Only Women

 

7/23/05: Miss D was upstairs at a girl bar helping a friend hand out promo cards. Downstairs was more bluecollar: beer, pool table, strippers, while the girls upstairs were more lipstick and Mimosa types. Everyone was wondering who the new girl was. Miss D always serves notice in a crowd with her slim, dark, presence. Seeing her for the first time is a little like seeing a Renoir, a bit of a blush, as opposed something by Rembrandt. You might get some idea of her if you imagine, like, Wynona Ryder, but Miss D has better eyes and a cuter chin. Her face is defined and symmetrical and you almost pray for some physical defect to step her down to a level where you can catch your breath. But her ankles are slim and her hair has that body and shine most women would go into debt to get. Then when she speaks and you hear her precise, clear enunciations, you realize that you must be at your best because it’s easy to be the boring one in a conversation with her and she might blow you off the way pretty girls sometimes do because they feel they have no reason to be kind. Except Miss D’s not like that. If there was in the house some shlubby guy in trousers and baseball cap, she would have been as friendly as if he had been one of the cute, well-spoken guys she sometimes hangs out with. (And not only because he would have on, probably, men’s underwear because she can’t help not being attracted to a man in panties.) None of the girls there that night were going to hold hands with her or get close enough to smell her shampoo. All around her the clothing was light and often tight, the buttons on the left, the waistband of the trousers in women’s sizes. Under all the clothing, including Miss D’s: a roomful of bras and panties. She was having fun, but this was not a night she would dream about. Miss D would later say more than once: “I met you where there were only women and that’s how I see you.”