St. Patrick's Day had been a rough day.
Teenagers in green tights under scandalously short shorts and shamrock make-up cluttered the streets, the sidewalks, and even Central Park. Why are you in Central Park? There is nothing adolescently sexy about this place. They must have been Juniors or Seniors in high school because their clothes were just provocative enough that they might be confused with college kids, but their presentational smoking was not.
She glanced lazily in their direction, not wanting to be bothered, not wanting to look their youth in the face, or in the midriff, or anywhere.
She knew she was invisible to them. For a while, years in fact, she had enjoyed a luxury of being mistaken for an age much younger than her own. She would laugh musically and toss her long hair when the grocers carded her for that wine or beer. Yes, you may see my I.D. and now you are my favorite cashier! It was her favorite joke. But just days before St. Patrick's Day, in a resigned exhale to be more truthful, she'd had 6 inches of that hair severed, and what remained she had returned to its natural color. No, no, of course it is not completely natural; my Guy had to dye it to conceal the remaining blonde and the emerging grey, but yes, this is what it would look like if I didn't fuck with it, okay?
She had been hanging on to that hair for more than the aesthetic reasons.
The sight of the scantily clad teenagers were not endorsing her decision. Of course, she was unable to articulate this to herself at 10:00 A.M on St. Patrick's Day. She just knew that she hated them. It was only when one of them jostled her chair that she produced enough inertia -a monumental effort, it seemed to her- to turn her head in futile attempt to silence their yelps, which, she felt, in any other species would be defined as "Mating Call" . . . but other species do not have the added obstacle of fearful parents pushing university over pregnancy, and so "yelps" it is for them . . . at least, at 10:00 A.M. on St. Patrick's Day in Central Park.
Following her reasonably priced coffee, she would jog a little, and then go to therapy where she would punch a code to get into the restroom. Only in New York. There she would wedge herself into the New York City standard of small stalls and wriggle out of the sweatiest layers of clothes and then wriggle into the dry ones she had toted around all morning in a small plastic bag.
Therapy can be so . . .
Therapeutic.
She often leaves these sessions dizzy and emotionally spent. But on St. Patrick's Day, the hour ended before her catharsis and so, with a choking sensation and the threat of wet eyes, she was thrust back onto the uncaring (and increasingly intoxicated) St. Patty's Day streets of New York. She remembered a time what holiday was that? when she had skipped a half-day of high school Christmas? The last day before Christmas Break? and gone to a Mexican restaurant where the local Top 40 radio station was broadcasting. She and the other rule-breaking Catholic-school girls had ordered Cokes and smoked cigarettes . . . back when that was still legal at restaurants. What had been the attraction? The aging actor that played Eddie Haskal on Leave It To Beaver was there. He was answering questions or announcing prize winners, and probably he was thinking, "Why are you here? There is nothing adolescently sexy about this place."
She falls asleep on the R Train, which is nothing less than playing with fire. IknowIknowIknow. A person could end up in Jamaica. (Queens, that is, not the tropical island.) IknowIknowIknow. A person could miss his or her stop and be delayed by an hour after rerouting. IknowIknowIknow. A person could be robbed. IknowIknowIFUCKINGknow. But the lure of doze was as strong as Marlboro Lights to a 17 year-old skipping school, and she gave in.
Her head lolled up, absorbing -vaguely- the stops as they drifted past the train windows, and then lolled down again. She gets out -miraculously- at the correct stop and discovers that somewhere in the Lineup of Feel-Sorry-For-Herself events, she had lost her metro card That's one hundred and four fucking dollars these days you bastards and then the neighborhood ATM presents itself as out-of-order. Meanwhile, outside it is sunny and, as most people would claim: "gorgeous." She doesn't know how to process the sunshine. How to categorize it. It doesn't go with anything as far as she is concerned. This was not the case with the one million other people enjoying St. Patrick's Day in her city.
With another -though less monumental- effort, she turned her head. Back and forth back and forth back and forth. It feels different without that heavy 6 inches of blonde. It can be disorienting. In the first 24 hours after the cut, it made her dizzy to turn her head in the most casual of circumstances. But by St. Patrick's Day, that sensation has long faded. She can easily look to the right. Look to the left. Weightless. Tip her face to sun.
From the sidewalk, just a few feet away, a teenager tips her face to the curb and barfs into the street. Her friends crowd around to comfort her, but they cannot stop laughing.
One of them kindly pulls a good six inches of hair away from her mouth.
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