A Little Change of Face
Lauren Baratz-Logsted
I need to change my life. On the surface, it doesn't look too bad. Great body, check. Pretty face, check. Job, check. Chicken pox. Check.Stuck in her Danbury, Connecticut, condo in self-imposed exile until she's contagion-free, Scarlett Jane Stein keeps circling around to a passing comment her friend Pam made: how everything (read: men) comes to Scarlett just because she's attractive.Is it true? All her life she's thought that she was fun to be around, that people liked her. Was it only because she was pretty (say it–because she's got incredible breasts)? Or is Pam, tired of playing second fiddle, now playing her? All Scarlett knows is that she's never found the man she believes is out there, her One True Love. So maybe Scarlett needs to change things up.So it's goodbye, Scarlett and hello, dowdier, schlumpier Lettie Shaw. And with her new look, new name, new home and new job, is there a chance that Lettie-née-Scarlett will find someone who loves her for who she is inside? Or has Scarlett's little change of face turned into the biggest mistake of her life?
PRAISE FOR LAUREN BARATZ-LOGSTED
Crossing the Line
“A terrific read—a story that is dryly funny, brightly written and emotionally satisfying.”
—Peter Lefcourt, author of Eleven Karens
“A delight! Buckle up and hang on for a joyride with Jane, an admirably eccentric heroine. This fast-paced, fun-filled novel about babies and breaking the rules brims with laughter, love and a unique and buoyant wisdom.”
—Nancy Thayer, author of The Hot Flash Club
“Chick lit with a twist!”
—Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries
The Thin Pink Line
“Faking it—hilariously… Wonderfully funny debut with a fine sense of the absurd and a flair for comic characterization.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Baratz-Logsted’s premise is hilarious and original.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Here written with humor and scathing honesty, is the diary of a (mad) pregnant woman chronicled with acid glee by Lauren Baratz-Logsted in a debut novel to share with every girlfriend you know before, during or after the baby comes. It’s a winner!”
—Adriana Trigiani, author of Big Stone Gap
“A sassy and beguiling comedy of reproduction that proves once and for all that a woman can indeed be half-pregnant. Bridget Jones is snorting with laughter and wondering why she didn’t think of it.”
—Karen Karbo, author of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me
A Little Change of Face
Lauren Baratz-Logsted
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my husband, Greg Logsted, for half a lifetime’s worth
of love and patience above and beyond
Acknowledgments
Thanks, as always, to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, for being a joy of an editor to work with, and to the rest of the RDI team. Special thanks this time to Annelise Robey for being the kind of agent a girl can really love.
I’d also like to thank Sue Estabrook and Lynn Kanter for being great first readers and great friends. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve such support and encouragement, but I’ll take it.
Another special thank-you goes to librarians everywhere, since librarians form the inspiration for this book. In particular, I’d like to thank Danbury Public Library, my current hometown library, and Bethel Public Library, which figures prominently here: I hope you’re all in your lovely new quarters by the time you read this.
Thank you to my family and friends for loving me and for not leaving me over my being the self-involved person I am.
Finally, thank you to Greg and Jackie for everything.
prologue
“Come here often?”
“God, what a line,” seethed Pam, who happened to be my best friend as well as being a world-class seether. “Yes, she does,” she added, summarily turning away Bachelor #1 from our table, “but not to meet people like you.”
“Buy you a drink?” Bachelor #2 asked me, somewhat timidly I thought, but maybe he’d already seen #1 get shot down by Pam. Despite his timidity, he was steely in his determination not to make eye contact with her, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on me.
Pam tapped his elbow. “Can’t you see she already has one?” Pam asked him with the kind of overly sweet tone of voice that was petrifying in its Stepford extreme.
That was all Bachelor #2 could take; off he slouched.
“Now, I know I don’t know you from anywhere…yet…but I’d sure like—”
“Get OUT!” screeched Pam, finishing off Bachelor #3 before he could even finish off his first sentence.
“Gee,” I said ruefully, sucking off the vodka from one of the ice cubes that had been clinking around in the bottom of my empty glass, “you could have at least let me accept a drink.”
“Oh, right, and then sit here for yet another Saturday night, watching one man after another fall in love with you? No, thank you!”
“I’d ask you who pissed in your Wheaties, but somehow I’m getting the impression it was me.”
“You know, Scarlett, it’s not always that easy being your best friend.” For a world-class seether, Pam was looking awfully deflated.
And, for the record: yes, my mother did have the balls to name me Scarlett.
“Scarlett O’Hara, the Scarlet Woman—okay, so maybe that only has one t, but still—you’re going to love it once you get older!”
I’d heard this repeatedly for thirty-nine years—i.e., the entire length of time I’d been alive—all thirty-nine of which I’d spent hating my name.
“You’re going to love it one day! I promise you!” my mother had promised.
As if.
With forty beginning to stare me in the face, along with what friends were warning me was going to be one hell of a midlife crisis—which I preferred to think of as an LRWS (Life Reassessment Way Station)—it seemed increasingly less likely that my mother would see her promise fulfilled. Of course, with forty beginning to stare me in the face, it was probably also a good time for me to begin thinking about giving up using the phrase “as if,” but I supposed I could always worry about that another day.
But back to our story.
I’d rather have a seething Pam than a deflated Pam any day of the week. Her deflation was deflating me.
“Why, Pam?” I asked, deflated, all seriousness now. “Why isn’t it always easy being my best friend?”
“Because you’re…you’re…you’re…you.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“Fine,” Pam seethed one last time, seething at me for once. “Did you ever wonder if you’d still get so much male attention if you weren’t so goddamned pretty, if you weren’t so goddamned thin, if you didn’t have those two—” and here she gave voice to what I had secretly suspected most people thought of first when they looked at me, but hoped was not the case “—spectacular breasts?”
And that’s basically how it all got started.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
1
Actually, Pam was wrong about a couple of things.
I wasn’t “so goddamned pretty,” and I wasn’t “so goddamned thin.”
(Okay, so maybe I did have spectacular breasts, but still. Besides, that was a whole other issue, and one that even sometimes bothered me.)
Regard my face for a moment, if you would, please, a face that will henceforth be known as Exhibit A: Note the long dark hair, the root color of which currently needs assistance from the bottle it’s been getting assistance from for over a decade, the assistance made necessary by the prematurely gray hair that, rather than being prematurely seductive, had caused coworkers to run shrieking from my path. Note (admittedly pretty) dark eyes beneath brows that have passed their expiration date for plucking. Note the slightly imperfect nose (erring on the side of largeness), the slightly imperfect chin (erring on the side of pointiness), the slightly imperfect chee—
No, actually, that would be a lie. My cheekbones kick butt.
Yes, I do know that this is coming perilously close to tipping into that odiously annoying territory that has been heretofore uniquely occupied by that hair-product commercial that used to run all the time years ago, the one in which the actress says “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” making the viewer long for technology to be advanced enough so that the actress would be able to hear it when viewers everywhere shout back at their TVs: “We don’t hate you because you’re beautiful! We hate you because the you that you are in this commercial is the single most annoying woman IN THE WORLD!” I do know how close I am coming to that awful-awful place, but please bear with me.
Regard the body now for a second moment, please, the body to appropriately be called Exhibit B: Note the lack of significant height (a smidgen below five feet, but just enough to make claiming a full five feet qualify me as a breaker of one of the Ten Commandments), which, when combined with the genetic legacy of good skin, is what makes people always howl, “Omigod! You don’t look that old!” whenever I say I’m thirty-nine. (That and “Omigod! You don’t look that short!” and “Omigod! You don’t look Jewish!” are the three phrases I’ve heard repeatedly all my life. And, yes, my full name is Scarlett Jane Stein; so sue me.) Note, also, the all-American flaw: the slight swell of lower belly that nothing short of lipo and a tuck would ever eradicate.
And, when I say all-American flaw, I really do mean that all American women have that flaw. I mean, come on: After you rule out those who’ve been sucked or sewed, and then you take away the actresses/models/overly wealthy who have had actual ribs removed, who do you have left? Oh, okay. So maybe you have the growing legion of anorexics and anorexic-wannabes; but after them, who do you have left? Answer: the rest of us. You’re left with the rest of us and our, at minimum, slightly swelling lower bellies.
And, yes, I am aware that I have much to be thankful for in that I’m located at the minimum end of the spectrum of swelling.
True, back in high school, I’d had one of those freakish metabolisms that necessitated my going home after school and eating a banana split just so that I wouldn’t get any thinner (Pam would have really hated me if she’d known me then…and I was not bulimic!), but those days were long gone and I had finally joined the female race. If I wanted to still fit into my size 6s, 4s and 2s (which one was always dependent upon mitigating factors like time of the month, emotional need for Ben & Jerry’s, which jeans I was wearing, etc.), and I did, then I needed to walk regularly, press weights regularly and engage for the short term in whatever latest exercise fad came down the pike.
Overall, though, not bad: This was the body that Pilates had built for me.
I guess then that what had rankled so much wasn’t Pam’s implication that I had a reasonably good body, because I guess I did, so much as the undertone that had suggested it was some kind of an unearned perk. I’d done my sweating, I’d done my pumping and, as a result, gravity was yet to become my sworn enemy. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t earned my face, but I’d earned my body.
Time to cut to the chase.
(Besides, we can talk about my breasts later.)
In short, then, while the only runways I’d ever been on had all involved planes, no one on the beach had ever begged me to put more clothes on. Objectively speaking, on bad days, I was acceptable; on good days, I was substantially more than.
The basic building blocks for Exhibit A and Exhibit B, with the exception of the color-enhanced roots and the weights-at-the-gym flab-free upper arms, were what God had started me out with in life. Just like the spectacular breasts, I hadn’t earned those building blocks; they were with me when I arrived. Exhibit A and Exhibit B had been with me my whole life so far.
Exhibit A and Exhibit B were what the world first saw whenever they saw me. (Untrue, that nasty little voice in my head, the one I heard upon occasion, niggled. What the world sees first about you are your breasts. You remember, don’t you? Exhibit C?)
Exhibit A and Exhibit B were the face and body I took to work with me every single day.
2
If you ever feel the need to hide in plain sight, you can do it by becoming a librarian.
I swear to God, sometimes I feel as though I’m some sort of nonwoman forty hours a week. Which is a good thing, in a way, since it gives me a nice bumper of time not to contend with my breasts and how the world sees them. Oh, sure, I still see people registering them first thing when they walk up to the reference desk, but it’s a passing registration, more fleeting than if, say, I were a nurse (people always check out nurses’ breasts) or a go-go dancer (ditto) or a guest star on the Bay-watch reunion movie (no parenthetical aside necessary). Since the public pretty much views librarians as some sort of asexual alien life force, and since the wearing to work of braless tanks is kind of frowned upon by the city that employs us, it’s a pretty safe place for a spectacularly-breasted woman to hide.
