A Little Change of Face Read online

  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 ha
d 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.