A Little Change of Face

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Plus, any time we were all over at Delta’s, which we certainly did all try to avoid, they were always underfoot.

  “Let go of my Lego!” yelled Mush.

  “Uh-uh,” countered Teenie, snatching what little hold he still had on it out of his reach before somehow managing to squeeze herself between T.B. and me, and then squeeze herself under the coffee table. “The only way I’ll let go of this Lego is if I decide to shove it up your butt!”

  Ah, children.

  Okay, so maybe it’s just possible that those of us who have never squeezed a child out of our bodies, or adopted or made one in a test tube or whatever, don’t have the accumulated natural sympathy necessary to see the charm in a sentence that includes the words Lego, shove and butt, all arranged in the worst possible order. Delta, on the other hand, having squeezed these particular children out, saw things differently.

  “Ain’t they just the cutest little things whenever they do like this?” she asked with the absent air of a mother who, hoping to get something done for an hour, informs her kids that it’s okay to play in the street so long as they remember to keep an eye out for cars.

  “Yeah, real cute,” said T.B., who sounded as though she really meant it, until Teenie, still under the table, bit down on T.B.’s gold-painted toenail, giving the toe beneath the nail a healthy bite in the process and caused T.B. to shriek, “Ah, son of a bitch! That goddamned little Teenie bit my toe!”

  Even Delta couldn’t let this one slide by. “Teenie! Get your butt out from under that table!” Now, we all knew where Teenie had gotten her curious grasp of the English language from. “What the hell do you mean by biting your Aunt T.B.’s toe for?”

  Teenie looked a little puzzled; maybe even she herself wasn’t completely certain of why that impulse had come over her. “Uh,” she asked her mother, “because I wanted to see if black people’s toes taste any different than Mush’s stupid dirty ones?”

  “Shit, Teenie! That ain’t no reason to bite her! My God. You think my friends come over to see me so that they can get bit by you just because you take it into your head to perform some kind of weird sociology project on them? If you’d wanted to know such a stupid thing, you could have just asked one of us, and we’d’ve told you. Of course black people’s toes taste different from Mush’s toes. They taste better. Hell, everybody’s toes taste better than Mush’s, that ain’t no big mystery. Now, then, say you’re sorry to—”

  “Hah!” yelled Mush, having snatched back the Lego from Teenie while Teenie was busy being chewed out by Delta. He raced, as best as he could race, toward his bedroom door, shouting over his shoulder to Teenie, “The only way you’ll ever see this Lego again, is if you’re willing to reach up my butt to get it back, ’cause that’s where I’m gonna be hiding it from you!”

  The over-the-shoulder-shout technique soon proved to be a tactical error on Mush’s part, when the side of his face crashed into his own doorjamb.

  Five minutes, one washcloth filled with ice cubes and a single admonishment to “stay in this room until my friends are gone and I don’t care if y’all kill each other in here because if you even think about coming back out into that living room and interrupting us again I’m going to be up both your butts” later, Delta was back among us.

  “Lord,” she said, flopping down on the couch, wineglass in hand, “y’all have no idea what it’s like to have kids.”

  Uh, yeah, we do, I wanted to say but didn’t. We got a real good idea from watching you. And what we see makes us think maybe we’ll all procreate like…uh…let me see, now…never?

  Delta eyed me suspiciously. “Did you just say something, Scarlett?”

  “Me? Uh, no.”

  “Huh. I don’t know why, I could’ve sworn you just said something about having kids. Oh, well.” She shrugged it off, tilting her head to rest her neck on the back of the couch, two fingers massaging the inner corners of her eyes. “Never mind.”

  “Well, you sure do make it look easy,” T.B. spoke softly, hoping perhaps to give Delta the necessary confidence to soldier on, even though T.B. was the one who was going to need a rabies shot after tonight.

  “Oh, right,” Pam snorted. “Nobody could make being those kids’ mother look easy.”

  “Pam!” I cautioned.

  “Well, it’s true,” she insisted.

  Well, of course it was true, but still—

  But Delta waved me and T.B. down before we could stage a credible defense of her offspring.

  “Pam’s right, you know,” she said.

  “Now,” T.B. said in an effort to lighten the moment, “there’re two words—Pam and right—a person doesn’t hear uttered in the same sentence every day.”

  “Fuck you,” seethed Pam.

  “Fuck you right back, Pam,” smiled T.B. “Oops,” she added, “I just made it twice in one day.”

  “Can y’all save your natural animosity for one another for a day when I’m not in the middle of a personal crisis?” Delta asked. “I’m trying to talk to y’all about my life here.”

  “Sorry,” said T.B. “You were saying? I believe it was something about Pam being right?”

  “Well, she is,” said Delta. “You know, when you get pregnant, nobody ever really tells you, in any way you could ever possibly grasp, just how hard it’s gonna be to squeeze a baby out into the world.”

  There was that squeeze word again, I thought.

  Delta went on. “And then, once you’ve had the baby, nobody ever really tells you just how hard those squeezed babies are going to make the rest of your life. Oh, I don’t mean that it never makes me happy. Hell, being Teenie and Mush’s mama makes me happier than anything else I do in this life—”

  It does? I translated the looks Pam and T.B. and I flashed to one another.

