The actress living in my building

Her face was as grossly real and surreally artificial as an impressionist painting, her makeup the colors of rugged flesh cheeks, blood purple lips, sky blue eyelids. The ridges of age, running down like rivulets, curved around her mouth thin and red-black like knife slashes. Her eyes, though rimmed with pink, were clear azure and pearl-white, her eyelashes long slivers of black. Then, standing beside her at the checkout in the Red Apple in 1979, I noticed the orange-red nails below her bent knuckles,  heard them click over and over against the dozens of cans of chicken and tuna catfood that this day, as most days, were perhaps her only purchase, perhaps her only reason to ride the elevator, limp toward the lobby door and face the world.