Ellipsis

Ordering off the menu for Kagee's birthday

Kagee, a dear friend, is celebrating her birthday today. She's fortunate that the weather is spectacular in the tri-state area, but since this is the weekend that we are "springing forward" by setting the clocks an hour ahead she'll be getting older faster.  But what is age, anyway? 

This question has been coming up a lot for me lately, not because not only am I getting "older" but I'm apprehensive about getting "old" and out-living my usefulness.  This is why I try to do everything better and maximize every moment of every day...but sometimes it drives people crazy - not because I'm living out my bucket list and hosting wild Bohemian Villa parties in Tuscany...but because it increases my intensity and makes me question everything...

Example:  I love my boss. She's young - she's tech savvy - she's forward-thinking, she's organized, she's poised, and I'm happy to be part of her team.  And I think she mostly enjoys working with me as well, but doesn't quite understand my personality and my penchant for debating everything.  I'm sure I exasperate her at times...albeit unintentionally.  Years ago, when I worked as an admin for Peter, an eccentric attorney at a NY law firm, he said "You do a great job...and I appreciate that you have a curious mind and a creative twist on things...but just once...if I ask you to get me a box of paper clips and they're are none in the supply room, it would be nice if you said 'there are none left' instead of writing me a 12-page note about why they weren't there."  Anyone who been with me at a diner knows that if the menu says "two eggs any style" I engage the waitress in a debate about how that description could be considered vague..."What if someone wants quail eggs?," I might ask (as she stands there, cracking her gum, scratching her head with a pencil, and wishing she wasn't assigned to my table - until I over-tip her for taking the ride with me). 

Nothing is simple, and I wish it was.  In life, I have my nose pressed against the window of other peoples' lives...those who do things in a "normal way."

"What did you do yesterday," I once asked a friend.

"Well," she said, "I got up...I did the laundry...I went for a  manicure and pedicure...went to the mall...watched a movie with my sister...and went to dinner with the family for my mother's birthday...what about you?"

I didn't have the heart to tell her that I obsessed about not folding the sheets properly after doing the laundry, that I paid a cleaning lady (who I couldn't really afford) to scrub my home (after selling earrings from one of my three ex-husbands to pay her) - tried to go for a manicure and pedicure but couldn't find anyone who knew how to give me a gel manicure with the proper amount of gel so that they pointed down and not skyward, spent 2 hours looking on Netflix for a video I wanted to watch but couldn't find anything, and went to dinner with my friends who hid behind the menus when I asked the waitress at the New China Inn if the chef could make me a pizza.   Do my friends who post happy pictures of their grandchildren angst about becoming "irrelevant"? 

And what about the people I commute with on the train every morning...what are they thinking as they ride into work.  Where to get the best bagel?  Where to go on vacation with the family? Remember Jackson Brown's song "The Pretender"?  Oh, how I long to be a "happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender." But, is anyone really that happy (or idiotic?)

I have no idea...but maybe I should send the laundry out so someone else can obsess about how to fold fitted sheets without having them look like lopsided pillows and tomorrow, when we take Kagee to lunch at an Italian restaurant, maybe I'll try not to order steamed dumplings with ginger sauce...it's a start, of sorts...

The Unpainted Wall

My divorce is close to being finalized and since it is after a prolonged separation and we live in separate states (which was the case even before he moved to Virginia), there's no sadness or regret attached to it; at this point, it's just a legal technicality.  The truth is, I married in haste for reasons I don't remember and it was a flawed relationship from the beginning; one that never should have been. The only part of it that concerns me is that after being married to various people for more than 20 years with some overlap - I've grown accustomed to complete independence and I'm not sure I can ever go back to arguing with someone about who took the garbage out last. This might be all well and good now, but down the road, I might regret the fact that sometimes what I look forward to most is time alone - to sing out loud in the car, spend an hour picking out the right dryer sheets, and sleep with my hair in rollers.