Not that hiding my breasts was the original impetus for my career choice, a choice that had ultimately landed me at Danbury Public Library. No, the real reason I had originally gone after my Master in Library Science was that I love books. Duh. And librarians make much more money than bookstore clerks. It just never occurred to me that instead of recommending great books to read, which was the chief joy in working in a bookstore, I’d spend my days called upon to answer questions ranging from, “Where can I find information on the economy of the Galapagos?” to “Why can I never find the books on the shelves where they’re supposed to be?” to “Why can’t I download porno from the Internet on your computers?”
But the pay was good, thepaywasgood, thepaywasgood. (If that sounds like a mantra, it’s because it is, itis, itis.)
Plus, the way I figured it, someone had to be an under-achiever so that all of those overachievers out there could feel superior about what they’d achieved. In a way, I was performing a social function here.
When I had originally declared my intention of becoming a librarian, I got this from my mother: “A librarian?” Like I wanted to be a welder or something. “I sent you to the best schools so you could become a librarian?”
“It’s not like I’m going to be selling crack. I will get to use my mind there.”
“I didn’t name you Scarlett so that you could grow up to be a librarian.”
“Oh, yeah, right. And I’m sure if I became a lawyer named Scarlett, I’d just get a ton of respect.”
“Maybe not.” She’d shrugged. “But the pay is good.”
Seven years into what was now my twelve-year stint at the library (four weeks vacation a year! The pay is good, thepayisgood, thepayisgood!), I’d run into an old high-school boyfriend at a party at Pam’s.
“So what do you do?” He’d leered at me over the vodka punch.
“I’m a librarian.”
“A librarian?” He’d gaped at me as if I’d just sprouted a bun or something.
“Why? What’d you think I’d grow up to be—a welder? a nurse? a stripper?”
“I don’t know,” he’d confessed, looking slightly sheepish. “It’s just hard to picture you behind the reference desk.” His gaze settled on my chest. “It just seems…I don’t know…wrong somehow.”
“Call me when you grow up,” I’d said, walking away.
“He always was a dick,” Pam had said when I found her in the kitchen.
“Yeah,” I’d sighed, “but he was always such a good-looking dick. Too bad he’s so narrow-minded.”
Pam, of course, had never been narrow-minded about my career choice. No, in Pam’s case—Pam, who really was a lawyer—it was downright hostility.
“You have a great brain, Scarlett. So what if your breasts get in the way a little bit? You could do what I do.”
Duh.
(Sometimes, I can’t believe I’m thirty-nine and still saying “duh.”) “Okay, so maybe you couldn’t do exactly what I do— I mean, with those breasts, you could hardly be in litigation—but you could certainly be a tax attorney. Hell, if you became an entertainment lawyer, you’d probably clean up!”
I didn’t even want to know what she meant by that.
“Really, Scarlett, I’m sure that if you just put your mind to it, you could become one of us.” The “us” referring to Pam herself and T.B. and Delta, the two other women that made up our quadrangular friendship.
“I suppose I could,” I conceded, “except for one small fact.”
“That being?”
“I’m not one of an ‘us.’ I’m one of a ‘me.’”
“So you say. I just think it’s a shame that you feel the need to waste this brain that God gave you.”
I tried the same not-a-crack-dealer line I’d used on my mother, but Pam wasn’t having any.
“It’s a waste, Scarlett, I don’t care what you say, it’s a waste. Locking that mind of yours away in a library is like winning the lottery and then just putting it all in the bank for the rest of your life, it’s like some kind of brain-cell chastity or something.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t get defensive. But, I mean, come on. Wouldn’t you like to find out what you could really become in life, if you weren’t so downright weird about the career world taking you at breast-face value?” Then she’d given a heavy sigh. “You’ve always been so pretty, though, with everything handed to you because of it—why would you ever have to know what it’s like to have to maintain the drive to go after something in life and earn it on sheer merit alone?”
You’re probably wondering right around now just exactly why this woman, this woman who could be considerably more hostile than she’s being here, was considered by me to be my best friend. Well, I did feel sorry for her a lot, and she did have some endearing qualities that are perhaps not so easy to see.
Plus, when I’d first met her and T.B. and Delta, Pam had made a point of—no other word for it—courting me. Like a second-string center on the football team with broken black glasses held together by masking tape, Pam had called and e-mailed me virtually every day, as though hoping to win a date for the prom. Finally, the will in me crushed under a deluge of daily questions along the lines of “So, what are you making for dinner tonight,” I’d caved and, muttering “uncle” under my breath, conceded, “Okay. Fine. You can be my best friend.”
Actually, though, Pam was my default best friend. But, like my breasts, that would take a lot of explaining, far too much explaining for right now.
So there I was, on a lovely Wednesday in July, hiding in plain sight behind the reference desk at the Danbury Public Library. I’d just dispensed with a patron who wanted books on pursuing a writing career, having led her to the 888s, and was hoping to sneak in a couple of reviews in the latest Publishers Weekly, which had just arrived. Besides, all working and no sneak-reading make Scarlett a very dull librarian. But this was not to be…
“Excuse me?”
“Hmm…?” I stashed the PW away. Damn! I was never going to learn what it had to say about the latest Anne Perry.
The excuser was a harried-looking woman, around my age, with a toddler in a stroller and a girl in tow. The girl looked to be about ten years old, her black hair cut in an old-fashioned pageboy that would have been more suitable on a woman sixty years ago than on a young girl today. Despite that handicap, you could tell she had pretty-potential, what with her warm brown eyes and wide smile, whenever she forgot to be self-conscious and just let one rip. More hampering than the hair was a mild case of premature acne. Poor thing. She was probably going to get breasts early, which would lead to much teasing at school from both the nonbreasted girls and the prepubescent boys, something I knew much about. Any day now, she’d have too much hair on her legs, her mother wouldn’t let her shave yet, and the other kids would all start calling her Monkey. I was sure of it.
Harried Mom put her hand proprietarily on the girl’s shoulder. “Sarah here needs to get some books from the summer reading list.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Much better than waiting until the end of summer like so many of the kids and then having to cram it all in at the last minute. Just go upstairs to the Juvenile Library—”
“Oh, no.” Harried Mom cut me off. “I want you to recommend specific titles from the list.” She handed me the list. “I don’t want her reading just anything.”
“Yes, but upstairs—”
“Please?” she pressed, then she looked up at the sign over my head: Information Desk—Reference. “This is what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
Well, she kind of had me there. Although I still would have said that upstairs was where she should go for help.
I looked at the list. “Well,” I said, “you can never go wrong with A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby.”
“She needs to read three,” Harried Mom said.
“Well, then, how about the Harry Potter, too? Might as well, if they’re going to put it on the list….”
“Thank you,” Harried Mom enthused, as though I’d just done her a great favor.
Just then, the girl coughed.
“Cover your mouth, Sarah,” Harried Mom admonished. Then she turned to me with an embarrassed smile. “Sarah’s just getting over the chicken pox, but she just can’t seem to shake that cough.”
“The chicken pox?” I took an involuntary step backward.
“Oh,” Harried Mom pooh-poohed as she headed off with her kids for the double doors that would lead her upstairs to the Juvenile Library, “she’s not contagious anymore. And, besides, hasn’t everybody had the chicken pox already?”
3
No. Not everybody.
About fourteen days after Sarah coughed in front of me, I developed a fever, along with an all-over achy feeling as though I’d spent the night in the ring with the WWF. At first, I thought it was the summer flu. Having not used any sick days yet that year, I called in three days straight at the library. That’s when the spots began to appear.
I’d never been troubled with acne when I was younger. And, yes, I do know that that’s another one of those statements that could make some people hate me. But it’s true. All through junior high and high school, I could barely buy a zit to save my life. Except for the occasional one or two around my period, I was blemish free. How odd then to suddenly be seeing spots at nearly forty. Could my period be due again so quickly? I wondered, studying the spot on my cheek, the one on my forehead.
But then, as the hours went on, and one day turned into the next, I developed more spots on my face…and a few on my neck…and then on my chest.
I called my doctor’s office in a bit of a panic; don’t ask me why, but I was certain I had the measles.
The receptionist at Dr. Berg’s office was very accommodating when I told her I thought I had the measles, saying that he could see me that afternoon. Since it was usually necessary to call two to three months in advance to get a regular visit with the most popular doctor in the city, and even the average garden-variety emergency complaint still required at least a one-day wait to get seen, I recognized how seriously she was taking my spots. The appointment slot I was given was the first after the lunch break, presumably so I wouldn’t infect a bunch of other patients in the waiting room.
Okay, am I the only woman out there who’s a little in love with her doctor?
I’d been seeing Dr. Berg for about a dozen years, ever since my previous physician—whom I’ll call Dr. X—had nearly killed me, which had seemed like a good reason to stop seeing him. Dr. X had been treating me for an infection that wouldn’t go away, and when he started me on yet another round of medication, I began feeling weird. Repeated calls to his office to say just how weird I was feeling had merely yielded the usual “just another hypochondriac” tone from his nurse. Well, naturally, once my body broke out in tiny little red spots from head to toe—a nice indicator of anaphylactic shock—they told me to stop taking the medication. Immediately. That another dose might kill me. But when I tried to get them to admit their mistake, that they should have listened to me in the first place, they insisted that standard practice dictated they do exactly what they did and that they’d do it again tomorrow. That they’d never heard of anyone nearly dying from that particular drug, even though it had nearly killed me. I suspected they didn’t want to admit culpability because they were terrified of a malpractice suit. Well, I wasn’t interested in a malpractice suit, but I was interested in having a doctor who was a mensch, which clearly was not anyone in that office. And they’d nearly killed me.
Did I mention they’d nearly killed me?
Well, naturally, after that experience, I was leery of doctors.
And I was still leery of doctors when I’d first started seeing Dr. Berg, but he’d quickly won me over. He was just so nice, so reassuring, and he took so much time to just talk to his patients—and not just about their illnesses, answering all questions with extreme patience, but even about their lives or whatever was in the news. I always felt so much better just seeing him—that balding head, those steel-rimmed glasses—that I often found myself telling people, “Who cares if he knows anything about medicine? I still love him.” Too bad he was married and a grandfather already.
