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From the vantage point of the Sky Bar on our mega cruise ship, we looked out over the baking bodies lounging by the pool and spotted what we nicknamed The Real Housewives of Miami – social Xrays with leather tanned hides wearing gold Rolexes that sported diamond bevels, a diamond infinity pendant, the right shade of red toenail polish, and perfect French manicures. They were lusting through magazines ripping out tear sheets of merchandise to buy when they returned home – all perfectly correct symbols of who they believed they were and should be.

Since the middle of the ship was a shopping mall of weird jewelry and clothes that you’d think no one would ever buy, we stood there, smugly, watching the housewives dream their dreams. I said it made me think of a dear friend who told me once that I’m a free spirit and she knows no one else like me. I was shocked by this statement believing myself to be just like everyone else. At issue is long ago with friends in their Bear River Reservoir cabin I proclaimed myself to be unconventional only to have my friend tell me he believed me most conventional. Careful what you believe and who. Identity questions are not what I ponder a lot but looking at these women I wondered if they had arrived at their own state of Nirvana because they were from top of head to bottom of toe a type.

Later, at the airport returning home, I was convinced the guy who kept staring at me was looking at someone other than me. Having just survived a foodathon on the cruise, I could not surely be the object of anyone’s desire. I chastised the snarky tongue of my inner critic and a battle royale took place for a few seconds, the winner being the obvious – the back of my sundress must be tucked in my panties and that is why he was looking. After boarding the plane, the woman next to me admired my scarf (actually it’s a jacket I told her, used like a scarf because I alternate hot and cold without warning – a knowing look by the two women seated there) and in flight, the flight attendant touched me on the shoulder from behind and said I love your dress and it looks great on you.

As if to form a compendium of my experience on my recent journey, Claire Dederer wrote a book called Poser that my friend in Boston sent to me after she read it; Dederer turns out to be a woman Tatjana knew in school who had always wanted to be a writer; Poser turns out to be a book that I usually disdain because they are mostly first-person narrated memoirs, but even though I flinched on page one, I could not put it down, and it ended up capturing the plight of a woman much like me and succinctly described how our past informs our present and how we are all pulled by different perceptions of ourselves and those we love and try as we may, no matter what we aspire to do or be, perfectly and perfect should not be the goal.

But I digress, to the housewives and others on the cruise, I wanted to shower them with these lines I savored by William Stafford quoted in Dederer’s book:

A pattern that others made may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god home we may miss our star

(excerpt by William Stafford)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 11:32 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.