Nora was at the end of an especially well-deserved cigarette, puffing away from a favorite perch in the outside window alcove of the pet store when a pedestrian stopped to make a pass at her.
“What’s a sweet little girl like you doing with a dirty cigarette? You’re too young and fresh to be ruining your dewy goodness with that rot. Leave the smoke to the grown-ups.”
Nora did not bother to explain she was a grown-up herself, despite her girlish appearance.
The man from which came the cat-call appeared normal enough. He wore a dark suit adequately tailored to fit his medium build, probably a salary man on his way to a lunch counter. His hair looked to be thinning moderately but he was probably no older than 35. To any other young woman, nothing about this man would come across as particularly striking. Any other woman could brush him away as just another regular creep, the same as all the rest. An unwelcome annoyance, but only a minor inconvenience, an unfortunate reality, nothing extraordinary or particularly disturbing.
To Nora, however, she could tell immediately that something was off about the man. So obvious to her that she could not fail to notice if she plugged her ears, shut her eyes and hummed. It wasn’t that she was more observant, or that she could perceive some subtle clue in his appearance. Rather, it was due to her own unique appearance that she was immediately alerted to something being off in this otherwise unremarkable, perfectly average man.
As for her own appearances, Nora was no more than four and a half feet. Her nose was minute, nothing more than a button of cartilage. Her small limbs were smooth and unmarked except for some sun freckles stippled across the narrow shoulders. Her torso was straight, lacking any convex arch, not the slightest suggestion of widening hips or curve in her chest.
Indeed, more than girlish, Nora literally had the appearance of a small girl, an utter child of elementary school age.
Being, in fact, a young woman, however, she inevitably ended up frequenting all sorts of adult spaces where a decently protective mother would never allow her delicate, vulnerable daughter to wander. Walking the streets at night, taking the late bus after a long shift, even going grocery shopping alone.
As can be imagined, Nora could barely manage by herself in a bar. Anyway, few would accept her legal ID, valid now for 5 years. As a result, Nora had become accustomed to other drinking venues, most notably the privacy of a living room dinner party, a beach BBQ or a friend’s backyard. Still, there were times she could not help but pine after a regular hop in a bar, to enjoy the simple privilege of any young woman her age and join the gang for a night out. Yet even under the protection of a loyal flock of friends, she could not let her guard down a moment. She could not, for example, carelessly wander off by herself even to use the toilet or risk a run in with some overly curious silver fox.
“Where’s your daddy, little girl? Do you need help finding your way back?”
All the time, she was coming in contact with other adult men who figured her easy prey, a lost little lady without the usual accompanying adult chaperone. In this way, Nora witnessed the side of these men when mother’s weren’t around to keep watch, apparently drawing out in them all their most unsavory appetites, the dark social taboos.
Here stood one such specimen before her now.
Usually, she’d ignore the man, having learned from experience that there was no possible response to hasten the end of the interaction. Whether she protested, disputed, demurred, or outright squealed like a case of rabies, the men exhibited an impressing level of dexterity in interpreting her response as further invitation as if they all wore vision-warping goggles that translated her gnashing teeth or sailor-shocking insults into coy blushing and goo-goo eyes. As if the spitball she’d hurled at one man had really been a perfumed hankie tossed in dainty demoiselle fashion following the old era of gallantry. After finally coming to appreciate the fervent male spirit of unfettered pursuit, and impressive capacity for improvisation (the one rule is “yes and!”), Nora learned the best course of action to end the interaction was to remain silent, and avoid so much as eye contact.
On this day, however, she was in a particularly unnerved mood, short tempered and grouchy. She’d been looking forward all morning to closing up the shop for 10 minutes to take her smoke break, enjoy a quick stretch, all-too brief lounging, and unwind from the previous evening’s aggravating sequence of events.
Thursday night, Nora had gone out to a ramen restaurant with a large group of friends where she knew drinking would be involved. Another group of men was planning to meet them there. Some mutual friends had organized the event as some sort of extravagant bachelor-bachelorette romantic-sexual mixer. A private karaoke room had been booked for after, once the restaurant closed.
As was usually the case, Nora considered herself somewhat of a charity invitation, present for the good company, to offer her sense of humor and rowdy stories to get the crowd going. She’d come to accept this role without resentment. She understood that she’d come to represent something of an ice-breaker. This was her spectacle, her spotlight performance, and she performed the role impeccably and with gusto.
In short, no pun intended, Nora was invited to the mixer as a greaser of gears for the serial-dating machine in all its clockwork euphony, not as a participating guest.
