miCRo: “Professional Makeup” by Julia LoFaso

Associate Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: Accruing through associative leaks, discarded images, and air-brushed turns, the form of Julia LoFaso’s “Professional Makeup” models its speaker’s sentiment: “Among the bitten shrimp, the bottoms-up ballet flats, I feel like part of an assemblage.” The mother is both automaton, site for production, and inescapably bodily. This piece considers what makes us up and what it means to be a “whole self,” especially in the midst of motherhood.

To hear Julia read her story, click here:

Professional Makeup

If you wore makeup, someone told me at sixteen, you’d be a knockout. But no shellacking of concealer can remove these bags, dark crescents I was born with.

I get sleep, drink water: it’s not about that.

Later when I am a bridesmaid (matron?), a makeup artist manages to disappear my moons, but I suspect the sudden brightness has more to do with her soothing hands than the second skin they smooth onto me. My whole body feels refreshed that day, my whole self. That day I am away, for the first time ever, from my nearly six-month-old daughter. My ten-hour vacation is not without anxiety: her weight has recently dipped due to a drop in my milk supply, my body’s sudden unwillingness to be food, and I’m worried about what that means for her. Formula, of course, except she won’t drink it. So I have to milk myself more often, says the doctor, and swallow capsules full of fenugreek until my pores leak the smell of curry and then, once a certain threshold is reached, maple syrup.

Beginning in 2005 a mysterious maple syrup smell occasionally floated over New York City. Air samples were collected, public assurances issued, antennae raised.

Poison? we wondered. Anthrax? Antifreeze? It’s easy to forget those years right after, when we were all so alert to the idea of airborne warfare. But like many things from the early ’00s that faded—exposed thongs, candy-colored computers, Lindsay Lohan’s long and fruitful career—its power was overstated. Turns out people were just processing fenugreek at a Jersey plant across the river.

Which only confirms what I’ve suspected for six months: my body is a factory.

At a wedding there is no ideal place to pump, so I do it in the combination bridal suite and wedding-band break room, perched on a Marshall amp.

I do it with my dress around my waist, draped in someone else’s pashmina, surrounded by bruised flower petals, half-eaten appetizers, and street clothes. Among the bitten shrimp, the bottoms-up ballet flats, I feel like part of an assemblage.

I catch my reflection in the full-length mirror: funnel-shaped flanges suctioned to pale breasts, face brilliant with the makeup artist’s magic, looking more awake than I have in years, maybe ever. The pump heaves out its rhythmic sighs. Ducts prickle, priming to spray. Later I’ll remember feeling futuristic: a milk bot, some lethal life machine, like every wet part of me could shoot lasers and kill for love.

Julia LoFaso‘s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Conjunctions, Day One, Underwater New York, Wigleaf, New South, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She lives in Queens.

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