“So, I understand you’re not feeling so good today, Scarlett,” said Dr. Berg, glancing at what the nurse had written on my chart as he entered the examination room, hand outstretched for a warm shake; Dr. Berg never looked scared that he might catch something from a patient. Dr. X, on the other hand, had always given a can’t-you-people-keep-your-distance look at the audacity of patients coming to see him while sick. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“These spots.” I indicated my face. “I think I have the measles.”
“The measles?” He spoke in a soothing voice as he felt my lymph nodes, examined this, looked at that. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “All these red spots—it just seemed to me like this is what the measles would look like.”
“No,” he said, sitting down on the stool next to the examining table, pen already flying across his page, “you don’t have the measles. I’m pretty sure what you have is the chicken pox.”
“The chicken pox?”
“Yes,” he said, starting to write a prescription. “Have you been exposed to anyone recently that may have been infected?”
I told him about Sarah, the girl with the list in the library two weeks ago.
“Yup,” he said, doing the math on the dates, “that’s the incubation period.”
That damned precocious little reader, I thought. Why couldn’t she have waited until later in the season, just like the rest of the kids, to come in for her books? Or at least have waited until she really wasn’t contagious. I suppose that’s Harried Mom’s fault….
“Here,” he said, handing me the prescription he’d written. “Now, I want to warn you. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
“You mean I’m going to feel even worse than I do now?”
“I’m afraid so. Chicken pox when you’re a kid is pretty easy. But as an adult? The older you get, the harder it is. You’re also going to be contagious for another seven to ten days, so no going out in public places until all the pocks scab over.”
Great.
“Now, I want you to call the office every day to let me know how you’re doing.” There was my reassuring Dr. Berg again. With all that talk of worse pain and the need to be quarantined, I’d wondered where he’d gone to. “This isn’t going to be easy for you and I’m going to want to keep a close eye on you until you start feeling better.”
“Thanks,” I said, glancing up and catching sight of myself in the mirror on the wall. Damn! I already had more spots than I had when I’d first come in there. “Um…can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Am I going to look like this forever? I feel like that animal in Put Me in the Zoo.”
“Put me in the zoo?” he asked, puzzled.
I sighed the sigh of the long-suffering librarian. It’s amazing how often people don’t get book references.
“Kids’ book,” I elaborated. “Animal keeps changing his spots. Big spots. Little spots. Red, blue, all the colors, really. Am I going to wind up like that?”
I felt strange, exposing myself that way. Over the years, we’d often talked about socio-cultural issues and he knew that I was big on saying that I didn’t think that appearances were as important as people made them out to be, that most women would be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about the outer so much and just focused on the inner. And I’d even backed it up by being the kind of woman who usually dressed casually, almost never bothered with makeup. Would he think now that all that had just been a sham? Would he think me shallow for being so concerned?
But he laughed, that reassuring sound. “Of course not. Provided you don’t scratch, before you know it, you’ll be just as beautiful as you’ve always been. Even with the spots, you still look good, Scarlett.”
It really was too bad about that wife and those grandchildren.
“Can I ask you a question now?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t you get the chicken pox as a kid, just like everybody else?”
4
(And now for a little station break, as we talk about my breasts…)
It’s really bothering you, isn’t it? I mean, like, you’re not going to let me go any further until I tell you about those breasts?
Am I right? Come on, I’m right, aren’t I?
Fine. You asked for it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It all started when I was ten years old….
Hard to believe that this silent war I’ve been having with a particular body part has been going on for nearly three-quarters of my life, for twenty-nine years. You’d think I’d be over it by now. God, I need to grow up.
But really, it all started when I was ten years old. Ten was when I went through puberty, got my first period, got my first hint of a pimple and when I heard the words for the first time, those immortal words that no girl or woman can ever hear enough of in her life—can you hear my sarcasm?—as spoken from the still prepubescent wise-guy mouth of Don Deeble, “Man, I’d like to grab a hold of those tits!”
Yeah, my life has been fun.
And it’s only gotten better from there.
On the trampoline; out jogging, even with a humongously camouflaging sweatshirt on; walking by construction sites—there hasn’t been one clichéd set of circumstances I’ve ever encountered in life where a member of the male population has failed to hold up his end of the cliché, has failed to make a loudly rude utterance something along the lines of the above citation from Don Deeble.
And they always preface it with that one italicized word: man.
“Man, those are great…!”
“Man, would you look at those…!”
“Man, man, man…tits!”
It got to the point, pretty early on in life, where it started to seem as though, based on the evidence of those sentences, my breasts could not exist in a man-less vacuum. The way I figure it, the fact that I’m heterosexual has as much to do with the fact that the male population has linguistically linked my breasts to their manhood for all time through the employment of a simple sentence structure as it does to any natural inclinations on my part.
Of course, none of the really fun stuff I’ve mentioned above gives any hint of the dark side of having spectacular breasts: the dates that turn ugly because mere possession of nicer-than-normal mammary glands is somehow interpreted as a law requiring willing sexual congress under risk of penalty for refusal; or the odd male relative who starts showing an unusual interest in your development, or worse; or the fact that some girls write you off without a chance, visibly resenting you, as though you had some kind of control over such a fate, as though you’d made an unholy alliance with the devil of pubescence.
But that’s just yet more of the good stuff.
Did you ever notice how, in today’s world, the most notoriously-breasted woman are all triple-namers? In the past, it was the alliterative that had it, the Marilyn Monroes. Nowadays, it’s the Pamela Sue Andersons and the Anna Nicole Smiths. Which is really bizarre, because that triple-namer thing means there’s still room left on-bimbo-board for…Scarlett Jane Stein?
Okay, now here’s the really killer part:
I do not—repeat, do not—have notorious breasts, not like those other women do.
I have spectacular breasts, which is nowhere near the same as notorious breasts, but is the same as average breasts…which you’ll soon see.
All of those triple-namers—who, by the way, are all blond, which I am not—have breasts that are creeping up on or have even tipped over to the other side of the forty-inch mark. Plus, they have cup sizes that all equal or surpass the enough-is-enough alphabetic place mark embodied by the fourth letter.
I, on the other hand, am a 36C, which is—collective gasp here!—average.
Yes, folks, that statistic is really true: the average American woman is a 36C.
So, why so much fuss about me? Why have all the men I’ve been naked with each uttered some version of the personalized phrase, “Man, Scarlett, but you’ve got great breasts!”? I’ve heard that phrase so often, it’s been so universal in my life, that on more than one occasion I’ve been tempted to inquire of whichever man was humping above me, “Um…uh…excuse me? But this is really an honest question here: Do you say that to all the girls? I mean, is saying that, like, some kind of thing with men?” But I’ve never had the nerve. And, truth to tell, the guys, even though they all say the same thing and all look the same way when they say it, all somehow also have that “Eureka!” look on their face, like they’ve discovered hooter gold where previously they’ve only encountered hooter tin.
Oh, and, parenthetically speaking? Yes, I do know that a lot has been made over the years of the fact that men have a tendency to be—hmm…what’s the most delicate way to put this here?—penis-obsessed, but we gals can be pretty breast-obsessed ourselves, this entire chapter standing as some kind of monumental proof of that fact. We just don’t like to publicize it.
But back to my breasts. Which I still maintain are average.
Did you ever notice how the most spectacular thing that any American kid can aspire to is to be average? Being top of the class is nothing to boast about; being head cheerleader is an open invitation for people to wish obesity on you later in life; being too good at chess is like requesting to get your ass kicked. On the other hand, being stupid means people calling you that; being fat means people calling you that and stupid; being not good at even chess means there’s not even a lowest rung for you to stand on.
The middle. Keeping to the middle ground in everything is the safe place to be as a kid in America.
And this middleness extends to adulthood as well. The wealthy are resented, the poor are blamed, and the message is clear: the safest place to be, even if it’s getting harder to keep up with the housing payments, is middle class.
In the breast department, if in nothing else in this life, I represented the national average, which was interpreted as being a smashing success, breastwise.
So, basically, I was spectacular mostly by virtue of being so damned average.
Oh, and plus the fact that with a waspish waist on a short Jewish woman, my 36Cs really did look like they might be one of those triple-named women’s 40+s.
There was that, too.
5
One of the things about being quarantined for seven to ten days: it gives you a lot of time to think.
Pam herself was not as much of a slouch as she liked to think she was, except for when she slouched, of course, which was often. This had been a big stumbling block in her attempts to build a bridge to the opposite sex; it’s been my observation that, while some think meeting Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong or even Mr. Anybody has to do with the luck of the draw, it’s really all about not being a slouch. A slouch says, “I’m worried about what you think of me, but I don’t think much of me, so why should you?” The non-slouch, on the other hand, says, “Even if you’re not interested in me, I’m having a pret-ty fucking good life here all on my own. So there.” Or she might just say, “My annoying mother always elbowed me in the back when I slouched.” Whatever. The real point is how the world interprets the non-slouch, and the world sees her as confident. Oh, I suppose there are times when the world sees her as arrogant…but who gives a fuck what the world thinks?
Slouchers, that’s who. Slouchers give a great fuck about what the world thinks, which neatly leads us back to our physical description of Pam.
Pam, an attorney, mind you, looked like she made a daily conscious decision to distance herself as much as possible from the thankfully archetypal uber-skinny female lawyer usually portrayed on TV. Now, I’m not saying that Pam was fat. Rather, in an effort to make sure that every male she came in contact with would not even think of treating her like a Twinkie, she had made herself work-asexual. Never mind those micro-mini-skirted suits that the TV lawyers seemed to favor, Pam was determined to furnish her entire career wardrobe from the sales rack at the back of Casual Corner. Thus, Pam owned a lot of brown.
The perverse flipside of Pam’s determined daytime devotion to a dour dress code was that whenever we went out on the town at night, she always went overboard. She tried too hard. Looking at her was like leapfrogging back in time twenty years to the heyday of all those shows about oil barons with wives who never had to work, instead spending their days beating one another up in the swimming pool. She was the epitome of big hair and shoulder pads and enough sequins to choke Liza Minnelli. She was the exact opposite of Daytime Pam, and it required sunglasses to look at her.
Oh, and scary makeup. Truly scary-scary makeup.
I couldn’t tell her, of course. I mean, obviously she thought she was making wise decisions.
Underneath the neutered daytime version and the vamped-up nighttime version, Pam was average: average height (5’4”), average weight (which, in America, currently equals a size 14), average coloring (neither albino nor African-American), average-average-average. Which wouldn’t be a problem for most people, since, as pointed out previously, average is currently the most desirable thing for any American to be, except that in Pam’s case she wanted to be below average in the daytime and above average in the nighttime and she was mostly a dismal failure at both.
