Familiar Faces #1 – The Sylvia Plath Woman

There’s this woman I’ve written about before – on another blog, in another place, a long time ago – who walks up and down my road. She does it at least once a day. In my head, I call her Sylvia Plath; based on the image of the poet haphazardly formed in my consciousness from half-glimpsed grainy black and white photos and the language of her poetry.

She walks with quick, short, nervous steps and I would sometimes see her wring her hands in a neurotic, Lady Macbeth way. She talks to herself, quite animatedly. She does it quite loudly too so when the traffic fades, her voice wafts down the road ahead of her.

Her age is hard to know. Her face doesn’t look too old – tired maybe, but not old. Her clothes though, they add years on her. It’s like they’re not really hers, but hand-me-downs from a mother or aunt or maybe from the charity of others. Her dresses are plain – usually neutral plaids or muted prints that seem decades out of style – and she wears those flat grey-brown shoes so favoured by all the nurses and grannies I’ve seen.

She wears an stern, brow-wrinkled expression that’s only occasionally relieved by a mirthless laugh. As I’ve passed, I’ve sometimes paused my iPod in the hopes of catching a shard of her inward conversation, but she quietens as anyone approaches, keeping her eyes firmly rooted on the ground in front of her. And when there’s not enough space on the footpath to comfortably pass her by, she pulls right into the wall, her hands held together self-consciously and she stares at the ground.

In the last couple of months though, a small white dog on a leash has materialised beside her and today I passed her on my way into town. The dog was sniffing in the first fallen leaves of the season and she was urging him to hurry up. Seeing me coming, she pulled in closer to the wall but as I passed, instead of keeping her eyes low, she looked at me – still with a self-conscious hesitancy – and we exchanged a nod and mumbled acknowledgment. And in that brief moment, that quick look between us, the troubled woman I think her to be disappeared.

It’s just funny how you build up these images or ideas of people you don’t even know and they can be shattered with a single look.