Makeovers by Marcia Read online

  When Marcia had finished the first hand, Mrs. Getty held it up for inspection. She crowed with delight.

  “Have you girls met the new man in Room Two-nineteen? From Nashville, Tennessee? When he talks southern to me, it’s like Elvis Presley whispering right into my ear. I might go waggle these nails at him when you gals are done with me.”

  As Mrs. Getty kept talking, Marcia started on the other hand, determined to give Mrs. Getty the manicure of her life. If the old man from Nashville didn’t fall head over heels for Mrs. Getty, it wouldn’t be for want of Marcia’s trying.

  eight

  Marcia decided against making an elaborate speech to Travis. Boys didn’t care about subtlety or nuance or exactly how much some girl liked them on a scale from 1 to 10, where 7.2 meant “She likes you a lot, but you’d better ask her to the dance quickly before somebody else does,” and 7.4 meant “I think if someone else asked her, she might stall, hoping to hear from you.” Instead, Marcia simply caught Travis’s eye as she passed him in the hall on the way to French class. He raised an eyebrow; she smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. Simple and elegant.

  If only Marcia could think of a simple and elegant way to let Madame Cowper know that she was really truly sorry about the picture she had drawn last week. Marcia was surprised by how sorry she was. Two summers ago, when she had taken Intensive Summer Language Learning, she had laughed louder than anybody else when Alex had called Madame Cowper “the Cow” and made comments about all the fattening French foods she probably shoveled in all day long. But gaining five pounds herself had made Marcia look at fat people in a new way. She wondered if Madame Cowper also weighed herself every day and hated the number she saw on the scale.

  Marcia didn’t say anything to Madame Cowper. It was hard to imagine what she could say. She tried to smile with special apologetic friendliness when Madame Cowper greeted the class. But she didn’t think Madame Cowper even noticed.

  In art class that day, they were drawing more still lifes. This time Mr. Morrison had brought in an apple that had seen better days. It was bruised and dented on one side, as if it had been too long forgotten at the bottom of the crisper. The good thing about drawing a picture of a half-rotten apple was that you couldn’t hurt its feelings by making it look withered and shriveled and ugly. Marcia took special pains with her drawing. No one could say her apple looked like a tennis ball now.

  “Good!”

  Marcia froze. Was Mr. Morrison talking to her? She hadn’t known the word “good” was in his vocabulary. She hadn’t expected it to be used on any drawing of hers. But, sure enough, he tapped her paper approvingly with one ink-stained finger.

  “You’re coming along. You’re looking at things now. That’s what art is all about. Drawing and painting what you see in front of you.”

  Even your French teacher bulging out of her polyester pantsuit?

  As he turned to go to the next student’s desk, Marcia decided to take a chance: “What if you drew a picture of somebody, and—well, you made them look exactly like they do in real life, but the trouble is that they look—well, awful in real life?”

  Mr. Morrison didn’t answer right away. Maybe it had been a dumb question. Then he said, “You’re not the first artist to ask this. It’s every portraitist’s dilemma, the duty to tell the truth versus the need to cater to vanity. Especially if you want to get paid. The great artists told the truth, most of them. That’s why they’re great. Wander through the galleries of any of the world’s most famous museums, and you’ll see portraits of some seriously ugly people.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “But what if—I mean, if you’re not getting paid, or anything, and it’s not that the person you’re drawing is vain exactly, but that—you made her look ugly, and you hurt her feelings. No one wants to look ugly.”

  “Ahh.” Mr. Morrison took another long pause. “The great artists painted ugly people in all their ugliness, but the other reason they’re great artists is that they also painted people in all their beauty.”

  Now it was Marcia’s turn not to understand.

  “Come here.”

  Mr. Morrison led Marcia over to a low bookcase filled with art books. He pulled out one of the fattest books and opened it at random to a portrait of a stout woman with a starchy ruff around her neck.

  “Do you know who this artist is?” he asked.

  “Um, no.” Marcia had always thought museums were boring. When Madame Cowper had taken them that summer to the Denver Art Museum to see the French Impressionists, all Marcia had cared about was how mad she was that Madame Cowper hadn’t let Alex come on the trip, because he had shot a rubber band at the picture of naked baby angels hung up in their classroom. He had hit one right on its plump little bottom. Marcia almost giggled now, remembering.

