Gliding Upon Concrete
What are we doing here?
The thought sounds too existential for the situation as it crosses my mind, but there’s really no other question to ask.
I tug on the sleeve of my dress. It’s designed in such a way that the wearer’s arms are rendered all but motionless. A deep regret for every time I have taken my range of motion for granted permeates my being.
A cup of tea I cannot physically lift to my lips is set down gently in front of me. I resign myself to watching it go cold, which is oddly chilling and fills me with a kind of sadness that must have manifested in the physical by slackening my spine because my sister Audrey is pulling my shoulders back under quickly constructed guise of admiring the stitching on the back of my dress Now I’ve been corrected and no one around us is aware of my momentary affront to perfection. We’re here today to look perfect, I suppose, to the most perfect among us.
All this pressure to impress the people we’ve traveled by train so early in the morning to be impressed by.
My sisters are speaking in hushed voices so that we might be able to overhear snippets of seemingly inconsequential conversation. I feel as though I’m both watching and acting in an art film. It’s as if I’ve stumbled into a gallery in The Village and have been inserted into a piece of performance art I don’t quite understand or want to be associated with. I suppose I came willingly enough - I didn’t throw myself onto the ground in protest, after all - but I am developing a headache by engaging my peripheral vision so actively. So is Lana, who sits across from me. I can see her lower lid beginning to twitch, which is a dead giveaway that her head is beginning to pulse with a dull pain.
Lana is going to develop a migraine by refusing to look at them head-on. She’ll truly make herself ill for these people who must know we’re only here to play voyeur to their experience, who show up here to be ogled. Who am I protecting by pretending? Them?
I reach for my tea but my dress restricts me.
Well, if I can’t even enjoy the small comfort of a warm teacup in my palm,, then I’m going to look.
It’s not as bold a maneuver as I’ve built it up to be. The Plaza’s staff does not immediately call for my forced removal and I am not instantly banned from their gilded lobby for the rest of my natural life.
Babe Paley and her gaggle of swans sit over fifteen feet from our table, so any shift in the air created by my head and neck turning will not upset their brunch of coffee, cigarettes, and barely-touched Devonshire cream.
My gaze will linger too long on Babe for me to play this off as an innocent stretch and I can feel my sisters’ hands coming for me, but I am able to make a few observations that I don’t believe those refusing to blatantly stare would have the opportunity to notice.
1.) Some people were made to be noticed. Once noticed, the light in the room shifts ever so slightly away from everyone else and onto them. It’s almost imperceptible, but once your eye catches them you feel a shift in the air that makes you question your position in society. This is odd because most of these women were born affluent and married strategically, from my understanding. The former position was beyond my control and latter still to be determined.
2.) They are crisp. That’s the only word to describe their style. Nothing seems out of place, as if each thread in their assumedly extravagantly priced clothing was stitched or woven with imbued importance. I feel as though if they were to tug at their hems or sleeves it would be for permanent adjustment to reflect the slight change of fashion they had to communicate for the masses, never for general comfort.
3.) They are like cutlery.
Cutlery.
As I look at Babe Paley, I see a fork. The kind of fork found at an opulent restaurant or home, of course, but a fork nonetheless.
She is expensive, polished, and pronged.
Her clothes, no matter how fashionable, encase her like a silken napkin so as to give her faux protection from the unseemly-by-contrast backdrop of a table seating many others that is this gritty American city. Her posture is surely reinforced, if not by steel, by sterling silver. Her motions are fluid and self-assured, as someone might present their silverware to guests in a manner that invites them to admire but warns them never to touch. And when I meet her eyes, I feel nothing short of skewered.
Audrey, Lana, and Liza are looking at me incredulously - they have gently yet firmly swung me back around to face them. Only Liza smirks at my doing exactly what we came here to do. But now, as I look to my cold tea, I look forward to the next part of our day more than I had expected. We plan to go see the swans glide upon the pond in Central Park. Composed and elegant above water; paddling like hell below, hiding their efforts from human eyes so that perfection is the lasting impression of their existence.
I feel myself warming somewhat to the women who sit at their raised booth behind me. I see the swans unseen work as worthy of praise, so perhaps the effort Babe Paley and her flock put into gliding upon concrete is Herculean. But then again, maybe it’s an affront to nature.