Parisian Beauty Salon. East Texas Engraving Co., Texas.
The Facialist
Fiction by Kate CavanaughThe facialist looked like a model from a distance, and maybe she was one, part-time, but up close, she looked like a bird. Her head was small; her eyes dark, searching, and blank. She was lovely in the way of a very different time—an antediluvian construction of a woman. Her soft-spokenness made Jenny feel uneasy, like she was shouting even though she wasn’t.
Jenny lay swaddled in a tube-shaped towel and a headband, leaving her face and neck naked. She was a crudely carved bust upon an artisan’s workbench. The facialist put tiny cup goggles over Jenny’s eyes before turning on a bright light to scan her pores. She urged Jenny’s chin this way, then that. Her index finger stroked the dryness of Jenny’s forehead and then lingered on her nose.
Jenny felt ashamed of the sebaceous filaments. Dirty blight of the city and her body’s own oil production embedded in her skin, no matter how much she sloughed. She still remembered the throb of her first pubescent nose zit. All these years later, she could locate the scar from that rude, pink pit of adolescence that she tried to lance with a pin one morning before school. The facialist dimmed the light, her assessment complete, and removed the goggles.
“I’d like to do our most oxygenating gel treatment. It will deliver carbon dioxide right to the skin to increase hydration by 117 percent. Your body will respond by pushing oxygen-rich blood to your facial tissue, increasing microcirculation and boosting collagen production.”
Jenny nodded slowly and said only: “Wow.”
“It’s $150 more.”
Jenny hesitated.
“It will resurface you entirely. You’ll look so dewy.” The facialist’s voice lifted brightly, which made the promise more believable.
“Great,” Jenny said. “Let’s do it.”
The last thing Jenny’s boyfriend said to her before he was no longer her boyfriend was that he sensed an indefinable disconnect between them, which Jenny took to mean some kind of lack within her. She would root it out, she thought, and make sure abandonment like this didn’t happen to her again. She never passed a moment in silence or stillness in the weeks following the breakup. Hers was the ceaseless movement that propels Great Whites through the sea.
In the morning, Jenny exercised until her heart beat in the flush of her cheeks. In the afternoon, she did her marketing job with determination, meeting and exceeding arbitrary deadlines. She received positive feedback on her performance, which seemed like momentum. She made protein-rich, fibrous dinners while listening to self-improvement podcasts and books on somatic healing, trying to connect with her body so she might release all that held her back. She bought new clothes that flattered her Kibbe body shape (soft classic) and her complexion (bright spring). When it came time to rest, she did so bathed in the blue of her phone, watching videos of women building six-figure businesses upon the foundation of their own well-being, and making their skin more beautiful than ever after heartbreak—not for revenge, but for transcendence.
Jenny learned of Glow Monastery in one such video. It was, according to the loveliest woman Jenny had ever seen, a skin spa and steward of the best faces in the city. Jenny booked The Rebirth Facial, with a non-refundable deposit. And now here she was.
The facialist capably warmed a honey-scented balm between her hands, and then applied it to Jenny’s face in soothing, upward strokes. Jenny closed her eyes and folded her hands across her front, remaining still while the facialist steamed and wiped with heated towels before taking a vibrating tool to her nose. Jenny shuddered, imagining the debris shaking loose, imagining her filth excavated. She loved to be dug into.
“Is this pressure ok?” The facialist massaged Jenny’s neck, urging circulation through her décolletage.
“You can press harder,” Jenny said, slightly embarrassed. Was she being greedy? Did this woman’s little wrists wield the power Jenny wanted? But her strength was surprising. The facialist wasn’t born within striking distance of a fashion runway, that much Jenny could tell now. Her hands held too much useful force, surely passed down from generations of sturdier women who ate bread and thick slices of full-fat cheese on a porch in the afternoon sun.
“We’re covering the dehydration and these little areas of congestion,” the facialist began, kneading the meat of Jenny’s cheeks with her knuckles, “but do you have any other particular areas of concern? I hardly see any lines on you.”
Jenny thought for a moment. It was true that she had generally good skin. But still, she was never happy with it. She poked, magnified, and tried products that fell short of their expensive promises. She never gave her skin all it wanted, or got what she wanted in return.
“I do have this feeling,” Jenny began, raising her hands from their resting position to assist visually. She pointed just beside her jaw, in the buccal region. The facialist immediately traced the place indicated.
“Jaw tension?” she asked.