  “—but it’s harder than anything else in my life, too. And you know what the hardest part is?”

  Removing Legos from their butts? was what I wanted to ask but didn’t.

  “Dating. That’s what. You have no idea how hard it is to meet some nice man, some man I think I might like, have him ask me out, tell him I was already married once before, have a good time, want to get to know him better, invite him back here, finally get up the nerve to tell him I’ve got two kids from three previous marriages, have him tell me that’s just fine, and then…and then…have him meet…them.”

  “I can imagine,” said Pam.

  “No,” said Delta, and her gaze was rock steady, “you can’t. You really and truly cannot even begin to imagine.”

  Despite the fact that it was no fun seeing the usually bubbly Delta feeling so dejected, it was nice, for once, to have the conversation shifted away from how nuts I was to be doing what I was doing, this plan Pam had concocted. Or was it my idea, too? See? It was too confusing to think about and a relief to be thinking about something else.

  “Hey!” Suddenly, Delta was looking much happier. In fact, she looked so happy as she looked at me, I could swear her pigtails were dancing. “I’ve got an idea, Scarlett. If you ever really want to test if some beau really wants you for yourself, you could always borrow Mush and Teenie!”

  Well, she thought it was hysterical.

  18

  Best Girlfriend really was worried about me.

  “I don’t like these turns your life is taking,” she said during our regular Sunday-night phone conversation. “And I really don’t like the idea of Pam having so much control over you.”

  This was an old story: Pam hated the very idea of Best Girlfriend and Best Girlfriend was eternally suspicious of Pam. Oh, to be loved by too many women…

  But if Best Girlfriend was worried about me, I was worried about Best Girlfriend, too. When we’d first got on the phone, she’d mentioned that she’d been feeling in crisis lately. She wasn’t sure if photography was the right profession for her.

  “But it’s what you’ve wanted,” I said, “ever since we were children.”

  “People change,” she said. “Plus, I’ve re
alized it’s not everything I thought it was going to be.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s hard to say. But I think that, sometimes, getting your dream is worse than not getting it.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Uh, because I just did?” But then she must have decided that sarcasm wasn’t the most effective approach here. “It’s kind of like, as long as you have the dream, you have something to shoot for, you can keep telling yourself, ‘Once I get X, I’ll be a happy person. My life will be great.’”

  “But then you get it—” I started.

  “—and you’re still not a happy person,” she finished softly.

  And then there are no excuses left. I was sure we both thought this, but neither of us had whatever it would have taken to speak the words aloud.

  So when she started trying to shift the focus of our conversation on to me and Pam, naturally I rebelled.

  “Can we not talk about me and my problems for once?” I said.

  “Then what would we talk about?”

  “You.”

  I heard her sigh. From hundreds upon hundreds of miles away, I heard her sigh.

  “I’m just not happy anymore, Scarlett. I’m not happy with work. I’m not happy with Bob,” she referred to the man she’d been living with for five years. “I’m just not happy. I’m thinking of moving.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Canada?”

  Best Girlfriend and I had been friends for what sometimes seemed like forever. Both being only children, it was more like we were each other’s families than two people who shared no common blood.

  Peculiarly enough, it was the only relationship I had in which the balance of power shifted in the other direction, meaning that Best Girlfriend was so drop-dead gorgeous that men literally fell at her feet. All through high school, all through college, I did fine for myself where guys were concerned, except for when she was around. When she was around, it was like guys couldn’t push me out of the way fast enough to get to her. Well, except for the ones who, as part of their strategy, became my friends so they’d have an excuse to hang out with her.

  Did this bother me? Did I resent it?

  No, I honestly thought I never had. After all, I thought Best Girlfriend was the most amazing female who ever lived. I mean, I’d made her Best Girlfriend after all, right? And if I thought that, then why shouldn’t everyone else?

  But, yes, it could sometimes make a person feel just a little insecure, like a dying star trying to hang out with the Northern Lights. Sometimes, I wanted to say to some of those guys, “Hello! Don’t you see another girl here? Don’t you see how great I am? Besides, Best Girlfriend is so busy…” So, I guess, in a way, having grown up to be something of a Northern Lights myself, I could kind of understand what bugged Pam so much.

  But I still believed—I had to believe, despite the niggling doubts Pam instilled in me—that people liked me for me, just like once upon a time people had liked Best Girlfriend for Best Girlfriend.

  19

  Quitting a job that you no longer love, a job in which you are required to be with Mr. Weinerman forty hours a week, is just as easy as it sounds. Having taken advantage of the four weeks’ worth of vacation that I still had coming to me, was I going to devote that time to finding a new job?

  Nah. I wasn’t worried about that. For some reason, any profession that has to do with reading can always make room for one more person who is good at what she does.

  I was going to use all of that free time to work on becoming as much not like me in appearance as I possibly could. If not a female version of Mr. Weinerman, I could at least make myself a little less good-looking, a little less in shape.

  I would become a sloucher.

