un-matronly metamorphosis
She threads a finger through the hole in her sweater, using her other hand to a place her cigarette in an ashtray. She doesn’t use the combs designed to hold burning cigarettes, instead she places her Marlboro Red flat on the bottom of the ashtray, where it gives life to other, historical, lipstick stained butts.
Denise smiles at me, her lips smeared with pesto from a sandwich consumed minutes before our interaction. Her teeth are ornate with the greenery and botanicals of her side-salad. Bits of ash dance on her sweater like depraved constellations.
“Too bad there’s no Fridays at Five during the summer,” she says to me, still smiling like a well-fed llama at the zoo.
Fridays at Five is a weekly happy-hour event held at my architecture school, where booze flows freely, and the students indulge vehemently like sex-starved sailors on leave. Its the only anecdote to scathing critiques and ill-completed architectural renderings.
Denise, at the ripe old age of 45, is by far the oldest student in studio 3A. She’s run the gamut from commercial jobs to a brief stint as a nurse before deciding one day to embark upon architecture school. She’s shady, for sure, but her poorly-dyed red hair and tattered sweaters are hard not to find endearing.
Usually, Denise is the last person to leave Fridays at Five. The crowd starts to dissipate around 7pm, as the work-weary students make their ways home or perhaps to dinner. But Denise meanders around, bumming cigarettes (her pack smoked long ago), eventually replacing the bartender, now off duty. She pours generously for herself, and for the remaining stragglers, too blasted to safely drive home. Sometimes she ends up sleeping with those stragglers, as rumor has it (one straggler worth noting was a much younger man in her studio.)
My friend Rhett works at an art gallery in Beverly Hills. Often, he is assigned to deliver and set-up art at auctions in Palm Springs. His driving partner, for the last couple of visits, has been a middle-aged alcoholic lady who lives with an old, sluggish Labrador Retriever in a Brentwood condominium. Her duvet cover (I know this because some of his friends house-sat for her one night) is matted with black dog hair. Her own hair is long, blonde, and Renaissance-like. While throwing back a few beers, en route back to Los Angeles, she says to him, with Budweiser-breath, “You ought to have a boyfriend in every city. That’s what I used to have when I was your age.”
They say that a man reaches his sexual peak in his early twenties, and that a woman generally reaches her’s around age fourty. In parallel, a man is usually predisposed to alchoholism in his late teens and early twenties, while women usually hit the bottle in mid-life (hence the chapters in the fabled AA book about the alcoholic housewife and the lady who drinks vodka from soda cans at the Laundromat and looses her family’s socks.) Married women tend to fare better in midlife, I have noticed. But the single mid-life women that have confronted me recently speak implicitly of their demographic, leading me to believe that a certain point, if still a spinster, a woman reemerges as a teenage boy.