Well-meaning friends who don't fully understand that my hiatis is self-imposed try to fix me up with people or ask me if I'm on Match.com.  I tell them that - while I did that for awhile - to try to get my groove back - my heart just wasn't it in.

"It's not organic enough," I tell them. Then I go into pontification mode.

"If you live your life to the fullest, you always have people in it," I say. "And finding 'love' has nothing to do with age or beauty or anything like that...it has to do with being completely engaged in life!"

Then I go on to say "I've met people who asked me out in all sorts of places.  Men at Home Depot have tried to pick me up - when I wasn't wearing make-up!"

I say this more to get them off my back than to prove I'm still attractive to the opposite sex, but I don't really tell the whole story or the whole truth.

Example:

Last summer, I decided that I wanted to paint my bedroom red because the blue was depressing me and the walls needed some zest.  And I wanted a very specific shade of red, so I brought a book called "The Good Spell Book" that a feng shui consultant had given me.  I actually had never read the book - but the cover was exactly the color I wanted for the walls, so I approached The Paint Guy at Home Depot.

I was full of questions. "Do I need primer?," I asked, "Should I buy eggshell or flat or gloss?" and so on...

"What book is that?," he asked.

"Just a book," I said, "I just want to match the color."

 "But what is it?," he persisted.

It was obvious at that point that he was several slices short of a ham sandwich, so I ignored the question and asked him to help me find the right color.

As he was mixing my paint, he casually asked, "How's married life?"

I looked at him blankly.

"You're married, aren't you?," he asked.

"Yes," I said. First of all, it wasn't technically a lie, and secondly, at that point I got the vibe that he was attempting to flirt with me.

"If you're married, why aren't you wearing a ring?," he asked.

"Because I'm about to paint," I said, with the unspoken "DUH" lingering in the air.

"Well," he said, "your husband should be painting for you."

Then I lost it. "Who are you?," I said, "Dr. Phil?  Just mix the paint."

By then he could tell I was quite annoyed, as could the man next to me who had heard the whole exchange and was amused.  He rolled his eyes and we both kind of smirked.  Then I noticed how cute he was; his eyes sparkled and he smelled  vaguely of Ivory soap and Polo, so after I got the paint, I considered following him around the store for awhile, to try to find out why he wasn't wearing a wedding ring...but I realized that I wasn't wearing make-up and my hair was going in several directions and that even if there was a spark, I would be too nervous and jerky to have a normal conversation, because I couldn't really flirt properly without eyeliner.

And besides...all I really wanted to do was paint my walls.

Since it wasn't like me to be single, I started to think something was terribly wrong; that I shoudl worry that I wasn't worried about dying alone.

Then I remembered what Kagee had told me.

After a bad marriage and a long-term relationship that ended unceremoniously, she just didn't feel like dating. "I'm more in love with the idea of macaroni and cheese and meatloaf than being in a relationship," she told a bunch of us one night, when we were having the kind of frank female discussion that was like a lost episode of "Sex and the City."

"I'm perfectly happy to stay home, watch movies and eat Doritos...bags of them in fact," she said.

At the time, none of who were present for the discussion us could relate to what she was saying.  Queenie was embroiled in a hot and heavy liaison with a red-headed gnome of a guy who spoke incoherently but who - as she described it - made perfect sense when he was horizontal; Marisol was obsessed with her endless internet dates, Ronnette was back on with her on-again, gone-again boyfriend  Vitanzo - and I was on the verge of getting married (for the third time).  I was probably more stunned than the others, being a hopeless romantic at heart and the one who had friends saying things like "We always love your weddings."

But years later I had to face facts...I was a member of the Kagee Club...and, unlike Stella, had no desire to get my groove back.

Of course, I called Kagee to tell her the news.

"Wow," Kagee said, "How depressing. I have a club named after me."  Then she told me she had to go to Home Depot to buy a dryer.  I was going to suggest that she wear make-up, just in case - but didn't want to mess with the perfect plan of "the universe."

