Just So

    How strange it must be to have a face slightly pouty in the center of your round, bald, Irish-looking nose, and a chin tilted upward, just so.  It seemed the center of the universe was to be sucked toward the space between both of the man's unfortunate features...
    "...that's what I said, right dear?" he glanced at me.  "Told him to check the page three of that damn proposal because it was RIGHT THERE when I left.  Unless my initials decided to go for a stroll."
    The knob-nosed man with his black-holed face stared forward, a look of amusement playing across his face throughout Marty's speech.  Suddenly, he burst forth with some witty remark about Edwin-something-or-other's glasses or shoes, and both men laughed foolishly to themselves as if I hadn't bothered to show up at all.
    He had some fine weight to throw around though, my Marty, and what did I have?  sunglasses on my head.  I was wearing slightly rumpled jeans and tweed blazer over an equally respectable but silken pale yellow blouse to dinner with Marty and Harold, nothing screaming femininity, but not purely masculine, either.  Hair pulled back in a crisp bun, I'd let me bangs fall into my face slightly.  Hey, this wasn't the Ritz, just a quick bite to eat with the boss, Marty had said.  I noticed the glasses perched on top of my head a moment to late, and apparently so had Harold who hated all things female and was so purely sexist that I was in a good mind to smack him right in the pug little face of his.  Marty glanced over nervously, and I removed them, cursing casually in the pit of my stomach, slipping the diamond-accented shades descretely under the chair.  A disheartening crunch underfoot as we stood from the table at the end of the meal, I, smiling sweetly as women should do, Marty, pulling the chair from under me as men most often do.
    "Well, Elizabeth, it was truly a pleasure," Harold breathed obnoxiously, courtesy of his well-nursed bourbon.  Most would find it awkward and unsettling the way he drank in public, like a drowing fish he was perfectly at home in the warm liquid but slowly, oh so slowly sinking.
    I obliged him with another womanly smile instead of dismissing his comment politely and regretted my mistake almost immediately.  He pressed on.
    "A lovely evening," he all but choked from under those silky amber waves, "we'll have to be sure to do it again.  Next time I'll bring along ol' Claudia, give you two hens something to cluck about."  He laughed at his joke loudly and turned to Marty who, in turn, gave a dry laugh of his own, eyeing the corpulent man suspiciously as one would a bomb or other large and unpredictable object.
    Claudia, his wife was a just a little thing some twenty years younger than Harold, but I had watched her age immensly since their marriage just two and a half years ago.  The man was a terror, but Claudia smiled feverishly every time he entered the room as if at any moment her face would shatter into one million pieces and she would be reduced to tears and cursing.
  I had assumed it was the money that kept the poor girl around.  It certainly couldn't be attraction, that's for sure.  With those pug-ugly looks I'm not sure even his mother could love the face.  But she stayed, nevertheless, and I felt bad for 'ol Claudia' even if she was a little bit of a gold-digger.
    But yes, Harold was becoming rude now as he usually did.  I'm surprised Marty even agreed to the dinner after the way his boss had be tossing around orders at work as if Marty was one of his own personal assistants.  Marty though, my dear husband, would never hear a word of my objections of the hours he'd been putting in at the office lately. 
    Who was I to meddle, I resolved.  After all, what good could a hen do except cluck her way along the avenue, window shopping with her heels and a bag perched delicately on the bend of her arm, stooping into a purple and white awning and the doorway just through.  Tapping the glass at the counter to show the young woman beyond just the right pair of sunglasses to pack in pretty pink tissue paper and fold into the black leather case.  The little old hen, buying her third pair of diamond-accented sunglasses, this month.