losing a few years v. 2

The girl at the front desk shoves a clipboard across at me, she even smiles.
“Please fill out your medical information, and then take a seat in the waiting area. We’ll have you in in a few minutes!”

The entire waiting area is vacant, so I stay at the counter. I start scratching down answers that have been pounded into my brain over a course of forty years.
“It’s not very busy here…”
Her fingers drill into a keyboard for a few minutes, before she smiles.
“Yeah, the cost of the operation tends to narrow down the clientele.” She types for a few minutes more. “But ‘s okay. We get enough off of the actual operation, and makin’ women like yourself feel young again. There’s somethin’ special about giving someone’s youth back to them.”
I continue filling out the form. Personal questions. All with the security of medical procedures thrown around their shoulders to keep their immodest little bodies hidden.
“I see you have a southern drawl.” I say. The desolate office. Empty. No cellphone chatter. Occasionally a car rolls by. The fan on the ceiling slowly creaks with each rotation.
The girl smiles some.
“Oh yeah. Me an’ Beth came up from the South together. We’ve been best friends since we were little girls. I wasn’t as smart as her, though, didn’t go and get my education. Just got married to the boyfriend…” She pauses shrugs laughs a little. Apologize for being open. Especially to yourself. “Yeah. Well you know how it goes. Anyways, Beth’s a real smart girl. You’re in for a treat today.”
I slide the clipboard across.
Her well-groomed hands and flashy manicure grasp around it quickly. She doesn’t even look at it long enough to realize I’ve only filled out the first page.
“Great. Well, I’ll go get her. It’ll prolly only be another five minutes or so. Can I get you a glass of water or anything? ‘S mighty hot.”
I shake my head.
She disappears down a hallway, her heels clicking the entire way.

This.
This, I want to say, is ridiculous. Two country bumpkins running a dying, hole-in-the-wall salon.
Tatiane might have great skin, but she sure as hell didn’t get it here.
I slip the business card out of my purse and stare at the address.

“Miss Jan?”

Her face right next to mine.
I don’t know how I didn’t hear her. Or how long it took her to sneak up on me. I can’t help but back away.
“Oh. Sorry ‘bout that Miss. People are always saying I’m too quiet for my own good.”
The esthetician, she looks like she’s in her twenties. Her black hair tied carefully in an up-do, paired with eerily bright blue eyes. She grins and tilts her head back, eyeing me skeptically.
“Oh hon. Is it your mom that’s in for this appointment?”
Flattery. Never respond to flattery. No one ever offers a flattering compliment without good reason. Either they want to guilt you into buying something, since they’re so damn nice, or they’re compensating.
“Oh. No. As you can see I’m getting quite the crows feet around my eyes.” I try slipping the business card back into my purse, as subtly as I can.
She nods a bit. Her thumb clicks on a ballpoint for a while as she stares. An uneasy kind of stare. I clear my throat. To remind her I’m still here, with my body, still aware of its scrutiny.
“Mm. Yeah, looks like you’re going to need some work on your hands. Do you apply sun block regularly?”  
When I’m not rushing out the door to get to the work place. Or getting a phone call about who Tom is sleeping with again. When the Gardner isn’t coming. I don’t tell her this, I tell her I do when I can. When I remember to.
She half frowns and nods.
“Okay. You’re in for a full-body, if I’m not mistaken?”
Try smiling.
“That I am.”
She grins and tilts a shoulder back.
“Your friends won’t even recognize you when you leave.”

The blankets are heavy and all-encompassing on my skin. The bed is too warm. The room is tiny, with some calming coat of blue paint slopped on the walls. The occasional fake plant limb dangles from strategic locations. In the corner there’s an altar of skin products on a metal rack. The only light in the room is covered by a transparent photo of clouds.
Staring at it, I can almost swear they move. Slow. Unraveling their white insides as they crawl from one side of their prison frame to the other.
I focus my eyes.
The corpses of moths press their shadows through the two dimensional clouds.
Her hands come down from above me, small wet, white pads beginning to scrub against my face.
“Your form says that you- you uh… smoke, Miss Jan. Is that right?”
I sigh a yes. She offers a nervous chuckle and continues scrubbing my face in circles. She sets the small pads down and begins to poke and pinch at my skin.
“I’m sure you’ve heard enough about it.”
She turns away and I can hear her turn on the sink.
“Did you know Jack Kevorkian was released today?”
She brings a paint brush out of a small cup, beginning to coat my face with some cold substance.
The usual scents of relaxation assault my senses: lavender choking me under a heavy cloud of chamomile. I’m in a glorified gas chamber. I try not to breath in through my nose, try to inhale through my throat and all I can do is cough.
She says,
“Probably not the most relaxing conversation. Y’know, I went through med school. I never thought he was a murderer.” She continues painting my face, setting half-moon shaped pads on my eyes.
I ask her why she didn’t become a doctor.
She smiles and starts to paint my neck.
“Oh, a misunderstanding.”
I ask what she means. She shrugs and smiles.
“I wasn’t too good with the cadavers. They scared the hell out of me.”