“No,” Jenny said. “Well, maybe that too, but it’s more like a feeling of…” She tried again: “Something in there,” she said. “Deep. Like, subterranean. A kind of pull.” Jenny opened her eyes then and saw that the facialist looked determined rather than puzzled. Again, her finger, long like a knitting needle, stroked where Jenny indicated.
“I know what you mean,” she said, finally.
“You do?” Jenny was surprised. She knew there was no actual blemish.
“I think the oxygenation will help us get to it,” the facialist said. Jenny rolled her ankles beneath the top sheet in anticipation. She had again underestimated this peculiar facialist, and now gleefully imagined air rushing into her face, pushing, expanding, getting at an underlayer she could never reach. She would pay any price. Why else was her credit card called “Freedom.”
The facialist turned on a machine. It made a startup noise Jenny didn’t recognize and wouldn’t be able to describe later. A rush of air pressed her head into the molded pillow. The facialist applied a thick gel to Jenny’s face. Somewhere above, an LED light flickered red. More pressure. The facialist ran a metallic wand across her face. Jenny felt a shift along her jaw, which wasn’t painful exactly, but felt wrong, the way a loose tooth does when it’s about to wiggle free. Something beneath her skin seemed drawn along after the wand, like a magnet. The force ached like a charley horse. The machine whirred again, louder. Then the facialist yelped, so Jenny did too.
The machine sputtered and stopped. Jenny opened her eyes again and lifted her head a few inches to look around. The facialist came around to the side of the table, her eyes gleaming.
“Look!” she cried, holding something up. Jenny squinted and leaned closer to see the small thing on her broad palm. A tiny doll. Carved in Jenny's likeness—her shape, her brown hair—just one inch tall. Getting closer still, Jenny could even make out the minuscule scar on this shrunken version of her nose. It was impossible. It was dreadful. It was darling.
“Was that…where did you…” Jenny couldn’t land the question. Now she sat up fully, looking toward the corner where she’d left her clothes and shoes.
“She was in your cheek,” the facialist said, her eyebrows raised.
That couldn’t be. Jenny touched her face. She ran her tongue along her top and bottom teeth. Nothing missing. She could still pinch her cheek fat between her thumb and index finger. She looked around the room for signs of something sinister, but saw only products meant to soothe: aloe, botanicals in thick glass jars, and a gently flickering candle in the window, emitting a signature scent custom-made for the studio. Jenny looked back at the facialist, who didn’t look shocked at all. This made her feel worse.
“Don’t worry,” the facialist said. “You’re not the first. Far from it, actually.” She waved her hand, bidding Jenny to follow. Nude but for the towel, which she now pulled tighter around her, Jenny followed the facialist across the room to what looked like the door of a linen closet.
“Well,” the facialist continued, “you’re my first because I only started here a couple of months ago, and this didn’t happen at other places I’ve worked. No one had the technology. I didn’t believe it at first when the other girls here told me, but…”
Jenny’s hands shook as the facialist opened the closet door. It couldn’t be. But it was. A shelf of little dolls just like hers, with varying details. They had freckles and moles, flyaway hairs, and teeny, tiny cellulite. Some had thin lips, others had thick little ankles. One wore a miniature hoodie, another wore identifiable designer shoes. Jenny felt sick. She pressed a hand to the side of her face.
“Women just have these…these…”
“Dolls in their faces, yeah. They’re really small and shrunken to fit the pores, but the carbon dioxide increases—”
“Increases oxygen by 117 percent, you said. Right. So they grow?”
“Exactly. Like those toys in the bath. The little capsules that expand. I had dinosaur ones when I was little. I don’t know about you.”
“But what are they? How did that get there?”
“We don’t really know,” the facialist said, shrugging apologetically. “We all have our theories. I think of them as baby teeth, or maybe wisdom teeth, since some women can just live with them. We hear stories of women doing things they’ve always wanted to do after extraction. That’s what the other girls call it, by the way. One client quit her job after years of deliberation. There have been divorces, too…all kinds of things that were a long time coming. Of course, no one can prove the correlation, but it’s just what we’ve heard.” She closed the door even though Jenny wasn’t done gawking. The facialist continued:
“Some women are really sad afterward, too. That’s harder for our clients to admit. It throws them, getting destabilized by something so small. I think burdens keep some women company, and without them, it’s easy to become unmoored, especially in the city.” The facialist laughed uncomfortably. “Anyway, I’m just going on and on. What I mean is, I hope you’re not one of the sad ones.”
“I won’t be,” Jenny said, already feeling reshaped. Everything above her neck felt pleasantly loose, like a bobblehead. Did her friends know about this? What about her boss, a frequent flyer of exclusive Korean skincare treatments? The facialist was looking at her, lips parted, as if deciding whether to say more.