Of course, there may still be hope for me.  I actually only got to paint 3 out of the 4 walls, and it grew boring.

 

Homage to Madame Defarge

Last week, I heard the song "My Pledge of Love" on the way home from work and was instantly transported back to where I was when I first heard it. This happens to people all the time; music and scents are powerful memory triggers. Unfortunately, my memory doesn't seem to need much triggering and has been alternately called "scary" and "amazing" - depending on what I'm remembering about whom at any given moment.

My sometimes uncanny autobiographical recolletability (which, by the way, is not actually a word) is not extensive enough to be called "superior" - which would put me into the same genius category as the likes of Marilu Henner, but it gets me in trouble from time to time. (For those of you who don't remember who Marilu is - among other things, she starred on the sitcom Taxi, dated John Travolta and briefly had her own talk show). She - and a handful of others like her -were recently featured in a story on Sixty Minutes for their rare ability to recall every detail of what happened on each day of their lives...if you throw out a random date - they know what occurred and can recite it in painstaking detail.

I have a touch of that gift - but it's not spontaneous;  it's fueled by diaries, journals, and my strange penchant for taking random moments and pressing them between the pages of books like flowers. That last example is specific; recently, when going through old books, I pulled out an old copy of Black's Law Dictionary, long abandoned along with my desire to practice law.  Low and behold - I found a flattened rose on the page in the "Ds." Instantly, I remembered that it was given to me by an admirer - some 20 years before - who, at the time was married. "Thank you for the rose," I said, "but you're married." However, his status didn't change my attraction to him - so I placed it on the same page that had "D" for "Divorce."  In retrospect, perhaps I should have tossed it along with the memory of him, whose name escapes me. I think it was Peter - and eventually he did get divorced - not sure why; maybe because his wife found out that he was giving random flowers out to other women. 

Lately, of my memories have been pouring out onto primitive, cartoonish tiles that I began to paint one night at a ceramics studio when an old song by Stephen Stills started playing. As the strains of "Love the One You're With" surrounded me, I started a table depicting people I knew kissing those other than their actual mates. It was somewhat of a Madame Defarge moment; some of the "characters" were people from high school...others from college...others from random moments. I kept painting more and more tiles - but never quite made a table - which is a good thing, because my art is primitive bordering on puerile (a word I learned in the 70s, from another soul randomly mentioned in journals for their penchant for doing crossword puzzles in ink).

But all of this "I remember" really came to the surface in spades ten years ago when my best friend (since 1966) LuMac and I pulled out diaries we had kept as teenagers.  For about 3 years, we wrote down every mundane detail of every day we spent as teenagers on Long Island - going to Jones Beach and to the Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall cruising for boys and taking silly pictures in the photo booth at Woolworth's. Of course, we had different takes on things. While I would write "LuMac and I went to the park today...we rolled down a hill and a cute boy took our picture," she might say "Went to the park today with my best friend. Should have worn my sneakers - we fell down a hill. And she really needs to stop talking to strange boys and letting them take our picture."

Social networking, of course, has brought things to a whole new level. "Whatever happened to Joe Blow" turns into "Maybe I'll look him up" - and then you do - and wives and girlfriends get involved and think you're stalking their man when all you really want is to see if they remember that on July 7, 1970 - you dropped sauerkraut on their now-husband's shoe at Dave Schorr's on Hempstead Turnpike.

Of course - time has a way of romanticizing things that - at the time - were less than noteworthy. I suppose this explains why after all these years - and so many moves from one place to another - I've never been able to toss the old diaries. Happily, if anyone finds them, including my son, he won't find anything incriminating in there...just the ramblings of a slightly neurotic suburban girl. And I can't help but wonder, now and then, if Mr. Sauerkraut is still pissed that the accident spill was actually intentional.

 

 

Slideshows

“One can choose one’s friends but relatives one cannot.”