In the darkness I can feel the table slowly turn. A cloud of steam above me. She moves around the bed. The space is so tight that anytime she does she bumps into the bed, and has to slowly tilt me back in the way of the steam. Her hands come around mine, oily, cold, greasy. The stench is unreal.
“I’m going to start the de-aging treatment with your hands and body, Miss Jan. We’ll just keep detoxing your face.” Her thumbs and fingers run straight into my muscles, a massage that almost seems cruel. I try shifting away from her hands.
“Oh. Sorry.” She continues slathering this cold poison on. My stomach, her hands against my breast, then thighs.

The office is hectic.
A miniature trade-city hit by mortars. Due dates. Procrastination. Laziness. Everyone’s running around, screaming this, yelling that, sewing this dress up, importing fifty trees for a photo-shoot A-S-A-yesterday.
I always hated that fucking term.
Normally, I would be comfortable.
These kinds of days rattle you for the first few weeks. Especially as a Creative Director. You’ll find yourself up at midnight, attempting to drown yourself in daiquiris and tequilas, so you can avoid the humiliation of having no cover in the morning. If you survive these first few weeks without a heart attack, then you’ll find they’re really quite monotonous and predictable.
Today is a new sort of stress.
There’s a sort of phenomenon in the pathways of female communication: bathroom gossip. Especially at workplaces. Especially where the subject of your conversation may be sitting in a stall.
You’ve seen this on typical rags-to-riches Cinderella story movies, romantic comedies, maybe even a drama. Which is what makes it all the more confounding. You’d think after a dozen movie stars and directors tell you the flaw of this method of communication, you’d stop.
Anyways, I was in the bathroom stall, trying to find a suitable alternative to a broken bra. And I can hear my secretary and the voice of another woman. The secretary, I think her name starts with a Y or a Z, or some obscure letter, she says,
“Okay, so I wanted to tell you this earlier but that witch was hovering around.”
The clicking of heels.
“I am going to be so rich.”
The woman that I’m not familiar with speaks; her voice sounds disaffected, half-dead. There’s another clak-clak-clak of heels.
“You’ve said this so many times before.
Every time it’s like another confession about what a slut you are.”
The click of her heels becomes swifter, maybe she’s being pulled.
“No. I’m telling you. I really am. Evelyn Jan? Her husband. Way rich.”
If I were a more docile woman, I would’ve waited longer. Learned more. I’d look ridiculous punching a twenty-something, so I do the closest thing I can. I step out of the stall.

She slips plastic around my hands, then my legs.
I ask her if it’s really supposed to smell so bad.
She smiles.
“Just a little patience, Miss Jan.”

He’s sitting in my office, the Venezuelan. Tatiane Zabonaya’s photographer husband. He looks irritated somehow.
His shirt is left unbuttoned, exposing tan skin. Exposing muscles. Exposing the low line of his pants. Unbuttoned as though he’s over-heating in a fucking air-conditioned building. He stands up as I enter.
“Miss Jan. You look beautiful. Aren’t you doing the aging thing backwards?”
I tell him to sit down. I tell him I’m busy, to get what he needs to say out of the way, and quick. In ten minutes I will go apeshit, and I will say no to delaying the date of his photo shoot. I tell him that he’s violating dress code.
His hands at my shoulders. Fingers digging in.
“Miss Jan, you should relax.” I try batting his hands off. “I’m your employee. I’m your photographer. I’m here to make you happy.”
He moves back around the desk and slumps down in the chair.
“How about this: let’s do a photo shoot. Of you, like you were in your…”
I’m not certain how hard I must be staring at him. How much strain I’m putting into my face, when really all I want to do is stare at the asymmetrical shapes of his hair. He laughs nervously. “They just forgot. You did not grow old. You grew forgotten, is that how to say?”
I adjust my papers. Stop looking at him.
I ask him what he came in for.
I ask him what to wear.

Her hands are at my neck now, the same cold oil spreading everywhere. Around my face, carefully.
I ask her if it’s supposed to burn.
She offers some long winded explanation of how wrinkles start deep under the skin. That any effective treatment has to target all layers of the skin. That her treatment is the most effective.


