A Face To Meet The Faces That You Meet

I think a stranger hates me and it hurts my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! You can only imagine the conclusions I jump to when you don’t….)

Every morning, when I drop my kindergartner off at school, I see the same scowling woman. Longtime readers might be wondering, wait, haven’t you written about her before? Sweet, naive Reader. If you think I can only long for one stranger’s approval at a time, you underestimate me. I have never spoken to the scowling woman I write about today, except once at a taco-themed school fundraiser. After two margaritas, I mistook her for a friend of a friend. I said hello, she seemed very irritated to be interrupted right in the middle of her taco — which was actually just a hot dog in a tortilla — I slunk away. My sense of rejection has only amplified since then. I see her at drop off, then sometimes at the grocery store, then sometimes while I’m walking down our main drag and she is jogging with one of those backpacks that’s actually a water bottle. More than once, we’ve shown up to school events wearing the same BOLD and UNMISTAKABLE prints. It’s an obvious conversation starter, and yet, no conversations have started. I’ve often tried to catch her gaze, but it genuinely feels like she’s refusing to look at me. Like I’m some ghoulish creep fondling myself as I leer at her from across the street. But I’m not a ghoulish creep and I’m not fondling myself. Reader, I can’t understand it. But it hurts my feelings.

At first I assumed she was just a miserable wretch, incapable of exuding warmth. Her haircut is humorless, her gaze narrow, her pants linen. But then she showed up to drop off with a dog (a lab, no less!) and if you’re willing to take care of a dog, you’re not just open to kindness, you’ll pick up another creature’s poop to get it. Then I saw her smiling and chatting warmly with other parents, disproving my hypothesis that her face is simply stuck that way. Reader, I seem to be eliciting a uniquely negative reaction. What have I done to deserve the coldest of shoulders? I don’t know this woman, so I have no choice but to speculate.

One possibility is that she’s from New York. She’s one of those people who thinks LA folks are fake, and New Yorkers are real, and that real people are entitled to be assholes because it’s far more important to be interesting than to be nice. Or maybe she’s from LA, but she’s the kind of LA person who needs to know what she stands to gain from talking to me before she puts in the time. Do I have a cool job? Do I have a pool? What kind of access can I give her that she doesn’t already have? I can’t really blame her. Don’t I also want something from her? I want sympathy, comradarie, commiseration. Sure, we’re in front of an elementary school surrounded by palm trees and the smell of jasmine and it’s winter but the sun is still warm enough to keep our kids from needing jackets. But we’re all still in hell, right? Would it kill her to smile? To brighten ever-so-slightly this hell stint?

Another possibility is that she knows I’m a creative and hates me for it. Maybe she’s noticed me wearing a Writers Guild shirt. Maybe she works at a studio. Maybe she thinks I’m lazy and entitled and clearly not talented enough to provide financially for my family, that I’d rather blame a rigged system than admit I really don’t have anything insightful to offer the world. I don’t have much evidence to support this theory, except that she appears to be dressed professionally every morning, like she’s on her way to an office. Any time our outfits match, I’ve grabbed mine off the floor from the day before in a mad scramble to get my kid to school on time. Her clothes appear to be “clean” and not “on their second day of use.” Maybe her apparent competence is repelled by my apparent opposite-of-competence.

A third possibility is that she’s famous and thinks I’m a fan. Our kids may go to a public school, but this is still LA. There are Roosevelts, momfluencers, actors who played — not leads —but still, recurring roles on The Americans. Maybe she’s a writer and thinks I’m trying to extract a job out of her. Maybe she’s not that kind of LA person, but she thinks I am. When I first moved to LA, I had a long chat with a nice woman at a baby shower. Trying to “put myself out there”, I asked for her phone number so we could grab lunch sometime. She looked horrified, and said maybe it would be better if we followed each other on Instagram. Instagram was how I learned she’s famous. We never got lunch.

If we’ve ever met in person, The Reader already knows that my face is frequently telling the world things I don’t want it to. Whenever I’m trying very hard to pay attention, I looked pained and anxious. In sixth grade, my English teacher would often stop in the middle of a grammar lesson to tell me, “Hallie, change your face.” Once, during a staff meeting for a newspaper I worked at in my twenties, my boss insisted I share with the group why I looked so upset about his feedback. Despite assurances that I was not upset, that what he was observing was actually just my face, he refused to relent, and I eventually burst into tears in front of all my new colleagues out of sheer humiliation. Weeping openly didn’t exactly convince my boss I was fine, but at least he moved on to the next item on the agenda. I never realized how unnerving it was to be face-to-face with my extremely stressed out expression until I had my eldest son. He makes the same face.

Listening Face

Maybe this scowling woman doesn’t remember the time I mistook her for someone else at a taco night. Maybe she’s had a scowl on her face since she was a kid, even though she sees herself as a pretty upbeat person. Maybe every morning when she drops off her kid, she sees a woman with a very worried look on her face and wonders what this lady has to be so upset about when she apparently hasn’t even been up long enough to change out of her pajamas. And maybe this confusion somehow comes out looking like anger. Or maybe this woman is just actually angry all the time. There’s a lot to be angry about, right? A lot to worry about, too.