“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 mo
tion. “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.”
13
I stood before the mirror in my bathroom, studying my hair.
Yes, I know. That does sound a bit too much like navel-gazing. But I had a purpose to what I was doing. And, besides, it was hair-gazing instead of navel-gazing, so didn’t that somehow make it okay?
Looking at all that long black hair, I thought about how long it had been a part of who I was. Ever since I’d been little, with the singular exception of a college flirtation with the shag, I’d always been the girl—now woman—with the long black hair. It was something I’d always received compliments on: from babysitters who had liked to play with it, turning it into long braids or trying to get it to take a wave with the curling iron, to men who had liked to see it splayed out against their pillows. Hell, there had even been a few women who had made passes at me because of it. Unlike some of my acquaintances, who were made uncomfortable by lesbian advances, I’d merely turned those women down in the same way I’d have turned down a man whom I wasn’t interested in dating: “Thank you so much for the compliment, but I’m just not looking to date right now. What can I say? It’s a character flaw.”
Even my mother had always claimed to love my hair, calling it my “crowning glory.”
Was I really going to get rid of it now?
I heard Best Girlfriend’s voice, admonishing me not to shave my head.
But I wasn’t going to shave it, just cut a dozen or so inches off. And besides, my local girlfriends had said that my hair was the first thing that had to go….
I went to the bedroom, lifted the receiver on the phone, thinking to call Helen at Snips & Moans, the combination styling salon and massage parlor I always went to whenever my split ends reached the unbearable point or when I needed to be touched by someone who would be unlikely to have sex as part of the agenda. The place was pretty rustic, and there was something vaguely scary about Helen, but in a pinch it worked.
But then I heard Pam’s voice distinctly, as though she were right there in the room with me, saying, “But that’s cheating, Scarlett! If you go to Helen, sure you’ll get your hair cut, but you’ll also be tempted
to do something stylish, something that the world will approve of. Put down the phone!”
For whatever reason, I listened to her.
Having decided to listen to the voice of Pam in my head as opposed to—oh, I don’t know—reason, I returned to the bathroom, looking in the drawers and cabinets for a decent pair of scissors. You would think I’d own a pair, but I never sewed anything, never hemmed anything that could be rolled up, so I was forced to settle on a teeny-tiny pair of gold scissors from my manicure kit.
Oh, well, I sighed, taking a hank of hair in my hand and holding it straight up in the air as I’d seen Helen do, watching my own reflected hand as it made the first decisive cut, this is probably going to take all night.
So…it didn’t take all night. But by the time I got done with my self-styling, working one hank and snip at a time, it had taken quite a while, and left me with some pretty sore fingertips.
And what else was I left with?
Very short hair, that was what I was left with: a completely naked neck with very short hair, still all black and parted on the side, but now looking like an uneven patchwork quilt. I looked like a little kid who had gone wild in the bathroom while Mom yakked for too long on the phone. Except for the fact that I wasn’t a kid and nobody was yakking on the phone, I looked exactly like that.
Oh, well, I sighed. The goal had been for me to look radically different….
Now, let’s see. What was next on the list?
I got out my contact lens case, removed my lenses, gently stowing them away as though they were a beloved pet I was sending off to the Great Rover Beyond.
Looking in the mirror, I saw…absolutely nothing but a blur. Without any assistance, I was blind as a bat, unable to pick O.J. Simpson out of a lineup of dwarves.
Reaching for my eyeglasses case, I removed the pair I wore at night before bed and first thing in the morning. They were on the small side, with tortoiseshell arms and gold rimming just the top half. Anne Klein II, maybe? I can never remember these things without looking.
I put them on, hearing Pam’s voice again in my head, only this time, it was from a dinner we’d had the spring before. Suffering from an eye infection, I’d worn my glasses for once. Pam had looked at me over the top of her menu.
A Little Change of Face Page 6