Oh, and she did have average American breasts—36C—but, coupled with a size 14 waist, as opposed to my own 2/4/6, well, let’s just say that she was of the belief that side-by-side was never a fair way for us to stand.
If she’d asked me, which she never did, I would have maintained that her failures were caused by being a slouch, both literally and psychologically, while I know she would have insisted that she’d just been cursed with faulty packaging and a low self-image.
“Take you, for instance, Scarlett,” she’d said the Saturday night following the Saturday night when she’d first shot down Bachelors #1, #2 and #3 like duckpins at the carnival.
As I looked into yet another mai tai in yet another bar on yet another Saturday night, I thought to myself, I hate it when we take me, for instance. Why can’t we take someone else for a change?
“If we have to take me,” I said, “can’t we at least take me somewhere exciting for a change?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I say ‘no’ so quickly, only because you’ve already had more than your fair share of unearned excitement in your life.”
“Oh. Right. I had forgotten about that.”
“Now, now. There’s no need for you to do that ‘oh’ thing you do with me.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You know, Scarlett, I don’t know why you always feel the need to make having a conversation with you so difficult.”
“Isn’t this the point where, if I were a lawyer like you, like you’re always urging me to be, I’d say to you, ‘Let’s move on’?”
“Point taken.”
I attempted a winning smile. “Redirect?”
“Are you asking for permission to question yourself?” She shook her head. “Honestly, Scarlett, you’re not that good at being a lawyer.”
“Oh.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Oh.”
“So cut it out.”
“Oh, okay.”
“No. Really. I mean it—cut it out.”
“Fine. For some real fun, then, why don’t we get back to your ‘Take you, for instance, Scarlett.’ I’m pretty sure that’s a line of discussion I’ll really enjoy.”
“Be snippy, if you want to. But I meant what I said the other night.”
“What other night? What thing you said?”
“When we were out last Saturday night, when all those men—one, two, three—kept hitting on you, when I asked you if you didn’t maybe think the real reason behind all the male attention you receive had something to do with the unfair advantage you have in the looks department.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes. That. Well, what do you think?”
“I think that I’ve decided to forgive you for bringing it up and for saying it in the first place.”
“Forgive me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, just for starters, the implicit message in your assessment is that I have no merit as a woman in my own right, that no one’s ever wanted to be with me simply because I’m—oh, I don’t know—fun to be with.”
“Now you’re sounding touchy. I thought you said I was forgiven.”
“You are. But just because I’ve forgiven you, it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what you said. Or what you must have meant by it. I mean, God, Pam, are you actively trying to insult me? Are you trying to instill free-floating feelings of worthlessness in me?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then what?”
“I’m just trying to get you to acknowledge that you were born with an unfair advantage.”
“How is it unfair, when I had nothing to do with the features I was born with? And I prefer to believe that I—oh, I don’t know—earned whatever I have in life.”
“How have you earned it? By going to the gym regularly?”
“No. That’s just how I earned some specific body parts. And, anyway, have you ever noticed how whenever we get into a heated discussion with each other, we always feel the need to verbally italicize key words for emphasis? I mean, are we juvenile or what?”
“Uh, in answer to your first question, no. And in answer to your second, uh…NO!”
“OH!”
“Come on, stop being like this. I’m really trying to have a conversation with you here.”
“What conversation? You’re basically saying that men only like me because of how I look, that it has nothing to do with whether or not I’m fun, whether or not I’m nice. You don’t think I’m fun? You don’t think I’m nice?”
She ignored my questions. “Look, if I were to accept the fact that you receive more male attention than I do because of something other than your looks, then where does that leave me? Does that mean that I’m not fun? Does that mean that I’m not nice?”
I returned her earlier favor by not answering her questions, either. Truth to tell, her questions made me uncomfortable. I mean, she was my Default Best Friend, after all. So what could I tell her? Sure, she could be fun…sometimes. Sometimes, she could even be nice. But she could seldom pull off both at once, and, anyway, they weren’t exactly qualities that radiated from her to such an extent that they could function as a man magnet.
Still, I thought about what she’d been saying, and not just tonight or the other night, but the message that had pretty much become an undercurrent of our about-the-opposite-sex conversations practically since we’d first met. Truthfully, I couldn’t understand why guys never called her a second time. Okay, there was that slight fashion-sense problem she had, but clothes weren’t everything. She really could be fun, sometimes; and she could even be nice, sometimes. Plus, she was a lawyer, for crying out loud, which meant that not only was there tangible evidence of intelligent life lurking within her, as witnessed by the J.D. initials (for Juris Doctor) that she brandished at the end of her name like a fishhook and a club, but also meant that she could uphold her end of any sizable mortgage in Fairfield County—no small feat for a woman in a two-income real estate world. I thought about all that, and I thought about the things that I had to bring to any relationship table—my looks and being fun, my looks and being reasonably nice, my looks and…and I began to wonder: Did Pam maybe possibly have something there? Had I been occupying an unearned seat on the gravy train all of my life?
I slumped back, sighed. “What exactly is it that you want, Pam?”
She leaned in closer to the table, eager. If I was deflated by the direction our conversation was taking, she was excited. “What I want is for the playing field to be leveled a bit. What I want is for you to have a little less of what you have, and for me to have a little more of what you have.”
It was at this point—I know, I know, I know—that I should have stopped and asked myself, Did I really want this woman to continue in the role of my Default Best Friend? And, why had I ever chosen her in the first place?
But I never got the chance to ask myself that question—not then, at any rate—because it was then that that evening’s Bachelor #1 chose to approach our table, insinuate himself between Pam and me with his back to her as if blocking out some kind of Martian sun, and utter the unfailingly catchy words: “Buy you a drink, pretty lady? I just hate to see a pretty lady sitting all by herself.”
On any other night, that “sitting by herself” part would have been enough to topple Pam over into a seething frenzy, which would have, in turn, prompted her to hit the eject button on my Bachelor #1 before I even had the chance to avail myself of the free beverage on offer. But not on this night. Not on this night that was all of a sudden different from all other nights. No, on this night, instead of doing the usual, Pam craned her neck around the side of Bachelor #1, a smug smirk on her face revealing her satisfaction at having obtained proof of the inherent unfairness of the world, and mouthed the words at me, “See what I mean?”
And, for a moment there, I guess I kind of did.
6
Dr. Berg was right: my illness got worse.
Oh, did it get worse.
The hardest thing about living alone is being sick all by yourself.
Home for me was a condo three-quarters of the way up a high hill in Danbury. I’d purchased it the year after I got the job at the library, so I’d been living there for a long time, but you couldn’t really call it a home. Maybe that’s the thing about condos; even when you own one outright it still feels like temporary lodging, like the place you’re living only until you get serious about what you’re going to do in life. At any rate, that was certainly the case with my condo, which I’d only decorated in the most marginal sense. Sure, I’d hung things on the wall—framed photographs that Best Girlfriend, who had made a whole career out of being something of a camera buff, had taken. And of course there was furniture, mostly of the looks-like-Domain-but-bought-at-a-shop-cheaper-than-Domain variety. I’d even painted: yellow in the tiny kitchen, leaf in the bathroom, heather in the dining and living rooms, periwinkle in the master bedroom. Every now and then I bought a few plants; but, with my black thumb, none of them ever survived for very long. So, despite my meager efforts, it still all had the look of a way station, a place to provide temporary shelter until I found where I was really meant to be.
For a week I remained there, alone in my temporary shelter, contemplating my current pain and the past life I had lived.
There are really no words to describe the physical pain of chicken pox at thirty-nine. I’d certainly experienced my own fair share of pain in my life—the usual sprains and broken bones brought on by a life lived both athletically and carelessly. (Okay, I’m a klutz.) And I’d even had a fair amount of dental work done without benefit of Novocaine. (I hate needles.) But nothing had prepared me for this. (Nothing.)
I wondered, through my pain, if this was what it had been like for Sarah, the girl who’d given me the chicken pox. Had she been this miserable? A part of me, the part that was still irrationally mad at her for giving the disease to me—when really it was her mother I should be mad at, for letting her out of the house!—was glad in a vengeful way. But then I remembered what Dr. Berg had said about it being much harder the older you are and I was suddenly glad to realize Sarah hadn’t suffered as much. After all, it wasn’t her fault she’d been out and about, it was her mother’s.
For the first three days, my fever raged at 103. And, as the pocks spread downward from my face and chest, eventually covering my entire body—even places that it would be indelicate of me to mention, but damn!—it became as though a thousand painful bonfires were roaring beneath my skin. When awake, I tried to obey Dr. Berg, tried not to scratch; but whenever I would actually fall asleep, I’d wake to find that I’d been involuntarily scratching while unconscious. I took the oatmeal baths as recommended—gross!—but they were just a stopgap measure, only serving to relieve the pain for the two twenty-minute periods a day I was submerged in the tub.
Of course, my mother offered to come over and take care of me.
“Scarlett, you shouldn’t be alone!”
“Um, really, that’s okay, Mom.” Please don’t come, pleasedontcome, pleasedontcome, I fervently prayed. The last thing I needed was for her to walk in the door and, first thing, tell me how awful I looked.
As if I didn’t already know.
Each morning, as the illness progressed, I rose, dragged myself to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. And then really-really wished I could avoid looking in the mirror. For, each day, I looked less and less like the me I’d always known. What had started out as a few pinkish-red spots had turned into an angry eruption, the spots multiplying and taking on the appearance of a plague until I no longer recognized myself. I didn’t know this woman. This woman was ugly.
Again, I found myself wondering what it had been like for Sarah, encountering an ugly version of herself in the looking glass. True, Dr. Berg said kids didn’t get it as bad, but I was sure he was referring to the pain and not the pocks. Surely, the quantity of pocks would still be great. Had Sarah felt as horrified at her image as I felt at mine now? Had she been scared, or at least reluctant, to have her friends see her? Why, when I had first seen her, I’d been sure her problem was prepubescent acne and I’d pitied her.
I pitied me now.
What, I began to wonder, would life be like if I always looked like this? What if this was the face that the world saw all the time?
As Pam had pointed out, and as I well knew, I’d never had any problem attracting men, being that literature-defying rarest of birds: an attractive librarian with a good sex life. Okay, maybe I’d never managed to marry any of those men but I’d never had trouble attracting them. I’d always assumed, unlike what Pam implied, that men were attracted to me because, well, I was just so damned much fun to be with.
I was the girl that, never mind men needing excuses to justify playing poker, played poker with.
I was the girl at the ball game, always rooting for the right team.
I was the girl who was nice.
I was the girl who was fun.
