a modern day haunting
Yesterday I was at the fruit store in White Plains with my mom. I was staring at packages of cherries, when I hear my mom say: Susan*? I look up and see a woman I can’t place. Her face paralyzes me: it’s waxy, so shiny, almost immobile. Her smile is rigid and hardly stretches. Her eyes are sunken and drawn up at the corners, and she blinks too frequently. She keeps patting down her hair on the sides and biting her top lip under her bottom: nervous, self-conscious tics. I try to regain possession of myself, and smile, and be ready to chime in with my name age school when questioned, assuming this is some lady my mom knows from work. But I can’t compose myself. I keep doing the trying-not-to-stare type of staring in wonder at her unnatural face. My mom asks her about James, and my mind goes: “?” The woman talks for a moment about her James, and then my mom says: have you met my eldest daughter? She’s Don’s age. And my head goes “!”
It’s Don Marin’s mom, Susan. The kind of lady you see about town, or think you see, always engaged in things. I thought she was so beautiful.
She must have had many plastic surgeries, and I had absolutely no inkling that she was who she is. My mind was whirring and I was paralyzed throughout the whole conversation. I kept internally kicking myself to not betray my shock, but it was so challenging; I’ve never been so thrown off, so confused, so lost. She looks like an entirely different person. Not even a person, exactly. Very alien-like and unreal. For the next hour, almost, I kept repeating “oh my god.”
I just keep thinking about her nose. I thought it had so much character. It was her feature that struck me when I saw her. It was thin and pointed up at the end in a very unique way, and I remember it as something special, something I liked to see, because I thought she was so pretty with her unusual, yet totally fitting, features. Now she has a very short nose, one that looks sort of dropped on to her face - a regular shape of perfect proportion. Which is funny, because it doesn’t seem to fit.
And I felt so many things afterward. So completely awful that my bewildered silence and paralyzed deer-in-headlamps look gave away my shock at her change. So sad that she felt she had to go under so many procedures. And I felt horrified. I hate that feeling of horror, inspired in me by this nice nice nice lady’s face. That’s so sad.
It’s strange that this affects me so much. I’ve met her maybe only once before. I certainly don’t mean this to be a gossipy story-telling of a small town woman’s plastic surgery - a dime a dozen sorta tale. That would be like bastardizing it. But I’m still unable to shake the experience; it’s really sticking with me. James and Don were away all summer, and she’s hardly seen them. I hope she has nice friends. I really want her to feel loved.
*I’ve gone ahead and altered the names.
