Warpaint by Stephanie A. Smith Page A

help?”
    Quiola gave her mother a tragic look. “No.”
    â€œHonest to Peter, Quiola, why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
    â€œI can’t. Not here.”
    Rose folded her arms and looked her daughter over. “All right, then, let’s go. Britta? Be back in five?”
    â€œNo problem, boss.”
    Nodding, Rose threaded her way through the orchestra of preparation that was her restaurant’s kitchen ballet, to a set of back stairs that led to her apartment. Quiola followed, watching her mother’s small back and slightly hunched shoulders, wondering how to say, how to tell her mother what she knew: she was dying.
    Once they’d gotten inside, and the noise from below muted to a distant rumble, Rose felt her daughter’s forehead again, and took a bottle of aspirin out of a kitchen shelf. She filled a glass from the tap, gestured for Quiola to sit at the little kitchen table beside an open window, and sat opposite to her. “All right, honey. Tell me. What’s wrong?”
    Quiola shook her head, then lowered it, to stare at her feet.
    Rose waited. After a few more tense moments she said. “It’s not a boy. Tell me it’s not a boy? Not that no-good Romero you went around with last year?”
    â€œMom, we were just friends. He’s funny.”
    â€œFunny or crazy. Depends on how you look at it but I say friends like that one you don’t need.”
    â€œWell it’s not him. It’s not a boy. You’ve warned me a thousand times –”
    â€œWith good reason. You don’t need to make the same mistake I did.”
    â€œFine. That’s not it, anyway – I – I think I’m dying.”
    â€œYou think… for heaven’s sake, Quiola what a thing to say to your mother! Why do you think you’re dying?”
    â€œI’m bleeding and it won’t stop. I’ve soaked right through the toilet paper I stuffed…up…there…I’m dying, Mama. I couldn’t tell the nuns – it’s too awful to be bleeding….”
    â€œDown there? Oh, sweetheart, it’s all right. You’re fine! You’re not dying, you’re just growing up. Don’t you remember I told you about the flower – the monthlies. I told you it would probably start soon, just a few weeks ago.”
    Quiola stared. “But you said it would just be a little – not like this, I’m
bleeding.
”
    Rose stood up. “I thought you would be like me, a little trickle at first. But of course we aren’t all the same. Some of us start with a flood. Your grandmother did – but she had her old-fashioned ways of handling it, and said it just made her proud. Proud! Of the curse? Let me get you what you need – you’ve seen my pads, haven’t you?”
    â€œCurse?”
    Rose turned around. “Don’t you think so? Most of my friends call it the curse. A mess like that, every month and for what? To have a baby – thank god you’re bleeding and not pregnant is all I have to say.”
    Â 
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    Paris, 1960. C.C. traveled aboard a steamer, to live in the City of Light for a while, with Liz Moore. Paul had willed Lizzie everything, having no one else, which included a Paris studio he hadn’t used since before the War, and it was in that one, high-ceilinged room, the kitchen a mere hotplate wedged into a closet with a sink and a glass fronted door, so the ‘kitchen’ could be closed off from the ‘dining room’ and miniscule bathroom, that she’d found a certain peace about his passing. Not an entirely peaceful peace, lined like a too-thin linen garment with a sheer slip of fear: what would she do now, without him?
    Yet more immediately that summer she had another question: what was she going to do with Nancy’s daughter? Twenty-four, all grown but as far as Liz could see, Smith College hadn’t changed the Davis girl much, though