Two images linger with me from my trip to New York last Wednesday, both of them people I saw on the bus. Public transit in New York has always been a great leveler, especially the buses, because rich people ride them along with street people. That’s why I often take the bus on my monthly visits, just to people-watch.

One of the people was sitting opposite me in the senior citizen seats at the front. She had excellent posture, and a large, beautifully-made-up face, and she was serenely looking into the distance out past the front door, as if she was in a sealed glass booth, untouched by the messiness around her.

Her lips protruded. They were immense. They looked like those old wax candy lips you could buy and then nibble when I was a kid, and those lips seemed to float a quarter inch past her unnaturally smooth face. And her eyes, even aside from the carefully applied cosmetics, were immense and wide, as if she was perpetually startled by something ferociously desirable. It was like looking at a face through one of those 3D viewers, with all the features exaggerated so that they moved independently.

It was impossible to tell how old she was, but based on her style and the way she was moving, probably in her fifties. My eyes kept getting drawn to her face and then shrinking away. She made the whole bus seem a hallucination.

The other person was on a much more crowded bus, going the opposite direction soon after the first sighting, because I had forgotten that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is closed on Wednesdays. A woman was holding on to a strap in front of me, because the bus was jammed. Something dropped. I looked down. It was a phone. I couldn’t quite reach it, but another passenger stooped, picked it up, and handed it to the woman holding on to the strap. I looked up at her.

Her face was that of a porcelain doll, delicately shaded by the most perfect brushwork so that her perfect skin resembled that of a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia or of a three-year-old girl. Her lips were parted. Her posture too was perfect; she was slim as a fish, her face was a perfect oval, and her neck was as long as Audrey Hepburn’s. She was looking down slightly at the phone she had dropped, or perhaps at my lap. It was hard to tell, because she was clearly thoroughly bewildered, like the three-year-old girl whose face she had stolen. The woman who had picked up the phone seemed to be her attendant, because she was touching her reassuringly.

Again, I had no way to tell by her face how old she was, but she was probably in her eighties, and she had dementia. And money. So much money. Enough money to make her face perfect with surgery and beauty products, enough money to pay an attendant to take her on the bus, even though her mind had slithered away.

The women I saw reminded me of another vision I had a few years ago. I used to compete in over-50 international fencing events, and though many of us had given up caring what we looked like (it’s counterproductive to wear perfect makeup when you’re sweating all day, wearing a mask that you take on and off, and wearing an all-white uniform), there were always a few people who manage to look stunning. One year, I saw a French woman in the 60-69 age group who had had some work done, and it was unnerving.

I am used to human beings, you see, women with wrinkles under their eyes, even if they are tall, glamorous, and slim (I was always the short stocky person in the medal ceremony). The current fashion in surgical skins is not precisely human.

The French woman’s lips were full, her eyes were wide, her cheekbones were prominent, and the rest of her was about 65. When she took her fencing mask off, she still had a mask on.

She wasn’t a very good fencer, either. I have no idea how she qualified for the team, but then the French women’s sabre team, unlike the US and Japanese teams which have a rigorous qualification path, is usually made up of whoever feels like going. The French don’t encourage old women to compete in sabre the way we do.

It’s the future, after all, and in the future we all get to be aliens on the bus. I can sort of understand it when I think of it that way, because I am often behaving in an inappropriate way for a person my age. We are all different people in the future. I just haven’t had any cosmetic surgery, that’s all.

Though I do have a tattoo and a nose piercing. There is that. I will endeavor to think of cosmetic surgery as something like a piercing, as if that will make it more understandable to me.