Sometimes ordinary people suddenly become characters. You've seen them day after day, heard their words and noticed their mannerisms, not really thinking anything unusual, until suddenly they morph. They suddenly are in costume according to their character, and what was frightening or boring or 2-dimensional before is suddenly rife with comedy and interest.
Crankster is one of those people. For the longest time, she was this cranky woman, barking about butter and toast and the size of the juice glasses. Then one morning, the steam rising from her cup of coffee became the haze of smoke in a 1920s speakeasy. She was leaned back in her chair, that glass of orange juice now a snifter of brandy in one hand, swirling slowly as she skeptically appraised the people and objects in the room. A smoldering cigar rested lightly on the fingers of her other hand, and she kept switching back and forth from cigar to brandy to cigar. Pinstripes and a jaunty hat completed her ensemble, and with each hoarse laugh, the stripes moved along her rolls and curves. She was no longer an old, cranky lady whose piercing gaze I avoid. Crankster was now a gangster, the head of some streetwise group of organized criminals. What was fear in me now turns to intrigue.
How did she come to be the haughty-eyed, gin-swilling, heard-hearted, pin-stripe-swagging creature that sits before us today? Surely at some time in life she was an innocent child, playing in the mud, curly blond hair bouncing as she beat her friends in softball again. Now that victory and that glory and that innocence survive only in the unconvincing laugh and the swirl of swill in her glass.
The eyes tell another story.
I've stopped asking who Crankster is, and I ask instead who she has been.
And now I not only fail to fear her. I couldn't even if I wanted.
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