  “Rembrandt. The greatest portraitist of all time. Look at this woman. Thick neck. Bulbous nose. Wrinkled jowls. Sunken eyes. Is she ugly?”

  Marcia studied the picture. She had never really looked at a famous portrait before. “No.”

  “Why not? This isn’t some twenty-year-old babe in a bikini that Rembrandt painted.”

  “She’s—well, you can tell that she’s a nice person.”

  “‘Nice’?” Mr. Morrison twisted his lip in disdain at the word. Ms. Singpurwalla didn’t let them use “nice” in their writing, either.

  “That she has a good heart. She’s kind. And she’s lived a long time, and her life has been hard—like, maybe she lost a child, or her husband died …” Marcia thought of the sad-eyed woman at the nursing home. “And maybe she has a daughter who never comes to see her, but she loves her daughter anyway, and she, like, never gives up hoping that she will come to see her.”

  Marcia stopped. She was sounding like Lizzie!

  “All that from one portrait,” Mr. Morrison said. “If a hundred people looked at this portrait, they’d tell a hundred different stories. This is the portrait of a beautiful woman.”

  “How did he do it? How did Rembrandt do it?”

  Mr. Morrison’s laugh was bitter. “If I knew the answer to that, I probably wouldn’t be teaching in a suburban middle school whose art budget has been cut for the third year in a row.”

  Marcia walked slowly back to her desk. Mr. Morrison was standing in the aisle, apparently still lost in his own thoughts, when Marcia said, “Can I show you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Marcia opened her French notebook to the picture of Madame Cowper. She had almost ripped it up into tiny little pieces and thrown it away, but something had made her save it.

  Mr. Morrison stifled a chuckle. “Don’t tell me she saw this.”

  Marcia still couldn’t laugh about it. She nodded mutely.

  “What’d she say?”

  “Something about how I draw very well, and it was an accurate picture, but it wasn’t very kind.”

  “What do you think?”

  “That she was right. I didn’t mean for her to see it.”

  “All right, Miss Marcia Faitak. When we finish with still lifes, we’re going to try some portraits. Your assignment is to find the ugliest person you can and show his or her inner beauty. Start looking for a model.”

  So Mr. Morrison was telling her, thirteen-year-old Marcia Faitak, to be another Rembrandt. Who was he kidding? But something about the assignment made her pulse quicken. She knew where she could find a model, a whole building full of models.

  West Creek Manor Nursing Home.

  At Marcia’s next visit to the nursing home, on Wednesday, she wanted to find out whether the southern-talking man from Nashville, Tennessee, had been impressed by Mavis Getty’s dark red fingernails and soft green eye shadow. But she and Lizzie were assigned to a Miss Alberta Estes.

  “Miss,” Marcia said to Lizzie as they walked down the long corridor to find the right room.

  “Well, Emily Dickinson never married, either,” Lizzie said, sounding a bit defensive.

  “Emily who?”

  “Dickinso
n. The poet?”

  Marcia shrugged. All right, there were two old maids for her to feel sorry for.

  She knew she would regret asking her next question, but she couldn’t stop herself. “You aren’t going—Has anyone—Has anyone asked you to the eighth-grade dance?”

  Lizzie blushed. Red-haired people shouldn’t blush, Marcia thought crossly. Red hair and red skin was not a flattering combination. “Actually, two boys asked me.”

  Yes, Marcia regretted her question all right.

  “Tom asked me first, and I’m starting to like Tom. He’s on the math team, too, and he writes for the magazine, and we have a lot in common. So I told Tom I’d go with him, and then guess who asked me?”

  Marcia refused to guess. She would die if it was Alex, just shrivel up inside and die.

  “Ethan! Remember how I used to have that crush on him?”

  Overcome with relief, Marcia managed a small smile. “Slightly.”

