The Makeup Guru

My high school best friend was a makeup guru.

I can think on so many times that we crowded the girl’s room, vying for a position at the mirrored counter, making ourselves up and showing off our latest cosmetic acquisitions.

In a private Catholic all-girls school, you make yourself up for you. Nobody else.

I met her when I was 14. She had tweezed eyebrows, something considered taboo in my household. She penciled them in with ultra-fine strokes. She was tall and slender. She wore expensive jewelry. She was very cosmopolitan.

And I was not. I’d been attending the sheltered school for two years prior to her entry. My experience with makeup had been, to that point, with a palette of cheap, shockingly bright eyeliners my mother had purchased several years before. I remember attending a Girl Scout meeting with the girls in my town whom I’d “ditched” to attend private school. I wore gold eyeliner. I felt horribly out of place.

Even now I can see her sitting at the round tables in the upperclassmen lunch area, her bag of Clinique goodies open and on display. She mixed her own lipstick, which I thought was the height of creativity. I’d watch in silent awe as she smeared a thick coat of cocoa brown on her normally rosy pink lips. The florescent lights overhead sparkled off the glossy coat as she talked. It was like sunbeams reflecting off a golden pond.

I suppose I was very taken with her. Mesmerised, at first, and then when we became inseparable, she seemed to embody everything I wished I could be. She was pretty and popular. She had a fabulous sense of humour. She was confident and relaxed. She was talented, artistic, yet also skilled at the concrete arts of math and science. And then there was me. Sure, I had my specialties. But I’d never be wearing the latest Donna Karan to the prom.

Maybe I was so taken I didn’t see that she was taken with me, too. And even if I’d noticed it I’d never have believed it.

Lacking a home life of any merit of her own, she “adopted” my mother. She called her “Mom.” My mother adored her. She was always complimentary--in a genuine, if a bit envious way--of my singing and acting abilities. She joked that she had no talent for such and would always be a “monkey,” like in the Wizard of Oz production, or the rear end of a horse, like in the “Hello Dolly” production. She stayed at my house for days at a time, making friends with my local friends. She played with my childhood dollhouse.

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