Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

Lisa and I are doing our makeup in front of the full-length mirrors attached to my sliding closet doors. We are listening to T. Rex and dancing a little as we do ourselves up. We are laughing, but we are also sort of bored.

I look up and see that Nik is at the door watching us. He has his new Polaroid SX-70. He takes a picture of us in the mirror. I put a hand on my waist and extend the other arm in an exaggerated wave. I wink. I blow a kiss. Lisa puts her arms around my waist and peeks her head through my arm. He takes more pictures. We hear the click and groan as each picture is taken and expelled, and it makes us feel like superstars. He collects each photo as it comes out of the camera and places it on my bed. Nik stops when the film runs out. He pulls out the spent cartridge and chucks it in the wastebasket. He pulls a new pack out of his pocket and clicks it in. He pulls another flash bar out and snaps it on top. I have no idea where he gets the money for all the film and flash bars he uses. But he must use tons: a wall of his room is covered from ceiling to floor with Polaroids. At least half are self-portraits. By the time he has switched film, the posing moment is over, and instead of taking more, we all hover over the photos on the bed, watching as they develop. Something about the flash and the Polaroid film makes a made-up face work particularly well. We are eyes and lips and blush-edged cheekbones. We hardly have noses. We look gorgeous.

“Your album cover,” Nik says, pointing to one extra-posey shot. We don’t have a band, but we nod in agreement. That must be the cover . Now we would have to start a band.

As we stare at the pictures, Nik picks up my eyeliner pencil and approaches the mirror. He stares into his eyes’ reflection and grips the pencil.

“Want me to show you?” I say.

“Yeah, but let me do it,” he says. I take the pencil and look into the mirror. He watches as I put a finger to my lower lid and pull down. Then I take the hand holding the pencil and apply the tip to the thin strip of skin between eyeball and lash line. I make a dark, smooth line of color. It isn’t smudgy at all. It is one of the few things I have mastered in this world — I have the eyeliner business down flat. Nik watches, and then takes the pencil from me and leans close to the mirror. His wide-set eyes are a soft, clear gray, and they look made for augmentation. He shakily applies the liner on one eye and then the other. He blinks at his image.

“You’re a prettier girl than I am,” I say, and we all laugh, but it’s not really a joke. He is. I don’t usually look closely at him, but somehow the eyeliner enables a new appraisal. I also notice Lisa is staring at Nik. He’s wearing a T-shirt. He’s tall and really skinny. It’s a tight T-shirt, baby blue with a scoop neck. I realize it is actually one of my T-shirts, and I wonder when my brother decided he needed to get his girl on. But he isn’t gay, he is just super vain, and he is currently staring at himself in the mirror, his arms folded.

“Let me take your picture,” I say, as if he would ever not let someone take his picture. I pick up his camera and he turns to face me. He starts an apparently well-rehearsed series of poses. He cocks his head, he juts out his jaw slightly and purses his lips. He yawns and looks theatrically bored. He starts to laugh and looks down, hands in pockets. He looks at the camera again, and I notice there is a tiny edge to his expression, an undertone that suggests he is about to do something, or is suppressing something, only you can’t quite read it, it might be a smile or a sneer or he might crack up. And he looks as though he is in on the joke somehow, of the phony poses, of his vanity, of a photograph. I can’t quite figure out how this works, but I understand that this is what we mean when we say someone looks cool. My brother looks cool. He is wearing my girly T-shirt and eyeliner, and he totally pulls it off.

He stops abruptly and reaches for his camera.

“I can’t take this music,” he says, and he leaves the room. Lisa and I examine the photos I just took. They move from gray-brown to big blobs of color and then grow sharper.

“Nik is a fox,” Lisa says. I shrug. He is so familiar, so deeply of my family life, that it is nearly impossible for me to believe he is sexually attractive to anyone. I fan out the photos. His looks are an abstract asset to me, something I hope reflects my own attractiveness, which I am also blind to. I hold the little padded border of the photos. He could be in a magazine, sure he could. But so could anyone. Nik and I are both theatrical, we both figured out how far that veneer of theater could take you.

We spent many nights alone as little kids. The lack of supervision meant we would have whole evenings of uninterrupted fantasy. We would pretend we were on a ship lost at sea, or were royalty in exile, living in an abandoned country castle (one of Nik’s favorites). We were in a musical, and we would burst into song. We were in a bomb shelter, and the whole world had been obliterated. We would lay down the rules of the premise, and we would do what we had to do, make dinner or do chores or whatever, within these made-up parameters. Mama didn’t know any of it; by the time she got home from work, she was just glad we were safe and fed and in bed. As we got older, we retained our love of artifice of any kind. Nik’s first stab at a band was called the Make-Believers.

I revel in affectation and teach it to Lisa. Even if I weren’t already an expert, it wouldn’t take a girl long to figure it out. All you have to do is put on your clothes and makeup and go for a walk on lower Sunset, where all the clubs are, or even just waltz into Hamburger Hamlet: we would get looks, we would get attention. It’s fun because we are made up — not just in makeup, but we are made-up, imaginary people. We are liberated because not only do we know we can pull it off (whatever it is) but we know everyone else is a fake, too. Maybe Lisa doesn’t yet know this, but I have always known it.

We decide to get Nik to drive us over to Sunset. We live not far away, but we don’t want to trudge the back blocks in our high heels. Besides, Nik is a good accessory. He always knows what club has good music and is always being invited to parties. If I look iffy and maybe a bit too young, Nik tips the scales in my favor; he ups the charade considerably. You might ask what the goal of all of this is, but believe me, it is pretty innocent. We don’t have sex, not yet, and we rarely drink much or do any drugs (Nik, alas, is a different story). We just want to be out and around the sex and drugs, the hip adults; we want to hear good music, and we want — most of all — to be looked at and desired. We want to feel that desire the way you feel the hot sun burning down on your head. We want it to cover us and make us glow. That is enough for me, anyway.

I pound on his door. Our walls and doors, his and mine, are covered in posters. The door to his room has a huge poster of Lou Reed’s new album Transformer. Reed has an angular face, prominent ears, and a lot of eye makeup on. He looks like a dainty version of Frankenstein. Now I grasp what Nik is getting at with his ragged drag.

He opens the door. He has augmented my T-shirt with an ancient yellow chiffon scarf. He is smoking a joint. He gives us an exaggerated look of fatigue. Lisa giggles with longing as I propose he take us out. He considers and shrugs.

“I left a note for Ma,” I say. That is all we have to do, since she works the night shift. She doesn’t usually come back until about three, but we might want to stay out even later, so we leave a note. It sounds remarkably unsupervised, doesn’t it? And it is, but it has always been like that. She works at a call center, an answering service. She has for years. Way back, when our father was still around, Nik would go to his house after school, and I would actually go to work with my mother. They let her bring me, and I would sit under her desk most of the time, eat my sandwich, draw or color, and eventually fall asleep in my sleeping bag. I loved it. I remember looking at my mother’s soft legs in nude stockings and low-heeled pumps. She always had these chubby legs. She hated them and wore long skirts to hide them, but I loved those legs, loved being near them. She would wake me up at two, then I would sleepwalk to the car. I’d sleep on the ride home. Usually I wouldn’t even remember her finally tucking me into bed. I didn’t mind it at all — I tried to be as portable as possible. She used to call me her pocket kid. But that didn’t last for too long. My father left town again, and Nik and I settled into our routine on our own. In the morning she sleeps while we get ourselves up for school. I make my own breakfast (blueberry Pop-Tart with vanilla frosting). Nik always just has coffee with tons of sugar. We made ourselves into little adults, and we have oh-so-much freedom.