Re: Third class, dining.
Frowning did you no favors. Frowning drew wrinkles where photographs could make out you were off your game, you were done, you were outta there like a ball sailing past the park and over the audience’s heads. The femme fatale pursed her lips and the scowl disappeared, smoothed out to creamy perfection beneath the picture hat. There was no need to point. Everyone would see it in the day’s papers. If you were drawn to laugh and drawn to be sad, if the script said sad when you were mad then you rolled it all up and stuffed it all in at the seams, a hatpin in your handbag to stab someone with and you were positively poisonous from your trailer afterwards. Even if it was a boat (and the femme fatale thought less and less of it as she watched the mime laugh herself to silent, silly sickness with the hate reserved for stolen parts in her eyes) she shouldn’t have begun to frown. But she had, and the rose lipstick was beginning to fold itself into the creases at the corners of her mouth.
There was no thinking about calf’s leather bags now. The water kicked up by the little mime arched neatly in the air like a man leaning over in the street to spit and it sputtered over the fur and the picture-hat and the sharp spindles of her shoes. The femme fatale sputtered too and the stiff, set curls unroiled themselves immediately into draggles of blond hair beneath the soggy brim of the picture hat.
You didn’t need men at all but they were useful. They were often stupid particularly when they thought you were stupid and there were many ways to convince them that that was so. But the little mime had her hands in those clean white gloves hard in the small of her back and the deck tipped and the femme fatale stumbled on the silly high heels, the kind unsuited to decks and boats at all.