Behind her masks Aug. 9, 2012
She looked bad when I saw her again on Tuesday, even though
she had all her usual elements in place.
They just didn’t come together as they usually did.
It was something different in her expression, a look that
our former temporary boss once described broadcasting intense pain.
Her face tends to change depending on time and place, or
even the role she is playing – such as that brilliant performance she put on
during that day I accompanied her to the high school to watch her teach. She
can be teacher, writer, party person, close confident, a cub in search of a
mentor, a vulnerable soul in need of protection.
Sometimes, she lets the mask slip, as she did a few times
when we were in the bar and she played the role of barfly – most memorable that
time outside the German bar when she went for a cigarette, her mouth puckering
and eyes narrowing so that I saw something almost ruthless in the void beyond. Street
smart, but also scared. Once or twice at meetings her mask slipped and I caught
the intense look of rage, glaring at me across the table whenever she saw me
looking.
But the face I saw this Tuesday, looked bewildered, a bit
scattered, despite the perfect make up, lipstick and mascara perfectly placed,
still utterly professional and yet – something more desperate showed from beneath
the mask, as if some real expression showed she did not intend to reveal.
She laughed a lot yet did not sound like her real laugh. I
wanted to laugh, too, needing to down grade the alert status from a constant
state of war, wanting to have work turn into a cease fire zone so that we could
both get on with our lives.
At one point later – just as she had the previous Tuesday –
she came up to my desk and asked a work-related question, as if she, too,
needed to turn down the nightmarish volume with both suffered through over the
last few months.
Perhaps – as Mary Ann claimed – she felt more in control
after her threats and the threats her family (if that’s who they were) made on
her birthday worked and I was in my proper place again.
Perhaps she wonders why I’m not more hostile after all that.
Perhaps she missed the owner, who took the week off to go to
Michigan to see his family.
Yet, I sensed something else wrong, perhaps something to do
with the eating disorders she complained she had, or maybe something else, some
bad medical news.
She seems more alone than ever, caught up with men who professed
to love her, but always had to go home at night to their wives.
For all the bad things that went on, all the horrible things
said between us (even that arrogant forgiveness poem), I find myself feeling
sorry for her, not the masks she puts on, but rather the person she seems to
hide behind them.
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