can leave me here,” she said. “I’ll get home okay.”
With my hands firmly around her wrists, I towed her to the front door. The two men laughed, backed off, and began to circle around another girl a few stools down. The bartender pulled the white washcloth over the bar, eyeing the two of us while we left with what I thought was pity.
“Let’s go.” I was gripping Sabrina’s wrist harder than necessary. She wobbled behind me and I squeezed tighter and angrier, worried my nails would mark her skin. “Don’t you care how people look at you?”
Outside the air was cool, the moon surrounded by a thin cloud. I kept dragging Sabrina to the car as she tottered behind me, her face to the sky like that of a dreamy child. When I finally let her go, she steadied herself against my trunk, opening her blue eyes wide.
“They look at us the same way, Corina.” She laughed and pointed to my face. “They look at us like we’re nothing.”
I told her to get into the car and said she was drunk. As we drove home, I glanced at her worn-out face resting against the window and I felt something unknowable about Sabrina, some sadness at her core that moved between us like a sickness. Where did it come from? Or had it always been there, growing inside her, filling her lungs with its liquid weight. “Sabrina,” I whispered, tapping her shoulder, but she was already asleep, and for the first time in my life, I missed someone sitting right beside me.
* * *
—
Sabrina’s body lay on a chrome table surrounded by clear tubes and murky chemicals. Her head was propped up on a plastic stand. Her eyes were closed and her whitish mouth curdled along the edges. The room smelled of singed skin, disinfectant, and vinegar.
“These pretty girls.” Carlos shook his head. “They get themselves into such ugly situations.”
I stared at Sabrina, her dark hair framing the pale column of her rippled throat. The bruising spanned her entire neck. Bluish lines edged sour yellow and circled her indented vocal cords. Broken blood vessels spread to her collarbones. Her bloated chin was tilted stiffly to the right, perched oddly above it all.
“You think you’ll be okay?” Carlos asked.
I exhaled, and hid my hands behind my back, my fingers lightly shaking. “I’ll be fine. Where’s the makeup?”
Carlos wheeled over a metal table. On it were several glass jars and brushes laid out in rows and a small cassette player–radio. “This makeup is different. It doesn’t blend as well as your traditional products, but application is mostly the same. You know about the eyes and lips, right?”
“What about them?”
Carlos ran his hand above Sabrina’s eyes. “We suture them shut to set them in an attractive pose. I used the picture you gave me. She should look like herself.”
He handed me the photo from his pocket. Sabrina had taken it in my bathroom mirror. She was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, at the time.
Carlos rubbed a freckle on Sabrina’s forehead like he was polishing a piece of furniture. He turned on the radio. The Shirelles. A tune about a man doing all of us, every woman who had ever lived, wrong. Carlos told me to find him down the hall when I was done.
I walked around Sabrina’s body. I reached out, touching her cheek, warmer than I had expected. I got to work, focusing on disguising the swelling of her temples and chin. Her right cheek had grown stiff with a ridge cutting near her lips. I filled it in with my thinnest brush and stepped back. Her lashes, I noticed, had grown longer in death. It almost made her look shy.
With a boar-bristle brush, I detangled her knotted strands. Her hair shone like spilled motor oil, greens and golds and blues all in that black. Corkscrewed sections bounced off my curling iron, more alive than anything else on that table.
For her neck, I grabbed a lime green concealer with olive undertones, a normal base coat for problematic rosacea. I dabbed a fanning synthetic brush into the jar and swirled it over my wrist. It was a good undercoat, even and heavy. Her throat felt plastic and ribbed where notches of hardened flesh had risen and stayed. They didn’t give way as I worked the brush from her collarbones to her soft chin. I covered her skin in a solid flesh tone, a small pool of makeup congealing in the cup of her sternum. I used a tissue to wipe it away.
I considered checking the backside of her neck for bruising, but I realized that no one, not even my grandmother, would see. Sabrina was forever to face ceilings and casket tops padded in pink satin, and once she was lowered into he
r grave, her throat would collapse, slowly disintegrating into the dark.
