Reconnaissance

Encountering personal history has the thrill of an ambush. For years the grocery store isles harbored only the nameless. Even the staff are nameless, though every week their name tags announce their identity to any shopper who bothers to notice. But the general anonymity of other people picking up their weekly/monthly food habits makes the whole shopping experience something akin to traveling to another country. Their chatter drones in the background of list checking to see if I remembered to pick up the seltzer water this week.
Then, out of nowhere, there's this woman who I knew when she was a girl. Boy child tucked nicely into the shopping cart seat. She is put together; a smart black pea coat wrapped up to her neck which reveals the tendons of one who either doesn't eat enough or has enveloped themself in the sheild of vegetarianism and yoga for health.
I am frumpy in a red oversized sweatshirt and messy hair. I suddenly sense the hairs on my upper lip as if they were growing darker the more she searched my face for recognition.
"Lara?"
I hate to say it, but I recognized her nose first. Not because she has a horribly deformed ridge of cartiledge, but for some reason I remember noses. They say so much about a face.
I don't want to talk to her. Reminisce about the old times and people we knew together. So when she starts naming off those people we knew I can't help but mention my ex-husband as one of hoard. She tried to make the moves on him while we were at a party together. I don't know if he reciprocated, but my underwhelming sense of self worth figured that was just the way things happened.
She looks a bit taken aback. Finishes up with some brief chit chat and then moves on her way.
I had put up a satisfactory front in the face of the enemy. Much more able to defend myself from past acqaintences than I was when my first grade teacher recognized me more than 27 years later while on assignment at an elementary school.
She was itching to ask.
"You had problems with your father, didn't you? How did that turn out?"
That was a slaughter. Faced with her own unanswered questions about what happened to the child who was afraid of men, she couldn't resist. Deftly set the trap to satisfy her own ends and reduced me to a mess of personal shrapnel.
Her ambush caused me public humiliation, a job and a confirmed fear.
Everyone knew it was abuse, except me.