“You couldn’t have worn them anyway,” said Maggie, moving her head from side to side.
“Sure I could have. Aunt Rose pierced my ears when I was a baby. I just stopped wearing earrings when I got married. Now the holes are closed up.”
“Why did you stop?”
“It used to be something that only girls right off the boat did. Girls like your aunt Margaret didn’t have pierced ears.”
“And you were a girl like Aunt Margaret?”
Connie grinned. “I tried to be,” she said. “I don’t think I was very good at it.”
“Oh, Connie, what a beautiful job you’ve done,” Aunt Cass said. “Will her hat fit over that hairdo?”
“No,” Connie said. “I don’t think she’ll wear the hat. It’s not really her, Cass. And the other girls are wearing hats and dresses that are entirely different.”
Aunt Cass narrowed her lips, but she looked again at Maggie’s hair, and then she sighed. “Maybe God will count the ribbons as a hat,” she finally said.
“Go into the bathroom and see if there’s any Vaseline,” Connie said to Maggie. “Put a little on your lips and blot it off.”
Her mother moved aside and Maggie saw herself in the mirror. She could not believe what her mother had done, how she had managed, with her Touch ’n’ Glo creamy ivory and her Autumn Roses cake rouge and her eyebrow pencil, to turn Maggie into a shadow of Connie herself, a manufactured double. She leaned forward but try as she might she could not make the resemblance go away, and it suddenly occurred to her that this was the only difference between the two of them—a little color, a little pressed powder, a few years.
“Thank you,” she said to Connie’s reflection.
“It was my pleasure,” Connie replied, as though the two of them were partners in some antiquated dance.
Maggie drew one of Mary Frances’s housecoats tight around her lanky body and staggered into the bathroom in her new dyed-to-match damask pumps. Monica was leaning into her own reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. The bathroom was strewn with curlers, bobby pins, pots of cream and foundation, bottles of perfume.
“Excuse me,” Maggie said, moving past her cousin to reach for the Vaseline on top of the toilet tank. Monica recoiled, and Maggie thought she was about to get nasty again when suddenly she moved toward the toilet and fell to her knees. The retching was painful to hear, as if Monica had a fishbone in her throat; a roller fell from the front of her hair onto the floor. Maggie leaned forward, picked it up, and held back the long curl so it would not get in Monica’s way.
The vomiting seemed to go on and on, and Maggie felt stupid standing there, bent over, holding a piece of hair, afraid to move. She had seen the same thing happen too many times to her mother to misunderstand, and this made her feel stupid, too. She remembered saying to her cousin, “You don’t fool me one bit,” in the bridal salon, and she knew everyone had thought she meant more than she was saying. Perhaps, she thought, her grandfather would in fact have wanted the wedding to take place today, funeral or no funeral. She could see the red welt on Monica’s tanned back where the merry widow had pressed into her flesh, and when her cousin finally rose, using the toilet to hoist herself from her knees like an old woman, Maggie saw that her mascara had run in gray rivulets all over her face, making little rivers in the pink of her makeup. Her eyes were bloodshot, her lips swollen, the veins on the part of her breasts spilling from the top of her fancy underpinnings blue and swollen too.
Maggie watched Monica in the mirror as she methodically began to apply cold cream to take off her ruined makeup. When Monica’s face was bare, she put out her hand peremptorily, her polished nails pearly, and retrieved the roller. She twisted the long lock of hair back up and began to redo her face, first blotting a single tear that ran down the side of her nose.
“Monica,” said Maggie, “I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry it turned out like this.”
She knew she had said the wrong thing when she saw the usually implacable face contort. Her cousin whirled round to face her, so close that they were almost touching. “You just don’t get it, do you, Maria Goretti,” Monica said, her