“Was there something else?” Jenny asked. The facialist tented her fingers.
“No, nothing else. I want you to know that we’re very discreet here. We have to be with our clientele. And in addition to my discretion, I’m going to give you some samples that I think will transform your skin barrier over time.”
After Jenny paid, the facialist hugged her, an awkward, limby hug, and Jenny made her way toward the door. In her hand was the bag of expensive sample-size products and her miniature doll. It was up to each woman, the facialist said, to take her doll or leave it.
“Why would you leave it here?” Jenny asked. Then, because she didn’t feel so confident in either option: “Or, I guess, why do other people take them home?”
“I think it’s a gut feeling women get, one way or the other, once they’re up close to it,” the facialist said. “It’s probably fifty-fifty. We keep the ones left here in case anyone changes their mind.”
At home that night, Jenny studied her face in the mirror. She looked bright and awake for how late it was and how shocking the day had been. Before bed, she put the doll beneath the pillow to keep it close but also out of sight, and for the first time in recent months, Jenny went to sleep without watching videos of women telling her how to be beautiful.
Over the next several days, Jenny thought less and less about the doll, who remained tiny and safe in the pink silken pillowcase. She stopped thinking about her ex as much, too, or more specifically, about the feeling of lack he’d planted in her chest the day he stopped being her boyfriend. Memories of him, of how he discarded her, grew slippery and scattered like particles, each one too small to do any real damage. At work, Jenny felt restless. She stared off into space during meetings instead of maintaining a diligent gaze on the camera lens, aimed like a laser at her forehead. During her evening routine, Jenny caught her own reflection less and less.
At least that was true until Jenny learned that her ex-boyfriend had a new girlfriend and, after diligent research that took considerable time, figured out her name. Flipping through her photos and seeing the many things she was that Jenny was not—at a party downtown, in a pottery studio, tending to a basil plant—became a new scab to pick.
Having already heard all the self-help podcasts that appealed to her, Jenny tried to read about spirituality for deeper help. She bought a meditation course, but only made it halfway through. The stillness drove her mad. And so she began to go on long walks instead. She chose different neighborhoods to ramble through, stopping to study particular buildings and decide whether she liked them. She imagined she lived or worked in a building, church, or office that was exceptionally tall, historic, or industrial and square. She thought about who she might be in those lives, and, by contrast, who she was in this one. It pleased her to construct new visions.
On one of these walks, Jenny found herself near Glow Monastery. Evening had begun to seep into the folds of the afternoon, turning the sky’s colors inside out and cooling Jenny’s brow. As she took a left to head homeward, she saw a vaguely familiar, angular figure standing in a doorway halfway down the block. Out of context, Jenny almost didn’t recognize her, but the way she used her whole hand to wipe the hair out of her face made it click. Jenny lifted her own hand to wave before she could second-guess herself.
“Hello!” Jenny called out to the facialist.
“Hi there.”
The facialist looked different in jeans rather than her minimalist uniform, and her posture seemed more lived-in outside of work hours. She was even smoking a cigarette, which didn’t look very Glow Monastery of her. “I’ve been meaning to schedule another facial,” Jenny lied. She hadn’t, and she wasn’t sure she ever would. “You’re doing well?”
“I’m doing well,” the facialist replied, “and you?”
“The same,” Jenny said, lifting her hand instinctively to where the doll had been. The facialist looked at her intently when she spoke again:
“I was actually hoping you’d come back or that I’d run into you.” She faltered for a moment and then committed: “I was wondering, if I show you how to use the machine, if you might try to get mine? I thought about asking someone at Glow Monastery, but I didn’t want them to see me if I didn’t take it well. I know you’re a client, but I don’t know. You’ve been through it before. There’s something about you I trust.” The facialist scrunched her face a little and pointed just to the side of a cheek dimple Jenny hadn’t noticed before. “Mine’s in here,” she said.
“Are you sure it’s not just like a cystic pimple or something?”
“I'm sure.”
Jenny considered offering encouragement, because that was what you did. She thought of her own doll at home, nestled in her pillowcase. There were worse things, probably, than being sad. When offered, Jenny took an unpracticed drag from the facialist’s cigarette. A satisfying fullness unfurled as her lungs swelled to hold the smoke.
“Well, just tell me when,” Jenny said.
Kate Cavanaugh is a writer from New Hampshire living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Voicemail Poems, Frozen Sea, Hobart, and elsewhere. Find her writing prompts on Substack @impromptyou.