Arthur had never asked for a photograph of my roses. He talked about them all the time. He asked about my Peace roses and my Mister Lincolns. But he’d never once asked to see them.
He’d never asked for a picture of my house. Or my kitchen. Or my garden. Or me holding Maddie’s new puppy, which I’d mentioned three times.
Only my face.
Always my face. Always without makeup. Always close up.
I lay there in the dark for a long time.
Then I told myself I was being a foolish, suspicious old woman, and I went to sleep.
Arthur’s house was a big old brick Colonial on a quiet street on the north side of town, with tall trees in front and a slate path leading to the door.
He greeted me at the door with a bouquet of pink roses.
“For the lady who grows better ones,” he said.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” I said.
He smiled. Then he looked at my face. He studied it for so long that I touched my upper lip without meaning to.
“Come in, Holly,” he said.
The house was beautiful and a little dusty. Old bookshelves lined the hallway, floor to ceiling, packed with books. There were photographs everywhere, on the walls, on the tables, on the mantel. Most of them were of a woman with short silver hair and a gentle face. Margaret, I assumed. Margaret on a beach. Margaret in a garden. Margaret laughing at a birthday party.
In every picture, Margaret was holding her hand near her face. Covering her cheek, or her chin. I noticed that right away. I know that gesture. I’ve made it a million times.
Arthur led me into the living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace.
A woman came in from the hallway carrying two crystal wine glasses on a little silver tray.
She was about sixty, short and round, with gray hair pulled back in a bun and a plain blue apron over her dress.
“Holly, this is Helen,” Arthur said. “Helen, this is Holly.”
Helen looked at me.
And she went completely white.
One glass slipped off the tray. Then the other.
They shattered on the hardwood floor.
“Oh, goodness!” I said.
I jumped back. There was broken crystal everywhere, glittering in the firelight.
Helen didn’t move. She didn’t even look down at the glass. She just stood there with the empty tray in her hands, staring at my face.
“Are you all right?” I asked her.
Her lips moved.
“Holly?” she said.
It came out like a gasp.
I blinked.
“Yes?”
Arthur stepped between us.
He moved faster than I’d seen him move all week.
“Helen,” he said. “Please take care of the glasses.”
Helen looked at him.
“Arthur…”
“Now, please.”
His voice was firmer than I’d ever heard it. Not loud. But hard.
Helen bent down slowly and began picking up the pieces of glass, one by one, and putting them on the silver tray.
I knelt down to help her.
“No, ma’am,” she said quickly. She wouldn’t look at me now. “Please don’t. You’ll cut yourself.”
Arthur put his hand on my elbow and guided me gently toward the dining room.
“She’s been having a difficult week,” he said quietly. “Her sister’s in the hospital.”
I glanced back over my shoulder.
Helen was still kneeling on the floor among the broken glass. And she was still watching me.
I had the uncomfortable feeling she’d just recognized somebody she wasn’t supposed to see.
The dining room was dark wood, with a long table set for two and candles in silver holders.
Helen brought out dinner a few minutes later. Roast chicken, potatoes, green beans with almonds. She set the plates down in front of us without saying a word. She didn’t look at me. Her hands were shaking.
It was the best roast chicken I’d ever eaten.
I barely tasted it.
Over dinner, Arthur started asking questions about my childhood.
Then my parents.
Then whether I’d ever had a sister.
“No,” I said. “I was an only child. Why?”
“Just curious,” Arthur said.
He cut his chicken into very small pieces. He wasn’t eating any of it.
I set down my water glass.
“You’re asking a lot of family questions tonight, Arthur.”
He smiled.
“I’m just getting to know you, darling.”
I tried to relax. I really tried.
Then he asked something that made my fork stop halfway to my mouth.
“Did your mother live in Chicago in 1965?”
I stared at him across the candles.
“How do you know that?”
Arthur reached for his wine glass. His hand wasn’t quite steady.
“Lucky guess,” he said.
“Arthur,” I said slowly, “that’s a very specific guess.”
He gave a small, uneasy laugh.
“You mentioned you lived in Illinois for a while.”
“I said Illinois,” I said. “I never said Chicago. And I never said 1965.”
His smile faded.
He put the wine glass down without drinking any of it.
For the first time, I wondered whether our meeting had been an accident.
Before I could ask him anything else, his phone rang.
He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. Something moved across his face.
“Excuse me,” he said. He stood up. “I’m sorry. I need to take this.”
He walked out of the dining room. I heard his footsteps go down the long hallway. A door opened and closed somewhere at the far end of the house.
I sat there alone with my half-eaten dinner and the candles flickering.
The house was very quiet. I could hear the old grandfather clock ticking in the hallway.
Then I heard footsteps. Fast and light. Hurrying.
Helen appeared in the dining room doorway.
She wasn’t carrying anything. She’d taken off her apron.
“Ma’am,” she whispered. “You need to leave.”
I stared at her.
“What?”
“Please,” Helen said. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the hallway. “Before he comes back.”
“Helen, what’s going on?”
She came into the room. She stood very close to my chair. Her eyes were wet.
“There’s something you should know,” she said. “Something he should have told you a long time ago.”
She took my hand. Her fingers were cold.
She pulled me gently up out of my chair and led me toward the hallway.
“Arthur’s been looking for you,” she whispered. “For years.”
My heart started pounding.
“Looking for me? Why?”