You’re probably wondering right now, “If she’s so godawful wonderful, so nice, then why hasn’t anyone asked her to marry them yet?”
Actually, I had been asked, more than once, but that’s not the point here. Because this isn’t so much a “Why isn’t she married yet?” story, as it is a “Why doesn’t she seem to care that she isn’t married yet?” story.
I guess I don’t want things just because everyone else has them.
I guess I don’t want to settle.
I guess I’ve just been—gasp!—waiting for the right man.
Best Girlfriend always maintained that not only am I too nice, but that I also scare men.
“I scare men?”
“Of course you scare them, Scarlett. Men are more terrified of a woman who seemingly isn’t looking for something than they are of a woman who obviously is.”
“You mean they worry about what I might have up my sleeve?”
“Oh, who the hell knows why they think like they do? They’re men!”
“So then why do they keep asking me out, if they’re so scared?”
“Because they’re men!”
“You’re kind of working that angle both ways, aren’t you?”
“Not really. They ask you out because you’re bright and you’re beautiful and you’re funny and you’re available. They may be men, but they’re not totally stupid.”
“But you think they’re all scared of me?”
“Yup.”
Nice and scary; scary and nice—what a combination.
But, I wondered now, how many men would ask me out if this face and body—this Put-Me-in-the-Zoo face and body—was always the first thing they saw upon meeting me?
Naturally, my local friends—Pam, T.B. and Delta—all of whom had been smart enough to have chicken pox when they were kids, offered to come over, to bring me things, to keep me company.
But I declined.
At first, I declined because the pain was too intense; it was all I could think about. But as the third day of confinement turned into the fourth, and the pain began to abate somewhat—and even thoughts of Sarah, as both agent of and imagined companion in my misery, had receded—I realized that I just really did not want the world to see me this way. If it meant eating packets of ramen noodles three meals a day, which was pretty much all that was left in the house, so be it. I had on my giant T-shirt from my UCONN days—big enough that it barely touched any skin when I was standing—and I had my remote control for the TV. I ask you, what else did I need?
Of course, being a librarian, having spent my entire life in books really, I wasn’t much for TV. But when you get that sick…and then you get that depressed…it’s a whole new ball game.
Pam, T.B. and Delta always spent part of the time we were all together rehashing whatever the hot programs were on TV. For three attorneys, they sure watched a lot of what I thought of as junky TV. Didn’t anyone else read anymore? And they particularly loved reality shows. They’d been following Real World ever since it was launched and were constantly mentioning shows with words like temptation and fear in the titles. Fear and desire seemed to be the great motivating factors of these programs; love and death lay behind everything.
I clicked through the channels, clicking past comedies (not funny enough), dramas (I didn’t have the concentration) and political talk shows (who cared what was going on with the world? I was sick!).
Click, click, click.
I thought about looking for a legal show. I’d always liked legal shows, especially when I was younger. It seemed like, back then, the shows were reinventing the justice system so that things were as they ought to be, rather than how they were: common sense prevailed over racism and last-minute stays of execution were granted just in time. But lately I’d noticed TV had grown more cynical, and the legal shows, rather than restoring order to the universe, portrayed a hellishly topsy-turvy world in which the guilty always walked on a technicality and the innocent fried.
Click, click, click.
Then, all of a sudden, my screen was filled with…plastic surgery?
But I was fascinated. For a whole hour I watched as three people, none of whom I thought ugly but I was sure the world had called each just that at one point or another, were nipped, tucked, reconstructed, cut and dyed—you name it—until they’d each undergone an Extreme Makeover, intended to change their lives forever.
Well, they certainly looked better.
If not exactly swans now, they no longer had the residue of facial or body features that had no doubt earned them all kinds of insults as children and probably even as adults. At the end of the show, they were all dressed in great clothes—they’d received wardrobe makeovers, too—and were now ready to embark on their new lives.
I wondered, sitting there with my spots, which had finally stopped spreading and were finally starting to ease up a bit in terms of the anger of their appearance, if their lives would really be changed. I mean, they had to change, right? But would those changes all be good changes?
Reality shows hadn’t been around for that long and I began to wonder if anyone had done any kind of follow-up studies on this sort of thing yet. Were people really happy afterward? I knew that they’d done many studies with lottery winners, all showing that, in general, becoming wealthy did not make people’s lives better; in fact, it often made their lives worse.
Well, I sighed, clicking off the TV and praying for sleep, not to mention praying that I’d wake to a face more recognizable than the one I’d wakened to that morning, being one of life’s sort-of swans had not made my life better, not if the definition of better was some kind of lasting romantic love….
7
As I said, one of the things about being home sick for an extended period of time is that it gives you the chance to ponder the little things in life, like, say, how I had come to be thirty-nine and was still seriously unattached. After all, even if I wasn’t overly concerned with getting married, it still didn’t mean I wanted to be alone forever.
Maybe, I was beginning to think, it had been my career choices?
If you want to meet good-looking men, don’t expect to do it in a library or a bookstore. Trust me on this: it only happens in movies, that two cinematically perfect human beings fall in love over the dusty stacks while doing research on the mating rites of the South African tree frog or bump lattes at the local chain. Real life in a library looks more like this:
Regard Mr. Weinerman, if you will, please (I know you might not want to, but you kind of have to, since this is my story): Mr. Weinerman is your prototypical library patron. He is here every day. He sits at the same chair at the same table every day. He sits there and he reads all day long—newspapers, magazines, books—and he only moves to either (a) go outside to smoke a cigarette; (b) go to the bathroom for twenty minutes at a clip (you can hear him eating his lunch and snacks in there, among other things you can hear that you’d rather you couldn’t [the acoustics in this building suck]); (c) read things on his favorite computer terminal (he intimidates other patrons into moving whenever he wants to sit there).
Mr. Weinerman is omnipresent in my library life. He is here waiting when we open in the morning, he is the last to leave before the staff at night, he has a complete nervous breakdown if we have to close because of a severe snowstorm or power outage. He is omnipresent and he is perhaps the single most physically hideous human being that I have ever set eyes on in my life.
Not that looks matter, mind you, but does he have to take every poor building block that he started out with in life and then make what looks like a conscious effort to exaggerate every hideous feature to its worst extreme?
He is just so…rubbery is really the only word for it. He is the kind of person that when asked a question that necessitates your taking a library material and passing it on to him, you dread that his hand might glance against yours and that you would actually be forced into social contact with that very antisocial-looking hand, that hand that looks like it only ever gets social with its owner, and in places I didn’t like to think about.
Granted, every library patron didn’t look like Mr. Weinerman, but the whole lot were a far cry from anything half-way good, and believe me: every library does have its Mr. Weinerman.
And bookstores are the same. I know that for a fact, because I worked in one before I got my MLS. The sighting of a decent-looking man in a bookstore is so rare that the few times one passed through, I was dumbstruck. Oh, sure, I saw plenty of great-looking men whenever I went to the bar or the beach or even Super Stop & Shop, but almost never in the bookstore. When it did happen, it made me feel like I was the lone gas station attendant at the only stop within a hundred-mile radius in Nebraska on a hot July day when there comes Brendan Fraser pulling up in a Jag, looking for a full tank of octane, a Vanilla Coke and a tube of Rolos. Really, it felt exactly like that.
Now, then: If you ask me why you never see good-looking guys in these places, what do you think I’ll say—that hunks don’t read? That they’re too stupid? That they’d rather watch it on the video? That they’re too busy getting fucked?
Nah.
I think the real reason is that they all have good-looking girlfriends, that they have these good-looking girlfriends fully trained in what their own tastes in reading material are (as well as exactly how they like their blow jobs, standing or sitting or on the hood of a Jag in the middle of the Nebraska desert while drinking a Vanilla Coke), and they send their girlfriend minions out to do their book-shopping for them, so that they don’t have to undergo the bug-under-the-microscope discomfort of having the desperate women working in the libraries/bookstores across the land ogle them.
Just so you know: You do see an awful lot of good-looking women in libraries/bookstores.
Too bad I’d never been interested in women in that way.
Over the years, when people asked me why I was a librarian, they always said I should be a writer instead—not because I had any talent that anyone knew of, but because I loved books so much. And I’d tried. In secret. Oh, how I’d tried. But I was just no good at it. Like a music lover with no ear, I was doomed to listen and never play.
8
Now for the eternal question, the one that has been tormenting humans down through the ages:
How is a woman like a green M&M?
(I’ll bet you can tell I was starting to feel better.)
I’d always claimed that the green M&M’s were the best in the bag—the precise order, before they started adding new colors, going green, yellow, orange, brown, blue, red—a claim for which I’d encountered many detractors.
My mother: “It’s just different-colored dye, you can’t taste dye.”
Best Girlfriend: “Okay, I can see where there might be a discernible difference between green and red, since they really are so far apart. But green, yellow and orange? Uh-uh. Too close to call. In a blind taste test you’d never do more than equal the statistical probability of naming them by chance.” (She was right, but it was fun, since we were very drunk.)
Pam: “They all taste exactly alike, for chrissakes—just eat the damn things!”
Despite the reluctance on the part of the world to adopt my candy-theorizing, I’d felt heartened when, in a getting-to-know-you campaign by Mars, Inc., little pieces of informative cardboard began accompanying officially licensed products, in this case a giant plush toy (don’t ask). My favorite, of course, was the one that read, “Read About Green: Green is quick-witted and intelligent; she says it like it is. She knows she’s attractive, so she’s flirty, but not in a tacky way. While feminine, she keeps up with the boys; finds the rest of the gang a bit childish. She knows how to handle trouble. She will get what she wants.”
That, in a candy-coated shell, was me.
I was all of those things and—except on days when I was PMS-ing and was therefore less—more. Okay, except for maybe the very last sentence, but I was hoping that, in the fullness of time, that might prove true, too.
Just like Cathy once proclaimed, “I am Heathcliff, and he is me,” I am a green M&M. Further, as far as I’m concerned, the fact that I’m a green M&M has pretty much well explained for me the reason why getting dates has never been a problem.
Pam, on the other hand, has always viewed the matter quite differently.
9
Okay. Okay okay OKAY! I know you’re not going to let me go any further without first explaining how Pam came to be my best friend and just what exactly a “default best friend” is.
Straight out of college, my best friend—my real best friend—known as Best Girlfriend, the woman who thinks men find me scary, embarked on a series of geographical moves purposely designed to keep her out of Connecticut. The distance has only grown farther as the years have gone on. Having started out in New York, six moves later has seen her temporarily settled on the Oregon coast. It’s my private belief, one of the few beliefs I have never shared with her for fear of giving her an idea that she hasn’t had yet, that she’s just one last move away from Alaska. After that, I’m sure I’ll lose her to Russia—she’ll probably walk across to it one day when the ocean is frozen really good—and then the world.
