Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-06-08 - 12:32 p.m.

What People Think

I drove out to the Russian River a few days ago to take some photographs for a friend, and I passed a small derelict restaurant. We used to eat at that restaurant regularly, my boyfriend at the time and I, years ago. They had great French toast. Mostly, though, I remember the proprietor: a tall, thin middle-aged hippie with languid movements and a sarcastic manner. I remember never knowing if he liked us.

We're talking maybe eighteen years ago, and the two memories I have are French toast and whether the proprietor liked us. Now good French toast, we know, is an important factor in anyone's life. But why can I so clearly bring back the uneasy feeling of not being sure how a man I didn't even know felt about me?

It's that feeling, the one that says, "You may THINK you're all that, but they're really laughing at you." The one that makes you feel like your bushel basket has been unceremoniously snatched off, and what the beacon shows isn't good enough for the light of day. The one that says that your best dress shoes will always have toilet paper stuck to one heel, that the first time you use a new word you'll mispronounce it - and that somehow, in some deep grade-school recess of the mind, that any of this actually MATTERS.

I consider making t-shirts for Youngest Daughter with large letters on the back: "Yes, I DID brush her hair," or simply, "She chose this outfit herself." I don't like to leave my garage door open because it's such a trashy mess in there, and people walk by. I sometimes turn around and look over my shoulder to see my ass in the mirror. I wonder if my elderly mother's neighbors think I'm a good daughter, or if they think I neglect her. I frantically throw the toys and pool towels out of the courtyard into the garage when the bug-spray man comes (which explains some of the trashy mess in the garage.)

Are we seeing a pattern here? Like maybe I spend a little too much time trying to figure out what someone else might think about what I do, what I look like, who I am? Like maybe I don't trust my own opinion, good or bad, as much as I give merit to any stranger's?

Intellectually, we all know that strangers have better things to do than to form judgments about us. Like worrying about whether THEIR hair is sticking out funny, or if anyone saw them just drive over the curb. And for those who do judge us wanting, this will have little or no impact on our lives. The odds of my applying for a great job and hearing, "No. We KNOW about your kid's hair," are pretty slim. Yeah, I know this. Yeah, I can speak rationally on the subject, and I can laugh at myself, but it's kind of a rueful laugh. Because that uneasy, decades-old hotfaced self-consciousness still lurks in my middle-aged heart.

Of course, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't think you would know exactly what the hell I was talking about. Yeah, YOU, there, with the hair.

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