That was the fortune in the cookie she got once, and used as a caption under a picture of her sister and brother-in-law.  The photo was the night of her junior prom.  They had just come from the beach, and her sister had worn sunglasses, so there were white rings around her eyes where the sun didn’t hit her face.  Her brother-in-law had a mustache that he waxed.  It was taken with an instamatic camera, probably by her father.  The fortune cookie caption was amusing at the time – to anyone who leafed through her photo album.  But now - lifetimes later, most of the family was gone and the few who live are virtual strangers to each other, and she reminded herself of that slogan over and over when she sought comfort. Sometimes it works. Most times, in fact. Her friends were always around, for which she was grateful. Some had been around for most of her life; she was blessed.  And she loved them all for different reasons and in different ways.  But the feeling of loss and longing lingered.

Ten years after she first read the fortune in that cookie – there was another cookie to be read.  She sat across from a boy at a Chinese restaurant who said “your face would be beautiful to see across a table every day.”

She was touched and embarrassed and shy about his compliment, so she averted her eyes and concentrated on opening the cookie.

“He loves you as much as he can,” it said, “but he cannot love too much.”

And all of these memories of Chinese food and randomly prophetic fortunes came to her as she prepared a Thanksgiving feast for friends.

A few days prior, she was presented with a slideshow by a man she was only just getting to know and it made her so wistful, so sad, in ways he could never begin to understand. The longing for a sense of belonging rose up in her chest and her eyes well up with tears of regret and loss.  The picture that struck her most was one of three children, on a Christmas morning, wearing jackets he had bought for them.  Leather motorcycle jackets for the sons and a full-length leather coat for the daughter. That was just one of the many pictures of his children and his family that he shared with her, adding “I don’t show these to just anyone.” She was honored to have caught the glimpse and empty because it was like looking through a catalog of clothing that she would never be able to afford.

She had a beautiful child, whom she deeply loved more than words could ever express, but she knew that she needed to set him free soon, to live his own life. And she wished for him a big family, with everyone gathered for holidays, and a slideshow he could someday present to others.

She usually played Billie Holiday when she cooked, but today it was Rufus Wainwright…his song Slideshow droned on and surrounded her as she tried to remember all of the ingredients she needed for the stuffed mushrooms. 

Do I love you because you treat me so indifferently?
Or is it the medication?
Or is it me?

Do I love you because you don't want me to rub your back?
Or is it the medication?
Or is it you?
Or is it true?

 

Lying in Total Candor

G-man stopped by the other night, after a disappointing blind date with a woman who, according to him, reminded him of his Aunt Eleanor.

"You mean your Aunt Eleanor when she was younger?," I asked.

"No," he said, "that's the problem...she reminds me of my Aunt Eleanor NOW."

We drank wine with too many sulfites and buried ourselves in morose thoughts until he left to meet another woman he loved but was holding back from, because he wasn't quite over his last girlfriend who had ripped his heart out.

"We connected so well...we communicated so naturally...but I think she was lying to me," he said, "some of the stuff she said didn't make sense...but I didn't want to ask her...I tried to trap her in a lie instead."

"That's crazy," I said, "it's not really a sign of good communication if you can't say what's on your mind."

He looked at me as though I was speaking in a foreign language.  I didn't even try to phrase it another way, because I knew he'd never get it.  I drank more of the sulfite-riddled red.

"Well," I said, "I never trusted her anyway...something seemed shady...and you turned into a complete mush after the first meeting...remember when she made you repeat something to her in Spanish on your first date?...I think she put a spell on you...it was Santeria..."

G laughed. "No," he said, "it wasn't like that..."

But I wasn't convinced.  G-man is not the kind of guy to dance in parking lots and for her - he did that.  I sent up a silent prayer that he would finally find a nice girl, settle down, and stop searching for things that didn't exist.

The next day, I woke up with a hangover from the sulfites, and got a message from a man I had been seeing.

"Ouch," he texted, "too much whiskey...my daughter drank me under the table...and you know I'm not a drinker."

