And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida Page B

mall. The cheapest option is eyelash tints. For ten dollars, the woman with extraordinarily tweezed eyebrows tells us, we won't have to wear mascara for a month.

    "I don't wear mascara anyway," I tell the woman.

    "Well, now you won't need to," she says, and smiles. I can't stop looking at her eyebrows— they look like birds in flight, miles away.

    Freddie and I are seated next to each other on bar stools. The woman asks us to close our eyes and she uses a paintbrush to smooth blue-black dye over our lashes. "I'll come back in twenty minutes to check on you," she says. When my eyes were open I didn't notice what an awful, abrasive voice she has. "You might feel some stinging. But whatever you do, don't rub your eyes," the voice tells us.

    Freddie and I sit facing each other but with our eyes sealed. Our knees knock against each other's. She grabs my knee between hers and I try to extract myself from her grip.

    "Stop it," I say.

    Freddie laughs. "You used to always say that," she says. "What?" I ask.
    " 'Stop it.' Remember when Dad and I called you 'the stop-it girl.' " "Stop," I say.
    She laughs.

    We sit in silence for a moment. Inside my eyelids, I see white speckles, the Milky Way. Freddie releases my knee but I don't pull it away. She takes my hands in her hands. We hold hands for longer than I think we've ever held hands. I can't see her face but I know her expression as it changes. At first her hands are shaky and then they're calm, steady, strong. We sit there until the woman comes back to tissue off the dye from our lashes.

    At home, I look through my old art books, ones I bought at garage sales when I was in high school. The woman up the street, in another of the sherbet-colored stucco houses that line
    our block, would have a sale on the second Saturday of every month. She had been the nurse to a dying man, and when he passed on he left her his house, his money, his possessions.

    At each of the garage sales she'd put out more of his art books. I'd buy them, carrying them home in a stack with great difficulty; I'd learned paper bags couldn't support their weight. Once home, I'd sit in my room and pencil check marks next to the pictures I liked the most.

    Now, looking through the books, I try to remember what I could possibly have seen in some of the checked-off paintings—the Piero della Francescas; the Botticellis—besides the order and the beauty, the art looking like art. I study Venus's slanting shoulder, its untruthful anatomy. No shoulder slopes like that.

    There have to be more important things to paint, to see, to do. There has to be more than all this symmetry and beauty. When I get back to school I'll study the Baroque period , I decide. That will fill some of the days, some of the gaps.

    I ask my father if we can go visit Uncle Lou—it's been a while since I saw him. I think I need to talk to someone old. My father calls Lou and we arrange to drive to Sacramento the next afternoon.

    My father drives and I sit in the passenger seat with my shoes off, my feet on the dashboard. It's sunny out. I roll down the window and stick my arm out the window, my palm turned forward.

    It's in the car that my father gives me the strangest news. I was eleven when he wanted to tell me about his marital problems. "I just want you to know that your mother and I don't have a normal marriage," he said. We were driving down a steep hill and I thrust my head out the window so the breeze would blow away the rest of what he was saying.

    "Look out for the guy who wears an American tie," my father says to me now, as we approach the Bay Bridge.

    "Why? Who's he?" I say.

    "He stands on the corner here and if you give him a dollar, he'll give you a prayer." "The same one or a different one each time?" I ask.
    "Well, it used to be a different one, but lately I've noticed that it's just the same one. I think he's gotten lazy."

    When we get to the man's usual corner my father slows down, looks around, and then sighs