Because I’d made “that vow,” as I called it, not to wear lipstick until I was eighteen—four years away!—the colors all the other girls wore in my high school class entranced me in spite of myself, especially their names: Passion Pink, Purple Persuasion, Orange Sky at Sunset (I made that one up myself). Spread on my friends’ smooth lips, those colors took on a glow, like the colors on tropical fish. And their lips swam—I swear it!—in a warm limpet ocean of their own.
This was the year before boys began to arrive, sometimes in convertibles with the tops down to pick up chosen girls. But I knew what would come later—kisses, sometimes staining the collar of a white shirt. By then it was too late to do anything about this but I tried anyway: I urged my friends to sign a vow, like me, that they would take off their lipstick and refuse to reapply it until they turned eighteen.
No one signed.
I kind of knew they wouldn’t but I still had to try. We were very close friends, partners in field hockey and basketball, frequenters of slumber parties (these soon stopped), spending long hours on the telephone in the evenings…
I often smile now to think of my vow and my doomed attempt to get my friends to copy me. But I also love and admire that earnest girl who knew, even then, that I was going to choose a different path: I’d published several pieces in a young adult magazine; I wrote every day in my journal; and during summer vacations when the rest of them were playing tennis or sleeping late after parties, I sat in my hot room (this was before air conditioning in hot and humid Kentucky) and wrote pages in my lined notebook, my forearms sticking to the pages with sweat.
Our immediate goals matched: to graduate with good grades and maybe a special medal, and to on to colleges, many of them the well-known women’s colleges in the East.
I’m sure some of my friends knew what they wanted to do as adults; some even had a sense of mission, although no one ever talked in such high falutin’ terms.
I didn’t either. I would have been embarrassed. But I knew in my bones that my future as a privileged white woman wouldn’t revolve around romance, and what comes after. It did for a while, but sooner or later I came back to the meaning of that vow.
William Wordsworth, one of my most admired poets, wrote at age twenty-seven at the end of his long poem “Prelude,” subtitled “After The Ball,” composed while crossing fields at dawn after an all-night shindig:
I made no vows…
But vows were then made for me,
That I would be, else sinning greatly, a dedicated spirit.”
He was a poet of those English fields but also of Revolution, the only poet I know of who wrote about Touissant Louverture and the revolution in Haiti.
Sometimes it takes decades for us to claim, courageously, the power and originality of our first vision. May all of you claim it and stick your tongues out, without lipstick!
A portrait of Toussaint Louverture Oil on Canvas (Alexandre-François-Louis, comte de Girardin), Wikipedia
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