Use By Date

You've all seen it. Pretty girls who have that political capital to make doors open, or at least to have them held open for them. Along with that, they have that ability to charm which is learned at a young age. Most girls are either wired with that at birth or come to learn that quick, usually by kindergarten. So take your pretty girl and have her flash an attentive look at someone, with a mile wide smile and all of a sudden she gets the date/job/lower interest rate loan while the rest of the girls are relegated back to the pig wallow to claw and fight for the rest of the scraps.

My Dad once opined to my Mom that women who didn't marry by 30 were losers. For men, he said if a guy didn't “make it” by 40, he was a loser. I didn't understand this till years later when I saw a few girls, who were pressing 30, freak out and got married, pregnant and acquired that 30 year mortgage. For guys, it was more of a rusting that occurred over 40 if they didn't have either the cash and/or career success. By the time they hit 45 and if they were still doing menial labor, everyone around them quietly adjudged them failures.

“Holy Shit Dad! You were right! I get it now!” Your pretty girls married way prior to 30, scoring the best guy they could and retired early as that old Janis Ian song goes.

**

Chellos is a a decent restaurant in only that their food has an amazing consistent quality. Their burgers taste the same as they did when I was five years old and for me, it holds a nostalgic quality. It's also a nice place to go if I'm too lazy to cook something decent for myself. I'll cook off a gallon sized pot luck, last-for-three-days kinda meal and I get bored with that eventually.

So, there I am at the bar at the East Providence Chello's on Newport Ave munching away on steak fries when I hear a familiar voice. I lean over to peer around the beer taps and I see her, Natalie. I don't say anything nor try to alert her to my presence and honestly, it's been so many decades now that both of us would have to do some mental detective work to rekindle those memories. I continue to munch away as I spied.

Natalie was a real Prom Queen of the East Providence High school back then. We had come to know her when some EP kids would come by Slater Park to hang out. Of course, all the guys would be entranced by her looks. It's too bad you girls can't sense what we guys feel when we see a very beautiful girl. It's hard to put into words. You'd be surprised at it and then understand why some of us actually sigh when we see it. We don't control that reaction either, it comes up from out of nowhere in us.

Anyways, Natalie, as a teen, looked like a slightly, just slightly ugly version of Helena Bonham Cater when she was young. 

 

But not anymore. Years have passed. Her beauty had a “sell by date” and I was close enough to see life had etched it's abuse on her face. That's the way time works. Fresh leather car seats turn to creases in time and so does everything else. When Natalie got up to steal a set plate from a neighboring table, she had packed on 50 or so more pounds from what I could see. From what I know and heard over time and it's decent intelligence (gossip), she had married, had a son, divorced, married again and divorced again. She was still fixing hair at various salons in EP and Seekonk for a living.

I wasn't surprised by that at all, not at my age. Everyone I know at this age has porked out, lost hair, gone gray, divorced, blown through relationship after relationship, lost their perky titties or that figure. That's age. That's how things go.

But what did surprise me was that she was still “holding court.” She was at the end of that bar with four other girls and directing it all. The conversation, commenting on the food and leading the pack of girls there as any alpha cheerleader would. The restaurant is also a stop for EP cops and when a couple came in, Natalie gets off the stool in excitement, with a bit of a shrill scream, to greet them and shepherd them to her gaggle who's at that end of the bar. Again, she directs all the action that's happening now.

“Wow..You're still at it!” I think. “Still trying to control it all. You're still 18 and Prom Queen.”

Age is hard on women. For us guys, it' isn't illegal to age. We get “distinguished.” We can get away with dating some girl half our age if we had the chops to pull it off. Our pressures are different and like I said, it's money/power that we're measured by. Do I honestly believe that? No. We're all worthy in our own right by whatever positive traits we own. But you know how society is, how people are. We tend to glorify beauty or power.

You see...we never leave high school, we never graduate...it repeats!

And women are held to a standard of beauty that is taken away, sooo slowly, with time. I've seen many times where a guy's initial attention is drawn away from the 40 year old women he's talking to, to the college girl who happens to be in close proximity. At work one time, where we used to go out back and smoke cigs or take a break, I watched a woman from the business office just glare and I mean glare, at the 18 year old hot and tight diet aid who was wearing yoga pants. I sat there and watched. I read her face and on it was written jealousy raised to the 100^th power.

This same diet aid complained of being sick of guys who constantly hit her up too. Our 40+ business office women nearly burst out of her skin when she heard that. It wasn't said intentionally either, this pretty teen girl who hadn't the experience to deal with it, had a hard time with all that attention.

**

So there was Natalie in Chello's. I guess losing your crown due to aging isn't fun and you clutch and grasp to keep it there, or at least replay your past as you knew it, to this day. The script she played and acted worked so well then, why give it up? It brought happiness.

I finished my burger, paid the bill and left. Going out the door I nearly stumbled on the steps going down due to my ever present kluztiness. A young waitress stationed near the door, the greeter, rushed towards me then stopped when she realized I had regained my footing.

“I”m fine” I say.

“Oh..I was scared for a moment...I thought...but your OK!” she said, trailing off.

Her face was smiling, calm and she felt safe. I can tell now, you get old and can read faces. She reacted to me like I was her Gran Dad.