Glittered as She Walked

When I was in college, I would have given my right arm to be Micki Greene, which would have completely invalidated my purpose because Micki Greene lacked for nothing.

Eighteen-year-olds aren’t old enough to be called beautiful, but Micki was headed that way. Her eyes were blue slate, her short, coiffed hair was silver blonde, and her complexion was glowing. To top it off, there was something fragile and charmingly confused about her, and she had the most adorable way of talking, in excited, almost lisping bursts. Perhaps she cultivated it, but it worked.

She called herself Micki, short for Michaela, a unique name at the time, but  Micki's name was not the only thing that made her stand out. One way or another, we always became aware of her.  I remember how everyone laughed when she sneezed thirty-one times in a row from the upper back side of the auditorium during a particularly boring philosophy lecture.  The teacher called her down, saying she was deliberately disturbing class, but I thought it was just Micki.

At the time, it seemed to be a wonder that this magical creature and I both lived in the oldest women’s residence on campus, but I was there for economy while Micki was there for tradition.  She pledged Pi Phi, wore pearls in her pierced lobes when no one else was wearing earrings, and zoomed around in a powder blue MG sports car—illegally, of course, since only upperclassmen were allowed to have cars, which only added to her legend. Dorm gossip had it that her rich, handsome father regularly appeared to escort her out to dinner, and that she talked about visiting her mother in places like Monaco and Madrid. 

My roommate gave her one look and said she was crazy.

Micki may have acted confused, but she was no dummy.  She was in the liberal arts honors program, although everyone knew she wasn’t destined for Phi Beta Kappa. This was the era when prizes like Micki considered their college time well spent when they left after their sophomore year to marry up-and-coming young lawyers. Strangely enough, I was the one who married early, although, after getting my ears pierced for pearls, I stuck around college long enough to pick up a history degree, magna cum laude.  Somewhere between the laundry and the senior thesis, I have a dim memory of the society section reporting that Micki had married an up-and-coming young lawyer in a lavish ceremony worthy of her. 

My husband, who had gone to high school with Micki, said she was crazy.

Ten years later, my Micki update came from a friend who told me about a woman who had sat down next to her in her children’s swim class and poured out her breaking heart about her cheating and abusive husband, then said the lawyer she'd hired out of Houston would cut his balls off.

My friend’s husband, who’d known Micki’s mild-mannered husband since childhood, said Micki was crazy.

Another decade down the line, I spotted Micki at a high school football game. She entered the bleachers two rows in front of us, and I recognized her immediately even though her silver-blonde bob had become a pewter-blonde braid and her teen-age slenderness had rounded out into womanly curves.  Going with the current fashion, her skirt was romantically ethnic and she had topped her Mexican blouse with a long, trailing scarf. Micki was beautiful now, with that same charming aura of fragile confusion. 

But Mickey was sitting alone because she was divorced, again. I knew this from my friend, who got the lawyer gossip from her husband, and because the year before I had seen newspaper coverage of Micki and her daughter at home in a stylishly gentrified area of the city.   It was hard to tell which was which, of course—and I could tell that the reporter was as as entranced by Micki as I had been. 

The bleachers were crowded.  Micki waved at her daughter who was, of course, a cheerleader, and picked her way down the row, finally putting her stadium seat down beside an expensive-looking couple who greeted her by name. I caught a thread of their conversation now and then, but after a while Micki's friends seemed to tire of her, and their replies became shorter and shorter, then ceased altogether. At halftime they moved three rows down and across.  

All alone, Micki rocked herself back and forth on her stadium seat, lisping softly to herself as she played with her long, trailing scarf. 

I finally got it. Micki was crazy.