She anticipated this would be the case like always, but no matter how many years she’d settled for this role, it was never the easiest pill to swallow. Perhaps the rest of the world found it perfectly normal for a dwarf, not even a dwarf but some other unprecedented freak of nature, to be reaching her third decade still a virgin. For Nora, however, she was inside herself still a woman, and it was hard for her to be facing the end of her 20s without ever having done it.
This was the heavy, invisible burden she carried on her shoulders that night, surrounded by glowing paper lanterns, beside a wall of fake-bamboo.
As the evening wore on, and more rounds of hot sake were poured, with each additional shot of hot, mildy-tangy, cloudy liquid down her throat, that frustration moved from her shoulders down somewhere deeper. The tension between her legs grew to such a point she was fearfully certain she could not bear another night alone. As if all the years of virginity she had lived along with all the future decades she faced combined all at once into one day of frustrated chastity, an impossible burden for one woman. She was like Atlas holding the sky, flexing the force of his entire body to hold the heavens apart from the earth, except heaven and earth were her two legs, and she was flexing the force of her entire body to keep them together.
At one point during the festivities, one of the men engaged Nora in a dangerous charade. He would flirt with her in jest, toying with the obvious taboo of any real attraction for a prepubescent looking woman. Often, the men would push the limits of the charade in an exact reflection of their confidence that those boundaries remained obvious to all. The man flaunted a confidence in his own integrity by joking about any suggestions of indecency, exhibiting Nora as the epitome of perversion.
Nora was used to such egotistical shenanigans, always a hit with the company, and had long since grown numb to their cruelty, but on that night she felt stung anew, as fresh as a highschool girl first realizing she would never hit puberty but was doomed never to escape the same infantile bullying of middle school.
Indeed, as the man curled a lock of Nora’s hair between his fingers, grinning in mock imitation of the imaginary pedophile, she felt she was once again standing in the middle of the cafeteria, after a girl from the grade above her, a busty, well-developed volleyball player already passing 5 feet, had cracked a egg on her chest and cackled out “Oops, sorry. I thought your chest was a frying pan!” to the shrieking of her squad, all in mini-skirts and fitted tank-tops exhibiting well-developing thighs and blossoming breasts accentuated by new, lacey push-up bras.
The memory was completely absurd. Where had the girl acquired a raw egg? Yet whether the memory had really been a nightmare, the image remained seared forever in Nora’s mind like a cattle brand that left a white hot scar as if in tribute to the searing pain which created the wound, the glowing iron on flesh.
Then something strange took place. As the boy pulled his hand back again from Nora’s hair, shaking his wrist as if he were sprinkling away cooties to the laughter of the crowded table, only to pull up to her again yet closer, to tickle underneath her chin and coo, something took place in Nora’s body that transformed all the anger of injustice, the bitter self-containment and hot rage of embarrassment, into quit a different sensation.
All at once, she forgot herself in the charade. Like an actress on stage becoming blinded by the lights, seems to faint from reality as the character becomes herself.
It became suddenly clear to Nora that the boy’s theatrics were all to hide his real feelings for her, that he played up the apparent taboo only because he was embarrassed by the judgements of others, that they’d consider him a pervert, a kiddy-catcher, when in reality, he could see beyond her appearance to the woman she really was. And it was this real woman who had captured his heart. Caught by the cruel and superficial judgements of society, however, all he could do was flirt with her in jest.
Nora saw this in a flash, this classical tragedy. She understood the poor boy’s lonely sufferings, his secret desire, pure and true. In a way, the two were reflections of the same ill-fated soul. A soul so much more profound than the short-minded society that condemned them and therefore, by their unique sensitivity, doomed to suffer. Doomed by the whims of the cruel constellations, those indifferent stars.
Nora was struck by that realization with such a profound, and aching sorrow. Simultaneously, the relief in the discovery of a twin soul raised her from despair. She met his eyes, finding there the intense flame of desire, and for a moment the breath left her. She must act. She could not for another minute deny such sincere passions. Such a denial was to betray the soul itself.
Nora bit her lip, seductively, pensively. What to do. She looked from his eyes then down below. Under the table, there she could be sure, an unmistakable bulge in his pants. Clarity struck her from above, beautiful poetic truth. There was the key, the clincher, to all communication.
Nora began to slide a dainty hand across the pleather bench seat, scooting herself inch by inch towards this vague shape defined by light and shadow, the folds of denim fabric. Then all at once, just as the boy bopped her on the minute nose, nothing more than a button of cartilage, her hand lurched forward to grasp the key, the clincher, the empty folds of fabric. Quite empty.
