Rouge by Mona Awad EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Mona Awad
- Language: English
- Genre: Humorous Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
2016
La Jolla, California
After the funeral. I’m hiding in Mother’s bathroom watching a skincare video
about necks. Cheap black dress that chafes. Illicit cigarette. Sitting on the toilet
amid her decorative baskets, her red jellysh soaps, her black towel sets. Smoke
comes tumbling out of my mouth in amorphous gray clouds. I blow it out the
window where the palm trees still sway and the alien sun still shines and the sky
is a blue that hurts my eyes. There’s a Kleenex box made entirely of jagged
seashells at my back—probably she never once lled it with Kleenex. There’s her
mirror over the sink, a crack running right down the middle of the glass.
Whenever I look at myself in that mirror, I look broken. Cleaved. There’s the
perfume she wore every day of her life on the marble counter, the Chanel Rouge
Allure lipstick in its gold-and-black case. A little cluster of red jars and vials on a
silver tray. For the face, dear. For the face, I can hear Mother saying to me. Need
all the help we can get, am I right? Cynical smile of the beautiful who know
they’re on the downhill slope.
Yes, Mother, I’d say. But not you. You don’t need any help at all.
I don’t look closely at any of it.
Instead I stare at my phone, where the skin video plays. My eyes are dry and
they are focused. Focused on Dr. Marva, who is telling me in her reassuring
English accent all about my poor, poor neck. The video is actually called “How
to Save Your Own Neck.” I’ve watched it before. It’s one of my favorites.
Dr. Marva’s soft yet rm words ll my mother’s bathroom.
“We don’t take care of our necks,” Dr. Marva is saying sadly. And she looks
quite sad in her white silk blouse. As if she is grieving for us and our poor necks.
“They often get neglected, don’t they?”
She looks right at me with her golden eyes. I nd myself nodding as I always
do.
“Yes, Marva,” I whisper along. Yes, they do get neglected.
“Which is quite a tragedy,” Marva observes. “Because the skin there is already
so thin.”
Didn’t Mother always tell me this? The neck never lies, Belle. The neck is
truthful, deeply cruel. Like a mirror of the soul. It reveals all, you see? And she’d
point at her own throat. I’d look at Mother’s throat and see nothing. Just an
expanse of whiteness shot through with blue veins.
I see, Mother, I always said.
On my phone screen, Marva shakes her head as if this truth about necks is
one she cannot bear to speak. “What atrocities,” she whispers, stroking her own
neck, “might bloom here? Redness, of course,” she intones. “A brown pigment,
perhaps. Thinning, atrophied patches. Essentially,” she adds with a laugh, “a
triumvirate of horror.”
As Marva says this, she tilts her head back to reveal an impossibly smooth
white column of esh. Untainted, unmarred. She strokes the skin softly with her
red-nailed hands.
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