One day a woman asked my mom if it didn’t bother her that her six-year-old daughter had fuller lashes than she herself did, even though she used mascara and a lash curler. Mom always told me there was an old Gypsy saying: if you get too many compliments about one particular thing, that thing will eventually disappear. That was always her explanation, too, whenever I asked why I no longer had any lashes. I have a lingering mental image, though: In the middle of the night I wake up and mom is sitting on the side of my bed where she usually sits to read me stories. She’s holding my head still, and I feel cold metal along the edge of my eyelids. Snip. On both eyes. And mom’s voice says, “It’s only a dream, my child.”
With my fingertips I’d always touch the stubs of the lashes. If mom’s Gypsy story were true, the lashes would have fallen out completely. But I can’t really pin it on mom, either, because I often blur the distinctions between reality, lies, and dreams. These days in particular I can’t keep things straight because of all the years I took drugs. The wildest party I ever had happened when my friend Corinna realized Michael, my drug-dealer boyfriend at the time, had forgotten his stash of drugs at her house. There was no occasion for a party. It’s just what you say you’re doing when you take drugs. Partying.
Michael kept all his blotters and pills and packets of speed and coke in a fake soda can. It looked just like a normal can of cola, but you could screw the top off.
Michael always tried to stuff enough drugs into it so it weighed exactly as much as a real can of cola would.
Corinna said: “Check it out, Helen—Michael’s can. He wouldn’t mind, would he?”
She grinned at me, wrinkling her nose in the process. That always means she’s genuinely excited.
We blew off school, bought some red wine at a kiosk, and left a message for Michael on his answering machine: “If you’re looking for cola, we found a whole case in Corinna’s room. You won’t get pissed if we start drinking without you, will you?”
We were big on using badly coded language over the phone. When you’re taking drugs you get paranoid and confuse yourself with Scarface. You think you’re being listened to and there’s about to be a raid, arrests, and a court proceeding during which the judge will say, “So, Helen Memel, what do the words ‘laundry detergent,’ ‘pizza,’ and ‘painting’ really mean? At no point during this time were you doing laundry, eating pizza, or painting. We didn’t just tap your phone; you were also under surveillance.”
Then began our race against time. The idea was to take as many drugs as possible before the first one took effect and before Michael showed up. Anything we didn’t slurp down we’d have to give back. At nine in the morning we started taking two pills at a time, washing them down with wine. It didn’t seem right to snort speed and coke so early in the morning, so we made minigrenades out of toilet paper.
Half a packet for each us—which is half a gram—poured onto a little piece of toilet paper, skillfully wrapped up, and gulped down with lots of wine. Maybe there was less than a gram per packet—Michael was a good businessman and he messed with everyone a little on the amounts. So he could earn more. One time I weighed something that was supposed to be a gram. Not even close. But people can’t exactly register a complaint with the police. That’s just the way it is on the black market. No consumer protection.
Anyway, these paper grenades are very tough to get down. It takes practice. If it doesn’t get washed down your throat right away, the minigrenade opens up and the bitter powder sticks to your mouth and gums. You definitely don’t want that.
I guess everything started to kick in. I can only remember the highlights. Corinna and I laughed the whole time and made up stories set in a fantasy land. At some point Michael came by to pick up his can and cursed us out. We giggled. He said if all the stuff we’d ingested didn’t kill us, we would have to pay him back. We just laughed.
Later we puked. First Corinna, then me from the sound and smell of hers. In a big, white bucket. The puke looked like blood because of the red wine. But it took us a long time to figure out why it looked like that. And then we realized there were undigested pills floating around. This seemed like a terrible waste to us.
I said: “Half and half?”
Corinna said: “Okay, you first.”
And so for the first time in my life I drank someone else’s puke. Mixed with my own. In big gulps. Taking turns. Until the bucket was empty.
A lot of brain cells die on days like that. And this, along with other similar parties, definitely took a toll on my memory. There’s another memory that I’ve never been sure is even a memory. I come home one day from elementary school and call out hello. Nobody answers. So I think nobody’s home.
Then I go into the kitchen and lying there on the floor are my mom and my brother. Hand in hand. They’re asleep. My brother’s head is resting on his Winnie the Pooh pillow and mom’s is on a folded-up, light-green dish towel.
The oven door is open. It smells like gas. What to do? I saw a movie once where somebody struck a match and the whole house blew up. So, nice and slow, I carefully creep over to the oven—there are people sleeping here—and turn off the gas. Then I open the windows and call the fire department. I can’t think of the number for the hospital in order to get an ambulance. Oh, both are on the way … yes, they’re still sleeping … I can ride with them. Two ambulances. A whole crew. Flashing blue lights. Sirens. They have their stomachs pumped at the hospital and dad comes directly from work.
Nobody in the family has ever spoken about it. At least not with me. That’s why I’m not sure whether maybe I dreamed it or made it up and have just convinced myself it’s true over the years. It’s possible.
Mom trained me to be a good liar. To such a degree that I believe most of my own lies. Sometimes it can be fun. Other times it can be maddening, as in this case. I guess I could just ask mom.
“Mom, did you used to cut off my eyelashes out of jealousy? And another thing: Did you try to kill yourself along with my brother? And: Why didn’t you want to take me with you?”
I never find the right moment.
At some stage my eyelashes grew back and I always curled them and used mascara to make the best out of them—and to piss off my mother in case that memory is a genuine memory. Top and bottom, I want my real lashes to look like plastic false eyelashes from the sixties. I mix cheap and expensive mascara to make the ultimate lashes. The best way is to use the end of the brush, where the mascara accumulates, and just glob it onto the lashes. The goal is for people half a mile away to think: “Wow, she’s a walking set of lashes.”
Mascara is always advertised as not being sticky, and the brush is always supposed to keep the lashes separate so there are no clumps. But for me those are reasons not to buy a mascara. When my relatives and neighbors figured out that I never remove the mascara and just put more on every day, a panic broke out.
“If you don’t remove the mascara from your lashes, they never get any light or air—and then they’ll fall out.”
I thought: It couldn’t be any worse than it used to be. And I thought up cool tricks to avoid water ever getting on my lashes. After putting so much money and effort into my lashes, I can’t just let them get ruined in the shower. And besides, when months’ worth of mascara slowly dissolves in hot water and runs into your eyes, it burns. You definitely don’t want that. So I shower in stages. First I wash my hair and wrap it in a towel so the water can’t get into my eyes. Then I do the rest of my body from