Excerpt: Parentheses

She stepped out of her jeans and pulled off her t-shirt, looking at her body in her underwear in the mirror on the door of her closet. Her mother used to do this, too, every morning before she got dressed. She would press her fingers to her stomach and thighs and the upper parts of her breasts; she would drag two fingers across her neck. She touched herself as if doing so could affirm that she was real, that even though she was overlooked most of the time, or treated poorly, she still existed as a person. There was a sadness in the press of her fingertips that Jude had recognized even very young, because it was such a human sadness: the sadness of wanting to be acknowledged and loved and not being so, and not having the chance of being so. It was the kind of sadness that everyone understood at a very young age.

Some mornings her mother wouldn’t move for more than a half an hour; she would stand in front of her mirror and stare, and the cast of her eyes would get sadder and sadder, and Jude always wanted to throw something and break the mirror and its spell. You aren’t in the mirror, she wanted to say. The mirror isn’t in you. But that didn’t mean anything.

She shook herself out and decided against changing her underwear, as there was no way in hell Daniel was going to see it even if he tried very hard – especially too hard. To Jude, nothing was more pathetic than trying too hard. Nothing was more disdainful than all of that wasted effort.

From the bed, Oakley made a soft sound and rolled onto her back, exposing her stomach to the air. Jude turned from the mirror and moved to scratch her belly and the dog wriggled happily, and for a few minutes Jude was distracted. But eventually Oakley twisted back onto her stomach again and put her chin back on her paws and resumed looking at Jude, who returned to her closet.

So, the green dress. Even if it was false advertising, she liked it. She felt attractive in it. It was, quite probably, the only date-worthy dress she owned. She would have to rectify that, and not only because of Daniel; it was a little pathetic to only have one outfit that she could wear on a date. She stepped into the dress and pulled it up to her hips, folding herself into it like a flower in reverse; the zipper refused to be caught by her fingers and she spent a harried few seconds twisting, trying to nab it and finally succeeding, contorting like a pretzel to get it the rest of the way up her back. And then the dress was on and she could return to the mirror. She smoothed out the front of it and adjusted the fall of the skirt, pulled at the fabric between her breasts and frowned at how deeply it fell. Either she had forgotten or she had lost weight, one of the two.

There was nothing for it, though; this was the dress she was wearing. She shut the closet door and crossed her room in three long strides, sitting at the desk-come-vanity that she rigged for these kinds of occasions. It had a small mirror on it and it is this she consulted as she dug out her small collection of makeup, trying to decide between her three shades of lipstick. Each of them looked equally decent on her but they gave off very different effects. The first, a pale and demure pink, reminded her strongly of her mother. Most makeup did. Most dressing did. Most clothing did. Most aspects of the bedroom, of the mundane portions of each morning that prepare one for the rest of the day, reminded Jude of her mother. It was as if the woman’s shade lived in the corners of her bedroom and dogged her footsteps as she brushed her teeth and chose her outfit and prepared for a date.

Not the pink. The pink would look terrible with the green; there would be too much contrast.

Her next option (she picked up the tube with delicate fingers, acting as though it would bite her if she moved too quickly) was deeper and redder but still in the realm of pink, and it was the discreet kind of color that put on a front of pristine goodness and gave handjobs in public bathrooms. It was the cousin of the colors that had shown up on the collars of her father’s shirts, on the curve of his thick neck, caressing the tendons as if those women had tried to suck him dry.

Jude knew now, understood with the wisdom of a grown woman, that he had intentionally left their stains on him. Their lips imprinted in his skin and clothing must have made him feel so good about himself. The way they made her mother shake and pale must have made him feel powerful. The women who wore this shake of pink were the women who weren’t strong enough to say no; they were the women who didn’t understand when they didn’t really have any power, just the illusion of it, and only because he let them believe that they did. Jude didn’t know why she owned this color. It was a color she hated, as laden as it was with things she couldn’t forgive or forget, and she held it like one might hold a small, sleeping, venomous animal. She didn’t know what to do with it. It sat in the palm of her hand and seemed to look at her.

She tossed it in the wastepaper basket next to her desk.

That left the third shade, the darkest and deepest of them all. The color worn by women who knew the shifts in power and understood them at their most basic level; the color worn by women who did not press their lips in ineffectual claims against the necks of men who were not and could never be truly theirs, because he was too busy being only his; the color worn by women who kissed only when they chose to, and who claimed only when there was something to claim.

Jude parted her lips and put it on.

Each shade of her makeup followed the lipstick; her eyeliner dark and smooth underneath the sweet flicker of her hazelnut iris, a soft wash of golden eyeshadow obscuring the blue veins in her pale, freckled eyelids. Those same freckles were half-hidden by powder, but only half-hidden; where they cluster around her nose Jude would not want to hide them, and the rogue ones that span across her face are still visible if one looked closely enough. They sat in their rightful places on her skin and refused to be obliterated, even by a layer of makeup. They were part of her.

She adorned herself thusly, sliding thick golden bracelets onto her wrists and a coiled, burnished locket around her throat. Her hair she piled atop her head, fixing it there with skillful maneuvering of pins and one carefully placed elastic. Pieces of it fell in soft wisps around her face and neck, but the overall effect made her feel Amazonian, untouchable.