Her fingers force their way into my mouth, the threads of a towel exploding in the back of my throat, I try breathing and all I can do is wildly exhale.
It leaves my throat immediately raw, violated. Years of bulimia will teach you that the flesh of your throat retaliates in tenfold to any agitation. She shoves the towel so far in that my stomach throws bile up my esophagus and into the back of the towel, where it soaks in and slams back down my throat.
My finger nails won’t reach her skin and the plastic and oil is too slippery to let me grab her. I pound as hard as I can at her figure, but my elbows stop every time they hit the bed, and all that I manage is a pathetic slap at her. I kick my knees up.
She cringes as I hit her side, then grips one knee and pushes it against the other. Her elbow, deep in my chest, making a bridge of her forearm across my collarbone.
Dense and cold metal rips into my neck. I only wish I could say slide.
Imagine grating your fingernails against the grain on broken pieces of wood. Splinters sliding deep under the dense calcium of your nails and lodging their little sharp splinter teeth into your flesh.
Imagine pulling it back out.

The girl at the desk.
I wonder if she knew about this. If she knew the entire time that she laughed and told me how beautiful I was. How pathetic her life was. What a treat I was in for.

My body won’t move as though my muscles have been liquefied. Uncooked crab-legs, hot water in gelatin powder, a water bed. I can hardly get my ribs to lift off of my lungs. The towel is soaked with drool snot tears and it’s all over my face.
“Hon. I think you might’ve bruised me.” She slips her white coat down a bit to inspect her shoulder carefully. “Oh well. I guess it can’t be avoided…” She slips a hand into her pocket and pulls out a small black cell phone. The phone rings. She looks at me, “By the way, I coated your body in a nice relaxing formaldehyde mask. Nice, don’t ya think?”  
The cheap relaxing music seems to disappear behind the ringing on the other line. A voice with a heavy accent picks up.
Her cute little Southern drawl drowns it all out.

Ah, yeah. Miss Zabonaya? Yep.
It’s Beth.
Miss Jan has checked in for her appointment. Of course I took good care of her. No, you won’t have to worry about your next promotion, or your husband.

Yes, of course. I’m a professional.

I want to scream. Scream that she can at least wait until I’m dead. That she could have the courtesy to step out of the room.
She pulls the cell phone away from her head and presses a button.
All I can think to myself is,
Tatiane might have great skin, but she sure as hell didn’t get it here.

Beth sits down and smiles at me, her hands on her knees. Her head tilted. Sympathy.
“It’s us time now, Miss Jan.”
She pulls a large black bag out from underneath the counter. She rummages through it slowly, sparing me the occasional glance.
“You were a model way back when. I know.” She smiles and tilts her head again. “I used to have all these pictures of you on my mirror. Yeah. I even uh… Did the bulimia thing, to lose a few pounds. Didn’t get into modeling though, I’m too short.” Another smile.
I want to tell her I can’t help that.
A teal and yellow drill, she clumsily fits a drill bit in, and sets it down beside the chair leg.
“So, I liked you a lot. Which means I’m going to give you an option.” She turns. Her hands and her bag are out of sight now. I can hear the clinking of glass. “Since now you’ll never get the chance to age, I’m going to offer you a quick path to old age. You can decay as you breath. Feel your skin decompose and sag and rot. Just like old people, in a mini, concentrated time lapse.” Her voice is slow, deliberate. Like a test proctor. “Or, I could make you more famous that you ever were in life. You’ll be the greatest wonder in female murder victims since the Black Dahlia.”
She slowly turns her chair back to me, her head practically rolled down onto her shoulder.
Blink once if you want to become an old zombie, she says.
Blink twice if you want to be a dead doll.

I try staring. I try not to blink.
She nods.
“I agree with your choice, Miss Jan. Being beautiful in death would be an appropriate way to end your life.” She pulls the towel out of my mouth, slowly, every ridge of bile-soaked thread grinding against my tongue.
“Oh, and don’t hold this against Tatiane. She thought she was just hiring any end-of-the-line hitman.” Beth hums, her body bouncing way to another to whatever tune plays through her sick little mind. She might even be dancing to the nature sounds disc blaring through the speakers. Pulls on latex gloves and reaches into her bag.
“As you get older your teeth wear down, which adds significantly to the appearance of your age. And you, being a smoker, Miss Jan, have yellow teeth.” She leans over me and smiles. “Don’t worry. I thought about this all. Really, I made sure to prepare for this, just right. You and me, this is our time.”
She sighs and rolls her shoulders, closing her eyes.
“So just relax. Really, you’re getting a treat here. This is the ultimate anti-aging system, you know.”
Some metal device comes around my lips, spreading them far. The dirt on it, I can practically smell the hardware store.
Her face and body and coat above me now. She lifts a hand, and I can see the blurry outline of a hammer.



“Long live beauty, right?”