Pretty Ugly

"Great." 

There were people walking in the direction of the wine bar before I even completely turned on to 12th. I knew they were walking to the Italian place next door, but still. From that vicinity, parking was going to be a pain in the ass. 

I circled the block a few times to see if anyone was leaving, to no avail. I was already late to Regina's going away party. It was supposed to start ten minutes before I decided to pull into a spot on the end of a side street down the block. My lateness would be okay though. Regina wasn't exactly the most punctual person herself. What wasn't okay, was the fact that I would have to walk nearly a mile in my suede-like four inch heels. 

"Holy crap," I muttered to myself while climbing the slight incline that began to feel like Mount Rainier. Which was not an exaggeration. Everest, though, would have been over the top. 

The sky had only begun to spit rain as I entered the twinkle-lit wine bar, and I thought nothing of it. 

"Hi! Oh my god!" Regina got up and hugged me, as was her way. She was half Persian and half Happy Christian, if that makes any sense. She wore black rimmed glasses that I was at times jealous of, but somehow diminished the size of her eyes which could often bore holes through her dinner companions.

"I can't believe you're leaving soon." I sat down next to her at the end of a long table. There were three girls next to her and one across the table. I thought that was odd. The two girls to the far left of her couldn't even see her, much less join the conversation. I wondered if they did it on purpose. 

"I know! My plane leaves Thursday!" I settled into my chair. The two girls closest to Regina were discussing wines in a way that made me wonder if they were wine snobs or snobs in general. I decided they were only wine snobs. And the other two girls farthest from Regina were also discussing something absorbing, but with less fervor. They must have just met. 

"So I have some bad news," Regina pierced me with an annoyed look. "The wine bar isn't doing two for ones any more."

"Oh." Damn it! 9 dollars for something-I-don't-enjoy, here I come! "That's okay."

"Yeah, if I had known that I wouldn't have had us meet here." She looked down at her menu and I looked at mine. "Also, Peter got his hair cut. He looks like a model." She swooned.

I cocked an eyebrow and looked around. "Might make him look more manly. He always did look rather boyish with the long hair."

"Yes. It is manly. He also looks like he's gained a little weight. But in a good way. In a way that makes him look manly."

Peter the waiter did look manly. But he didn't look like a model for anything but his longer looking face, and wider grin. He wasn't hampered by any suddenly necessary hair flicks. I ordered a glass of wine from him and began jumping into conversations here and there. I had to, I didn't know anybody.

I'm not really a fan of large gatherings. This is possibly because, as previously stated, I am terrible at making friends. Regina was almost-friends with me in high school. Since then, I used her as a sound board for my awkwardly awful dating life, since she also had many awkwardly awful dating experiences. We agreed that we were mostly amused by the sincerity of overly anxious lovers, but through our wry and sarcastic jokes we hid the fact that we both wished to God that we could actually be overly anxious lovers ourselves. Since all the "anxious" had apparently drained out of us and become wise-cracking apathy. I liked Regina. 

It also helped that when I was around her I suddenly developed an overly confident dry wit. Which would explain the joke that came out of my mouth when the newest dinner-party-goer joined the pack.

"I don't see you very often! I'm so glad you could come!" Regina was singing the good hostess song before the blonde girl even sat down. 

"I know I just work all the time. Its kind of like my work has become my life these days." She sat in one of the only seats left at the opposite end of the table from Regina and I. She was very pretty. Her hair was a highlighted glowing blonde. She was wearing a fitted black shirt, and a polka dotted skirt.

"What do you do?" Someone asked.

"I'm a banker, I work at Fifth Third. You'd think after working late this often, I'd start to hate my life." A banker, you say? A joke suddenly exploded out of the birth canal of my mind.

"Did you say you're a banker?" Everyone looked when I said it. I was at the other end of the table from this new girl.

"Yes."

"A banker."

"Yes." 

"Cool! So you're like rocking at Oregon Trail."

She stared at me with no expression, and the two girls closest to me got the joke and chuckled. Oddly, even without an expression, she made me feel like I had grown a third arm. 

"...You know, because everybody wants to be the banker on Oregon Trail." She still stared. "That's cool, man, because you know I've never meet a person who says they're a banker. That's cool." Bank teller, I thought later. 

