Cherries In The Snow by Emma Forrest Page A

as the color appears before me. She never wears lipstick that costs less than twenty dollars. She steps back and studies her work.
    â€˜This is just red.’
    She’s asking me a question, but so cheap with language is Holly that she usually expects you to supply the question mark or the exclamation point in a sentence. The answer to her question is: ‘Kind of.’ Yes, it’s red. But that’s just part of the story. I look at our mouths floating side by side in the mirror and I see Lauren Bacall in black and white, the deep gray on her elegant mouth somehow, undoubtedly, Cherries. I see a 1950s afternoon tryst, the first woman on the block to get divorced, the first to find herself. I see a girl who really loves a man’s body rather than getting through sex with her eyes closed and her hands to herself, a girl who finds her lover’s whole body beautiful. I am not that brave girl. Not yet. But each time I apply Cherries in the Snow, I have hope…
    â€˜It’s a
great
red,’ I reply. Holly stares at me, at my mouth, but says nothing. I feel like I am waiting for a queen to announce whether I’m getting leniency or the guillotine. Finally she speaks: ‘I get it.’
    Relief. Suspicion. ‘What do you mean?’
    She puts her arm around me. We are the same height in the mirror, give or take an inch. She sees this and straightens up, taking the inch. ‘We need our Cherries in the Snow.’
    â€˜Really?’ She doesn’t know what this means to me.
    â€˜Look, our company, the ugly, edgy makeup, is cute and all, but we need something that will last, live past us. Honey, I plan to die young. I want to know that there’re dream-filled sluts out there using my products long after these skinny bones are gone …’
    I never would have described her as skinny. Compact is better. The pun is not intended. Rather destiny has entwined her body type and her career.
    â€˜Our company’s been going for five years. We’ve got our core audience, I know, but these girls are going to grow up eventually, find out that, actually, edgy is all very well, but what they really want is to be beautiful. One product, one name. That’s what will do it. The product doesn’t really matter. But the name …’
    â€˜That’s my job, huh?’
    She nods, kisses me on the forehead, and walks out. I look in the mirror. She has a nasty habit of stamping me with her scarlet seal of approval. Great. It will not budge. I brush my bangs over my eyes. But I am too overwhelmed to be pissed at her.
    At lunch, Holly goes out and buys some cherries and we place them in the snow on our windowsill, then stand back and watch, as though they are about to do something. They do look wonderful.
    â€˜I hope I look like that when I’m stretched out on my white sheets with a man.’ I sigh.
    That’s what we’re doing when we hear a cough and turn around to see a guy carrying a brown paper bag. It is the handsome yogi I met in the bodega the month before. I recognize him immediately even without the carton of soy milk in his hand. Brown eyes fringed with long lashes, close-cropped black hair, mocha skin. I can’t quite place his ethnicity: skin too dark for a European Jew. Sephardic maybe? Like my dad. Away from the harsh bodega lighting, he looks ten times handsomer than I remember him. His body is different. Maybe it was like that before, ripped dancer’s abs and other words I remember from my time at the gym but never gave a shit about until they were standing before me, Springsteen-ian with lack of effort.
    The cherries glow behind him, a chorus of approval, they lift themselves from the snowy windowsill and dance around his head, forming a heart shape that encircles his close-cropped skull like a halo. A 3-D painting of a saint. Saint cheekbones of the doe eyes. I sigh. There is a gentleness to his features that makes me feel calm.
    â€˜Oh, my