Then she gets the idea of showing me how to charcoal my eyes like Dietrich did. She strikes a match off the rough underside of the table. She picks up my ice cream bowl and holds it up high and lets the match burn for a minute on the bottom, so there’s a gray smoke smudge on the crockery. Then she digs around in her pocketbook for the jar of Vaseline she always carries. She dabs a tiny sable brush in the Vaseline and swooshes it around in the soot on the bowl’s bottom.
She takes my chin in her left hand. She tells me to tilt my head back and make my eyes sleepy. Then she starts tickling at my eyelid with that brush. She goes on to say that I have the prettiest eyelashes in the universe. This matters to Mother because she’s only got lashes if she takes the time to paste on false ones. “When I was pregnant with you, I didn’t care what sex you were, or if you had all your fingers and toes. I prayed to God you’d have long eyelashes.” She draws on her Salem for a minute, and we hang there in the smoke and the Shalimar and the vodka smell, waiting for her to exhale. She waves the smoke away from my face before she sets back to work on me, this time brushing the hollow space above my eyeball in an arc. “My mother said God would send me a blue-headed baby with water on the brain for saying that kind of prayer. And I said, ‘Then that baby will have pretty eyelashes,’ and you did.” This is also the first time she’s said one word about Grandma since she came back. I try to cut my eyes over to Lecia to figure out what such a mention could mean.
But Lecia has Mother’s compact in one hand and her mascara wand in the other. And I can see she’s worrying the mascara onto her lashes. Lecia is easily as broke out in eyelashes as I am, but Mother said mine were the prettiest. It’s my face Mother’s holding….Mother steers my chin away from trying to sneak a look at Lecia, and it’s just Mother and me again. I can feel her breath in light puffs on my nose. She rears back and looks at me, then starts to smudge at what she’s done with her thumb pad above my eyeball. She’s painted oil portraits of us before. We’ve sat in our Sunday clothes on the raised model’s platform in her studio, watching her step out from behind the easel and study us all cool-eyed, but this is different. This is up close. Her hands feel like kid gloves and she is working right on my face, like she’s using all her attention to paint me right into being. (I am Marlene Dietrich. I am the cathedral wall on which the painter Giotto outlines an angel.)
The memory turns to smoke right there. It floats out the door over the cape jasmine. But there were a lot of nights that winter when Lecia and I sat watching Mother drink and hearing her grieve for New York.
Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club, p. 130-131