No image today. Let see if you can picture this along with me: The picture of small indignities that kinda hurt.
I’m a visual person, and when
I see something pretty, or shiny, or new, I get overly enthusiastic. Unfortunately, besides being a visual
person and an overly enthusiastic person, I am also a person who lacks what I
will call verbal filters.
Picture the setting. Me on a quick run to the grocery store in whatever it is was wearing because the chicken I was planning to cook for dinner did not smell okay. (Being French I have a high tolerance for passed expiration dates but this poor chicken smelled Not Okay as only the scent of fermented raw chicken can be Not Okay. A smell that did not belong in my children’s plate no matter how much I needed it to.) So there I was looking my frumpy 6pm self, my hair in need of a wash self, my I’m 43 and no one is hearing me roar self, elbow deep in boneless-skinless chicken thighs packages at the meat isle of my local Ralph, in search of one that would have even less skin, and less bones lets it be rejected my picky 9 year old and thereby render the entire outing pointless.
I turned my head to the left, and there she was: a vision
She was maybe 20 or 25, A small-bone nymphet with golden skin as smooth and glossy as a Krispy Cream donut before those became illegal. She was truly stunning. Her eyebrows were shaped just so and she had gorgeous clear blue eyes. But it is her stylishness that made me stop. I live in L.A. you see, and not in a hip area code. In L.A. we have a lot of stunning women, but not too many that dress well. They might dress expensively, but well, ahem.. no. But this young woman’s style was entirely cool and way beyond my area code. She wore a man’s shirt tied with a large leather belt, and a colorful funky quilted super-miniskirt. At her feet were those Grecian sandals which manufacturing was abandoned in 500 BC to be replaced by more practical models only to be mysteriously revived in 2008. The type of laced sandals no one can comfortable walk in unless you are a Grecian goddess, which she clearly was.
She had a package of meat in each hand and looked from one to the other as though she was holding a miniature tennis match. I should have known better than to interrupt her concentration, but my filters were not activated, so as I moved pass her pushing my cart, I beamed and said in a clear, cheerful voice that was full of love for my fellow woman: “I just adooore your style and the way you are dressed.”
Her response I will reenact as in slow motion so that you can feel, as I sure did, the magnitude of the impact, though it only happened in fractions of a second.
She lifted her eyes from her meat package. Not immediately, nooope. She lifted her eyes slowwwly, looked right through me as though she had no idea where the voice was coming from, then noticed me, or noticed a vague human shape with a big goofy smile--a sub-human form of some sort. She frowned prettily but with an air puzzlement, then slowwwly lowered her eyes back to her meat to finally, and only after she had stopped looking at me, uttered the killer words:
“Huh, huh…”
Huh huh. As the type of answer you might give if
a prefect stranger told you that the sky was large or that water was wet.
Huh huh. As in “yes, that is correct, you have indeed stated the obvious.”
Or was it Huh huh, as in “you’re welcome… but not quite”?
You recognize that last huh huh I’m sure. You say’ thank you very much’, for anything really, to anyone, for bagging your groceries, for bringing you a glass of water in a restaurant, for bringing you the right size shoes… and instead of responding “you’re welcome” (which in all fairness maybe difficult to pronounce, I mean you can’t get away with saying it using less than three syllables) you are answered huh huh, which I have a tendency to interpret as “lets face it your thankfulness is not welcomed. Please stuff a sock in your mouth and go choke further down the street.”
But I’m afraid that my
beautiful Hellenist meat eater was not saying thank you for the
compliment. She was saying.
“What-Evar!” and this was a second by second reenactment of a technique
perfected by generations of beautiful women to convey how entirely
insignificant you are.
And my thought was. “Maybe not as beautiful inside, heh?”
Well, no. That was my second thought. My first thought as I trotted in a huff
towards the dairy isle was “ Huh huh?
Huh frigging Huh? What
about thank you, b#@&!”