I know we’re supposed to be a mobile society, but mobility is just not something that people in my family do. And it’s not that I mind Best Girlfriend’s independence, her freedom, her sense of adventure. On the contrary, it’s one of the many things I admire about her. I just wish the distance between us didn’t make it so hard for us to sit on Irwin Lerner’s face together.
Perhaps I need to explain that last remark.
While we were at UCONN together—me in Liberal Arts, she in Fine Arts—we fell into a set of fairly regular habits, the kind of habits that helped normalize a life lived during an uncertain time when the drinking age was just beginning its incremental progress from eighteen to twenty-one (hence, we were all doing the constant-slow-IV-drip kind of drinking as opposed to the binge drinking that occurs in the much safer college atmospheres we have now) and AIDS was just thinking of poking its head over the American horizon (meaning that most of us were getting laid, fairly regularly, sometimes by people we barely knew, and none of us were using rubbers). Some of our life-raft habits included practical things, like always letting the other know approximately where we’d be when we went out (“A party, I think over in South Campus”) and approximately when we’d return (“Tomorrow morning? Tomorrow afternoon? Definitely sometime in there”). All right, so maybe we never were so exact with the information that any efficient sort of police report could ever be filed, should such a thing prove necessary, but it was just barely enough to technically pass the telling-the-truth test whenever I told my mother, “Not to worry: Best Girlfriend is keeping tabs on me.” Did it really matter how close those tabs on me were?
Other life-raft habits included: eating breakfast together (8:15 to 9:45 a.m.), but only if we were still up from the night before, because otherwise we’d never be up by then; lunch together (10:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.); and dinner together (4:15 to 6:45 p.m.); oh, and milk shakes at the snack bar set up in the cafeteria after dinner (8:00 p.m. to whenever). So maybe we didn’t make it to a lot of our classes, and maybe that does sound like a lot of time devoted to eating (which might also finally explain the notorious weight problem known as the Freshman 15), but I swear to God we did not spend all of that time eating. It was just that we always seemed to have a lot of stuff that we needed to talk about, and food was always in the immediate vicinity whenever we did so.
And then there were those vast forty-eight-hour waste-lands of time at that suitcase college that were more commonly referred to as the weekend; weekends where the dorm cafeteria was closed and we often resorted to the Student Union for our hungover-Saturday and Sunday eating-lunch-for-breakfast meals: tuna melts and milk shakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and Funny Bones, lots of diet soda and lots of cigarettes. Eateateat, talktalktalk.
But the most important Student Union meals of all were the rare ones that occurred late on Sunday afternoons at the tail end of rare weekends when one of us had stayed on campus alone while—gasp!—the other had gone home alone. This meant that, not only did we have a pressing need to discuss the usual pressing-need stuff—guys we were interested in, parties, other girls who annoyed us, diets, whether we’d pass any of the classes we never seemed to be going to, the inherent impossibility (slurp!) of sticking to any milk-shake-free diet while going to a school with its own agricultural college, the fact that she was indeed now a smoker since she had passed the pack-a-day mark and should therefore probably contribute to our daily nic tab, the fact that I could be petty from time to time—but we also had all of the pressing-need stuff that we’d been acquiring independently while (gasp!) apart.
These extra-special talks, during which we each felt as though we were talking to a whole new other person, given our protracted separation, required foodstuffs that went beyond the usual Nutrasweet/Funny Bones double-whammy. It required something beyond smoking while eating. It required something extra-special to recement us as the friends we’d always been and always would be, reconfirming the fact that it would always be okay for us to grow while apart just so long as we never grew apart. And, leave it to Best Girlfriend to come up with the perfect reconnection ritual climax: miniature peppermint patties consumed while sitting on a bronze plaque commemorating some man we never knew anything about.
“It’s gotta be his face,” Best Girlfriend had said, taking a teensy bite from the patty in order to make it last longer.
“Ya think?” I’d asked, taking my own first nip. “How can you possibly know such a thing? How come not the feet? In graveyards, aren’t headstones at the head and plaques at the feet?”
“But this isn’t a graveyard. I mean, what’re you talking about?” It was amazing how, for two girls who’d grown up entirely within the state of Connecticut, in most of our discussions during our college years, we both sounded remarkably like Joe Pesci. “If there were a real person underneath us here, buried on the lawn outside of the Student Union, right around the area where we usually sit for movies sometimes, that would just be way too gross for words. It’s just a commemorative plaque.”
“So, wait a second, then. The reason you said we’re sitting on Irwin Lerner’s face is because…?”
“It’s because I said so.”
“Ah.”
And Best Girlfriend was just enough months older than me that she always had the edge in any heated debate.
But then she moved away after college, and there was no more sitting on Irwin Lerner’s face together for us.
Our friendship was like being married to someone who gets sentenced to a really-really long prison term. On the one hand, you’ve sworn to wait for him and maybe you even intend to, and maybe you’ll even be able to. But in the case of a best friend that moves far away, even though she remains your official best friend, you still need to hook up with someone close by, someone you can go shopping with so that you can reject whatever the current fashion trend is together, someone with whom to attend chick flicks, someone to talk to on a daily basis, sharing each other’s soap opera.
Hold on. So maybe it’s not like being married to someone who gets sentenced to a really-really long term in prison so much as it is like being the husband who is in fact sentenced: you might start having sex with some beefy bruiser named Bart, but he’s not really who you want and everyone knows it.
Pam was my Bart while Best Girlfriend was the real deal.
This might not sound like such a great deal from Pam’s perspective, but Pam had known what she was getting herself into—being the Default Best Friend of someone who already had a real Best Girlfriend (and, yes, I do realize how immature I sound right around now)—and had in fact campaigned for the position, beating out Delta and T.B. (more on them later). As for me, I’d needed someone to go with me to see the latest Jennifer Aniston movie (you can go alone to dramas, but never comedies, because the laughing part just never works the same, which I suppose says something profound about the fact that people can suffer alone, but to celebrate the joys of living—laughter, success, popcorn, new shoes, finding out that Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t have a better body than you after all, the comical/ironical/blissful sides of love—you mostly need someone to celebrate with. It’s like getting a Ben & Jerry jones on: when you share a pint with a friend, it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a friend,” while if you eat that same pint alone, it’s like, “Wow, I’m pathetic,” (and not just because you will have eaten twice as much).
As I said, I needed a pal to go to the movies, and Delta had to work late and T.B. had a first date, so—tag!—Pam was it. She called me that one extra time, I said “uncle” and the rest was Default Best Girlfriend history. It was that simple. The two other friends in our foursome were busy and thus Pam became my Default Best Friend.
But, just like sex with beefy Bart, it just wasn’t the same. Pam could laugh with me in a crowded theater, and agree that hip-huggers sucked and that most of the people who wear them shouldn’t without it sounding like sour grapes, but she could never be someone who saw me for everything I was and hoped to be, and everything I wasn’t while loving me just the same, with the clarity of a god, nor, I suppose, could I see her in that way.
Best Girlfriend was the only woman who’d ever been able to actually see me; Best Girlfriend was the only woman I could honestly say I knew.
Did it suck for Pam? Probably. I don’t know; she never said. And besides, we did have fun most times. But it also sucked for me and it sucked for Best Girlfriend, too.
But Best Girlfriend needed to actualize herself in ways that never tempted me, career-wise, adventure-wise, relationship-wise. And, if I was going to love her like I loved no other woman on the face of this planet, then I was just going to have to let her lead her life in whatever way she needed to.
So, in a nutshell, it’s not so much that I mind her being there; I just want her here.
10
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Apparently, Best Girlfriend was not best pleased with some of the life decisions I was making.
“Are you fucking nuts, Scarlett?”
Having reached nearly the end of my quarantine period, I’d decided to call her up, looking for a little support, a little support that seemed to be sadly lacking.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”
“Fair enough. Maybe that was a little harsh. But do you realize that what you’re telling me sounds, uh—no, there’s no nicer way to put this—slightly crazy?”
“Which part are you referring to?”
“Well, most women, when they get to be our age, put their efforts into making themselves look better, not worse. I’d say that pretty much covers the ‘slightly crazy’ part.”
“I didn’t say I was definitely going to do it.”
“What then?”
“I said I was thinking about doing it.”
“Oh. Well, that’s radically different.”
“Come on, be honest. Haven’t you ever wondered?”
Best Girlfriend was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known who wasn’t in movies. I know it may sound elitist to say this, but there’s a real continuum of attractiveness. Someone has to occupy the high end; Best Girlfriend was at the very top, and I was close up there.
“Haven’t you ever wondered,” I asked, “what your life would be like, what your relationships with men would be like, if you didn’t look the way you do?”
“No. I haven’t.” She said it so simply that I realized it must be true.
“Oh,” I said.
“You never did say, Scarlett. Just what—or who—put this idea into your head?”
“Pam?” I winced.
“Oh.”
Pam and Best Girlfriend had met once or twice, when Best Girlfriend flew into town for her occasional visits. While I’d had high hopes for those meetings—who, after all, wouldn’t flat-out adore Best Girlfriend?—the meetings hadn’t gone as planned. Pam had insisted on spending the entire time talking about mutual acquaintances that Best Girlfriend, living clear across the country, had nothing mutual with. And Best Girlfriend, usually so self-confident and secure, had been uncharacteristically miffed. The resultant conversations that began with “I don’t know what you see in her” from both of them had been enough to keep me off the idea of ever willingly bringing the two together again. Maybe, if I ever finally got married, I’d need to have them both in the same place again. But until such a time occurred…
“Oh,” Best Girlfriend said again.
And then she changed the subject, and we talked about politics and Israel and books and movies, and men of course. It was our usual greatly fulfilling kind of conversation: we got to solve the problems of the world, trade ideas on popular culture and remember yet again why we were and would always be best girlfriends.
Naturally, none of that stopped her from obeying her in-grained instincts by getting in the last word. I mean, she was those few months older than me, after all.
“Just promise me one thing, Scarlett.”
“Shoot.”
“Promise me you’ll really think about it before embarking on this crazy road.”
“Okay.”
“‘Okay’ is not the same as ‘I promise.’”
“Okay. I promise.”
“Good. And one other thing?”
“Hmm?”
“Promise me you’ll think twice before shaving all your hair off?”
11
I believed in three things, beliefs I formed not while reading a book, but rather—gasp!—while watching a movie.