Before she could answer, a voice came from the end of the hallway.
“Helen. What are you doing?”
Arthur was standing at the end of the long hallway, by the door of a room I hadn’t seen yet. His phone was still in his hand.
Helen didn’t let go of my hand.
“I’m telling her,” she said.
“Not like this,” Arthur said.
“Then how, Arthur?” Helen said. Her voice shook, but she didn’t back down. “You’ve had three dates. You’ve had an entire dinner. You’ve had weeks of phone calls. When were you going to tell her?”
I looked from one of them to the other.
“Somebody,” I said, “had better explain to me what’s happening. Right now.”
Arthur walked toward us slowly down the hallway. He stopped about six feet away.
“Holly,” he said. “Please don’t be frightened.”
“That,” I said, “is not a reassuring thing to say.”
He stopped.
Helen turned toward me. She was still holding my hand.
“There’s something in his study you need to see,” she said.
“Helen…” Arthur said. He sounded panicked.
“No,” I said. I pulled my hand gently out of Helen’s. I looked straight at Arthur. “Show me.”
His study was at the end of the hallway. It smelled like old paper and furniture polish and pipe tobacco, even though he told me he’d quit years ago.
There were filing cabinets along one wall. A big wooden desk. Framed photographs on the walls. Not of Margaret. Old black-and-white photographs. Advertisements. Women in pearls holding up bottles of face cream. A girl in a sundress smiling next to a box of hair removal cream. SMOOTH. FEMININE. FLAWLESS.
In the middle of the desk sat a small cardboard box.
Arthur looked at that box as if he’d been hoping I’d never notice it.
I looked at Arthur. Then at the box. Then at Helen.
Helen stepped forward and opened the lid.
Inside were yellowed envelopes, old newspaper clippings, and photographs.
On top of everything else, there were printouts. I recognized them right away. They were the pictures I’d sent Arthur. My face. Close up. Without makeup. Printed out on glossy photo paper.
All of them.
And next to them, in a clear plastic protective sleeve, was an old black-and-white photograph.
Helen lifted it out of the box very carefully, by the edges.
She handed it to me.
It showed a teenage girl sitting under a bright salon lamp.
Her hair was pinned back off her face with bobby pins. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap. She was wearing a dress with a little white collar. She was looking down at her hands. Not at the camera.
There was a dark shadow on her upper lip.
I knew her before I recognized the dress.
It was me.
Me, at seventeen. In Chicago.
I sat down in the leather chair next to the desk. My legs just gave out.
I ran my thumb along the photograph’s worn edge.
I remembered that day. I’d spent sixty-one years trying not to remember it.
It was the spring of 1965. We’d been living in Chicago for two years, in a little brick apartment on the North Side. My father was traveling all the time for work. It was just my mother and me most of the time.
My mother loved me. I want to say that. She loved me fiercely. But she was terrified for me. She’d grown up in a small town in Iowa where girls got married at nineteen, and she couldn’t imagine what would happen to a girl who looked the way I was starting to look.
One Saturday, she took me downtown to Marshall Field’s, the big department store on State Street. She said we were going shopping for a dress for my junior prom.
Instead, she took me up to the eighth floor, to the cosmetics department, where a company was holding what they called a beauty consultation.
There was a sign. I still remember it. LET US HELP YOUR DAUGHTER BLOSSOM.
A woman in a pink smock took me into a little room with a big mirror and a bright lamp.
She promised my mother they could make my face look more feminine.
She sat me in a chair under the lamp. She tilted my chin up with two fingers. She looked at my upper lip for a long time, like a doctor looking at a rash.
There were other adults in the room. Another woman with a clipboard, writing things down. My mother, sitting in a chair by the door, twisting her handkerchief.
And a young man with a camera. Skinny. Dark-haired. Barely older than me. He was standing by a tripod in the corner.
They talked about my face like I wasn’t there.
“That much hair will be difficult to conceal,” the woman in the pink smock said.
“She’ll need regular treatment,” the woman with the clipboard said. “Weekly, at first. Then perhaps twice a month.”
“Girls are terribly sensitive at this age,” the first woman told my mother, in a low voice, like I couldn’t hear her from three feet away. “We find it’s best to address these things early. Before boys start to notice.”
My mother nodded and twisted her handkerchief.
Then the woman in the pink smock nodded at the young man with the camera.
“Before photo,” she said.
He stepped up to the tripod. He looked at me through the lens.
I looked up at him. He was the only person in that room close to my age. The only one who wasn’t talking about me.
“Do I look terrible?” I asked him.
My voice came out very small.
He didn’t answer.
He just looked down at his camera. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. His face went red.
The woman in the pink smock laughed.
“Well,” she said, “that’s why we’re here, dear.”
The camera flashed.
I’d stared down at my hands until the appointment ended. They put cream on my lip that burned like fire. They sold my mother three jars of it and a booklet and a schedule of appointments.
Then I went into the ladies’ room on the eighth floor of Marshall Field’s, locked myself in a stall, and cried until my mother came looking for me.
I’d never gone back for the appointments. My mother never made me. I think she saw my face in the car on the way home and understood she’d made a mistake. She never brought it up again. Not once.
But I’d carried that afternoon around with me for sixty-one years.
That much hair will be difficult to conceal.
Well, that’s why we’re here, dear.
I’d never forgotten that boy’s silence.