* * *
—
By our mid-twenties, I saw Sabrina less and less. She worked nights. I worked days. She moved a few times and I lost track of her addresses, the names of her friends, the men she dated, the bars she tended. She rarely went to family dinners, but when she did, she was puffy-eyed and sallow-skinned, her slinky tops always falling off her shoulders. She’d gulp cups of black coffee like water, laughing at her own jokes, her hair swinging over my grandmother’s table. After some time, we both stopped calling and, for a while, I thought she was fine with that.
At work one afternoon I was helping a white woman find blush. She was young and blond with a sheen to her skin that only comes from years of good nutrition, expensive moisturizers, and generations of tragedy-free living. I dusted shimmering golden rouge over her undefined cheekbones. She seemed pleased as she examined her reflection in a hand mirror.
“I always feel silly spending money on makeup,” she said, handing me her Amex card.
“It’s a good investment,” I said, ringing her up. “Studies show that men find a woman’s face to be her most sexually appealing feature, her body second.”
From somewhere behind, I heard a coarse laugh. “That’s a lie.”
Sabrina stood at my counter in a short denim skirt with a misshapen purse slung over her shoulder, a neon-pink bra peeking out from her white tank top. She had parked herself beside the woman, who first gawked and then stepped quickly away, as though Sabrina was some escaped zoo animal. I did a quick scan of the sales floor, searching for my managers, but was relieved when none were in sight. Sarcastically, I asked Sabrina what she was doing there, so early, at noon.
“I miss you,” she said, sweetly. “I thought tomorrow we could celebrate.”
I gathered several kabuki brushes, positioning them on their base. “Celebrate what?”
“My birthday.” Sabrina began spraying a bottle of Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue down the front of her shirt. “I’m twenty-five tomorrow. We can shoot pool or cook dinner. Like old times.”
I wanted to tell her that I was busy, but when I looked across the glass counter, her makeupless face shocked me. Her skin was as gray as old meat and her blue eyes were dull with crumbs of dried sleep in their corners. Her purse was stained, the zipper broken, the contents exposed—crumpled tissues, capless pens, two loose dollars. Sabrina, I decided, needed me.
“I’m off tomorrow at nine,” I said. “Come over. We’ll figure it out.”
That night and the next day I kept thinking of Sabrina’s filthy purse, its worthless contents. I made a run to the dollar store for decorations, white streamers and metallic glitter. I baked tres leches cake and wrapped presents—eye shadow, a tester bottle of Dior perfume, lipsticks. When everything looked like a wedding cake, all shiny and pastel, I sat on my bed and waited for Sabrina to arrive.
I had been asleep in the bluish light of my apartment when I woke up at midnight to someone banging on the door. Sabrina stood on the stoop, shivering in torn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. She came inside, carrying the cold air on her body, taking a seat on my couch. Snowflakes melted in her black hair. “I walked here,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how much it snowed. Everything is covered in white.”
I knew she was drunk by the way she spoke. Her words weren’t slurred, but softer than usual, almost angelic in their lightness.
“I kept thinking about that story,” she said. “The one about the devil at the dance. Remember?”
My grandmother told the story often. A beautiful girl disobeys her family by sneaking into a midnight dance. She’s only there for a short time when a good-looking man slinks toward her out of the crowd. She discovers he can dance well, and not just for an Anglo. He twirls her for hours until the girl notices the faces around her, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed. Her arms suddenly burn, then her lower back, and eventually her lips to throat—all the places where the man touched her. She screams as she notices that his feet, like the devil’s, are hooved.
“It’s funny the way Grandma tells it,” Sabrina said. “When the girl notices a sour smell and it’s her own flesh burning.”
I told her it wasn’t funny. I said it was horrible.
“You’ve always had a shitty sense of humor, Corina.”
I handed over her presents. “Happy birthday, by the way. You’re a day late. Where were you?”
Sabrina uncurled a smile, and with frenzied hands she unwrapped her gifts, shards of silver paper landing at her wet shoes. She pulled the items out one by one—blotting eye shadow over her wrists, running lipstick across her mouth, and spraying perfume along her throat. It was like watching a toddler at their birthday party, their eyes wide with amazement as they realize that every gift, every person, is there for them. “I went out,” she said.
I paced between the front window and couch, the muted television the only light between us. “I waited for you all night. You could have called.”
“I forgot.”
“You asked me to see you. Not the other way around.”
