“Some women just stop trying,” my ex-husband’s fiancée told me. Four months later, she cornered me at my son’s wedding to ask what I’d done.
The text came on a Tuesday in February, with a smiley face at the end.
"Hi Deb!! It's Brooke. Would love to grab a coffee before the wedding, just us girls? 😊"
Brooke is thirty-seven. She is engaged to Gary, who was my husband for twenty-four years. Our son Kyle was marrying Hannah in June, and I had been doing a very good job of being the calm one about all of it.
I knew it wasn't really about coffee. I went anyway. That's what you do when your son is getting married.
The café
She was already there when I walked in, in a cream blazer with her hair done like she was going somewhere after. She'd ordered for me. A vanilla something with whipped cream. I haven't had whipped cream in my coffee since Kyle was in high school.
We talked about the seating chart for about four minutes. Then she tilted her head and looked at me. Not at my eyes. At my mouth.
"I really admire you," she said. "Some women just stop trying after a certain age. I think it's brave."
She smiled while she said it. A big, warm, sorority smile.
I said something. I don't remember what. I remember my hand on the cup, and that I couldn't feel how hot it was. I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot for twenty minutes with the engine off.
Twenty-four years
I want to be fair to Gary. He wasn't cruel. He just stopped seeing me somewhere around year fifteen, and after a while I stopped seeing me too.
I ran the house. Kyle's practices, Gary's mother's appointments, the dentist, the dog, the gutters. I was the person everyone called. Nobody calls the person everyone calls to ask how she's doing.
When we split, I got the house and the dog and a very quiet kitchen. I went to work, came home, watched the same three shows. I didn't think of it as giving up. I thought of it as taking a break.
And somewhere in there I stopped wearing anything on my lips.
I had a reason. Every lipstick I owned ended up in the little lines above my top lip by lunch, like paint running into the cracks of an old fence. The darker ones made my mouth look like it had been drawn on with a marker. The lighter ones made me look ill. So one day I just didn't put any on. Then I didn't the next day either.
That night after the coffee, I took my glasses off in the bathroom and leaned close to the mirror over the sink. My lips were the same color as the rest of my face. Thin. Dry at the corners. A little straight line under my nose that didn't say anything at all.
That's what Brooke had been looking at.
"And you believe her?"
Tess lives two houses down. She's fifty-six, she's been widowed six years, and she is the only person I know who will tell you the truth before you've finished asking for it.
She saw me sitting in my car in my own driveway that Saturday and knocked on the window with her knuckle.
I told her about the coffee. I did a very good impression of Brooke's head tilt.
Tess didn't laugh. She said, "And you believe her?"
"She's not wrong, Tess. Look at me."
"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you for eleven years." She opened my car door. "Come inside. I made too much chili."
I stayed until almost midnight. I cried twice, once about Brooke and once about something Kyle said when he was nine that I hadn't thought about in decades. Tess just kept refilling my bowl.
The photo
In April, Hannah asked me for a picture of Gary and me on our wedding day, for a table at the reception with both sets of parents and grandparents. Three generations, she said. She was so sweet about it.
I found it in a shoebox in the hall closet. Me at twenty-nine, laughing at something off camera, mouth wide open, a bright color on my lips that I had picked out myself at a department store counter and thought was the most glamorous thing I'd ever owned.
I didn't recognize her.
I mean that. I sat on the hall floor with that photo for a long time, trying to remember the last time I'd laughed with my whole face.
The phone call
Three weeks before the wedding, Hannah called me on her lunch break. She sounded like she'd been working up to it.
"I wanted you to hear it from me," she said. "Gary asked if Brooke can be in the parents' photo. With you. Kyle said it's up to you."
So there it was. The family picture.
Gary, me, and the woman who thought I was brave for not trying, standing right next to us in some perfect dress.
I told Hannah it was fine. Of course it was fine. It was her day.
Then I hung up and wrote "We regret that we are unable to attend" in my notes app. I deleted it. I wrote it again. I deleted it again. At 11:30 that night I texted Tess.
"Are you up?"
She was at my back door in her robe four minutes later.
"You didn't let yourself go."
