How can I possibly write with them all every day? How does the purple pen, the playful shade I turn to most often for commenting on student essays, feel when she sifts down to the bottom of the pile and I forget her there? And what is that smell rising up from this immaculate place? Fresh leather, like a new car, with mint and floral notes at the finish. Have you seen these women in the department stores or, most astoundingly, at the ticket counter in the airport with their coordinated luggage? How they unsnap their handbags, reach in with manicured fingers, and pull back just the thing you imagine those enviable fingers reached in to retrieve? How smooth they make this reaching seem, as if their whole lives are this effortless, this finding of things without even looking. I should be a person who has designated compartments in her purse-one for a phone, one for a wallet, one for those blasted sunglasses, and one with a zipper for the lipsticks: just two at a time, a tinted lip balm and a color. I should be a person who has her act together, inside and out. I should have made more progress, and I shouldn’t be so afraid. But that, as I’m trying to get to here, was a long, long time ago, and while today’s dusty bits are usually the crumbs of granola bars or a crushed Tylenol, I know I should be a better person by now. Back in grad school, when I was a smoker, there was always a dusting of tobacco and the clank of a dead lighter or two, sometimes the lepidopteran flap of the spare flights I carried-for real-for late-night darts at the bar. I lay out a sheet of newspaper on the dining room table and I shake the bag upside down, letting the detritus of my quotidian life rain or float down, depending on weight and density. Of course, I intend to clean the lipsticks out, and on these bad days, I do, because I have no other choice. That’s how gruesome melted Sheer Ambrosia Fire looks under the nails and between the fingers.
Most days, this works out okay, but sometimes I leave my bag in a hot car or the sharp end of one of my keys knocks the lid off a tube-who knows how it happens, really?-and then the next time I reach into the depths of my bag for a fallen tin of mints or the magnetic sunglasses that are forever eluding me, I feel something wet, something gooey, and my hand comes back up looking as if I’ve been in some kind of accident, like instead of being the kind of woman who lets old lipsticks accumulate, I might be another kind, the kind who keeps razor blades in the bottom of her bag, just in case. I carry fears around the way some women accumulate old lipsticks in the bottom of their handbags.
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