"I don't know anything about you," I said, but not to him, "because no one really knows anyone else, ever."

And in a parallel universe, I would have known that it's better never to ask.

 

 

Food and Water

One of my four cats went missing and at first neither my son nor I noticed. We had four - we were both busy - each one of them sometimes escaped at different times. But after a few days, when Dominick didn't come home, we got concerned.

"We need to put signs up for Dom," my son texted one morning.

At the time, I was at work, trying to make a deadline, and felt a sense of dread.

Dominick's brother Anthony had disappeared a few years before. We suspected that our then-neighbor - a corrections officer who wore his gun when he mowed the lawn, might have shot him. We couldn't prove it of course, and didn't try.

"Your cat is digging up my garden," he had told us more than once, "you have to keep it in the house."

Nevermind that his "garden" was a tangle of weeds with empty beer bottles interspersed that likely should have been condemned by the Board of Health or whatever administrative body forces people to clean up their property.

So I called the animal control department of my town, to see if anyone had turned in a lost cat.  Since town hall was so close to our house, the changes were a little better than slim-to-none.

"Can you describe this cat?," the woman who answered the phone asked.

"Yes," I said, "he's grey and white...missing a few teeth...drools a lot...and pretty much looks like a bowling ball with legs...he's fat."

She laughed, but sounded sympathetic.  Took my name and number - gave me a few more numbers to call - and wished me luck in my quest to find him.

"My cats escape sometimes too," she said, "I hope you get him back...it's like losing a child."

Visions of Fat Dom's picture on milk cartons danced through my head. 

But before we could make posters with his picture, my son had good news just two days later.

"We found Dom," he said, "He was on someone's lawn about 12 houses up the street...there was food and water for him.  So I carried him home."

That night when I returned from work, there were no signs of Dominick, even as the other cats scurried to the table for food ravenous as always.  I called; he didn't answer - and finally I found him on my bed, drooling and purring.

"Dominick," I said, "where have you been?"

He immediately came to me and ran his head under my hands, walking in circles and purring loudly.

Since we found him, he has been afraid to leave the house. His urge for going has been diminished.

My son and I walked there last night, to thank the people for having taken care of him, and to give them our number in case he showed up again so we could retrieve him.

The house looked abandoned and unkempt.  The doorbell hung from it's wire and there were holes in the screens of the windows.  The only ornamentation on the lawn - which hadn't been mowed for sometime - was an American flag. No one answered the door as we knocked.

When Dominick's demons make him wander again, maybe we'll find out the mystery.

In the meantime, all we could do was salute the flag, and go back home to feed him and the others.

Sincerely, Theresa

When my father's father - Grandpa John died, a month after he collapsed from a heart attack on Christmas day, and one day after his 70th birthday, Grandma Tessie wrote a sympathy card to Grandma Edith, his widow. It was a simple gesture, yet courageous, as Grandma Tessie's husband - Grandpa Umberto - had passed away only two weeks before. There was a whirlwind of death in the family that year, for sure. Two of the Scandinavian relatives and at least one of the Italians. My parents ran from one hospital to another that year, and Christmas was never the same, nor would it ever be.

Grandma Tessie summoned me for help as she wrote the card in my mother's kitchen in the house where I grew up.

"How do you spell sincerely?," she asked, in broken English, Italian being her first language.

I wasn't entirely sure, but knew that she would accept any answer I gave her, so I spelled it for her and she signed the card "Sincerely, Theresa."  I was never sure why she was called "Tessie" instead of Theresa - since the former wasn't half as elegant as the latter - but that's how we always knew of her. She was a headstrong woman with an amazing capability to save money without appearing cheap, and who apparently treated my mother poorly as a child, which she never forgot, and which was her excuse when she was hard on my sister and me.

"You should have had Grandma Tessie for a mother," she said, after she criticized us in some way, or withheld love.

