7
“I FOUND THE BATHROOM,” she said. “I washed my face. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw how much I had changed. Of course, I was still gorgeous—but I had a hardness that I hadn’t had.”
“Funny that you should mention—”
“Shh. I had, when I was a kid, kind of a softness. A roundness. Smooth. Soft. It was gone.” She was staring into space, or into the past, perhaps into the mirror that had hung on her wall in the tiny bedroom she had as a girl. Suddenly she came back, turned to me, and said, “It’s still gone, I’m happy to say. It’s been gone for a long time. I’m glad. I wouldn’t want that back. There are things about youth that I would be very glad to have back. I’d like—well, it’s a long list—but I wouldn’t want that softness back. It’s not useful. Anyway, I decided that things had to change. I heard that old warning: you must change your life. So I decided to try to become one of the kids again. Denny invited me to one of their parties, and I went along with the gag.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. “And so forth. You can take it from there.”
[to be continued]
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