#igotcarded

Once there was a girl, who grew into a woman, who reached an age when wrinkles marred her brow and small puffs, miniature croissants one might say, hung beneath her eyes. Sagging, aging flesh laid claim to any thigh gap she might have once boasted, and her traitorous teenage son took every opportunity to point out her burgeoning bingo wings.

Each day she carefully applied her makeup, over a base layer of Miracle Mask Line Minimizer, and ending with a Light Diffusing Youth Extending Translucent Mineral Powder. In the absence of sufficient cash for Botox injections, she painstakingly arranged her forty-something bangs across her forehead and fixed a scarf around her developing turkey-neck. A few squirts of perfume, she always thought, would go a long way toward distracting a person from the observable ravages of age, and so she wore a spritz of Tresor every chance she had, and when she found herself in a spot that proclaimed itself SCENT REDUCED, or worse SCENT FREE (implausible as such an idea even was) she simply hoped, peevishly, that no one smelled it, or if they did that they had minimal objections.

Always a slave to fashion and the trappings of perpetual youth, for years the woman struggled through summer in heels too high for normal walking, but which accentuated the calves no one ever looked at anymore. In Fall she wore the peep toe suede booties with the five inch heels as noted in InStyle magazine to be the rage of the season, though they were completely impractical in the  bitter wetness of Fall in her part of the country. When Spring arrived each year, she donned the essential skirts and blouses of the new season, and picked her way through the lingering snow banks in her trend-observant clothing. Her feet were afflicted with ceaseless cramping, and she was chronically cold. However, it never occurred to her to do any different.

Then the year came when she ventured outside the house, in public, in her fake suede, flat-heeled winter ankle boots that were lined with shabby faux shearling. She had purchased them sight unseen from an online retailer. They felt wonderful on her feet, like a pair of favorite sneakers, but for two years she wore them only for her daily constitutional walks on the back roads of the village where she lived. When the horrendous winter of 2015 hit, she had no choice one day. Her leather wedge-heeled calf-high boot would be ruined in the vast drifts of salted snow, and so, with serious misgivings, she sheepishly wore the fake-suedes to town.

Nothing happened. Not a single person even seemed to notice, although there were others, the woman saw, who took a chance on their stylish leather boots despite the storm. She shook her head and dismissed them as peacock-ish, and probably French.  When she returned home, her feet were warm and dry, and her arches were cramp-free. On her next trip to town she wore the boots again, but this time she tried out the dreadful down jacket. She had purchased it at the same time as the fake suede ankle boots, but on a whim had ordered it in an unfortunate shade of aqua. It was the roomy hood that had lured her. It was lined with faux-fur, and stuffed with so much down she couldn’t hear a thing once she pulled it over her head.

Once again, she returned home warm and dry and cramp-free, albeit with a few stray feathers from the cheap down coat smattering her dashboard.

It was the comfort of it all that made it a habit, and for most of the winter the woman wore this frumpy get-up on her excursions to town, telling herself it was winter after all, and she was getting old, and wasn’t it about time she started dressing for comfort? Maybe she would update her whole wardrobe. She thought of her upcoming trip to Europe and saw matte jersey in her future.

One day, she stood at the mirror and withdrew from her makeup bag a brand new trendy eyeshadow duo, something youthful and highly praised in InStyle magasine. She applied it carefully to her eyelids, the lighter colour just below the brows, and the darker one in the creases. It glittered ridiculously and she wiped it off and put on her usual 40-something makeup and went to town in her ugly parka and fake-suede boots.

Her last errand, after Walmart and the pet store, was the liquor store, and she sat in the car for several minutes considering what she would buy. There was a new Sauvignon Blanc she had purchased just recently, a Marlborough type, and quite enjoyed – she didn’t know the name but there was a horse on the label and it came from France. What she wanted, though, was beer. Such a shame beer is so… unpolished. Something one never comes across in InStyle is a beer advertisement. Then the woman noticed the smudged cuffs of her aqua parka and got out of the car, entered the liquor store and walked directly to the beer cooler, where she selected a new type of beer, one she’d seen a poster for that contained 6.4% alcohol.

The woman walked past the wine section to the cash register, and slid her case of beer toward the clerk, who glanced up briefly.

“Do you have ID?” the clerk asked.

“Wh-what?” The woman’s eyes slid to the left, and then to the right, assuming this was some sort of training exercise and they were being observed by a supervisor. There was no one. She stole a suspicious glance at the cashier, looking for a smirk but there was none.

“Do you have ID with you today?” the cashier repeated.

The woman felt her heart hammer, just for a beat or two, and she flipped open her wallet to the small plastic rectangle that housed her driver’s license. Not being the type to get pulled over, she had never been required to flash her license before. She held it up to the cashier, who squinted at it, and then said, “Oh. Sorry about that. We have to ask anyone who looks under 30.”

The woman thought about her parka and her boots and her forty-something makeup as she walked, grinning, to her car, swinging her case of 6.4% beer. When she started the car, the radio was in the midst of a story explaining that March 20th, in addition to being the Vernal Equinox AND World Storytelling Day, was International Day of Happiness.

She might have guessed.