Years later after I had my own child who sometimes thought I failed him, I understood that she did the best she could at the time.  But at 11, I felt sometimes that despite the mainstream life I lived in Suburban Long Island, I was being raised by wolverines.  My parents never showed each other affection and punished us by withholding love.  They did their best; at least that's what I know intellectually.  Emotionally, I'm still not quite there, some 40 years after the quiet storm.

Grandma Tessie was always good to me and had my best interests at heart. She said things like "You have a nice complexion." She made the best fried asparagus and braciole that I've ever tasted.

She and Grandma Edith were different in most every way possible; Grandma Tessie found it hard to stop talking and Grandma Edith was stern and quiet and gave disapproving looks to everyone except my sister, who was her favorite.

But I loved them both, sincerely.

 

The Intersection of Four Gazes

She should be taking care of Important Matters at Hand - in initial caps -  but there she was, writing stories about trees again. Or at least thinking about trees.

It gave her peace to lie on the ground and look up at the branches. It started when Grandpa John planted a tree in front of the house the same year she was born. When she was five, he pointed to the tree. "Look how tall it is," he teased, "do you think you will ever be that tall?  You're the same age and you need to catch up."

She knew he was being silly, even as a child, but it was a silly that she cherished.  A playful nature that made him eat peas she made of PlayDough because he pretended he thought they were real.  A loving silly that made him sit quietly when she put his hair in rollers.

"You're all heart," Grandpa John always said to her.  And when he said it, she believed him and she became that way. In another lifetime.

Things changed both quickly and gradually and the memory of those moments were carefully stored in boxes on the tops of closet shelves and in basements, preserved and jettisoned in time.

But now it was late autumn, and it didn't take more than a fallen leaf or two to put her in that mood of hopeful, wistful anticipation.  Some of it came from the memory of the one year in the past that was a defining time.  Family ate dinner in the basement and extra food was stored on the staircase of the outside entrance to keep it cold and relatives who spoke languages she never heard surrounded her.  There was a feeling of safety and peace that had never been surpassed and then it ended with unceremonious deaths and their aftermath.  Things slowly deconstructed and fully ended when her father passed in his sleep, too young at 53, with no good-bye or explanation.  Did she die then too?  Sometimes she thought so. And she hadn't heard from him - from the other side - the way she had her mother who sent random words of wisdom in messages she could understand because - for better or worse - they had been ad odds yet close. 

She gave a lot of parties and did a lot of things to keep herself busy and her mind cluttered so that she could both connect and detach from the rest of the world - and from herself. Most people did that, it was a common fact. Or if they didn't, they drank too much or abused other substances...they had more children than they could give individual attention to...they became political activists where the means far outweighed the end. 

But that wasn't what she was thinking about when she was doing the laundry and planning the menu not for one but for two parties where she would be surrounded by a certain type of peace and safety. 

In the middle of all of this, she was thinking about ripples in a pond that she never saw in a photo taken by someone who wouldn't sell his soul, even if he got a good price for it.  Who was this person?  She didn't want to ask the question, much less find out the answer. She saw in him a boy, a man, a poet, a fisher, the sun and the clouds. And in herself, she saw acceptance and envy. Could she ever be that free?

This person - who didn't like to be called by the name she gave him for reasons he didn't really understand - was as bold as love. That was her song for him. A Jimi Hendrix song.

She couldn't be sure if he was real or an apparition. He was logical and also spoke in non-sequiturs and his eyes told a story and yet she couldn't quite understand the subtext. His simplicity, she sensed, was subterfuge, but maybe not cannily so.  He wasn't a liar, but he was a warrior.

It was confusing to be around someone who didn't care about who she was "then" or who she might be tomorrow but was transfixed by the evolving mercurial moments of the "now."  In this case, she was an observer more than a participant, her nose pressed against the window, her mouth breathing tiny circles of smoke which further clouded her judgment. 

