Chapter Nineteen

The next day I didn’t cut my hair or pierce my ears a zillion times like I intended too. Nothing, too drastic as of yet, but I did, however, walk down to the corner of Western and Devon and bought myself the reddest nail polish I could find at Woolworths. I also looked for some black lipstick but couldn’t find any. I guess I’d have to go to some specialty store to find it, maybe somewhere on Clark and Diversey near the Century Mall. I once saw some punk-rock shop that carried that kind of stuff when I was with my Nanna, who had some business to do down in that area of town.
I decided to walk another block down to Dr. Bright’s office, even though it was freezing cold outside and I couldn’t feel my toes or fingertips despite my polar fleece gloves and my brand new sheepskin-lined RUBBER BOOTS. At least they were black and not brown.
Dr. Bright’s office creeps me out; there is nothing bright about it or him. His office is dark and musty smelling with green carpeting that’s got to have been there since the fifties. Plus, Dr. Bright is a total pervert-- constantly staring at my chest, which is a real shocker since I don’t have a chest. And he knows nothing about personal space whatsoever. It is very annoying. He is always two inches from my face when speaking to me. I’m always backing away from him when he’s talking to me but he just keeps moving closer and closer.
Taking a seat, I sifted through some of the magazines he had on the corner table; there was a stack of very old National Geographic’s (1970’s) and a couple of People and of course a couple of Smithsonian’s lying around. I picked up one of the People that had Boy George on the cover, and realized that Marie was right, I do resemble him in a bizarre way. We have the same nose!
“Gianna, will you follow me.”
I put the magazine on the table and followed Dr. Bright.
“Well, I have a couple of fancy one’s here,” he said as he took my glasses off my face for me.
I wasn’t really listening to him. I was trying to concentrate on not looking directly at him, as well as trying to figure out how I was going to pay for my new glasses. I thought I was going to get more Christmas money from my relatives this year but they were a bunch of cheap bastards--some only gave me five bucks in my cards! And it’s not as if I made any money bussing tables at the restaurant recently. But by some miracle I had scraped together fifty dollars, and some loose change I had taken out of my fathers’ pants pockets.
Of course, I was not going to ask my mother to pay for them because she would’ve made such a big deal about it, and tell me that I didn’t need new pair of glasses-- that my old ones were just fine. And, she would have wanted to come with me which would have been more embarrassing. She’d start blabbing about something personal about me, like the chest problem or my current grades; things that a non-family member need not know about me. Plus, I wasn’t speaking to her at the moment due to her ripping down all my Duran Duran posters.
Dr. Bright brought over a handheld mirror for me to take a look at the new glasses he had just placed on my face. His breath smelled like sour milk and I was having a hard time hearing what he was saying on account that I was holding my breath.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
I repositioned myself in my seat. I put my shoulders back, took a deep breath and held the mirror up to my face. I don’t know what I was thinking-- as if a new pair of glasses was in some way going to transform my face into something angelic or even something called pretty, let alone beautiful. I was a least hoping for a pair of glasses that would mask my big nose and puffy chipmunk cheeks. I blinked, hoping to see another face, hoping that by some miracle my nose had shrunk to look like Brooke Shields’, and that my pimples were gone and my face resembled a porcelain doll. No, not a chance, the new more stylish glasses did nothing to enhance my face. It fact they enhanced the bad parts, making my face look rounder and my nose bigger.
“You got anything smaller and not so round? I don’t think these do anything for me.” I am not going for the John Lennon look.
Looking a bit put out, Dr. Bright took the glasses off my face a little too forcefully, and said rather snippily, “You need big frames; they’ll help disguise your imperfections. Plus, you have very pretty blue eyes and these round glasses will help bring the color out more.”
“Well, I don’t like them,” I said hoping he didn’t hear my voice crack.
‘How much you have to spend?” he asked, all matter-of-fact.
“Fifty bucks!”
Peering at me over his bifocals, he said, “Gianna, I have known your family for a long time and I’ll do you a favor for today. I’ll reexamine your eyes and throw in pair of discounted glasses all for fifty dollars
This was becoming the story of my life, again with the discount rack.
“Fine, anything is better than what I got on my face now,” I said, hoping that by some act of God he would find me a pair of glasses that would compliment my face!
I wouldn’t call what he found for me by any means complimentary. In fact, they were just plain boring. Out of the heap of discounted glasses that he had in a closet, he found me a pair that was a smaller version of my old glasses. Well, that’s what he said but in truth they didn’t look smaller they looked the same size. And instead of them being a pale blue color like my old pair they were a sickly pale orange color that did nothing for bringing out the color of my eyes. I really think the man is senile.