coldhearted scientist وداد

I have a Flax dress (a 2008 dress, sort of a cross between the bias slip dress and the sunshine dress) and the head painter informs me it is too sheer. It scared the carpenter, who is afraid to look at me now, and who informed the head painter that this dress could be detrimental to the health of his sons.

For context: these are all brown-skinned, blue to green-eyed, French-speaking men, former Catholics, who now go to the revival meeting of some Christian sect every night. Some sons are in high school and others are in college. Apparently the sons have been polled and they, unlike the carpenter, are not afraid of me because my other clothes are not like this and I was only wearing that dress once.

Therefore, the head painter was dispatched to let me know about this dress, since I might want to be informed. For context — he feels it is part of his job to flirt with me, and knows that I know that he is only doing this because he considers it to be part of his job. I laugh and he says, “Mais yeah, mo Kreyòl, sha” [“Well yeah, I’m Creole, dawlin'”].

So I have taken it under advisement; I now know a fact about this dress I did not know before. In the future I will think twice about how I wear this dress and where. But my question is, is it really perverse in me that I do not care?

I mean, for the sake of the sensibilities of the carpenter and others who may be like him I care, but I do not care, and I am quite sure that people in Europe and Brazil would not care. Am I weird not to be taking this more to heart — and to suspect this is not serious in the way it was presented, but is rather just a part of the ongoing ritual?

*

And I note that this whole interaction is an odd mixture of elements itself — all these African American looking men who have had their DNA tested and are in fact mostly French; I who am Caucasian but am rarely believed when I say so; the combination of French flirtatiousness and perhaps that puritanical bent to which Americans are given, according to Clarissa. I intrigue them, they say, because I dare to live alone, which is incomprehensible.

Axé.