  Lizzie laughed. “Oh, I know I made it pretty obvious. I think the whole school knew. Poor Ethan! I still have about a hundred poems I wrote to him, back in sixth grade. My poetry has improved a lot since then, let me tell you. If the best you can do for a rhyme with ‘Ethan’ is ‘heathen,’ you should stick to free verse. Anyway, Ethan asked me to the dance. And all I could think was, if only I could see sixth-grade Lizzie again, just for ten seconds, and tell her! But of course I had to turn him down. He didn’t look crushed or anything. I think he asked me for old times’ sake. And because he’s short, and I’m short.”

  Maybe two-hundred-pound Elliot Abrams would ask Marcia because he was fat and she was fat.

  Marcia willed Lizzie not to do the polite thing and ask her now if she had an invitation to the dance. Lizzie was smart. Maybe, if Marcia was lucky, Lizzie would have picked up on the desperation in Marcia’s voice earlier.

  Lizzie hesitated, as if torn between politeness and awareness. “And you … ?”

  “I’m forming an old maids’ club,” Marcia said, trying to make a joke of it. “Me, and Alberta Estes, and—who’s that poet?”

  “Emily Dickinson.”

  “Me, and Alberta, and Emily.”

  “Marcia Faitak, all you have to do is lift your pinkie, and every boy in our school would come crawling to your feet.”

  Ha! But it felt good to have Lizzie say it. Marcia lifted her pinkie high in the air and waited expectantly.

  Nothing happened, except that Lizzie laughed.

  Then Marcia noticed Alex and a boy named Todd approaching. Did she want to say hello to him, or would it be too painful?

  “Come on, Lizzie.” She and Lizzie started down the hall.

  “Hey, Marcia!” Alex called after her. She let him catch up with them. “How’s it going? So they put you and Lizzie together? Todd and I are supposed to be playing chess with these two guys. Do you know how many men they have in this place? Two. A thousand women, and two men. So we have to play chess with them every single time. At least they’re not senile.”

  “Were they in the hall when we came for orientation?” Marcia asked.

  “Yup. That’s them. Watching every girl in sight. When Todd and I showed up on Monday, they practically keeled over with disappointment.”

  “There’s another non-senile man,” Marcia said. “He’s new. From Nashville, Tennessee.”

  “How do you know so much?” It was flattering that he was ignoring Lizzie and Todd completely and focusing entirely on her.

  She made her eyes big and wide. “I have my ways. But if you see him, tell him—well, don’t tell him anything, but maybe mention the name Mavis Getty, and see what he says.”

  Alex grinned at her. “Check.” He and Todd turned into the room of one of the chess players.

  Now Marcia was the matchmaker for Sarah and Travis and for Mavis Getty and the man from Nashville. Who was going to play matchmaker for her?

  Alberta Estes was tiny, one of the few women Marcia had ever seen who needed to gain weight. She looked like a bird. Her blue eyes were bright and darting, and her hands picked constantly at a balled tissue, shredding it into tiny wisps, as if she were preparing a soft lining for her nest.

  Miss Estes, too, was thrilled at the idea of a makeover. “Oh, my!” she said. “I’m going to feel like one of those Hollywood movie stars. Do you girls know that I’ve never worn makeup in my life? Not even one speck of lipstick?”

  “Why not?” Marcia asked, rummaging in her bag for the shade she already knew she wanted: First Kiss Pink.

  “My mother died when I was four years old, and I was raised by my father and my three older brothers, on our farm on the Plains.”

  Lizzie was busy scribbling in her notebook.

  “They didn’t know anything more about girls than the man in the moon. I never had a pretty dress until the war came, and I earned the money for it myself, working in a munitions plant outside Denver. But I was too old by then to have the knack for dolling myself up. I’ve always worn my hair in this same bun. And I’ve never known how to put any of that stuff on my face.”

  “Today is the day, then!” Marcia said. “Is it okay if I take down the bun?”

  Miss Estes’s hands flew to her hair, and her eyes darted fearfully toward the mirror across from her bed. Then: “Why not?” she said.

  “Tell us more about the farm,” Lizzie prompted. “Where did you go to school?”

  “A one-room schoolhouse, two miles down the road. I walked there and back by myself, when I was six years old. My brothers were over at the regional high school. So I walked by myself, a little bit of a thing in a feed-sack dress.”