"You didn't let yourself go, Deb," Tess said, at my kitchen table, very slowly, like she was explaining it to a jury. "You let yourself get talked over. For twenty-four years. Then you got so used to it you started doing it to yourself."
I didn't have an answer for that.
Then she did something I didn't expect. She reached into the pocket of her robe, set something small on the table and slid it over.
"My niece sent me two after Christmas," she said. "I've been wearing this since January. You never noticed, did you?"
I hadn't. That was the point, she said. It looked like nothing in the tube. Just a little gold inside. She put it on right there, no mirror, and in a minute or two her lips were a color. Not a lipstick color. Hers. Like her mouth on a good day, twenty years ago, after a walk in the cold.
"It's called Areliaa. It changes based on your own body chemistry," she said. "Jojoba oil, squalane and vitamin E, so it doesn't dry you out, and it doesn't go hunting for the little lines like the old stuff."
"Tess, I'm not doing a lipstick so Brooke likes me."
"Good," she said. "Don't. Do it so you're in the picture."
I ordered it at 11:52 that night, mostly so she'd go home. It was buy one, get one free when I did it. I gave the second one to Hannah.
Five weeks
It came on a Thursday. I didn't open it until Saturday, because I was a little afraid of it.
It went on like nothing, like Tess said. I stood there in the bathroom feeling silly. Then, standing at the sink, I watched my mouth come back. That's the only way I can describe it. Not painted. Back.
It wasn't dramatic. It was just me, with my lips where they're supposed to be.
Over the next five weeks I kept a list, because I didn't trust myself:
- The man at the dry cleaner, who I've seen every two weeks for six years, asked if I'd gotten new glasses. Same glasses.
- My boss asked if I'd been on vacation.
- My sister on FaceTime stopped in the middle of a story about her gutters and said, "Wait. What's different?"
And I started doing things I hadn't done in years. I sang in the car. I bought a dress. Not a mother-of-the-groom dress in taupe. A green one, the color of a wine bottle, that the saleswoman at the department store pulled off the rack and held up to me without asking.
"This one," she said. "With your coloring."
I hadn't thought about my coloring since 2009.
The wedding
It was in June, outside, under a big white tent at a farm about an hour south of town.
I put it on in the car before I got out, and once more before the photos. The green dress. My mother's earrings. My own mouth.
Gary saw me first. He did a small double take, the kind you'd miss if you hadn't been married to him for twenty-four years. Then he said, "You look nice, Deb," the way you'd tell someone their porch looked nice.
I said thank you. I didn't feel anything at all, and that was a gift.
Hannah hugged me and whispered, "Look at you." Kyle didn't say anything. He just held on a little longer than usual.
Then it was time for the parents' photo. Gary in the middle. Brooke on his left in pale blue, perfect as ever. Me on his right.
Somebody behind the camera told everyone to squish in, and Kyle yelled "Mom, do the laugh!" from the side, an old joke from when he was little, and I laughed. My whole face. Right there in the family picture.
I danced for most of the night. With Kyle, with Hannah's grandfather, with Tess, who came as my date and wore sequins on purpose.
"What did you do?"
At around ten I went to the ladies' room in the barn. Bright lights, big mirror, a line of women fixing their faces. I was washing my hands when Brooke came in behind me.
She didn't fix her face. She just stood next to me and looked at me in the mirror. At my mouth again, actually. But it was a different look this time.
"Can I ask you something?" she said. "What did you do? You look so different."
I dried my hands. I thought about that coffee, and the whipped cream, and the twenty minutes in my car with the engine off.
"Somebody told me some women let themselves go," I said. "I decided to come back."
Then I went back out and danced with Tess until they turned on the big lights.
One last thing
I know how this sounds. I'm not telling you a little tube changed my life. Tess changed my life, and Hannah did, and maybe a little bit Brooke did, which I'll never tell her.
But I'll tell you what the lipstick did. It gave me back one small thing I'd quit without noticing, and that one small thing reminded me I was still in here.
If somebody told you a story about yourself that you never agreed to, you don't have to argue with them. You just have to stop believing it.
The parents' picture is on my fridge now. Brooke is in it. So am I. You'd never know which one of us was supposed to be the brave one.