People Notice
By Summer Block

I was at work on Monday morning, an editorial assistant in a slick office in downtown San Francisco, and I wasn't clean. I had spent the weekend in an impromptu road trip and now I was sitting in my cubicle wearing the same outfit I had been wearing when I left on Friday afternoon.

"No one will notice," I told myself, "if you skip one shower."

But the idea continued to haunt me. There is nothing I hate more than making a spectacle of myself. I decided to use my lunch break to shower at my friend Emily's nearby apartment.

On the way, I stopped at the supermarket to buy something for lunch. In the "10 items or less" line, a woman with many more than 10 items was waiting ahead of me with her sequin-clad daughter, a tall, slim girl of eight impossibly wedged into the cart's infant seat. No sooner had I taken my place in line than the mother turned to me, asked "Can you just watch her?" and then scampered off before I could answer.

The girl twisted around on her too-small perch and asked me to hand her a coupon she'd dropped. I handed it to her. I told her she had a nice outfit on. She told me I had nice hair. The clerk told me that I had too many items for this line. I explained that neither the items nor the child were mine: "I'm just, you know, watching everything."

The clerk told me to take my child and my thirty-odd grocery items and leave his line. I pacified him by paying for my own items. In doing so, I stepped briefly in front of the little girl in the shopping cart. When I turned back, the girl was gone.

Panicked to think that my momentary negligence had caused the untimely death of this little girl, I raced up and down several aisles before I discovered that her mother had wheeled her off without telling me and was now busy filling the entire bottom rack of her cart with box after box of Krispy Kremes. Neither paid any me any notice.

Back at the cash register, a thin, haggard woman was unloading her basket of instant coffee, cigarettes, and yogurt. (Why not bedroom slippers and methadone?)

I rushed to Emily's, pulled off my clothes, and stood in her bathroom for five long minutes trying absolutely every possible configuration of knob and button, but nothing would make her shower turn on. Finally, defeated, I decided to take a bath.

I hadn't taken a bath since I was a child, and now I remembered why. I sat in Emily's tiny tub, pouring water over various body parts in turn, feeling like a beached whale being kept alive by solicitous members of Greenpeace. My hair was much too long to wash in this way, so I piled it on top of my head into a soapy castle and later tried unsuccessfully to rinse it in the sink. I also decided to shave my legs in the sink and cut myself in the process: another ten minutes was spent soapy, bleeding, and naked in Emily's flooded bathroom, trying to clean up the growing mess I made with every step. With seconds to spare, I rubbed on some lotion that Emily had in her bathroom cabinet. It so happens I choose a lotion with an odor so strong it made me almost dizzy, though I didn't notice until I had covered myself in it.

I repeated to myself: "No one will notice."

Usually I use finish my makeup with a quick puff of pinkish golden powder. The powder is fine and subtle, with just the slightest hint of glitter, and imparts to the harried face a beatific touch of radiant, settled calm. I unwrapped a brand new box for the occasion. It didn't occur to me that a brand new box might boast a higher concentration of glitter than what my old box had. One swipe, and my face was covered in glitter. I looked like I tripped and fell into a junior high dance.

Here's the thing about glitter: there is no way to remove glitter. Trying to wipe it off only rubs it deeper into your pores, until it's basically embedded in your skin, all these little points of radiance shooting from your pores like light through a sieve.

Again I told myself, "No one will notice."

No time to fix the mess I had made - I dashed back to the office to make my afternoon meeting. I splurged on a taxi, whose driver kindly shared with me his inarticulate but nonetheless vehemently held opinions concerning the number of Mexicans now living in California. It's a testament to the subtly of his arguments that after eleven minutes I still wasn't sure whether or not he was in favor of Mexicans, though I probably could have made a guess.

By the time I reached the office lobby, my makeup had begun to cake and melt. Nothing on earth looks more pitiable and desperate than stray remnants of glitter clinging to a damp jaw line. I noticed now for the first time that my suit jacket had several fundamental structural inadequacies. The right lapel was permanently bent askew and now hung flapping limply, like a flag of surrender. Who notices lapels? I asked myself in the elevator.

I dashed into my meeting half an hour late, with dripping, shampoo-slick hair, my jacket crushed and mangled, my face glowing like one of Rembrandt's milkmaids. The room was quiet. All eyes turned towards me, the spectacle.

My boss looked up from her PowerPoint presentation to say, "What is that smell? I noticed it the minute you walked in! You know I don't like you to wear perfume around me, I'm very sensitive to fragrances."

——

Summer Block will go to any lengths, no matter how grotesque or painful, to avoid brief instances of social awkwardness.

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