Facing Forward

Sandra Butler

On the first Tuesday of the month, the Avon lady came to Desert Manor where I was briefly living, to set up her wares on the edge of what also served as the dance floor. I watched her unpack and artfully arrange moisturizers, emollients, creams, sprays, balms, and polish. Within minutes, there was a crowd in front of the display as women, their eyes no longer what they used to be, leaned in to read the small print on the boxes. Later that afternoon, I saw a woman who always wore bright red lipstick, so assumed other facially decorative items accompanied her painted mouth and asked if she had bought makeup that afternoon.

“Oh, no, she replied, “I don’t drive anymore.” The loss of her license was the slippery slope from no longer driving to no longer getting dressed up to no longer wearing makeup.

But I drove, and while my face had aged more gradually than most of my friends, and I found ways to mention how old I was so I could delight in people’s either real or, more recently, perhaps feigned astonishment at the high number, while my face continued to rearrange itself into serious oldness.

As a young woman, I had emphasized and decorated my eyes. I lined and mascaraed them, remembering never to rub them when they itched because the carefully crafted effect shifted from sparkling to blurry and smeary. Which is not a good look at any age.

I eventually gave up eye makeup because I kept forgetting about the rubbing thing and remembering to buy the liner and wand that were the tools of my abbreviated trade. So, for the past thirty years, nothing has been added to my face to alter, augment, or improve it.

But during the COVID years, I began to see my father’s face superimposed onto mine in my computer’s Zoom square. And I didn’t like it. I mean, I liked my dad fine, but an old male face with random brown spots isn’t ever what I wanted at the top of my neck.

My daughter, who still has most of her original face, thought it would be a splendid idea to arrange a session with a professional makeup artist; a woman would teach me how to create a painted replica of my face before it fell into disarray.

The process began with me in a salon chair facing a mirror with my bare face returning my disappointed gaze. My illustrator was holding a palette easel next to a table with a large builder’s toolbox that slid open to reveal shelves of tiny jars, tubes, brushes, wands, pencils, powder, and creams in dozens of shades for every skin color. I was to be the canvas.

She assessed me with a surgically precise gaze, reached into her supplies, and daubed something on my forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin and began using a feathery brush to blend it in. Which felt like little raindrops on my face. I relaxed and imagined myself as Sandra Bullock being made up for her triumphant entrance in Miss Congeniality.

“This is just to moisturize your skin,” she said. “And now we begin,” echoing Philip Roth’s famous last sentence in his then scandalous book about Portnoy, which snapped me out of movie star relaxation and into seeing myself as Roth would have seen me, scorched in what I imagined to be his scorn. An old woman having her face painted in a small studio on a busy street in a mid- sized American town. Think of what he could do with that!

But having had decades of practice casting out male thinking and assessment, I managed to do it once again. I reanimated my Sandra Bullock fantasy, Philip Roth fading into the ether, evaporating in his own misogyny.

Nearly an hour later, after her eventual final pat, smooth, and spray, my face still had every one of its deep lines, but there were no more brown spots and truly imposing crème brûlée eyes.

Alison returned me to Desert Manor after lovingly giving me a gift bag she had purchased that contained all the products that had been used to redesign my face. As I walked through the lobby, I received several puzzled glances, which got Shirley’s attention, and she turned around from her bingo bar stool and hollered across the entire room,

“Are you OK?”

Did I look like I had been in a fight and ended up with two black eyes? The crème brûlée may have darkened. I certainly didn’t look like I had when I’d left. Everyone turned around and stared at my unfamiliar heavily decorated appearance. The game paused as I embarrassedly and hurriedly made my way through the great room. Averting my face as best I could, I assured all of them with a clipped,

“I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t fine. I wanted to look like myself again, even if that meant looking like my father with brown spots. I wanted to take all that stuff off my face but didn’t own any makeup remover. Why would I? My initial application of Pond’s cold cream just smushed everything into a slippery, thick, multicolored coating. Rubbing with tissues merely spread it around. I resorted to the one thing I have used all my adult life. I scrubbed my face with soap. But not just any soap. French milled soap. I don’t know what milling does to a bar of soap except make it more expensive, but it’s from the south of France and brings back memories of my summers there. Which, of course, has nothing to do with my face.

I lathered up and began scouring, rubbing, splashing, getting water all over my shirt and the counter, but relieved as I began to see more and more of my wrinkled, brown-spotted skin. As I finished, I smiled at my happily breathing face, gathered all my new wands and tubes, and put them into a beautiful vase, which would be their permanent resting place.

Facing Forward is from Leaving Home at 83, a new book by Sandra Butler, to be published in October.

sandrabutler.net.