Dear Marianne Part I

June 30, 2014

Dear Marianne,

When you chatted it up at the block party with Roberto Dennis and his pack of macho friends, it seemed as if you didn't know me.  And this confuses me.  Just a few months ago you acted like we were sorority sisters.

"Tell me about the neighborhood," you said.  And then you winked at me and looked at me encouragingly.  We sipped our tea.  You smiled but said little about anything.

I gossiped about everything.  How Roberto's wife, Delucca Dennis has the worst temper and hollers every morning at her dogs that will not stay in her yard and how those dogs run wild all over the neighborhood as if they are possessed.  I told you the Johnson's daughter is a high-school dropout and also has a druggie boyfriend.  I sipped my tea.  I gossiped more.

Your face seemed wise like Grizzly when she wasn't drunk, and I started to tell you about my sister and her child.  But it was like I forgot you were even there.  It was like I was speaking to a ghost in the room.  You sat so quiet and still almost as if you and the lounge chair in the coffee house had become one.   

"My niece drives me crazy," I said.  "And I hate her hair.  It looks angry as if she couldn't decide between pink and red and the gorgeous blonde color she was born with."

"That's just teenagers and that's just hair." You said.  And I jumped when I heard your voice.  You sipped your tea.  I spilled mine all over my new shorts. 

I wanted to ask how much bleach your stylist uses to make your hair like you were born with the pale, white blonde hair that some babies have and with no visible roots.  But the most I managed after staining my outfit was, "How often do you have to go to the salon, every four weeks, right?" 

And then you rolled up your pant leg and showed off an ankle tattoo.  It fanned upward, the brown spots made the kind of pattern like you had stepped into a mud puddle, except it felt like I had been the clumsy one and I had slipped up and splashed mud everywhere.   

I almost thought I might catch your tattoo and see it in the pattern of the spilled tea all over my cream colored clothes.