Letting Go (Excerpt from Coming Out Of Indiana)

After a bad break-up, it can be hard to feel connected to anything. After my very first relationship with a man ended, I worked to fling myself into my job selling make-up at the Lazarus Department Store. At least that was something rewarding that I could do well. That is, I could do most of it well. Recording my sales and accounting for the stock we needed to re-order was impossible. Though I liked the fun part of selling make-up, I couldn’t be bothered with logging sales. Do you think Way Bandy has to write down every shade of lip-liner he goes through when he’s making up models for the cover of Vogue? I was at Lazarus to do beautiful things. There wasn’t a fucking thing beautiful about sifting through crinkled lists of color codes and back orders. It felt like a homework assignment that would never be finished. I’d lose track of sales, putting off my counts for so long that I’d be unable to make sense of the inventory sheets.
Mary, the other sales associate, would try to help me whenever she saw me attempting to fill out forms. “Let’s start small,” she’d say. “We’ll count the lipsticks.” Eventually I’d always end up throwing my hands in the air.
“I give up! It’s impossible!” When I finally left, they said it took six months just to straighten out my inventory. Regardless of my inventory woes, the job offered me a comfortable balance of artistry and service. I felt like I was helping to make women more beautiful and they appreciated me for it.
Lazarus gave each makeup artist her own set of sable brushes. I wanted to treat mine the same way I treated my spare albums, and my bridal doll from Ma-Maw. Of course I couldn’t jut keep the brushes in their original packaging. These were the tools I needed to use everyday. I compromised. I treated the brushes like religious objects, never letting them out of my sight and never letting loaning them out to less careful associates who had misplaced their allotment. I stored the brushes in their sleeves, only putting them away after they’d been thoroughly cleaned between makeovers. After hundreds of smoky eyes and heightened cheekbones, my brushes still looked like new.
For all of my clumsiness with the conventional tools that my father thought every man ought to know their way around, I was quite skilled with my brushes. My success at Lazarus, however, had as much to do with my ability to talk to the women having their colors done as it did with applying make-up. The women loved me. Women have always loved me. I feel that my ability to find something beautiful in every woman lay at the core of this. It didn’t matter what size or shape they were, I was able to find their best features and accentuate them. It almost became a game where I would get such satisfaction out of finding the beauty that each one of them had hidden away.
One girl more than any of the others impressed upon me what it meant to appreciate undiscovered beauty. The evening Joyce approached me at the counter she couldn’t look me in the eye. She stared down at the floor while she talked as if not looking at me would actually protect her from being seen. “I don’t have the first clue where to begin with makeup,” she confessed. “Can you help me?” The admission was a hushed voice in a high register emanating from beneath a man’s hunting jacket that disguised her shape. Other women would practically melt onto the glass countertop when perusing the lines from all of the different manufacturers, but Joyce stood about a foot away from the edge of the counter, anchored to the gleaming aisle in a pair of well-worn work boots. “I work in a turkey processing plant,” she said. “So, it doesn’t really matter what I look like, but I just thought…”
“Of course it matters,” I said, before she could come up with an excuse. She smiled her name, “I’m Joyce.” I reached across the counter to grab her hand and guide her over to my chair.
“I’m Eddie,” I said. I gently put the fingertips of my right hand under her chin to tilt her head up toward me. When I did, I found the deepest, most soulful pair of eyes looking back. Eyes were my specialty, so I got excited about her potential. I used a brown pencil to meticulously line and smudge, line and smudge, until I’d created enough depth. The technique was Way’s, but I’d done it so often that it felt like my own.
When I was satisfied, I presented her with one of the mirrors we kept on the countertop. She held it up to her face and screamed. She put the mirror down so she could catch the tears as she started to cry. “Don’t cry, don’t cry!” I pleaded. “You’ll fuck up your eyes!” She stopped crying just long enough to let a giggle escape and then she smiled through the tears that I had begun blotting from her cheeks.
“How is this possible?” she asked. “These are my eyes?” she said, incredulously. “And with your big hands! How’d you do it with those big hands?” It was a valid question. Her face had disappeared behind my hands each time I used one to steady her and one to apply the cosmetics. Somehow, it just worked. I held the eye pencil exactly as I would hold my writing pencil as a boy. The same technique that infuriated my father had helped me flourish as a make-up artist.