Maybe she's born with it

Smack. The mirror reflects blood red lips. Slash. The eyelashes are decorated with mascara. Puff. The face becomes a vivid pink thanks to powder. Fever! The glossy little radio sings Ella.
She was carefully painting her visage; she was more perfect than a photograph, well blown up. Every body could have look at her for hours.
Indeed Sam was observing her with all the interest an eight year-old girl could have..
She was alive and gold and she should never grow old, Sam thought.
“It’s night, Sam you should go to bed. I have a cab coming to bring me to the disco scene. I’ don’t want to be late!”
Sam nodded without saying anything. Her mother was going dancing and that was sacred.
Now the little girl was alone in her dark room. But she wanted to start her own party, so she turned on the lights, switched on the music, her hectic small feet running in her mother’s bedroom and stopping in front of the maquillage mirror. She put on everything she could reach out for, all of her friends. She wasn’t alone anymore.
“Welcome home lip gloss and rouge, come to me!”
Sam knew she wasn’t allowed; the last time her mother found out she got slapped across the face.
However Sam was hearing the rhythm of “Le freak, so chic” in the air, she couldn’t resist. There was an atmosphere and her face changed to a freaky look; she was a comfortable comic figure.
Power, energy, glory these were the keywords when she was wearing make up. She was unstoppable; the momentum of the strokes of her eyeliner built the instant into insanity.
Smash. The mirror reflects a little girl suddenly fallen asleep on the floor. Uff. Mother comes back home, sees her, has a secret tantrum and leaves her on the carpet. Wow. Too much make up.
The next morning Sam’s cereal was getting sluggish, she was watching TV and was distracted by Grace Jones’s face on the Morning show.
“She was at Studio 54 too yesterday night, naked”.
“Louise darling, a woman is never naked”, Sam, blushing, answered back trying to imitate her mother’s agent.
Louise wasn’t of the same opinion, she thought it was a fun idea, but she just continued with her chat:
“I was travolting with Bianca, Margo and Liza, when Scavullo came up to me, asked if he could take a picture, then I instantly posed. I will finally have my break through.”
The little girl rolled her eyes. She understood the antiphon.
As expected her mother never made the cover of any magazine and for sure not with Scavullo’s photos. In the meantime anyway she met a man that made her fall in love.
Or that is what she said, but the reality was that she had many men and many proposed to her. She had at her feat at least seven man-prototypes a woman could dream of (Sam synthesized them into these categories); the Charming, the Handsome, the Rich, the Famous, the Smart, the Sensitive and the Real-Man, all of them on the palm of her hand, all of them would have done anything for her, she just had to choose who would do it. But she wasn’t much of a decider. She wanted that the whole group would be at her service, one for every emotional state.
Louise wanted to create her own little harem, she wanted to overturn the custom of the one presided by males. She was the new female. She was the alpha-female.
However this didn’t last long, because eventually her passionate emotional state took over the others.
She found herself knocked up, with only one guy being guilty (in her opinion it was a crime). That man was the Real-Man.
Real-Man in many senses, first of all because he responded to every stereotype a man carries and secondly because his testosterone was very high, to the point in which almost every time he had sex, with or without condom, he would score big time. Well this was evident. He was also very caring and these just made the situation unlivable.
Obviously Louise forced the man to marry her because she was scared she would remain completely alone. BAD CHOICE.
So the period started. A seven years long period. Those seven years in which the marriage, the fights, the A.A. meetings and the divorce took place one after the other.
After those seven years Louise, the beauty queen, was completely broken inside as well as in her bank account.
Her friends, all those crazy people, the fashion pack, the people you saw in the magazines, the ones that smiled always in their limousines, the ones that were going out only at night were a very far mirage.
Yes, Louise had changed. She let her self go, because over time she failed everything. She had fucked up her modest career as publicity star after presenting herself drunk and high and with “some” pounds too much. Her marriage and her money were out the window after she started hitting the former “Real-man” with vodka bottles. She had drunken everything, all her resources.
In other words she was everything a person would expect from a fallen “meteorite”, a person longing for fame and getting burned.
But why did this happened Sam couldn’t explain it. She guessed that probably the day, the everyday had won, had overwhelmed her mother. She was disgusted by her mother’s surrender. Surrender first of all to the great pleasure of civilization, which for Sam was a metaphor for life that meant everything.
