Portrait of a bag lady

Well, she isn't a bag lady by definition because this woman does have a home (if her stories are true), but on all other counts Barbara can be adequately described as such.

Barbara is swiftly becoming the local wraith of East End Shirt Company. She's a random lady who visits the store daily, giant shopping bags in tow, bartering for trinkets and jewelry with anything and everything she has on her. After counting back the years since she'd seen Billy Ray Cyrus in concert (14, by the way), I learned that she is sixty-five . . . which shouldn't have surprised me because she asks for a senior citizen discount at least three times during each visit.

The answer is always no.

Barbara's hair is wiry and black, streaked with strands of white only slightly longer than the witch hair growing out of her chin. Behind glasses bent in such a way that it looks like she was punched on the bridge of her nose, one of her watery brown eyes is clouded by a cataract, so she's constantly asking whoever is working to tell her the sizes and prices of various store items she's interested in "buying." Her tops vary, but she almost always wears an ankle-length bohemian skirt. Even if she hadn't told me several times that she recently lost fifty pounds ("I used to be a hundred and fifty-something, but now I'm a hundred twenty-something!") I would've guessed as much because although she's on the smallish side, the extra skin on her arms create bingo wings like you've never seen. One day she was wearing a strappy green peasant top that didn't quite cover her lacy, light pink bra, and didn't cover her sunburned back at all. Because of this, I could see a protrusion right in the crease of her back, a pinkie fingernail-sized growth hanging off her skin so precariously that I wanted terribly to flick off--if it wouldn't require making contact, that is. Each limb sparkles with costume jewelry--chunky, beaded bracelets, a rhinestone-studded watch, fake silver anklets. She wears more necklaces at a time than I own altogether.

When she dropped by the first time, I wasn't super-friendly towards her because I had zero patience for her questions, her stories, or her bartering. But then, of course, she starts going on and on about how "nobody is nice to her," playing on my stupid conscience. She totally played me, and before I knew it I was hearing about how she gave the people at Chase a piece of her mind because it wasn't her fault that four checks bounced, blah blah blah, then I was showing her how to use her brick of a Nokia cell phone . . . she gave me a handful of Dum-Dum lollipops before she left because she's nice to people that are nice to her. She says.

More to follow.