Any attempt at beauty bothered my mother.
Beauty should be natural, she said, or not at all. Based on her belief, she wouldn’t allow us to wear makeup or high-heeled shoes. She didn’t do any of that, she said; she never did, and was prettier than each and every one of us, prettier than we could imagine. As a result, none of us learned how to apply blusher or curl our hair, and minus the cotton frocks and bonnets, we must have seemed almost Amish in our general appearance.
Aside from those times when I wanted to wear eye shadow and hoop earrings to act out the part of Sandy in the finale of Grease, my mother’s beauty rules were not hard to follow. I liked clothes, enjoyed dressing up, but whether we’d inherited our mother’s simplicity, or developed it out of necessity, none of us girls had an inclination toward excessive ornamentation. And other than minor pleading for lipstick or a curling iron, none of us really challenged her.
Until I met Michelle Labella.
Michelle was the new girl at church who came to Mass wearing a red satin sleeveless top and matching lips. She was a giant almost, standing taller than a grown woman. And as if that were not intriguing enough, she snapped her gum, smoked, and had breasts. I was younger by over a year, but Michelle Labella somehow allowed me into her company and began to dole out her beauty secrets.
“Wear red,” she said, “always.”
“Put lemon juice in your hair for blonde streaks.”
“And if you don’t want to wait for Mother Nature to help you out with those,” she said while pointing at the tiny teepees sitting on the prairie of my chest, “eat raw potatoes.”
I followed her advice; scrounged up a red T-shirt, drizzled lemon juice into my hair, cubed potatoes and crunched them day and night.
Pounds of potatoes later, no breasts emerged.
Still, Michelle seemed a beacon of feminine cunning, and it wasn’t until she told me that Mitochondria was her name in Italian that I began to doubt her. I might have been a grade behind, but I knew perfectly well from helping with her homework that “mitochondria” was just one of the ninth-grade biology words she’d taken a fancy to.
“I don’t care what any old book says,” Michelle said while lying on her belly and filing her fingernails, “I’m Italian and should know my own name.”
I knew she was wrong, but I hung on to everything Michelle said just the same. I mimicked her talking and gum-snapping, and one morning walked into eleven o’clock Mass wearing so much cherry-red lip gloss that the lower part of my face positively sagged.
I’d spent the night before at the Labellas letting them practice giving a perm on my hair. They used no solution, but twisted my hair into tight rollers. So when I walked past the statue of St. Joseph the next morning wearing tight jeans tucked into knee-high platform boots, my lips heavy as glass, and my hair sprayed into a helmet of frizz, my mother did not wait for me to sit down. She dug her fingers into my upper arm and pulled me into the basement, where she took a wad of scratchy brown paper towels to my face.
“Do you know how you look?” she asked in a way that did not invite response.
“Do you know what people say about girls who dress like that?”
Michelle and her two older sisters teased their hair, oiled their legs, and talked to grown men on the CB radio while their mother was at work as an overnight nurse. They lured men to them like underage sirens, then hopped into strangers’ cars for slow and smoky rides round the corner. Even when she was home, they stole the keys to their mother’s mint-green Pacer and took us out for joy rides while she slept. I’d sit in the backseat, hoping to appear casual as I clung to the door handle.
Everything was a toy to them.
Including me.
Michelle brushed my hair, said how much she loved the little wisps that grew round my hairline, said how much like a Puerto Rican I was with all those baby hairs sprouting around my crown. She decorated me while talking for hours about boys and the daytime soaps she watched. We listened to Le Chic and Donna Summer, bought matching shirts, and started our own dance group—the Sly Foxes. Michelle, her sisters, and their friends scooped up the foxiest names. Dr. Fox. Lady Fox. Mama Fox. I hated the name I was given, but knew my place, and so slipped into my “Baby Fox” T-shirt without a word.
Sometimes Michelle’s oldest sister got bored and whipped up a crisis. She talked of suicide, pregnancy, or proclaimed her homosexuality—even started CBing girls. Sometimes she’d feed me pills—birth control once, and speed a few times—just to see how I’d handle it. After the speed, I felt obliged to fake a high for her, flapping my arms, jumping off beds, and rolling all over the floor. I was less motivated for the birth control pill and just clutched at the pink plastic case and acted sick to my stomach.
Besides being an all-around badass, Michelle was in pain. She was in love with Jimmy Sulli. She loved everything about him: the wide shoulders, the chocolate eyes, the corkscrew curls. They’d met at Mass and gone out for two glorious weeks. Since then, Jimmy was all Michelle thought of. Their someday reunion, their someday marriage, followed by their someday babies who’d inherit Jimmy’s mop of hair and Michelle’s green-flecked eyes. She even convinced me to sneak into the rectory office with her so we could type up a marriage certificate.
James and Michelle Sulli, I punched out on the keys of the old typewriter, giggling while she watched the door.
She pasted their wedding certificate to her bedroom wall, but it was not to be. Jimmy was in love with my sister Stephanie, who was everything Michelle was not. Jimmy couldn’t get enough of how smart Steph was, how strong she was, how thick and black and long her hair was. To Michelle’s great pain, Jimmy followed my sister everywhere, and Steph’s overall indifference only deepened his affections.
Michelle’s love for Jimmy soon turned to hate for Stephanie. She talked endlessly of ways to win Jimmy Sulli back. She plotted what to wear, what to say, what to try next. The more her plans did not work, the more desperate she became. Michelle was a soap opera addict, after all, with a natural flair for the dramatic, which led to sensationalized plans to rid the world of Stephanie. She’d trap her in an unheated winter cabin where Steph would succumb to the elements. Or starve. She’d put a chink in a chain, flatten a tire, or otherwise engineer a bicycling accident. She’d write a phony letter to Jimmy from Steph, saying she only had eyes for Scott Matizzi.
I stayed quiet while Michelle braided my hair and plotted to destroy my sister. It was only when her plans become more pointed that I began to worry. Not only would she poison Steph, she’d use the rat poison in her basement. She’d dissolve it in Stephanie’s soda. She’d do it next week. After Mass.
We were at odds lately, Steph and I. Despite our years of closeness, my friendship with Michelle and Jimmy’s fawning took their toll.
We began to fight.
Things only got worse when her period started. She told no one, not even my mother, and confided in me only after I swore secrecy. But I was giddy and weak with her news, and when her secret banged its way out of my mouth, she didn’t forgive me.
We fought more.
The stakes got progressively higher: I called her names; she cut the internal wires on my clock radio. I told my mother I saw a purple hickey on the tender skin just below her collarbone; she used permanent marker to put a black dot on my favorite white shirt. It was during one of these escalating fights, with my mother between us, that I blurted out that Michelle Labella was going to sprinkle rat poison into Steph’s drink the following week at church, at which time she would surely die.
My mother was horrified.
Steph was speechless.
And I was punished for three weeks straight for assisting with plans to murder my own sister.