See her there.  Looking very ill-at-ease.  Don’t know why.  Maybe because she isn’t happy with her makeup.  Maybe because she’s menstruating.  Maybe because she just doesn’t feel like being friendly.  It’s like she believes in something beyond her experience, but is afraid to commit to it.  She likes to project herself onto people who are monotonous.  Always becomes impatient with cliches and hackneyed plots.  She doesn’t understand why it rains or why there’s lightning in the sky or how many senators there are, but she knows how to manipulate a man, for damn sure, and how to suspend belief, which is always a valuable skill to have.  So what if her boyfriend thinks she’s “certifiably coo coo?”  She still has nice firm tits and a face that adolescent boys fantasize about.

She looks in the mirror.  Time to lose the glasses and get Lasik surgery.

Looks at the bags under her eyes and the crow’s feet.  Time for a little plastic surgery.

Lifts her blouse, looks at her belly.  Time for liposuction.

Her hair is still blonde, there’s no sign of any graying.  Done everything wrong my whole life, she thinks, and still have enough residual confidence left over to… It’s no good.  The thought is no good; mostly because she can’t complete it.   She is forever beginning thoughts and not finishing them.   She chalks this up to having recently diagnosed herself with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder after watching a commercial on the Lifetime network.  Or was it Oxygen?   She can never keep those two networks straight.  All she knows is one of them plays reruns of Oprah and the other…oh, who the hell knows…the wine is the thing…and the third glass is really the thing…

In her journal that night she writes:

“I would have been called voguish in the twenties, reactionary in the thirties, cantankerous in the forties, obstreperous in the fifties, liverish in the sixties, nebulous in the seventies, self-denying in the eighties, semi-conscious in the nineties… these days i’m just called a laughing sinner… i’ve really scrambled to get where i am… i’m common… a proletariat… my lips have become a joke… my eyebrows, exaggerated… my eyes, presbyopic… my vocabulary, tiresome… don’t even know the definition of “self.” i’m plucky, but disengaged, slavishly devoted to feather-light comedies… i aggressively seek out the role of being on the down-low… i have an arsenal of rage…”

She puts the pen down, closes her eyes and thinks about something her mother once said to her:  “The secret is being able to do anything and not knowing where you’re going to end up at the end of the day and just letting fate fall into the palm of your hand…”

She looks at the palms of her hands. They’re the only parts of me that have not aged, she thinks, and she smiles for the first time that day.