One of the first strangers I recognized in Chicago was this older lady who rides my bus. (The other was this mountain of a woman with elaborate hair who works at the post office in the Sears Tower. I went there once to mail a package and almost exclaimed "I know you!" She rides my bus too.)
This first lady lives right near me and works right near me, so sometimes we'll travel the whole way together and other times I'll pick her up mid-commute, if one of us took the express and the other's transferring. I noticed her at first because she's an older black lady who wears the makeup of a 60's Stepford wife--frosted pink lipstick, frosted blue eyeshadow, big ol' stripes of blush. She has a fragile, careful look about her, like a regimented eater, and her face has a slack look which makes it older than her body.
Today she got on the crosstown bus with me, having not been on my uptown bus--it's amazing how often that happens. I took my sunglasses off to see if she was wearing her makeup, but she wasn't. She looked tired. She got off a few stops early and went into a Starbucks, and I noticed she was almost a head shorter than everyone else on the street. A class trip of high schoolers, rounded and pink-cheeked, stopped to let her through, bouncing off one another like bubbles.
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