Maryna thinks Erin really should try some lipstick.
We are four, maybe five drinks into the afternoon when she decides this.
“Why you don’t wear leepsteek? You have beautiful leeps. Pearl, look me and tell me truthfully: does Erin have beautiful leeps?”
Erin grins at me from across the booth.
Galentine’s Day, 2013. Sixteen women, sixteen cash cards.
I grin back at Erin. “Erin’s leeps – hic! – lips are like curvaceous little –“ I pause and forget to start up again. I am looking for something to convey the curving, plumpness of her lips but the only words that spring to mind are “gummi worms” and “kiss cushions”.
This will not do.
I laugh to myself.
“I’ve tried wearing lipstick,” Erin says to the booth at large. “It always gets on my teeth. I just pretty much stick to gloss.”
“You,” I say, cleverly pointing out the obvious and chuckling to myself, “have to stop – hic! – applying it to your teeth. ’snot teethstick!”
Maryna regards me patiently. “No, my dear,” she says, “ees not teethsteek.” She and Erin share a smile, and I blink heavily. Perhaps I should order a water…
Erin shakes a vigorous finger at me. “You,” she says.
Maryna and I both stop what we’re doing and stare.
“That’s all,” Erin says, waving her hand dismissively. “Just YOU.”
These things are funny to us.
Maryna finishes applying the first color to Erin’s lips. “You like?”
Erin pulls a compact from her purse, examines her lips in the tiny mirror. “Wow. I love this. Pearl, do you love this color?”
I, too, love the color, and signify so by nodding drunkenly.
“Ees official,” Maryna says. “We loff first color. Mebbe we smoke now, come back and try another color?”
And this is funny to us, too.
And you know why?
Because Happy Galentine’s Day, that’s why.