  Okay, so maybe there wasn’t much I could do about the spectacular breasts, but I was determined to level the playing field between Pam and me, to tilt the scales of dating justice more firmly in her favor, so that, at the end of the day, I could still prove that it was me and not my looks that attracted other people.

  After I was done with that, then I could worry about finding a new job.

  “Frump,” Pam declared, holding up a brown wool skirt.

  “Frumpier,” she said with delight two minutes later, lofting a beige shirtwaist.

  “Frumpiest,” she concluded triumphantly. The object in question? Something that looked suspiciously like a house-dress.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  “I know.” Pam shook her head, the disillusionment apparent. “Who would have suspected something like this—” she indicated the unlikely garment “—could be found in a place like this?”

  “Oh, I’m not talking about that,” I pooh-poohed her.

  “What then?”

  “It’s just that, I can’t believe what I’m doing here. I can’t believe I keep letting you take me out to purposely select clothes that will make me look less attractive. I mean, isn’t that the opposite of normal female behavior or something?”

  Even though I’d said that I wanted to prove that it was me and not my looks that attracted people, to purposefully be seeking out the frumpiest… What can I say? Not only did I have murky motives, but I was fickle.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Not if you’re self-destructive, it’s not.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “But you do want to prove some kind of point.”

  “Wait a second here. Isn’t it your point that you’re having me see if I can disprove?”

  She shrugged her shoulders again. “Details.”

  My life had become some sort of weird Halloween party where I was seeking to costume myself as anything but the fairy princess.

  There was an ad in the paper from Bethel Library, looking for an entry-level librarian. Bethel is a small town bordering on Danbury and I figured this was the chance I needed to start somewhere fresh.

  But how to keep the person I’d been at Danbury Library and the person I was going to be at Bethel Library, provided they gave me the job, separate? After all, if I gave Danbury as a reference, the person Danbury described would be far different from the person Bethel would be getting.

  Delta had the solution.

  “I’ll doctor your transcripts,” she offered.

  “You can do that?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, between keeping Mush from killing Teenie, or maybe it was between keeping Teenie from killing Mush. “Just give me your school transcripts. I’ll just change the dates, so it looks like you just got your degree.”

  “But wouldn’t that be, um, deceptive?”

  “Well, if y’all want to be technical about it.”

  “Can you really distinguish between technical and non-technical deception?”

  “Oh, who the hell knows?” Her attention was momentarily deflected by: “Teenie Beauchamp! Stop pouring pepper on your brother’s Pop-Tart. It ain’t nice.” Then she turned back to me with a shrug. “Look at it this way. In actuality, Bethel’ll be getting a librarian with twelve years’ experience, but they’ll be thinking they’re getting someone at entry level and, unfortunately, will probably pay you same. How bad off does that make them? Actually, sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

  When she put it like that…

  “So, I’ll kind of be offering them the librarian deal of the century?” I asked.

  “Exactly!”

  I suppose it should have given me some financial pause to be considering taking a job at entry level, but I did have that money my dad had left me and the job was full-time, so there would be good benefits.

  “There’s just one other thing,” I said.

  This was when I told her about wanting to change my name to fit my new identity. It just seemed, oh, I don’t know, fitting.

  “So,” she said, finally grabbing the pepper from Teenie, “you’re going to go from being Scarlett Jane Stein to being who exactly?”

  I’d given this a lot of thought.

  I took
a deep breath. “Lettie Shaw,” I said.

  Well, at least she didn’t laugh at me. She laughed at something Mush was doing to get back at Teenie. At least, I think she was laughing at Mush and not me.

  “You’re going to go from being a Scarlett to being a Lettie?” But then she looked at my new hair, my glasses, my clothes. “Yeah, I guess Lettie sounds about right now. But Shaw? What the hell’s your Jewish mother going to say? You are going to go on being Jewish, aren’t you?”

  “I hadn’t really worked that out yet,” I said, and I hadn’t. “I mean, I’m still going to go on being Jewish. But Mom? Oh, hell. I’ll just tell her that the name change has to do with meeting men. She’ll be all for it then.”

  “You still haven’t said. Shaw?”

  “Oh, that. It’s a nod to George Bernard. I know what I’m doing is the opposite of Pygmalion, but, somehow, it’s still the same thing.”

  Feeling a little like I was making a deal with a counterfeiter, I got my transcripts and left them with Delta, who promised they’d be ready the next day, in time for my interview at Bethel Library.

  “You’re a little, um, experienced—” I was sure the director wanted to say old “—to have only just decided on a career in Library Science, aren’t you?”

  “My mother always said I was a late bloomer,” I said.

  He eyed me, obviously concluding that my mother was right, about everything.

  We were in the Bethel Library, of course, that beautiful white building with black shutters that sits on the corner of Greenwood Avenue—Bethel’s version of Main Street—and Library Place. I loved the old building: its large white pillars out front, its brick walkways. It was so different from where I’d come from.

  The director, Roland James, looked to be only about five years or so older than me, with fading blond looks that had an “I coulda been a contenduh” air about them. He also wore glasses, not all that different from my own, and a lean body that was either the gift of metabolism or the result of some serious effort.