A Little Change of Face Read online

  “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 gla
sses—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.