…Usually she was the last person to appear in the
morning–arriving flustered, handbag open, coat flapping, no makeup, cigarette in hand, some wild story to tell. She hadn’t been to bed until four A.M. She had a whale of a hangover. She’d mixed her booze badly last night. She’d met some guy and on to a party.

Her life seemed wildly haphazard to me. She was lively, scattered, funny, forever on the edge of some great upheaval or other…It always struck me that in reality she didn’t give a damn one way or the other about these little dramas. life for her was something you lived, and if you couldn’t laugh about it, if you couldn’t throw yourself in the deep end, then you didn’t deserve it.

She’d dump the contents of her purse on the table in the staff room…This was always a complex operation, but she had it down to a fast art. She’d brush her red hair, which she wore short at this time, in broad strokes. She’d take a couple of puffs on a cigarette without losing the fluency of her movement. the lipstick(usually a bright pink or something similar). Some kind of powder(always just a touch). Eyeliner(sparse). Mascara(even more sparse). A few more drags on her cigarette, a couple of slugs of coffee, and she’d be transformed from an A.M. wreck into somebody fetchingly prseentable. She always wore bright colors, and if they clashed–what the hell, it didn’t matter.
She was just over five feet tall. Her face was oval, and she had a tiny gap between her front teeth. She wasn’t beautiful in any sense of that word, but she had a delightful air of mischief about her, an impish quality, and a smart, sharp light in her eyes.
I sometimes had the vague suspicion that she didn’t have half the confidence she tried to project, that under the seemingly blunderbuss approach she took to life, the haphazard exterior and all the easy repartee with salesmen, she wasn’t exactly imbued with self-assurance: something troubled her, something gnawed at her on a level she didn’t want to explore. What did I see there? A sadness? A slight haunting? A hidden fragility? Or was I inventing a mysterious persona for her? I wasn’t sure.
I liked her, I knew that. I was intrigued by the currents of her life, stories of her mishaps. There was a Keystone Kop element about her misadventures. They always involved the wrong train, the wrong bus, a taxi to the wrong address. She had a stand-up’s sense of timing and a good line in self-derision. She disliked pomposity, people with affectations. If she had plans and ambitions, she didn’t speak about them. I felt she was just going with the flow, and yet, just underneath the surface, I suspected that, in fact, she was quietly directing the flow to go where she wanted it.”

(“I Hope You Have A Good Life”)