Shirley Temper

After work today, I was walking in my neighborhood. There was a cute girl in front of me, maybe about my age. She was smallish and wearing a tiny t-shirt and shorts smaller than most of my underwear. She was no great beauty, but pretty enough. Guys were making lewd comments to her, as they do, and I could see her profile as she walked along, weirdly acknowledging them (I'm a cold-hearted re-buffer). We were both ducking into Marshall's on 125th and as we are going up the elevator, she is sort of crunched against the side of the elevator stairs.

All of a sudden, I felt so bad for her. This small girl wearing small clothes trying to take up as little space as possible. The whole scene was just so desperate: her in her tiny shorts as if she has to cull from the bottom of the ocean of men to get noticed. It made me glad to be more substantial than her, and I felt myself suddenly putting my hands on my hips to take up more room. I felt glad too to be wearing a sort of grantastic skirt and loose shirt, and not endlessly in pursuit of a small life, in which all that could be said of me was that I took up as little room as possible.