Sabrina stood from the couch and moved along the kitchen wall. She opened and closed cabinet doors, pushing herself taller on her tippy-toes, searching my shelves.
“I don’t have any booze,” I said.
She turned around, peering at me through the semidark, her eyes almost all white. “I’m looking for a water glass.”
I grabbed one from the drying rack and thrust it into her hands. She rolled it between her palms, her fingernails jagged, their ruby polish chipped.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Aren’t we going out?”
I told her bars were closing soon. I said she was too late. Sabrina filled her glass with water and gulped it down in a few swallows. She wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve, the water running over her chin. Her carelessness disgusted me. I wanted to throw the glass out of her hands and hold a mirror to her face, forcing her to see herself. “Can’t you tell what people think of you? What I think of you?”
Sabrina smirked. “What does my little cousin Corina think of me?”
“You don’t care,” I said. “You don’t care about anything, not even yourself. Look at the way you live.”
Sabrina gazed toward me, her blue eyes vacant and glossy, as if she saw nothing. “So, how do I live? I mean, you would know. All you’ve done your entire life is follow me around.”
“Pathetically,” I said. “That’s how.”
She gathered her gifts from the couch, tossing them loudly into the trash. She put on her hood and secured the strings around her neck. “You’re down here with the rest of us, Corina. You’re just too ashamed to notice.”
I turned to the window, where I saw myself streaked in light. “I’m nothing like you.”
“You’re right.” Sabrina laughed. “I’m not some lonely makeup girl at the mall.”
“You’re a drunk,” I said, my face burning with anger.
Sabrina opened the door, the snow falling white and golden behind her. “You’ve only ever had me,” she said, stepping into the night. “Remember that when you have no one.”
I watched through the window as she walked away, shrinking smaller in the distance, streetlights casting shadows around her in wide amber shafts. After some time, I stood outside on the stoop and breathed fog like smoke in her direction. By the time I thought of calling out her name, Sabrina was already down the block, too far to hear me, and too far to look back.
* * *
—
I took a seat in the last row of the viewing room. Classical music played from the ceiling speakers. Sabrina’s casket was open, flowers arranged on either side, an ivory curtain behind it, making it look as though she was on a stage. Aunties and uncles walked with their arms linked. They gazed down, turned their heads to the sid
e, whispered, and stepped away. Some of my cousins smoothed her hair. My mother kissed her hands. My grandmother snapped a photo as part of her normal routine at funerals. When it was my turn, I kneeled at Sabrina’s casket and touched her face. It felt colder than before. There was lipstick on her forehead where someone had kissed her. I was smudging it away when my grandmother appeared at my side.
“Everyone is saying she looks beautiful, Corina.” She petted my head and kissed my cheek.
I thanked my grandmother and focused over her head at my family in folding chairs. They were arranged in rows with rosaries in their hands, their eyes swimming with muted colors. I looked at my youngest cousins, kicking their legs in white tights, pigtail braids, and red ribbons in their hair. I looked to my mother and father, dazed and accepting, numb to everything.
After some time, I heard my grandmother say to my auntie Josie, “It’s what she would have wanted.”
I thought of all the women my family had lost, the horrible things they’d witnessed, the acts they simply endured. Sabrina had become another face in a line of tragedies that stretched back generations. And soon, when the mood hit my grandmother just right, she’d sit at her kitchen table, a Styrofoam cup of lemonade in her warped hand, and she’d tell the story of Sabrina Cordova—how men loved her too much, how little she loved herself, how in the end it killed her. The stories always ended the same, only different girls died, and I didn’t want to hear them anymore.
“No,” I said, turning back to my grandmother before taking my seat. “Sabrina didn’t want any of this. She wanted to be valuable.”
* * *
—
Five months before the wake some girls from work invited me to a party on Colfax Avenue, in one of those stone mansions built by silver barons and their doe-eyed wives, a four-story house with a rounded balcony above a wraparound porch. Younger girls were huddled outside smoking cigarettes. They pulled deep drags and allowed the smoke to rise slowly from their heavily painted lips. One was telling a story about a guy she used to date who had recently been found stabbed to death in a dumpster. The other girls hung their heads until one of them cracked a joke. I stepped past them and went inside.
Sabrina & Corina Page 4