Not Polite to Stare

[LSPoorEeyorick]

Sitting at the café that Sunday morning, waiting for the friend I'd so anxiously wanted to talk to for weeks, I found myself surprisingly disinterested in my recent tales and details. When she arrived, I just wanted to tell her about the curious crowd at La Luna Negra the previous evening. In fact, I wanted to tell everyone.

At the right end of a bar at the end of the room sat an elderly woman.

I could not take my eyes off of her.

She was wearing a long white shift, soiled slightly from years of nights out, slightly sagging against her frame like a swimsuit ravaged by bacteria, elasticity sapped. In fact, elasticity was sapped from her whole being, from the perfect double-fold of skin peeking out one low arm-hole, edges of breasts unpinned, sliding over skin all gills and edges – to her tiny arms, braceleted, laden with long skin wings. She was an ancient, dingy butterfly. Even her posture had lost its spring, stooping her over like a bent reed, pulled downward by gravity and time. Her face, from a French art film or a marionette show, was pointed, with a curling nose, deep creasing lines and a certain gravity to her eyes. Her hat – a marvelous knitted beret – was a remnant of what must have been a young life full of swank and distinct pleasures.

No, despite how I tried, I could not take my eyes off of her. I wanted immediately to write about her. But our typical brainstorming game – coming up with the finer details of all the lonely hearts at the Good Neighbor café – seemed unworthy of her. She was too brilliant for a fictitious past. So instead, I wanted to photograph her, to draw her, to paint her, to film her. And the bar clientele beside her served as a perfect frame. A clever friend at the table described it as a David Lynch extravaganza.

To her right sat a tall swan of a flamenco dancer, all limbs and curves and motion. Moments earlier, she and her partners had clacked their high-heeled shoes on the tiny stage in the corner, clapping off the beat, swirling their frilled skirts and crooning, slightly out of breath, some dreamy Mexican serenade. They'd pulled up members of the audience to dance with them, including the birthday girl in the form-fitting red dress, which skimmed her thighs as she tried to keep up with the rhythm, glowing and unaware of the graceful rise and fall of her perfect breasts. This was only for a moment before the realization and shame set in, causing her to cover her cleavage with one hand, stomping less passionately, more slowly to keep herself still. The next volunteer from the floor crept behind my chair to reach the wood-planked stage, and for a moment, I emitted a bit of a happy sigh, thinking they'd found a child to join the performance. But once she'd arrived at the stage, I realized that I was terribly wrong; she wasn't a child, she was a beautiful, bubbly and smiling little person. As gorgeous a dwarf as I'd ever seen, with her creamy, rich coffee complexion, her silky thick bob of dark hair, her full lips… I started to feel shame at taking such pleasure in watching her, carefree and playful, stomping in tiny sloping mary janes to the jang of the flamenco guitar. It was ingrained in me since youth: it's not polite to stare. So I did not see – but I was told by a particularly stylish friend – that later on, the woman was wearing an A-lined houndstooth coat, befitting Jackie O. That is, if Jackie O had been a glamorous first-lady midget.

Next to the flamenco dancer sat a pair of ladies sporting what had to have been the largest hairdos I had seen since the eighties. Tight spiral curls had been teased and sprayed into enormously puffy bouffants, one girl's in sticky platinum, the other's in mousey brown. Their metallic, asymmetrical outfits even complemented each other; in fact, the two were so much a matched pair that when one went to powder her nose, the others in my party complained that without the matching bookend, the remaining Susan was left desperately seeking balance, or at least a John to pass the time.

And on the far end of the bar, a little elderly couple perched together on their barstools like graying doves, holding hands. When they turned to exit, we could see that he was a vision of AARP, plaid shirt and golfer's cap and gnarled fingers. She was wrapped in a head scarf that my grandmother would have called a babushka.

But among the various and varied figures in the shadow of the black moon, none of them could hold a candle to the presence of the magnificent marionette lady, rippled and stooped and commanding my attention. I kept looking for that perfect shot, with the woman, and the midget and the flamenco dancer and the whores. And still, there was the shame. I knew that one ought not to stare at someone who is different. But when someone's differences make them beautiful, when they wear them as though they are elegant couture gowns, the magnetism is inescapable.