Still nothing.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I add. “She had terrific skin. Did you ever—？”
A hand on my shoulder, gripping. Then: “I’m afraid not.” She begins to knead my cheeks more forcefully.
“They offered me a free treatment. That was nice of them.”
I can feel her smiling in the dark. “They’re very generous.”
I hear that water fountain again in the distance. Soft ambient music. An airy drone like the endless reverberation of some otherworldly bell. I notice something glimmering out of the corner of my eye. I try to look without moving my face, still under her lathering hands. Then I see it: a small white jellyfish. Glowing in the corner of the dark room, in a little glass box full of water. I know it’s the tiny one I held in my palm last night. The one light as a wish. You’re going to go on quite a journey together, the girl-woman in black said.
“What is that?” I ask. “A jellyfish?”
“Shhh,” whispers the whisper woman. And then she says, “I’m just going to turn on the light so that I can assess your skin. It’s a bright light. So I’ll be covering your eyes, is that okay?”
“Of course.” And now I’m really smiling. Because, jellyfish aside, all of this is familiar. First some cleansing and massage. Now assessment followed by extractions. I can handle extractions. There was never anything to fear. Which is a little disappointing, frankly. Maybe I wanted to be obliterated. She presses a damp cotton pad over each of my closed eyelids. I can’t help but think of pennies on the eyes of the dead. The ferryman taking his change as I float on the river Styx. She shines a lamp over my face. The light’s so bright, I can see it even through my closed eyelids and the damp cotton pads. Flaming red. I feel the fact of her eyes. Looking at me.
“Well?” I say at last, because I can’t take any more of her silence. “What’s the verdict?” And I laugh my nervous laugh that betrays me. “Am I congested?”
“That’s a way of putting it,” she says quietly.
“Lots of extractions to do, then,” I offer. Listen to me offering.
She’s silent. No sound in the room but my own breathing and those chimes. The eucalyptus scent is beginning to be oppressive.
“If you have to do extractions, I can take it. I’m very seasoned. I’m—”
“It’s all here,” she whispers at last, touching my face. I feel her finger pads trace my forehead furrows, the deep creases between my brows. The veins around my nose and the muzzle lines around my mouth. Nasolabial folds, I know they’re called. Laugh lines that weren’t even born from laughing. I feel her fingers glide their way back to my forehead. Trace the scar, its shadowy star shape. She touches it so tenderly that a thin tear leaks from my eye. She takes the cotton pads from my lids. “Open,” she says. I do. And there I am in the oval mirror she’s holding over my face.
“Memory and skin go hand in hand, you know,” she says. “Good memories, good skin. Bad memories…” And here she trails off. Because the mirror speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
I stare into it. I stare and stare at my own wretched reflection. So close I was once. On certain days, in certain lights. It’s the closeness that kills me. The almost but not quite. The grasping and the disappointment. The resignation and the desperation. All etched in my face. The hope’s still there in my eyes. Dumb, persistent, unquashable. It gives me a slightly crazed, haunted look. Hope is a weed that Marva nurtures in the shade. Have faith, she entreats. Never give up, she pleads, on your #skingoals. It might just be a matter of the right combination of acids. Of not looking so closely, so punishingly in the mirror. Under such very bright lights, tsk, tsk. Herself under very bright lights as she says this. Looking so terribly flawless. Looking like evidence of godly design.
I feel the whisper woman hovering over me, just beyond the glass, smiling encouragingly. She could be thirty-five. She could be sixty-five. Beside her, the jellyfish is glowing more brightly, more whitely in its tank.
“What if we do something about it?” she says in a voice that is like a caress.
“Like what?”
“How attached are you to your memories?”
I look into the mirror again. The shadows and miseries imprinted there on my skin. My pores gaping open at me like silently screaming mouths. The toll of the years casts a grayness that perhaps will never be lifted. I see my paltry almost. My utterly unbearable closeness. Closeness to what? Mother’s face flashes brightly in my mind.