Miranda
Miranda ran out the door of the café and raced, well, more like walked swiftly, very swiftly, home. I’ve done it, she thought, and it’s about time. She opened the gate to her building and walked the forty-five staircase steps up to her third-floor apartment. Hers was a corner apartment, giving her a living room view of Shattuck Avenue and a kitchen view of Virginia Street. Miranda had moved into the apartment six years ago, after her husband ’s death and long after her two children had left home. “Home” at that time was in Phoenix where she had worked as a librarian, in an administrative position with the City’s library. Her husband had also held a civil service job; his was in landscape gardening. After his death, Miranda felt, too many memories lingered in Arizona. It was time for her to retire and move away, to return to Berkeley where she had attended UC Berkeley to get her library degree. The Bay Area, she felt, was her true home. She felt the pull of family, but no members of her family ever lived there.
Settling in a North Berkeley apartment her pension could barely afford, Miranda had few friends left from her years there. And like her, those few friends with whom she had been so close as a student were changed. Their lives had gone in different directions, their interests hardly recognizable to Miranda. Acquaintances they were, rather than friends, Miranda thought. She too could hardly be recognizable to them. The shy demeanor of her student days had vanished. She was bolder now, more willing to assert herself, take risks. Gone was the girlish physical appearance of her twenties. Her face, her entire body, exuded the commanding maturity of a woman in her early 60s who knows and accepts who she is. Had they passed Miranda by on the street, old friends would not have recognized her. This woman with a determined gait had no connection to their reticent, lovely friend. They had envied her long, shiny brown hair that, Miranda had told them, she’d ironed flat after every shampooing. The woman they passed now had short, wiry gray hair. At fifty-five, just over five years ago, Miranda had cut her long, mousy brown-turning-to-gray hair, releasing its natural curl. Eyebrows and eyelashes, so beautifully shaped on a young face had thinned and faded. Only her pug nose and dimpled cheek of her youth remained.
