Two Thomas Hardy-inspired Characterizations

by David Michael Conner

It was a time of transition between the relentless heat of summer and the chill of autumn, an atmosphere that the District of Columbia’s concrete foundation exaggerated. Heat radiated from the city’s faux-classical white marble, and breezes, finally cool after the long summer, offered some relief to the girdled young women who worked or lived there.

One small woman, scarcely five feet tall in the heeled shoes in which she spent her days walking to the Mayflower Hotel where she occupied her days with labor, attending the newsstand, afterward completing necessary errands in local shops and then returning to her small apartment on foot, was too busy to complain about the heat. Like a small dog or bird, the diminutive woman operated on nervous energy; her little legs moved twice as briskly as those of men who dwarfed her in stature, even in the rushed city, and so she was always a step ahead of them.

The woman, called Jane, was small, her smallness allowing for repetition as it was the most immediate characteristic that one would recognize upon meeting her, and then reassess in the context of her understated greatness as one grew to know her. Jane was a thing to be admired and coveted. Her form-fitting tweeds and wools kept her covered but revealed her womanly shape, even as the rationing of food for the war and her quick nature kept her slim. She bore resemblance to a living doll with her translucent skin contrasted against softly falling chestnut curls that tumbled around her round head. Her lips were thin and pursed, but exaggerated with red lipstick in the Cupid’s Bow fashion of the times, and made mysterious by her quiet nature. One might think from the combination of the woman’s features and manner that her lips were locked to protect secrets. In fact, they were.

* * *

Laura had been alone most of her life, as she saw it; always left alone by someone, though the people that left her had changed throughout her fifty-six years. Both her father and mother worked by necessity during her upbringing, an uncommon occurrence during the 1950s in the suburban United States but normal for her, though she was not oblivious to the unusual nature of it. While the aforementioned father and mother were toiling their long days and nights at work, Laura was left alone at home with her sister Virginia, who was charged at a disagreeably early age with the role of caretaker. Laura had stopped speaking with Virginia after a tumultuous dispute when Laura was in her forties, and her father had succumbed to pneumonia while being treated for a minor stroke in the hospital at the old age of eighty-two. Therefore, according to Laura’s reasoning, she was abandoned by almost everyone in her life. It was her mother’s turn to leave Laura now, but the matron was lingering at the dark doorstep of death, and Laura was growing extraordinarily weary of the wait. She felt herself growing older with each minute.

Laura’s hair retained its rich chestnut brown coloring, but it was growing fine and flaxen, signaling her age. Moreover, the style of her hair, worn long with a center part, instantly suggested that her favorite years had been decades before, in the 1960s and 1970s. Her chin and nose, which had at one time been pointed and sharp to match her wit, was growing softer with folds, not with the supple beauty of youth. She wore oversized cotton tee shirts faded from years of washing, marred by white or pink bleach marks from her reckless, rushed laundering habits. She was now cleaning her mother’s sheets and clothes. “From diapers stains to stains of death,” she thought to herself as she hobbled up the stairs from the laundry, stopping midway to set the basket down and regain her breath.