The movie, the name of which I no longer remember, had one character spouting off about Greeks, obituaries and passion, something along the lines of when a Greek man dies, his obituary isn’t about what he’s done, but about whether or not he had passion.
This is a wonderfully, wildly romantic notion of funerary rites that I have no way of proving or disproving, not having ever been to Greece or being much of an expert on Greek culture or even worldwide obituary practices in general.
“But,” you’ll say, raising your finger in the air as you make your indisputable winning point, “you are a librarian.”
“True,” I will concede.
“Surely,” you’ll go on, “you of all people should be able to place your finger on such information within moments. I mean,” you reiterate, “hel-lo! You are a librarian.”
To which I’ll finally have to respond, grumpily, “Fine. So maybe I don’t want to know.”
And it’s true. I don’t want to know if that stupid thing about Greeks/obituaries/passion I got from that stupid movie is true or not, particularly if it’s not true. And, even if it seems unlikely that a culture foolish enough to center their dietary menu around things like lamb and massive olives should come up with such a vast improvement on our distillation of a person’s entire life down into one short, fairly boring paragraph (plus inclusions about where to send flowers) by cutting right to the only thing that matters—whether a human being who lived had lived with passion—it seems equally likely that that same culture that built the Parthenon and that treats flying tableware as objects of joyful expression could have indeed accomplished such a thing.
Having admitted that I got the inspiration for my own life philosophy from a movie, here are the three things that I have chosen to stake my passionate claim on:
1. books
2. friendship
3. men.
The order changes from day to day; so sue me.
You probably can readily understand the books and friendship parts, at least why those things would matter to me so much, given what you already know about me. But here is where I take confession one step further. Here is where I tell you something about category three that you might not agree with, having perhaps grown too cynical.
I believe…I believe…I believe…
“Oh, God, Scarlett! Would you just fucking say it?”
Please don’t ask where that voice just came from.
Fine. Here goes.
I believe, not only in being passionate about men in general—which I am, always have been, can’t see myself ever not being—but I further believe that while you can go through an incredible number of men in a lifetime, and that there’s nothing wrong in doing so, and it can even be an interesting way to live, and you can love them all, and you can even love two at once, I believe, really believe, that for each person there is only ever one true love, and that if you fail to find that love, then at the end of your life the Greeks will eulogize you by saying, “Yes, Scarlett did some things passionately, perhaps, but she did not have passion.” I also believe if you give up too soon, if you settle down and marry someone before locating that one true love, then that’s exactly what you’re doing: settling.
One true love.
One—in my case—man.
Only one.
And I got all this—fucking A, as we librarians are known to say—from some stupid movie.
12
The only great thing about owning a condo in Danbury is that you get the use of a huge swimming pool, at least at my condo complex. And the view’s not bad. And it’s nice not to have to worry about the lawn. And the neighbors who aren’t psychotic are mostly okay. But other than that, I mean, come on, it’s not like living in the Waldorf-Astoria or something.
But the pool certainly is a plus. At least, the way Pam and Delta and T.B. saw things, it was. And they put their money where their mouths were by showing up on my doorstep every Sunday morning between Memorial Day and Labor Day, like it or not.
Truth to tell, I suppose I did like it, most of the time. For one thing, it gave me a built-in excuse not to cope with my mother until much later in the day, and for another, it wasn’t like I was seeing anybody special where it might make the disruption caused by three women showing up with a ridiculous quantity of paraphernalia on a Sunday morning after having had wild sex all of Saturday night, well, disruptive.
And they did always arrive with a ridiculous quantity of paraphernalia: the more normal items were sunblock, sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats, books, magazines, flip-flops. The less normal included yet more bottles of sunblock, only these had been emptied and rinsed thoroughly, making way for vodka apple martinis (Delta), since the condo rules were no consumables except for water by the pool. It was Delta’s theory that the Absolut-filled brown bottles of Tropical Sun or Deep Hawaiian were less conspicuous than see-through water bottles. I failed to see the reasoning for this, but in our group, I was in the minority.
Yes, I know it’s not very mature of us, still drinking so much as we age. What can I say? We were working on being Northern belles, except for Delta, who really was a Southern belle. Plus, whenever we went out, we appointed a designated driver—it doesn’t do for attorneys to rack up DUIs—and whenever we drank at my pool, everyone stayed put afterward until they were sober enough to drive again.
The other less-normal items for poolside use consisted of whatever new outfits had been purchased in the interim week (Pam), the runway show from cabana to diving board commencing only when enough Absolut tanners had been quaffed; and four copies of the Sunday edition of the New York Times (T.B.), which might sound like intellectual over-kill, but which T.B. brought every week in the hopes of getting us to compete in a four-way contest to see who could finish the puzzle in the magazine section the quickest. I was the only one who was ever willing to do this with her, but not because I felt the need to compete; it was more like that it was nice to enjoy what was traditionally a solo activity for me with company.
Best Girlfriend and I used to do the crossword together. And, even though she was a pencil-with-eraser person while I was strictly pen, sharing just one puzzle between us each day somehow worked.
“You think they think we don’t know by now who ‘architect Saarinen’ is?” T.B. asked, not bothering to look up from her puzzle as she filled in the blanks.
“They must think we’re stupid,” I answered, filling in the same blanks on my own puzzle.
Truth to tell, of the three, T.B. would have made the best Default Best Friend—hell, if the job wasn’t already filled until death us do part, she would have made a fine Best Girlfriend—but Pam had been so determined. Plus, T.B. was the only one of us four who was getting laid regularly by the same guy, and she wasn’t about to cut into nooky time just to go hold my hand while we went to the mall to laugh at those stupid hip-huggers.
“Child, you white folks are funny the way y’all’ll buy something just ’cause that skinny-assed Britney Spears is wearing it. You don’t see black folks doing anything so dumb.”
T.B. was one of them black folks. And she and I loved to slip into “girlfriend” mode.
“No, that’s right, girlfriend,” I said, “ya’ll black folks got your own dumb shit going on.”
“We black folks like to do this just to confuse y’all,” T.B. was fond of saying, “keep you on your toes, make you think we’re going to steal your silverware—something fun like that.”
“Gee, thanks, but you’re a fun girl,” I was fond of saying in return.
And then T.B. would laugh that rich beautiful laugh that I loved so well, the one that was like a swirling whirlpool made up of chocolate and which my skinny-assed Britney Spears self could never duplicate, not in a million years.
Now that you know just about everything else about T.B. worth knowing—that she was nice, smart and a Times-toting intellectual—you’re probably wondering how she came by the name of T.B. Had someone in her family been hooked up to an iron lung machine a few generations back? Was it perhaps short for “Too Bad,” as in “it’s too bad for you, but I’ve already got someone else I’m doing regular-like”? No, it was neither as tragic as the former nor as rude as the latter.
T.B., quite simply, stood for Token Black.
When I’d first been introduced to her by Pam, I’d returned her warm handshake, responding, “T.B.? Oh, right. If my name was Terebinthia Butterworth, I suppose I’d just go by my initials, too.”
“That’s not what T.B.’s for.”
“No?”
“It’s for Token Black.”
Since we were at a party at Pam’s—it was amazing how many big parties Pam threw, given how few people she liked and how few liked her—where the current population consisted of approximately twenty-nine white men and women plus her, it wasn’t all that difficult to guess where she might be going with this.
“Under the present circumstances, I can see what you mean.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“You may think you see what I mean—Pam told me all about those liberal tendencies of yours—but you don’t.”
I know it was wrong of me to take offense at someone else’s accurate assessment of the limitations on my experience of such things, but—what can I say?—I was offended anyway.
I puffed up: “Well, actually…” And I proceeded to tell her about my preteen best girlfriend, the one who came before Best Girlfriend, the one who was black, and about how once her sister had taken us and a carload of her friends—nine of us total, only one other white—to see a movie on the Fairfield/Bridgeport line, and how the movie theater was an every-seat-taken affair and the movie was a comedy and the only two whites in the whole theater were me and that other girl, and how downright spooked I’d felt when I’d been forced to recognize the truth: that some of the things we thought were funny were not perceived by those around us that way, at all, and that some of the things the majority found funny made me feel just a little intimidated. “So, you see—”
T.B. had the chutzpah to yawn in my face without making any real attempt to cover her mouth. “Oh, yeah, right,” she said, when she’d yawned long enough to stop my self-conscious flow of words. “Y’all had one minority experience and now you know what it’s all about.”
“I wasn’t saying that. What I was saying—”
“Look. Try taking your one lousy little experience and multiplying it by just about every day of your life. I didn’t go to no movie once and have that happen. I am the movies, baby, and TV, too.” T.B. shifted into street talk.
“Gee, you don’t look like a movie.”
“Well, I is. I’s the judge and the pediatrician and the prosecutor and—”
“Well—” I stopped her “—you is actually the prosecutor.”
She started to smile at me, and then made herself stop.
“I’s the local color, I’s the next-door neighbor, I’s the best friend who gets killed so the star can get angry—” dramatic pause “—I’s expendable.”
“Naw,” I said.
“Naw?”
“Ain’t I sayin’ it right?”
“Naw.”
I shrugged. Well, I couldn’t hear any difference between us.
“If I ain’t expendable, then what am I then?”
“You’s the glue. Without you, they ain’t no story.”
“No shit?”
“Naw shit.”
“If you stop imitatin’ me—” she smiled “—I’ll let you be my friend.”
“If you forgive me when I can’t help myself or I just do it, anyway, I’ll take you up on it.”
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait ’n’ see how often you do it.”
“Hey,” I said, serious again and feeling foolish, but more serious about anything than I’d felt in years maybe. “I’m sorry.”
And I could tell I didn’t really need to explain, but she pressed me, anyway, her voice soft. “For what, baby?”
“For everything I had no part in creating, for everything I’ll never change.”
Still soft: “Me too, baby.” Then much brighter: “But you know what?”
I shook my head.
“At least it’ll give you and I something other than the usual ‘being-a-woman-these-days-sucks-because-the-hemlines-are-too-high’ bullshit to talk about.”
“True.”
“Now, then. See her? See that one over there?” And she pointed her finger at the woman I would later come to learn was Delta from the Delta.
“You mean the one the men all seem to notice a lot?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You mean the one with the hair teased so high it practically touches the ceiling?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“The one with the too-tight capris and the fuchsia chiffon scarf and the really big…”
“…acres of Tara? Mmm-hmm. That’s be her.”
“What about her?”
“She really talks like this.”
“For real?”
“Naw shit.”
“And ya know somethin’ else?”
“What?”
“I actually like her.”
“Naw shit?”
“Naw shit, baby.”
