Re: Third class, dining.
That mime snarled like a comic in one of the old movies, the ones before the talkies where the script rolled every minute, curlicues and scrolls to spell out what happened on screen. The femme fatale had always wondered why when everything was spelled out on everyone’s faces, clear as day. Men, probably. Men couldn’t see what was in front of their noses on a clear day when the sun was shining. Men wished for script to roll every minute and tell them what a woman was thinking even when she had no thoughts at all she wanted to share. She looked when the mime gesticulated and those teeny tiny lines that no make-up man who wanted to work again would have drawn redrew themselves out of nothing and the femme fatale frowned before she forgot she wasn’t meant to, a crinkling of the brows. It made her look older, she was no ingenue in her scarlet toenails and her heavy fur, she was older and everyone knew the minute you stopped being young and drop-dead to look at, people didn’t look at you in a room. Sometimes, that was useful.
“You got stuck with a straw shorter than the road to good intentions,” the femme fatale agreed at that wriggle of shoulders beneath the snap of suspenders. “But that doesn’t make it my fault. I’m not like this at all on my days off.”
She had pretty nails, impractical but who cared about practicality on a boat when the brine was circling her ankles? They clicked on the little lipstick tube as she curled more of that old rose out of the tube and slicked it over her lips. “You can have the fur, if you want it.” She was feeling magnanimous now, that hat was atrocious. “It won’t go,” nothing would, poor girl, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t make a statement. “But I think they’ve got something to drink over there and no one cares when they’re drinking.”