  Marcia began combing out Miss Estes’s hair. It was long and white and incredibly soft, like spun silk the color of moonlight. Marcia could tell that if it weren’t so long, it would have some natural curl to it. But she didn’t know how to cut hair, and she knew without asking that Miss Estes wouldn’t want it cut.

  Miss Estes talked on, telling Lizzie about the hard work on the farm—the endless battle against dust and dirt and grinding poverty. The only time in her life that she had ever escaped from the farm was during the three wartime years that she worked in the factory.

  “Oh, the fun we had!”

  But after the war she had gone back home to keep house for her father and her remaining brother. One brother had married; the other had been killed on D-day, during World War II.

  “Why didn’t you ever marry?” Marcia asked, even though it was Lizzie’s job to do the interview.

  “Who would have taken care of Pa and Bill?”

  “They could have taken care of themselves!” Marcia answered indignantly. Miss Estes just smiled.

  She looked so pretty when Marcia was finished—her eyes accented by blue eye shadow, her lips pink, her hair falling past her shoulders like a bridal veil. Too pretty to be the model for Marcia’s “ugly but beautiful” portrait. Maybe Alberta Estes deserved the man from Nashville? But Mrs. Getty had spoken for him first.

  Lizzie was thanking Miss Estes and putting her notebook away.

  “Were you—were you happy?” Marcia suddenly blurted out.

  “Oh, yes,” Alberta Estes said. “I’ve had a wonderful life. And this has been a wonderful day.”

  nine

  Next Monday’s lady was as opposite from Alberta Estes as two ninety-year-old ladies in a nursing home could be. Mrs. Agnes Applebaum looked up with a scowl when Lizzie and Marcia presented themselves at the door of her room.

  “Who in blazes are you?” she barked at them.

  “I’m Marcia Faitak, and she’s Lizzie Archer,” Marcia told her. She didn’t need her tote of Jay-Dub samples this time. There was nothing that would improve Agnes Applebaum’s appearance more than a simple smile.

  “We’re here to visit you,” Lizzie explained timidly.

  Mrs. Applebaum’s scowl deepened. “Why? Out of the goodness of your little hearts? Wait. I know. It’s for a Girl Scout badge. Don’t they have some badge for visiting the elderly? Or—you’re not from
a church, are you? Handing out Bibles to help us get ready to meet our Maker? When I meet mine, I have a thing or two to tell Him that isn’t in any Bible.”

  “We’re from West Creek Middle School,” Marcia said. Somehow she knew that wouldn’t appease Agnes Applebaum.

  “Why aren’t you home doing your schoolwork? I know, this is your schoolwork. And they wonder why kids today can’t read or write or do a simple sum. Because they’re off bothering people in nursing homes who are waiting to die in peace.”

  “Maybe we should come back another time?” Lizzie offered.

  Agnes Applebaum laughed. To Marcia’s surprise, the laugh didn’t sound altogether hostile. “When? Do you think I’m like this only on Mondays? That on Tuesdays I’m a lovable old grannie with a twinkle in her eye?”

  Marcia decided to try a more direct approach. “Do you want us to go?”

  Mrs. Applebaum considered the question. Then she gave an exaggerated sigh. “If this is your schoolwork, you might as well do it. If you don’t, it’ll be something else they can blame me for. And they’ll send in some social worker from the county to find out why I’m not more ‘cooperative.’ No, come on in. Make yourselves at home. Both of you.”

  Marcia and Lizzie entered the room and perched themselves on the edge of Mrs. Applebaum’s bed. She’d probably yell at them for it, but there wasn’t any other place to sit.

  “All right, what can I do for you? Don’t tell me. You”—she pointed at Lizzie—“you’re here to record all my fascinating stories in your notebook and then send them off to the West Creek Historical Society to preserve for posterity. You’re going to ask me if I peed in a privy and made my clothes out of burlap feed sacks. And you”—she pointed at Marcia—“you’re going to smear some crud on my wrinkled old face and tell me how bee-you-ti-ful I look, not a day over eighty-five. Am I right?”

  Marcia looked at Lizzie. Lizzie’s freckles stood out vividly against her pale skin. Suddenly Marcia felt angry. It might not be any fun to be Agnes Applebaum, but it wasn’t all that much fun to spend time with her, either.