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Art Colony: the people
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
› by victoria
Every morning when I get up early, watching the morning news as a makeshift alarm clock because the VCR got removed and never replaced, I make sure that I am leaving at exactly 7:20 a.m. I have to walk two blocks, and when I exit the building there is always the woman who lives next door exiting her home at precisely the same time like clockwork. We then wait at the same bus stop for the same bus. This has been routine through rain, cold, wind, and sun.
We have never even said hello to each other over months.
She always wears the same outfit: black slacks, a black suitjacket with a black blouse, leprechaun-heeled shoes, her hair cut right below her earlobe. She is never talking on a cell phone or reading a book.
At 7:40 the bus always picks up the same man with a red-haired buzzcut, carrying his lunch in a plastic bag. The bus driver always knows him because they exchange pleasantries with one another before he gets seated.
Every evening in front of Rochambo's, at an outdoors green plastic table to the left of the steps, there sits a deeply tanned but wizened man with long white hair. His small puppy wears a leash and sits next to the table. It looks like a chihuahua-jack terrier mix and is terribly cute. His face looks as though it was put through horrible plastic surgery. Sometimes when we walk by he is holding the puppy in his arms. At other times of day I see the same puppy at the same outdoors table with a different, taller but still deeply tanned and wizened man with a shaved head.
Every day when I am waiting for the bus, so is she. She is short, and has a large mole right under her nose, black hair cut in a wildly frizzy bob, and glasses. She is always reading some supermarket paperback action novel, and when the bus arrives she always insists that I get on the bus before her. Usually the bus is quite crowded but she still focuses intensely on reading her book.
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