Thursday, September 15, 2005

Wide Smiles

The first thing I noticed about her was her enormous ass.  I have seen them marginally bigger, but not on a woman of such short stature.  Short, but not small - she was as buxom as she was broadbeamed and calipygian, despite being barely over five feet in height.  As she piled onto the bus, the crowd parted around her; she needed room to maneuver and lord love her she got it, with the other riders pressing out of her way to let her through.

She wore a black leather coat with cloth sleeves, stylish and in good repair.  Under it was a discreet dark blouse with slimming vertical stripes in two tones of brown, and her blue jeans were well-constructed and looked new.  The body these garments covered resembled an exercise ball, almost perfectly globular.  Her head was another smaller sphere of flesh balancing on top, with clear mahagony skin that set off her large dark eyes.  Her hair was complicated - a few regions of burgandy color, the rest a rich coffee brown, cut into different layers, with some parts straightened and some parts feathered and some I don’t know what she did to it.  As she rolled back toward where I sat on the bus, like a bowling ball through chilled maple syrup, a slender, tiny woman got up from a seat across from me, a seat between two persons of fairly standard proportions.  Others standing nearby made no move toward the empty spot. 

The big woman noticed this shifting of seat usage and worked her way gracefully to the vacancy.  She lightly lifted herself up in a slight sideways stretch and settled delicately onto the bench.  Though I was ostensibly writing in my chickenscratch notebook I couldn’t help but notice her virtuosity as she too her seat.  She notriced me noticing and , with supreme ease, flashed me an enormous smile, revealing an enormous gap between her large, bright incisors.  I smiled back, more reservedly but quite distinctly, and returned to my notes, tried to write out a few more sentences.  I glanced up, searching my mind for a word or a phrase; she was watching and bestowed another big grin on me.  I gave her back a curt, clenchjawed nod with a half-smile - the “commuter courtesy special” - and went back to my sheet of scrawlings for a few minutes.  When I looked up again, I was, again, greeted by her dazzling gaptoothed smile, surmounted by her warm smiling eyes.  I smiled back again, marginally more feelingly, and this time I saw her speaking to me.  I pulled off my earbuds and asked her to repeat herself. 

“You’re a writer,” she said with ambiguous inflection, as much a statement as a question.

My smile congealed just a little on my face.  “Just for fun,” I responded.  “What gave it away?  The way I’m putting words in this notebook?”

“The way you look.  Like you’re thinking.  Deep in thought.”

My smile thawed out a little.  “It helps me relax,” I admitted to her, “finding the right word, getting ideas out of my head, working through what I’ve been through till it means something....”

“I know what you mean,” she replied serenely; “Sometimes you just gotta get all that stuff in your head to settle down.  That’s why I do hair.”

“Hair?,” I asked her from across the crowded aisle of the bus.

“Oh yeah.  Stylin’ the hair is so relaxing.  Lets you leave all your thinking behind.” Her smile stretched around her face like the seams on a basketball.  “Ooh, here’s my stop.  Well g’bye sweetie.” Lightly she lofted to her feet and floated down the steps at Fillmore, with her fantastical hair and her enormous ass. 

When I turned back to my pen and paper, they seemed too flat and thin to have very much to say.