And they were always disruptive.
Given that this was the first Sunday since getting the chicken pox that I’d been well enough to have them over for a swim, if anything, they were more disruptive than usual.
It’s always struck me as funny how minigroups of like-situated people tend to cluster together. One of my male neighbors hadn’t married until age thirty-four. Previously, he’d had a group of friends who were all of similar age, all unmarried. Then, when he fell, they fell, too. For the first year or two afterward, he’d still laugh about people he knew from work who had kids, their lives all occupied with Little League and ballet recitals. But then his wife had gotten pregnant and, like a row of dominoes redux, all his friends had followed suit.
Our minigroup’s unifying theme was that we were all currently unmarried. T.B. had been married once and was still on good terms with her ex, Al, whom she even still dated occasionally, and who was in fact the person I’d been referring to earlier when I said she’d been getting laid regularly by the same guy. Delta had been married and divorced a whopping three times already, producing two bundles of mixed joy out of her efforts. Pam, like me, had never even said “I do” once.
I sat there in my lounge chair, a white beach robe covering my conservative olive tank suit. A sprinkling of faded pocks still marred my face and chest. Dr. Berg swore that they’d disappear completely in time, but I had my doubts. Unused to being blemished, I felt disfigured by the two spots that remained on my face, both on the left side, one just under my cheekbone, the other closer down to my chin. And my chest! Who would have thought that I, who had been previously bugged by all the attention the world paid to my unearned breasts, would be so bothered by having this smattering of flat, pale pinkish-red spots mar the previously creamy terrain? Well, even I was human.
As I sat there, I listened to my minigroup do the postmortem on their respective Saturday nights. T.B. had gone out with Ex-Al again, this time to a movie she’d badly wanted to see. To me this was a good sign of his earnest intent, since whenever a man consents to see a chick flick rather than a dick flick it means he cares enough to let his woman think Colin Firth is hotter than he is.
T.B. looked gorgeous in a strapless turquoise swimsuit, her long hair done in cornrows that she’d wrapped together in a matching turquoise scrunchie. I envied her the hairstyle (but knew I’d look like an idiot if I ever tried to imitate it).
“Are y’all possibly going to get back together again?” Delta voiced for all of us, readjusting her ample bosom with one hand to the chest of her ill-advised fuchsia two-piece suit as she knocked back a surreptitious mojito from her suntan-lotion bottle with her other. While I’d been ill, and with no pool to go to, mojitos had apparently taken my friends by storm.
“Naw,” said T.B. “I don’t think so. It’s more like having a man who has the same tastes and can be depended upon for good sex whenever the need arises.”
That didn’t sound like such a bad arrangement. It’d be convenient, anyway.
Delta had had one of her three ex-mothers-in-law stay with her gruesome twosome while she and Pam had spent the evening at Chalk Is Cheap, the pool hall/bar we usually frequented when we went out together.
“Was it fun?” I asked wistfully, wishing I’d been out with them rather than spending the night at home with reality television, feeling sorry for myself.
“Naw,” said Delta, “it wasn’t so great. A pair of suits came in who Pam and I thought might turn out to be possibilities—”
“But then they turned out to be gay,” Pam finished. Pam’s choice of a sedate one-piece black swimsuit that could not begin to camouflage a world of sin indicated that she was still depressed from the night before. If she’d scored, she’d have been wearing the white one, in hopes of a wedding to come.
“Well,” I said, “better you should learn that now than later.”
“Ain’t it the truth?” Delta laughed.
But Pam still looked bummed by the whole thing.
“So,” I said, as if we’d been talking about what I really wanted to be talking about all along, “if I were to deliberately sabotage my own looks—you know, in order to see how the world treated me if I no longer looked the same—how would you suggest I go about it?”
Pam shot me a look of almost victory as she moved over to the aluminum ladder, lowering herself into the pool.
“You’re not serious, are you?” T.B. asked, looking suspiciously over at Pam.
Was this a thing that my friends talked about behind my back? Strange to think that the paranoid voice in your head, the one that whispers, “People are talking about you,” was probably right.
Whatever.
“I’m not sure how serious I am,” I said, “but I am curious about what it would be like. And I’m also curious what y’all think I’d need to do.”
Y’all? See how easy it was, when with T.B. and Delta, to lapse into the kind of phrasing they used? I didn’t want to ask myself what it meant that, however much more time I spent in Pam’s company than theirs, I never had the desire to sound like her.
Pam eyed me appraisingly. “You’d need to start dressing down,” she said.
“Hah!” hah-ed Delta, the woman who’d never met an oversize piece of paste jewelry she didn’t love. “If Scarlett dressed any more down, she’d be…she’d be… Well, I don’t know what she’d be, but I just don’t think it’s possible. Maybe she’d be Toto.”
I knew that Delta was referring to the fact that I tended to dress, um, anonymously. It really wasn’t what you’d call dressing down—I mean, I was always clean—but my wardrobe mostly consisted of simple pants and shirts and dresses, things that were anti-fashion to the extent that I could have worn them ten years before, would be able to wear them ten years hence, and they’d never make a ripple of sensation. Timeless classics, I guess you would call them. But, like my condo, “lacking in personality or apparent ownership” is probably what Delta would call them.
As for the Toto remark, Delta, who had something nice to say about nearly everybody—well, she even occasionally found nice things to say about those two kids of hers, didn’t she?—had always nursed a somewhat rabid antipathy toward the little dog in The Wizard of Oz; “Damn thing looks like the business end of a mop,” she’d say.
“True,” Pam conceded, referring to my wardrobe, not the little dog. Having pulled herself up onto a big black inner tube, she was lazing around the pool, using her hands to gently provide the motion. “But Scarlett’s clothes still have some shape to them. She needs to go in the other direction.” Then she looked at me, smiled. “I could help you out with that. I could take you shopping.”
“Well,” said Delta, leaning over to finger my raven mane, “the hair would have to go.” She fluffed her own Dolly Parton-wannabe tresses. “Can’t be trying to slum it with pretty hair.”
“Oh,” said T.B., getting into the spirit of things, although I could tell she didn’t believe I’d ever do it, “and you’d need to get some glasses.”
“I could do that,” I asserted. “I wear contacts. I’ll just switch.”
“No heels,” warned Delta. “Ever.”
“Great,” I enthused. I’d reached an age where I was tired of the pain of occasionally wearing heels, even if those heels were sometimes the only things standing between me and regular teasing by my gal pals at my lack of significant height.
“And no makeup,” T.B. laughed. “Not that you ever wear any to speak of, anyway,” which was true. A little lipstick in the winter, just enough so that the chapping wouldn’t make me look like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and I was pretty much well ready to face the world.
“Hey,” Delta laughed, “and if you really want to make it challenging for a man to fall in love with you, you could borrow my kids for a while!”
“Um, no, thank you,” I said. It wasn’t that I was put off by the idea of kids in general so much as I was put off by the idea of Delta’s kids in particular.
“Oh, come on,” Delta encouraged. “Believe me, it’ll make it nearly impossible to find Prince Charming, if you’ve got a couple of kids at home.”
“Who ever said I was searching for Prince Charming?” I asked.
“Heh,” T.B. laughed softly. “Ain’t we all?”
“Well, no,” said Delta, going all literal on us. “I don’t think lesbians are looking for Prince Charming at all.”
“Prince Charming, Princess Charming,” said T.B., “it’s the same thing.”
All the while, Pam had been floating around in the pool, a smile playing on her lips as she tilted her face to the sun, eyes closed. She had the look of someone who was content to let others do her dirty work for her.
“Okay,” I said, feeling that I needed to object to something, but reluctant to address the particularly objectionable things that they were saying, “let’s say I do all this. What do I do about where I live, where I work?”
“Huh?” asked Pam, nearly falling off her float as she sat up too quickly.
“Think about it,” I said. “I can’t just show up at work one day looking radically different—people will think I’m nuts. I can’t stay living in the same place after going from swan to anti-swan. Did I mention that people will think I’ve gone nuts? All my neighbors will think I’ve gone nuts. People would ask questions. I’d have to give explanations.”
Pam shrugged, settled back, smiled. “So you’ll get a new job. So you’ll move.”
“Just like that?” I asked.
“Sure.” Pam shrugged again. “Why not?”
I thought about it. Would it really be that hard to do? I wasn’t that attached to my job. I certainly wasn’t that attached to where I lived. Except for the pool. But it would be Labor Day again before I knew it, which meant no more swimming for nine months, anyway. And leaving the library would get me away from Mr. Weinerman….
“You know,” Pam said in a devilishly seductive tone, “you could also bind your breasts.”
“I’m not going to bind my breasts!” I half shouted. Sheesh. A girl had to draw the line somewhere.
“Just a suggestion.” Pam smiled.
“Well,” I said, thinking about it all, everything, all at once, “if I do all that, I might as well change my name, too. People still do that sometimes when they get married or if they go Hollywood, so why can’t I? I could even change it legally. No sense in creating a new life, a new persona, and then keeping the same name.”
“No sense at all,” said T.B., in a tone that clearly revealed that she’d gone back to thinking me nuts.
“Naw,” said Delta, “Scarlett’s the name of a femme fatale. It’s the kind of name men can’t resist. We can’t have that.”
“So,” asked Pam, “just what are you going to call yourself in your new life? Who is the new and de-improved Scarlett going to become?”
“Who the hell knows?” I answered.
“Are you really gonna do this thing?” T.B. asked a few minutes later, once Delta had joined Pam in the pool, the two others caught up in talking TV.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know.” I thought about it some more. “Maybe?”
“But,” T.B. said, “forgive me if this is a dumb-ass thing to ask—Why?”
I thought about how Pam had planted the seed when at the bar, had been planting the seed for years, that my luck with men was unearned. I thought about how having the chicken pox had harvested the seed that I might not be as lovable if I didn’t look as good. I thought about my realization, while watching Extreme Makeover, that my looks might have brought me attention, but they hadn’t brought me love.
“Because Pam’s got me curious,” I said. “Because for thirty-nine years I’ve done things one way, and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere, not really. Has being attractive got me that Prince Charming you were talking about? No. So maybe doing something drastically different will get me what I want. Do I even want him? Who knows? Some days, yes. Some days, no. Maybe I want to do it because I worry that Pam might be right, that my good looks have earned me a free ride. Maybe I want to do it because I want to prove something to myself, that I’m likable just for me after all. Or maybe I want to do it simply because,” I finally sighed, “who the hell knows why? What can I say? I’m a confused and conflicted and ambivalent woman. I have murky motives.”
“Ah,” T.B. said. “I getcha now.”
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