A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Part 8

The girl was seven, eight at the most. Even from across the street in the dim, pulsing lights of the city, Lisa could see her eyes — bright and eager and knowing. She wore a dress, which was impractical in her position, with torn pink stockings and black tennis shoes. There was a park across the street from the hotel where Harold and Lisa stopped at the valet stand and made one last check of clothing and makeup on their way into the banquet. Lisa noticed the girl right away. And the newspapers.

She sat on the ground in front of a green metal park bench which supported a mass of ragged clothing and shopping bags that looked to conceal an adult, lying down. Over the mass was a layered array of newspapers serving as a quilt. The girl was taking selections from the quilt, choosing them carefully for her purposes, and tying slips of the newsprint into bows. Three already adorned her matted hair, tossing in the December breeze in unison with the edges of the quilt.

It didn't help. Lisa wondered if the little girl knew that her bows didn't look pretty; they only served to make the scene she occupied more pathetic. Lisa saw her as a gawker sees a Monet. She stared at her idly but intensely and absently shook her head. Something told her she shouldn't think of the girl as an exhibit, as if the valet might become a docent and point out the detail in the girl's bright green, threadbare scarf. But she couldn't help it. She saw her from across the street, but she knew the scene perfectly.

She knew the most minor details — the endless arrangement of strips of pulp that never seemed to align just right; the frailty of the bows; the way they seemed less pretty over time; the gnawing awareness that the bows weren't working; the drive to ignore that awareness; the little girl's fear of looking at the fluttering heap of newsprint behind her because she knew what she would see. She would see someone she didn't understand. Forces larger than her, cosmic and random and unexplained and unfair. Regret. Rejection in the form of charity. Ugliness.

One of the bows blew away from the girl's fingers and both of them watched it tumble down the street, then crash and crumple into the gutter.