Pickled Jalapenos

“What happened to your leg?” she asked, looking at its fresh scar as I tucked my feet into the warm water of the pedicure basin.

“Knife fight.”

Her eyes went wide, and she sat back in her low seat. “What?!”

I knew why she was surprised. In my blue jeans, pullover top, and sensible sandals I don’t look like the type to get into a bar brawl. I’m not. I don’t drink. And I wouldn’t want to ruin my nails.

“I was attacked by a dermatologist and she won,” I said. Skin cancers are my true enemies, not assailants in back alleys. Just to be safe, though, I try to avoid back alleys.

People underestimate me all the time. They size me up in half a glance and think they know me, sometimes writing me off in the process. Gray-blonde hair, probably a grandma. True. No wedding ring, must be a widow. Also true, although that one hurts. A lot. Squints at street signs, must need glasses. Seriously? Everyone my age squints. Sensible sandals, probably boring. Not true. My feet don’t typically get me in trouble. My mouth does.

Reconnecting at lunch with an old friend, she noticed something about me while I held the menu at arms’ length.

“Does that say the burgers come with jalapenos?” I asked her. “Cuz it kind of looks like they put pickles on them.”

“It says pickled jalapenos.”

“Oh. Maybe I’ll just have salad then. Pickles offend me.” I set the menu aside and picked up my coke.

“You have a tattoo,” she announced.

“I do?” I looked at my arm where a purple symbol smiled back at me. “I do!”

She laughed. “You don’t seem the type to have tattoos.”

“You have to watch out for the quiet ones,” I said. 

Warning people about quiet types usually makes them lean their heads to one side. They wonder what other secrets I'm hiding. What inside intel do I have that could make a salad appear more tantalizing than a pickled jalapeno burger?

I have two tattoos. Three, if you count the fact that I had the first one done twice. It hurt twice, so I’m counting it that way. The other one is on the inside of my foot which is one of the most painful places to let someone stab you with needles, so I’m counting that one twice, too. That gives me a grand total of four tattoos and a medal for bravery. Or idiocy. It’s a toss-up.

She was right, though. I don’t seem the type to do wild and crazy things. When I walk through a door, cloaked in insecurity as I am, I dress in a manner which allows me to blend in with the wallpaper. Although, I prefer to think of it as being stealthy. If no one notices me, it gives me plenty of time to size them up, too. I guess it works both ways.

It’s not like my Boring Badge is a new thing, though. I’ve had it since kindergarten when all the boys chased Brigitte Nelson across the playground because she was so perky while I watched from the top of the monkey bars because I was so sensible.  No way was I going to let a herd of five-year-olds tackle me in the grass. Do you know how hard it is to get grass stains out of a blue jumper?

Things were no better in high school. Instead of joining the yearbook committee with its cool staff advisor and after-school parties, I wrote articles for the school newspaper in a classroom where they never ordered in pizza during editing. Yearbooks are forever. Newspapers are for washing windows, if they even exist anymore, which I’m pretty sure they don’t.

Right after graduation, I married and went to work as a secretary for a law firm. Secretaries don’t exist anymore either because typewriters went the way of newspapers. Lawyers, however, have the same longevity as yearbooks. And the same after-school parties every Friday, only at the Five O’Clock Club. As fun as I know I am, I’m not as much fun as my also-married boss thought I should be.

One morning, he unexpectedly placed both hands on my desk, leaned in close and said, “I’d like to get you drunk some time and find out what you’re really like.”

I looked into his spectacled eyes where a slip of graying hair fell over the rim of his glasses and told him that would never happen.

“Why?” he asked. “Are you that good at keeping secrets?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m that good at staying sober.”

See, today we would call that sexual harassment. In 1977, I called it quits. I bet he never thought I’d expose him here in public for that. Surprise! Lucky for him, he’s probably dead by now and doesn’t care.

There are lots of ways to have fun that don’t involve hangovers or nasty extra-marital affairs. Actually, those two things don’t sound fun at all. They sound like a recipe for self-destruction and I’m too big a chicken to want to risk that.

I’m just saying, I think it’s fun to surprise people by not turning out to be the person they think you are. It’s kind of easy for me to do that to people because life keeps forcing me to change directions. I’m not turning out to be the person I thought I was, either. I’m discovering that some of my friends were right—I’m braver than I believed and stronger than I seem.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a third/fifth tattoo. Something delicate but bold, attractive but cautionary. Something that tells people who I am right off the bat so they can save time sizing me up or putting me down. A friend of mine has one of these. I bet she’d let me borrow it.

Fierce.   In twelve-point Lucida Sans Typewriter font. Just for old times’ sake. 

I don’t think it would scare off my dermatologist, though. I’ve got to stop meeting her in back alleys.