 My yellow in this case is no so mellow.
In fact I'm trying to say it's frightened like me.
And all of these emotions of mine keep holding me
from giving my life to a rainbow like you.
But I'm a yeah, I'm bold as love,
yeah yeah.

Beheading the Angels

If she ever told him how much she missed him, he would think she was crazy and in some ways, she believed he would be correct.  She really didn't know him at all - really never had - in fact - she hardly even met him.  All she knew were the few random things he had told her, which really wasn't much at all.  So it wasn't him who she missed; it was the vague notion of the possibilities that seemed to spring up in the storage room of her boarded up home, miles from where she was now when they fleetingly intersected in a flurry of temporary synchronicity.  That's what part of her was calling it retrospectively - and that's what it had to be.

 "The notion of him is filling a void for you," her rational self said when thoughts creeped in about the alleged magic between them.  Because that's all it was - an allegation.

"We could be so good together," her irrational self argued, "yeah we could - I KNOW we could."  The argument went on long after he turned to stone and went back to his true calling as his soul's warden. 

"That's a song you know...," rational offered, interrupting her half-hearted lament. "what you just said...lines from a song from an obscure album...it wasn't even a hit...and you're quoting the lyrics.  Typical"

"I'll tell you about the world that we'll invent," she said suddenly remembering it line by line...a wanton world without lament...enterprise...expedition...invitation and invention...

Then both the rational and irrational sides sang together in a kind of chant and felt a kind of peace.

The time you wait subtracts the joy

Beheads the Angels you destroy...

Angels fight; angels cry;

Angels dance and angels die."

 

Poses

She had started feeling voyeuristic about her own life and, once again, blamed the old diaries and boxes of old photos which sometimes she wished she had lost in a move - or maybe thrown down an incinerator. 

Two days before, she unearthed a picture of Trey with his daughters - and her - at Laurita's house on Christmas Eve dated 2001.  Trey, dressed in a bulky holiday sweater, had his face twisted into a neo sneer, the girls - all three beautiful - looked runway ready, and Bri, in black with bright red lips and sad eyes smiled a forced, fake smile, showing all of her teeth and part of her gums.  Ho ho ho. She had only just blogged about him the day before - making fun of how he made fun of her spaghetti sauce - and there he was at the mall - the Patron Saint of Emotional Unavailability - directly in front of her at Macy's.  She had sometimes wondered what they would say to each other if their paths crossed again but strangely - she had nothing to say. There was no bitterness - no nostalgia - not even hearty indifference...it was as though he wasn't there the whole time they were together - and even less so now.

She could have easily avoided him if his daughter hadn't noticed her. "Dad," she said, "Look - it's Brianna - HI BRI," she said waving.

Bri could feel the tension building but instantly snapped into "superficially charming" mode, and the vain side of her was relieved that she was having a good hair day and wearing six inch ankle boots that brought her to eye level with him. 

"How are you sweetie," she said to the daughter fatuously, "you look beautiful as always." 
 

"Oh gawd," she thought, "could I sound any more fake?  When did I turn into Kitty Carlisle?"

Then she leaned in and kissed Trey on both cheeks, a European affectation she had learned from watching the Countess on "The Real Housewives of New York City." 

"What can I say?," she said, vaguely.

"Hey, how the hell are you?," he asked, smiling warmly.

He seemed genuinely happy to see her, and looked pretty much the same, but thinner, older, and more tired.  She remembered hearing through the grapevine that a favorite nephew had passed away in a hunting accident, but didn't know if she should bring it up, wasn't sure of the protocol.

They exchanged brief pleasantries about kids and schools and other easily forgettable things and finally one or both of them said "Great seeing you" and walked off in opposite directions.

"Wow," Bri said, "wait till I tell Sofia who I just ran into."  She dug into her purse to find her phone to send a text...but stopped; then she didn't remember why it was important.

But she did remember that she needed moisturizer, which is why she walked into the store in the first place.  Surely not to strike poses for cameras, hidden or otherwise.