Cherries In The Snow by Emma Forrest

of her anti-Semitic doctor dad in her head: ‘My baby girl with a Jew?’ I’d judge her harder for it, but, you know, who can truly find peace when they know they’ve disappointed their daddy? Yet I can’t be around that unhappiness. You can’t choose your family. Occasionally people get lucky: Dad and I got it right, we are great friends. You know how some girls want to put couples together on the street: ‘You go with him.’ ‘Ech, he’s much too straight for you.’ ‘She’s too tall.’ I want to put families together too. Send Vicki to live with Mum.
    I sit at my desk in my turtleneck and knickers and try to think of a new way to market red lipstick. Vicki reminds me that people should think they have to buy all three, a set that can’t be separated. Well, gee, thanks for that, Vicki. But she’s right. They are basically all the same color and they each cost eighteen dollars. So I called one Chico, one Harpo, and oneGroucho. If you didn’t see that the colors were all the same, you’d have to be one of those people who plays along with psychics: ‘Yes, I
do
know a dark-haired woman who may bear me ill will.’ In my experience makeup junkies are the exact same people who pay to see psychics.
    I feel a pang of guilt when I show the gals my suggestions for the new reds. They think the names are great.
    â€˜But then it’s easy, isn’t it?’ says Vicki.
    â€˜It isn’t easy,’ I hiss, ‘it’s art.’ I haven’t even worked there three months. Still, I scramble on with my theory: ‘Cherries in the Snow is Revlon’s best-selling lipstick of all time. But it isn’t the color that makes it. That’s just another shade of red. It’s the name. Cherries in the Snow? That’s imagery worthy of a real writer. Truman Capote could have written that.’
    â€˜Chico. Harpo. Groucho,’ says Vicki, slow and spiteful, ‘that’s Dostoyevsky.’
    She pronounces it ‘dos-TOY-yefsky,’ conjuring a wooden dreidel sold in a children’s Judaica store. I hate her, I hate her, I hate her all over her body as if I were in love with her. It’s bonkers, this seething; it’s childish and useless. She’s just a dumb girl, so what’s the problem?
    As soon as I met Vicki, with her blond halo of curls, I wanted my old hair back. Once the girls colored my hair, I never left the house without putting on red lipstick carved into my unrealistic bow. I lost weight because I didn’t want to eat in case I messed up the lipstick. I remember as a kid how much I hated it when my room was touched, like I had lost control over the only thing I had. I feel like my face and what I do to it is all that I have control over.
    Ivy turns on Vicki. ‘You shut up, fatty,’ she gibes. Ivy calls everyone ‘fatty.’ She is trying to reclaim the word
fat
from being an insult to being a compliment.
    The row simmers down. Not much of a row, I know, buthey, I’m not in a relationship right now so I take what I can get.
    â€˜I need to take a slash,’ says Holly. She has retained from her time in England only the most vulgar slang. Kitted out, today in earrings that dangle all the way down to her collarbone, she beckons me to the bathroom with her.
    â€˜Give it to me,’ she says, hand outstretched.
    â€˜Give you what?’
    She rolls her eyes. ‘Your cherries.’
    I fish inside my bag and pull out the tube, which is getting pretty gnarly. She takes it from me, presses me up against the wall, and applies the lipstick to my mouth, not at all the way I do it. Four strokes exactly, half of my top lip, the other half, half of the bottom lip, and the final quarter. I can see, if I ever doubted it, how she is in bed: swift, confident, a little selfsatisfied. Then she applies it on herself, the same join-the-dots pattern, but I see it this time in slow motion, gasping