A Little Change of Face Read online

  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 th
ings 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 an
d 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.”