Last night I went out with Robin and Janet, both some seven or eight years younger than me and two of my dearest friends in this town. We had free tickets to see a medium contact dead people and we figured Hey a meal out, a couple of drinks, and fun in the car driving up and back – why not?
Janet is five-two with hips smaller than a seventh-grade boy. “Bitch!” a lesser woman would say to herself walking behind her. She can and does play bridge, manage the investment portfolios of stranger, bowl a higher score than 99% of the male population and speak truth to power.
Robin is like Janet in that she takes no prisoners. She’s five nine and has the longest legs in the greater Boston area, a waist as tiny as Janet’s waist and hips that flare out from that waist in such a way as to make grown men weak in the knees. Mostly though, Robin is blunt.
She had a filmy V-neck blouse on that she said kept gapping open to reveal a slight imperfection in her left breast. This imperfection grieves her.
“I can’t even see it!” exclaimed Janet, looking. “You will!” said Robin. “I’ll be flashing six seven times tonight.”
She and Janet had cosmopolitans at dinner. “What IS a cosmopolitan anyway?” I asked,” “Girly martini,” Robin said, lifting her glass to my lips. Then we made fun of men for a while, finished our dinners, and set out to walk the quarter mile to the theatre where the medium would be doing her stuff.
At the biggest intersection in this fair-sized city we waited at a light that seemed designed to NEVER let a pedestrians cross. We stood and stood with a handful of other theatre-bound women just behind us until Janet showed leadership, stepping into the thoroughfare just as the light turned green for the opposing team so to speak.
I nodded apologetically and scuttled across. It was the wrong thing, the nod, and I knew it as soon as I did it, Because suddenly a horn was blaring and a young guy in the car barreling through yelled “Way to cross a street you old biddies!” It was my entire fault for the apologetic head bob.
Janet frosted the guy by walking on in queenly fashion. But Robin yelled “Whaaat?” wheeled around, and said “Let’s run the fool down and pound on his hood!”
We didn’t though. We went like meek lambs to our show. Afterward Robin said “Let’s have a couple of cocktails and shoot the breeze some more.” She was kidding I guess. Because less than 40 minutes later we were dropping her off at her back door behind which her husband was probably still at his desk and her kids were doing homework and her dog Blue was listening listening listening for her footsteps.
