Beige Lady Spotted At the Back of the Bus

This morning’s spam commentary urging me to consider the benefits of no-name purses that mimic those with names reminded me of my bus ride yesterday. I was standing at the back – I know, I was careful to avoid the landmines and look! I’m still alive today! – and sitting in front of me were two women.

Both of them were talking on their phones at the very same time and by the way their conversations went, they could have been talking to each other. “Where’s the thing at?” “OK I’ll see you then.” “Oh My God, are you serious?” “That’s, like, the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” It was great. It was like being in a farmyard while two donkeys brayed in different directions.

The one woman hung up her phone and proceeded to have an “I’m so tired I’m going to close my eyes right here but stay totally elegant and not slump even a little” nap. The other woman kept calling people and text messaging them, even though she had a perfectly good romance novel open to the middle sitting on her lap. Because her conversation was dull, I stared at the sleeping woman instead.

She was a vision in beige. Elegant beige. I guess maybe it was more taupe than beige. Beat up blue jeans and a cream, cowl necked sweater, with a taupe blazer topping it. A wide, chocolate brown scarf was wound carelessly around her neck. yes, I have read my share of Danielle Steele novels. Why do you ask? She had small brown stud earrings that matched her brown beaded bracelet. Her Chanel sunglasses were pushed up on top of her head. Then I noticed her purse had the same double-c logo. It was also beige. There was a change purse attached to the big purse with a wrist strap. Also logo’d. Also beige. Her loafers – they were loafers, there was no way around it – were in the same fabric as the purse and change purse. Beige, logo’d loafers. No socks.

Her hair was chin length, also beige but over-highlighted and fairly straw-like, pulled back in a ponytail. The sunglasses were pinning down a particularly wiry bit. Her skin was beige but in a natural sort of way. She wore hardly any makeup. She was probably in her late ’20s. Maybe a bit older.

I wondered what the hell someone with so many logo’d clothing items and such an obvious sense of style (even if, to my unrefined palette, the sense of style was from 1984, but I’m told the ’80s are back, so) was doing on the bus. Napping. Amidst the rest of us: office workers who shuttle downtown and up again with our old, beat up shoes and bags and end-of-the-day grimaces, students heading up the mountain to SFU, obvious with their backpacks and giant textbooks that they pretend to read while they check out the other students. We office workers and students nap inelegantly. Our mouths gape open and we fall heavily to one side because we are exhausted from the office air and idiots or, if in the case of the students, from beer and fried food.

She was still on the bus when I got off; the seat next to her was empty by then and she had quarter-turned, extended her arm across the seat back and was resting her head upon her own shoulder. With her head turned against the light, I could see her lips, which were not beige but pink, puffy, stung by plumping gloss perhaps or botox or cold sores. It was a relief somehow, that she’d missed one spot on her person, that she was not completely beige but had taken the time – I like to think it was on purpose – to retain a bit of colour, a splash of humanity against her beige canvas.