Lipstick by Norma Schafer

The tube is gold and metallic blue, scratched, tarnished, and well-worn. The removeable gold top has ridges with the raised edges now silvery, signs of its aging.  I can still faintly read Estee Lauder stamped on the mid-section band between the two tones. There is a fancy monogram –E-L — inscribed on the gold top, the initials written in a flourishing script, elegant and sensuous. It holds the promise for many women who aspire to beauty and a certain allure to capture the heart of a man …  or woman. Wear this, I imagine the marketers saying, to become the woman you were always meant to be.  Wear this and you will be transformed. Purse your lips. A pout may be best to show you are still attractive. At the base of the blue section, the part you turn to advance the stick, there is a still readable label, though peeling at the edges.  It says: Double Wear. 11. And, in all capital letters, STAY CRANBERRY.

This was your favorite color. I remember you asking me as soon as I arrived, for what was to be our last visit, to go to Macy’s to replenish the tube. There wasn’t much else to do, so I easily agreed for a break in the daily routine of watching you sleep, listening for the regularity of inhales and exhales, preparing soft oatmeal with raisins and butter, boiling hot water for your favorite Earl Grey tea English-style, massaging your arthritic feet with Lubriderm, listening to your memories of the men who disappointed you. As the sun descended, we headed to the vast, cathedral domed dining room for the four o’clock seating, each table decorated with plastic yellow daffodils, where staff did their best to pretend we were guests at a luxury restaurant. I tucked you into bed at eight o’clock and watched Cate Blanchett’s Carol, waiting for my own sleep to come.

We thought you might recover, hold out, get that letter from President Obama congratulating you on reaching one hundred years. Just a few months to go. Hold on, now. You can do it, my sister and I implored you. In the bright November day, I pushed you in the wheelchair along courtyard paths lined with the withering flowers of summer, just beyond your apartment door. The leaves of the weeping Japanese maples had turned a resplendent wine red, mixed with the color of berry, lime, mandarin orange, peach. The air was brisk. You wear a favorite cerulean blue sweater and an ancient, checked Burberry mohair scarf colored brown, beige, and persimmon, that you always folded between scented tissue when you returned it to the oak dresser drawer. Your silver hair, still abundant, flows in errant billowing waves. Your lips are STAY CRANBERRY.  Then, you begin to drift away, easy at first, almost indiscernible, then in fits and starts, your intermittent sleep interrupted by demands and outcries in the dead of night. Hospice recommended morphine, then more. We begin to take turns keeping vigil on a futon at the foot of your bed, there to help but helpless. I swab your mouth with a long, cotton-tipped stick. You bite down. In the morning, when I return from taking a ten-minute shower, you are gone. 

Later, the men from the funeral home came to take you away from us to prepare you for the ashes you are to become. You are gowned in cozy flannel pajamas decorated with small pink nosegays held together with spring green bows. You smell like heritage rose mixed with baby powder. As I kiss you, I see your ashen face, feel its chill, and tremble.  

An aide rolls a well-used grey canvas dumpster into the living room. We have three days to clear everything out so the next occupant on the year-long waiting list can move in. We are too preoccupied to cry, our frenzied haste is not conducive to anguish and mourning.  The detritus of life lands in that container: canned goods beyond their shelf life, open cereal boxes of the type none of us eat, cotton socks with limp ankle elastic, the empty Knudsen carton I stomp on to compress after I pour sour milk down the drain. There go the fractured plastic storage containers, lint from drawer corners, stained washcloths, plastic forks and spoons, chipped crockery, and the ultimate insult, a cracked and torn oil painting you insisted was valuable, even after an Antiques Road Show appraisal in San Francisco deemed it worthless. What we can’t decide on, or use, goes in there, too, or into big black garbage bags destined for the Grey Bears Thrift Store.  

My job is to go through the bathroom, open drawers, and cupboards, evaluate toiletries and medicines, determine what to discard or keep. I remember you standing before the vanity mirror, carefully applying STAY CRANBERRY to your mouth, lips slightly open in the way that women do to be sure we cover each curvature with a steady stroke.  I see you close your lips together and smooth the color with upper lip pursed over lower, smiling, moving your lips gently back and forth to ensure an even application.  You are dressed in a pant suit, the color of ocean just beyond shore, tailored to fit your doll-size body, a deeper hued silk scarf embracing your neck for warmth and fashion, fastidious in your presentation of self. You are always pristine in your personal care. 

It was then, I gaze into that same mirror and begin to look like you. I pick up the found lipstick, remove the golden top, twist the metallic blue bottom until a quarter inch of color is exposed, apply it to my lips, instantly deciding this suits me, too. I drop it into my handbag and continue to clear out and clean up. In the seven years since then, I’ve used this tube regularly, though alternating it between Shiseido’s Code Red, Revlon’s Really Red, and Lancôme’s Floride, perhaps to extend its life.  Now, there is barely enough STAY CRANBERRY for two more applications. The other day I picked it up to use it and hesitated. I could not bring it to my lips. When it is gone, how will I be able to discard it? A question I don’t want to answer.  In those moments since, I revisit it, pick it up, gaze at it, turn it in my hand, open it, remember. Then, I, close it, return it to the drawer. There it is. There it will stay.

Norma Schafer lives in Taos, New Mexico, and Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. She is a member of Taos SOMOS literary society, has published in Selvedge magazine, and is founder/publisher of Oaxaca Cultural Navigator (oaxacaculture.com, @oaxacaculturalmexico) featuring photography, travel, social, cultural, and historical commentary.