By letting her beauty go, her mother let her life go with it. Her mother became slack with time repudiating her body and therefore her soul.
“I don’t understand why you care so much about your external appearance? Anyway it will fade soon. What you are living is fake, an illusion, listen to me, I had made the same mistake. But don’t worry, you will have my same destiny and you should be happy since I am your mother!”
Sam sighed to the idea. She didn’t answer what probably wasn’t even a provocation.
A very common scene in their life together: Louise would invite home her new friends, who she met at the dry cleaning she was working at. They would play strip poker, get naked and then tease Sam for her make up mania and her prudery.
Her mother arrived at the point to fart and not care about it, moreover she would laugh.
Sam viscerally hated them. She was embarrassed by her mother’s behavior and she thought that if she stayed there much longer she would become as vulgar as her mother&friends.
She didn’t stay long enough for that to happen, because in that period she was working as a make up artist on Broadway and she was then proposed to go to Hollywood for a good job. She went, with one big suitcase. She left. She finally had escaped.
Well fate was initially good to Sam: she became quickly known for her perfect skills and knowledge, she got a scholarship to study cosmetics and she landed a job as a counselor at a very big make up company. At one point she had enough money to open her own cosmetic industry. A small one.
Nevertheless she could still feel the phantom of her mother, of what her mother represented. Even a thousands miles away she could fell her mother’s deadly breath on her neck. She could still feel the fear of becoming like her. Of letting go. She was scared of the vertigo.
She dreamed more and more often of being in front of a precipice where the dark was calling her, was telling her to fall. Everything she had created was weighing so much on her shoulders. The only solution was to fall, to jump into the nothing, in a vortex of oblivion that would destroy one by one all her past beliefs.
It would inebriate her, she would experience the loss of senses, the loss of reason and judgment, she would be finally light in the stupor of obscurity.
She too could go around naked with her girlfriends touching each other’s tits to see who had the biggest ones. She wouldn’t be anymore unsure and ashamed of her body and all the things it stood for.
That call to the annulment, to the cancellation, to the denial was close. It was a cozy idea that followed her everywhere.
However fate played again a great role in her life, maybe a horrible one, or maybe the one of her savior depending from which prospective.
As any other day, Sam went down town to her offices. At the top of the pile of letters on her desk there was an envelope that struck her the first moment she entered the room. She opened it. Written on the back was a lawyer’s office address.
Her heart was pounding. She knew what the letter meant. She put it down, went toward the phone, picked up the receiver and dialed a number.
The trial against her company started. She was accused of producing cosmetics that contained lead that caused a group of angry women and one very angry man to have skin cancer.
Samantha Schonberg Vs. foaming at the mouth ex-costumers.
The case was fast and clean. It was like a guillotine on Sam’s head. She didn’t know how it happened; her head was just off her shoulders.
The “victims” of eyeliner and lip-pencil had won the case. Sam had to pay. She closed her little company. Destroyed.
Irony: Eventually she had to go to the doctor because she had problems of her own with skin.
“You have a Squamous cell carcinoma. It’s skin cancer.
“What can I do about it? Can I take some kind of medicine?”
“I am afraid not. We have to operate because the inner layers of skin are damaged and it won’t be long till your external skin will be attacked.”
“But how is it possible? I used all possible creams, I treat my skin like my only treasure”.
“You were probably born with it. What I suggest for now is that you stop wearing make up until we’ve resolved the problem, because the make up would help the cancer spread due to all the ingredients it is made out of.”
A gasp. She drew her breath in. A tear was forced to stay in the gland.
Samantha was in the boudoir. She was already wearing her nigh-gown.
Her face was horrible, her skin was indescribable. She simply couldn’t look at it. And the worst was that a month after her operation she still couldn’t satisfy her passion. But at the same time she couldn’t stare in the mirror.
Suddenly the whole flashback came to her. A clear image of her past. A photograph of her mother. In her mind she ripped it. She ripped the connection between the two of them.
She felt strong again. Samantha wouldn’t surrender. She didn’t give a shit if she was allowed or not. She knew it would be the medicine. She knew it was the permanent centre of gravity around which she gravitated and nobody would move her.
Smack. The mirror reflects blood red lips. Slash. The eyelashes are decorated with mascara. Puff. The face becomes a vivid pink thanks to powder.
When she was done she turned off the light and went under the silk bed covers.