Vivid memories of make-up

I wrote this on 1/28/01

I remember Mom making up her face in the kitchen on cold winter mornings. The wooden table top was streaked where the white paint had been repeatedly scratched off, as with a comb. I can feel the cold blackness of the cast iron table legs as I wrapped my child toes around them absentmindedly, while talking to her.

The ritual was always the same. I can smell the sweet liquidy Borghese foundation. I see her pencilling in eyebrows where once she plucked too vigorously and they never grew back. The high arching brown line always seemed to read surprise on my mother's smooth face.

Some years there was eyeliner, some years colored shadows for her round, somewhat protruding, lids. The liner took great skill to apply, like a sumi-e master painting careful branches onto a cherry blossom tree.

First a little water was applied to the black cake. A well had formed from repeated rubbings and the water now filled this, with grey cloudiness swirling over its surface. When swept with the thin sable-hair liner brush, it grew a rich black, darker and darker until my mother deemed it ready to use. I think she blotted the brush slightly onto paper towel before arching her brow even higher in order to stretch the lid and paint a fine line across it, just above the lash line.

Such a steady hand she had in my younger years. Later not so and I felt embarrassed for her, knowing that she would go out and the uneven lines would betray her to strangers; telling of her increasing infirmities without her permission.

Strangers would not know the elegant stately woman she had been, whose attention to detail and obsession for perfection I had absorbed by watching her morning ritual. They would only see an elderly lady with an unsteady hand, who might have been careless in her details all her life. They would miss the very essence of my mother: that God and survival lie in one's attention to the details of everyday living.