Dancing Lonely in a Crowd

Prompt:

An expert is a man who tells you a simple thing in a confused way in such a fashion as to make you thing the confusion is your own fault.
--- William Castle

Alone in a crowd

Alone I stood, holding up the doorjam, watching the little stabs of disapproval from one woman’s eyes to another ones cheap shoes.  Another would recognize the glance, and the knock-off heels from the discount shoe store. There would be that veiled smile flashed when the unfortunate fashion starved guest caught the look but didn’t read into it the volumes of meaning craftily hidden behind the moistened ruby lips.  I could imagine “Bless her heart” would’ve been on the accuser’s mind but she was too far from her comrade to whisper without being rude.  So she just looked.  I could feel that look right down to my self made five minute pedicure and I wasn’t even the one it was directed toward. 

Oh, I was one of them alright, the accused that is.  Deep down, under the classic black dress, pearls my husband gave me on my wedding day, and inexpensive black heels that weren’t fancy enough to draw stares which I bought in part, so the ladies wouldn’t say “Bless her heart” and partly because I don’t suffer for fashion.  I felt like a black woman in white skin at a white supremacy rally.  I knew what was in me, but they didn’t.  Still, the gladness I felt for not being targeted by “the look” didn’t obscure my guilt in knowing those looks should have been mine. 

I refilled my glass of lemonade, and tried to keep my mouth shut.  I’d resented these women growing up.  Never was in their camp.  Didn’t want to be.  But I’d married into something I wasn’t entirely sure how to resolve.  Here I sat in a room full of pretenders and I had my own role.  I watched the women walking in the front door, Coach bags caressing their curveless hips, and I wondered, who exactly made them the experts, the scale by which I weigh my worth as a woman? Was it me, I thought.  Did I give them the power, by seeing as the goal for which I should set my horizons? 

As I was pondering the Southern art of being the gracious hostess, the art of saying more
and meaning so much less, I heard a voice behind me whisper, “My God, did you see that dress.  Someone call the fashion police.”  I looked around to see who she was talking to.  I appeared to be the only one within hearing distance.  Not wanting to ignore her, I glanced where she was looking, quickly so as not to really be rude to someone I might actually be friends with who was the unfortunate target of her comment.  Nope, didn’t know her.  Before I caught myself, the little devil on my left shoulder replied, “What was she thinking?”

And that is how I became a fashion expert.  Standing there, cheap lip gloss hidden behind my clear nail polished fingernails, I moistened my own lips, trying to cover the horrible slant that just crossed my foul lips.  It was then that I noticed her eyes train toward mine, and look down slowly. 
I didn’t know her but, nevertheless, a dart struck through me, invisible but no less painful. 
I imagined I heard her voiceless cry, “I’m awkward and unwelcome here. But that girl with the pearls has it figured out. What have I missed that I stick out in all the ways unwomanlike.”

I wanted to scream “No, you’ve got it all wrong, I’m not like them.”  I wanted to tell her that, any other day of the year, I wear tennis shoes and I never paint my nails.  I dance to my own drumbeat, even it it’s a bit off.  I wear t-shirts to bed, not prissy silk pajamas and fuzzy slippers, not that I have any problem with silk pajama-wearing women.  I wanted to take her by the hand and walk us both out of that place of lies and tell her she is not hopeless, she is human.  To not worry about what these women say, they don’t know.  They aren’t the experts in how to be me, or her. 

I wanted to do all these things.  But instead, I stood there, perched by the trendy belle, looked like I belonged. I was playing this game of lies and shame.  I let her believe I was an expert at being a Southern woman, that I knew the rules.  I politely excused myself from the hostess’s company and made my way to the powder room.  I stared at myself in the mirror and what I really wanted to tell that girl came to me.  What I wanted to say to her was that we are both experts.  Experts in what it’s like to be alone in a crowd.

787 Words

For Project Write World
June 09 Entry