Immediately, based on that one failed attempt at making her laugh, I did not like Natasha. Who names their child Natasha anyway? When you're not even Russian, you're just asking for your child to grow up with only-child syndrome thinking the world revolves around pretty-pretty them, la la la. 

Regina went around to the other side of the table to visit Natasha, and I sipped wine that reportedly tasted of bacon fat, but was actually not disgusting. It tasted like wine. I suppose I am unrefined. But I do not care. 

Girl with open face sitting next to Regina's empty seat had a theater rehearsal to go to. She looked like theater. Like silent film maybe. Her eyes were very wide. Red head girl to my right ate a fourteen dollar plate of hors d'oeuvres at a total of probably 40 calories. It wasn't enough to keep a distended Ethiopian alive. 

"So let me tell you what happened on my awesomely tragic night out." Natasha had squished herself into the seat with Regina. She was now practically on top of me. And she launched into this story that started, I'm not kidding, with:

"--so I decided, what the hell, I'll just go on the party bus with her. How bad can it be? So I get there and realize that all of us girls are wearing dresses, are blonde, and have big boobs. All of us."

Big boobs? Oh no she didn't. I looked at Natasha's chestal region. The somewhat unnecessary comment had pretty much invited everyone at the table to do so. They could not have been bigger than C cups. I glanced at red head girl's massive amount of cleavage and then down at my own. Red head and I were both beating Blondie over there by like a mile. Myself especially. I have to buy custom fits because they don't freakin make my size at normal department stores, ya bitchy Barbie. 

Mind you, this comment would not have annoyed me if what came next hadn't come next.

"--So we're getting onto the bus and this one girl can't walk because her skirt is pretty much right at butt level. And her shoes are strapped up the leg. Like hooker shoes. And this is the point where Natasha decides that she's going to drink away the awfulness of it." (*cue overly enthusiastic laughter from surrounding party guests*) "But then it can and does get worse, and Natasha is driven to dance alone, by herself, because she's drunk, and its just too awful to think about." 

"Wow, that sounds pretty awful." Regina smiles.

"Yes, and the girl who can't walk decides that its a great idea to get up on a stripper pole with no underwear on."

"That is awful."

"Yes, now let me show you the pictures."

Now, why would someone having a terrible horrible awful time take pictures the entire night? You wouldn't. You'd just be Natasha, apparently. Who disturbingly continued to refer to herself in the third person.

"Natasha was lookin pretty out of it in this one. Can you tell I totally don't want to be there? She's all like she's my best friend, and I'm like, I totally hate you."

It is only when she passes me the camera that I realize I actually know the girl in the picture. Yes, the girl with the strappy shoes who was apparently a Britney/Paris/prostitute if you asked Natasha. 

Her name was Rachel Stevens, and she was in my class in middle school. She used to be brunette. She used to be obnoxiously out-going and ditzy, though very friendly. She would have hugged anybody if she was in a good mood and liked them just a little bit. That was probably why she was hugging Natasha. Not because she was a drunken armrest, but because she was having a blast. Natasha's rant somehow incited all this empathy for her in me. Natasha didn't know her. And while I didn't know Natasha, or even Rachel really, what I did know was that Natasha was the kind of person I was flushing out of my phone lately. She was negative. Everything she had to say was negative!

The way she looked at me when I cracked that joke. The way she continued to look at everything apparently, like she was bored and "so over it." But I couldn't put my finger on it. 

She wasn't a Blonde-tourage junkie obviously, she wasn't a college grad (banker???), or a feminist. She was getting married to her fiance. He was a tattoo artist, which meant a goody Goode was out. 

She wasn't really anything except the prettiest ugly person I had met in a long time. 

Maybe she just didn't present well.

"Bye! I'll make sure to call you!" Regina hugged me goodbye and I took a last look at Peter the waiter, who was being screamed at from the kitchen door to pick up his orders. His hair cut did make him look good. He was pretty, too. But not pretty-ugly. Just pretty, because you knew he thought horrible thoughts sometimes when the customer was maybe being difficult, or stared holes through his butt from across the room. He never let himself be pretty ugly. He was always just pretty.

I left the wine bar, and walked a mile back to my car in the pouring down rain.