As the simulated bulge deflated under her hand, a mere puff of air captured by poor happenchance in the denim fabric and accentuated by the harsh restaurant lighting, the elusive red lanterns, Nora felt herself too deflate absolutely. All the air of all her hopes and dreams sucked out of her like a vacuum, like a cold wind vortex.
She quickly rescinded her hand but it was too late. She stared up in chilly terror at the boy’s expression, a face that had only just popped a crooking, clucking grin in synchrony with the index finger that only barely just booped her button nose. The expression now was quite different, one of horror, but quite a different horror from that which she herself was experiencing, she could be sure. She could be sure that the boy had never once felt the faintest thread of the extravagant quilt of passion she had wound all alone in her own pathetic, lonely imagination.
Nora chose to forget the rest of the night, helped along by another half-dozen downed shots of sake taken in quick intervals from the shadow of a taxi stand waiting for a cab home.
Of course, she played off the entire miscommunication absolutely effortlessly, pulling back on that endearing, clownish charm, withdrawing into her old circus freak act. She’d been sure to set the boy at ease, brought the table into tears of laughter, probably buttered the buttons of a few burgeoning couples. All at her own expense, of course. Suddenly she could no longer bare to maintain the act for a moment longer than the final denouement it required to escape the horrible situation, the horrible embarrassment not of having made an unwelcome pass at an innocent boy, but in having so deeply misinterpreted his advances, at having for a single moment really believed that any normal, healthy human male in his right mind would ever for an instant harbor feelings for her.
The moment the scene was played out to its comedic conclusion, the miscommunication recontextualized and staged out according to the usual comic veins, Nora slipped out from the table, apologizing for an upset stomach, and tumbled from the restaurant, bursting into tears the moment she passed the threshold.
She called herself a cab then crawled, wet-faced and still bawling, to wait below a streetlamp, pulling out the bottle of sake from the folds of her coat for company.
She barely noticed as a man straggled behind his group, letting his companions pass by him into the restaurant as he slowed to a stop. He watched Nora simpering self-piteously, her simple makeup streaked with tears, the lipstick all but rubbed away by a dirty, tear-soaked sleeve, hairdo untied with the unbrushed locks pulled around her face in an effort to hide the pathetic expression.
“Poor little baby, why are you crying? Did you parents play some mean trick on you? Trying to teach you a lesson by leaving you behind all alone in the scary parking lot? You know, some mean stranger might come by and snatch you up.”
Nora covered her face with a wet sleeve and turned away, wishing to cry in peace. But then another thought came to her, a reckless thought, a dangerous thought.
Instead of waiting patiently, silently, for the man to pass, she turned to look back up at him. Suddenly, seeing herself through his eyes, she batted a pair of wet eyelashes, bit a quivering lip and tucking a lock of hair behind her ears with a sweater-paw, she nodded slowly at the man.
She was extremely drunk at that point, and extremely horny. The rest of the episode continues in grotesque flashes. The man bends a knee and places one extremely large and calloused hand in feigned-assurance on top of Nora’s perceived-to-be-empty head, smoothing down the locks that only moments before had been brushed elegantly into a sleek, mature coiffure, a twisted, asian-style knot secured with a sakura-blossom hair-pin obtained the previous autumn from a research trip to Osaka. Nora’s pet store specialized in spitz breeds, for which Japan boasted several pedigree varieties and hosted annual conferences.
Behind the wheel, the man pats his knee. Perhaps Nora would feel safer, more assured, if she sat on his lap as they drove home.
The man’s fingers, as part of those extremely large and calloused hands, are also extremely thick, and rough. She cannot help but think how dirty they must be underneath the nails. She imagines the boy instead, and the fine fingers, pink, tipped by neatly-filed nails perhaps even manicured, that bopped her on the nose just hours ago.
Underneath a streetlamp from outside the restaurant, a different streetlamp on a different street, a strange street she doesn’t recognize, Nora squats on the pavement alone. She’s again waiting for a cab.
Nora awoke the next morning with a searing migraine. Dressed herself for her morning shift, and thus found herself hours later perched in the outside window alcove of the pet store when a pedestrian stopped to make a pass at her.
Not bothering to stub out the cigarette, she tilted down her sunglasses to get another good look at the man. The night before she’d played the role of nymphet. But she wondered whether the ridiculous naive-sirene affectation was even necessary. After all, these men were the real gifted actors, the stage improvisationalist, never fumbling a line, never at a loss to counter a play. Always “yes and.” Never taking no for an answer.
Deeming the man satisfactory, hands more refined than that other woodsman-esque brute, she pulled the glasses back down over her face and took another puff from the cigarette before responding.
“You like little girls, huh?”