Whispers and Lies by Joy Fielding Page B

moving closer. “I’ll clean up later,” she announced as I felt first one tug, then another, and watched in horror as several wet clumps of hair fell to the white tile of the kitchen floor.
    “Oh, God,” I moaned.
    “Close your eyes,” Alison instructed. “Have faith.”
    With my eyes closed, the sound of cutting was even more intense. It was as if those scissors were slicing through all my protective outer layers, snipping away my secrets, sapping my strength. Samson and Delilah, I thought dramatically, taking a series of long, deep breaths, deciding to roll with the punches, go with the flow.
    “I’ll wait till after your facial to blow it dry properly. We can go into the living room now,” she instructed as I stepped over the hair lying across the white tiles, like a small area rug. “Don’t look,” she said as a shudder shook my shoulders. “Have faith. Trust me.”
    I’d already laid a bedsheet across the living room sofa in preparation for my “night at the spa,” as Alison had laughingly referred to it, and now I stood paralyzed in front of it, waiting for Alison to tell me what to do.
    “Okay. Lie down, with your head at this end, and your feet … here. That’s good. I want you to be really comfortable. You’re going to enjoy this,” Alison said as if she wasn’t sure. “Now, you get cozy, and I’ll bringall the stuff I need in here.”
    “The cucumber slices are in the fridge,” I reminded her, closing my eyes, my fingers darting about my neck, feeling for hair.
    “You didn’t have to slice them,” Alison called back from the kitchen. “I would have done that.”
    I heard her rifling around in the fridge, heard the tap running, listened to the sounds of cupboard doors opening and closing. What was she looking for?
    In less than a minute, Alison was back. “We’ll start with the exfoliating masque.”
    “Is that with a
que
or a
k?”
    She laughed. “The expensive one.”
    “Oh, good.”
    “Okay, so close your eyes, relax, think pleasant thoughts.”
    I felt something cold and slimy being spread across my face, like molasses on a slice of bread.
    “This might feel a bit weird as it starts to harden.”
    “Feels weird now.”
    “You won’t be able to talk,” she warned, slathering the product around the outlines of my lips. “So it’s best if you stay still.”
    Did I have a choice? Already it felt as if my face were encased in cement. A death mask, I remember thinking. Death
masque
, I amended, and might have laughed were it not for the stiffening of the muscles around my mouth. “For how long?” I asked through barely parted lips.
    “Twenty minutes.”
    “Twenty minutes?” I opened my eyes, started to sit up.
    Firm hands settled me back down. “Relax. The night isyoung, and we’re just getting started. Close your eyes. I’m going to put the cucumbers on them.”
    “What are the cucumbers for?” I asked, although I was no longer able to pronounce the hard
c
’s and the noun emerged as more of a verbal blur than an actual word.
    “They reduce swelling. What kind of nurse are you that you don’t know that?” she teased. Then: “Keep still. It was a rhetorical question.” She fitted the cucumber slices gently into the empty circles around my eyes. Instantly, the room darkened, as if I were wearing sunglasses. “You like that word,
rhetorical?”
    “Good word,” I managed to say without moving my mouth.
    “I’m trying to learn three new words every day.”
    “Oh?” That was an easy one.
    “Yeah, it’s kind of fun. I just open up the dictionary and point to a word, and if I don’t know what it means, I write it down and memorize the definition.”
    “Such as?”
    “Well, let’s see. Today I learned three very interesting words:
ineffable
, which means incapable of being expressed or described, like ineffable happiness, you know, so great you can’t describe it. That’s one. Then there’s
epiphany
, which was a real shock because I thought I knew