I’m so tired of seeing her, I can hardly stand it. I try not to look, but it’s like looking away from the scene of an accident. There’s a fascination with the grim reality. You can see the bags under her eyes and every wrinkle in her face, including the deep rivulets in her forehead. Her mother was always telling her to stop scowling or her face might freeze like that. Is this her mother’s vindication? I try to look only at the other people, but inadvertently I come back to that one face at once familiar and unfamiliar. I’d never really seen it in action before—the mouth talking or smiling or biting its lips, the cheeks scrunched up or stretched out.
It’s embarrassing to see how she can hog a conversation. I watch the neon square light up around whoever is speaking, and too often it settles around her. It seems an eternity before it moves off to frame someone else’s face. Even when the square is spending time elsewhere, I see it dart back and forth to her in between, and I realize how often she is making some interruption, however small—a snigger, a gasp, a grunt, a groan.
And then there’s the waiting for her. The meeting has started, someone may even have begun to speak. And then we see her name come up—big white letters on a black square. Whoever was talking stops, and we all watch impatiently as we see her come into view and look blankly up and around. We watch her lips move. We see her little red microphone with the line through it, and we wonder how long it will take her this time to figure it out. Of course she doesn’t know how to do two things at the same time, so if she has to refer to a document, she has printed it out and turns away to read it, which means we have trouble hearing her but clearly hear the sound of paper rustling. That’s the other thing—she forgets that we can hear everything going on in her environment, so people have to yell “Mute” when she’s yelling at the dog or calling to someone out of our view.
It’s so annoying to watch her move around, trying to find the most flattering light. She’ll sit and then bolt up as she realizes every facial flaw is spotlit. She’ll walk around, parts of her coming in and out of view. She’ll find a dark corner and people complain we can’t see her. She’ll move over a bit, and we watch her adjust anew to the shock of seeing herself among the rest of us.
I do have to give her credit for how well she managed an awkward moment recently. Her family got together to open gifts on Christmas morning, with a time adjustment for kids in Colorado and Texas. Her granddaughter Kaitlyn had sent each family member the name of the person for whom they were secret Santa. Her secret Santa was Kaitlyn’s fiance, Steve, and his gifts had been sitting under her tree for days, one large package and one smaller one.
When it was her turn, she opened the smaller package first. Just as she was on the final rip, we heard Steve say, “Someone told me you like mysteries.” He couldn’t have known his informant should have prefaced “mysteries” with “cozy, nonviolent, British.” She stared down at the book cover facing up at her: “The Killing Floor.” Below that, “Hired Gun” and “Hello Murder.” We could sense the struggle not to let her face betray her and reveal to Steve, close up and personal, how much she disliked such mysteries, guaranteed to have a macho detective, lots of gunfights, and sadistic killers spreading blood and gore. All she could hope for was no graphic sex. She managed to sound even gracious as she remarked that this would be a different kind of mystery for her and it would be good for her. Then Steve told her each of the books was the first in a series that is a favorite of his. You could tell by her face that she was touched by how special this gift now was. But then came a look of panic—perhaps she was imagining he might give her the second ones in the series for her birthday.
I guess all I can say is that if I have to keep seeing her, the least she can do is get her hair cut.
