And how did Mom go from being the party girl to being the chicken-soup wielding maven of practical shoes she now was? Who the hell knows?
I’d tried to ask her once, not long after Dad died, but all she would sadly say was: “You know, Scarlett, sometimes you just get tired of being the same person after a while. Everyone needs change.”
I had my own theory, albeit a warped one: without the audience of my dad, who was the best audience she ever had, it was no longer any fun playing dress up.
Needless to say, between Mom and Best Girlfriend, I’m conflicted on the subject of women’s appearances, both in terms of what it does to the women themselves and what it does to the world. I’m certainly conflicted about my own appearance.
Two hundred years from now, some anthropologist will dig me up and wonder, “Was she bothered by having great breasts? Was she proud of them?”
Okay, I know that will never happen; I’m going to be cremated. But still, somehow, they’re worthwhile questions, even if I may never know the answers.
23
I was shopping the Super Stop & Shop in Danbury, looking for cake mixes with which to christen my new home. The Queen of England may use champagne over the bow to break in a new battleship, but we girls from Danbury know that it’s Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix and Betty Crocker Ready-to-Spread Instant Buttercream Frosting that make up the real blessing of choice.
Of course, I wasn’t a Danbury girl anymore, I was now a Bethel girl, and so should more properly have been shopping my new local store, but old habits die hard. Just ask any politician.
So there I was, looking at the back of the box to see how much oil and how many eggs I’d need, since it had been so long since I’d pulled out my limited culinary talents to make a cake from mix that I’d forgot, when I heard an allergic sneeze and looked up to see a familiar head of hair over the bow of my cart.
Old-fashioned pageboy of black hair, pretty brown eyes: it was Sarah, the girl who’d given me the chicken pox, only now her complexion was cleared up, she was wearing the red-and-blue school uniform of a coed Catholic school in Danbury, including navy knee socks, and, lordy-lordy, she now had hairy knees.
She sneezed again. Weird how in a world where only a few people used to suffer from allergies, now nearly everyone I saw had problems with them. But of course there wasn’t anything wrong with the environment.
“Gezundheit, Sarah,” I said.
She shot me a quick look, confusion on her face.
“It means God bless you.” I answered her look.
“Not that,” she said warily, looking around for the safety of other shoppers as if I might be about to snatch her. “How did you know my name?”
“From Danbury Library,” I said, hopefully allaying her fears. “Your mother brought you in over the summer to get books from your reading list.”
She still looked puzzled.
“I helped you with the list,” I said. “I recommended some books for you.”
“You?” She looked shocked.
“Me.”
She looked at me more closely and I knew what she was seeing: the much shorter hair, cut weird, the glasses.
“Huh,” she said, “I’d have never recognized you. But why did you…?”
“Hey, I see you got over the chicken pox!” I said, not wanting to answer what I knew her question would be—why had I deliberately sabotaged my own looks?—perhaps because I wasn’t sure I even could answer it, not even to myself.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, completely forgetting me and remembering herself, just like any kid would. “It was awful!”
“Tell me about it,” I said, trying to be companionable. “I caught it from you.”
Now she looked horrified.
“But it’s okay,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “Honest. It wasn’t bad at all,” I lied, “and it gave me a great excuse to stay home from work for two weeks and watch TV.”
“Hello, do we know you?” I heard the feminine voice first and then turned to see the woman I recognized as Sarah’s mother, with the toddler she’d had in the library with her now in her arms. A part of me had been wondering who Sarah was with and where they’d gone to, since she wasn’t old enough to be doing the family shopping alone. From the look of the diaper bag over her mother’s shoulder and a slight whiff of something less than appetizing in the air, I guessed she and the toddler had needed to make an emergency trip to the Super Stop & Shop bathroom.
“I’m Lettie Shaw.” I introduced myself to her, hand outstretched, figuring she’d never known my old name, so I might as well introduce myself with the new one. “I helped you with Sarah’s summer reading list at Danbury Library several weeks ago.”
It was obvious that Sarah’s mother, a once-pretty woman with brown hair and a tired smile, was as puzzled by my change in appearance as her daughter.
“Nancy Davis.” She reluctantly shook my hand, as though whatever had made me suddenly look worse might be catching. Then she added brightly, “Those were great suggestions you gave Sarah. She loved the books. We’ll have to come back and see you…”
“Oh, no,” I cut her off. “I’m afraid I don’t work there anymore. I’m at Bethel Library now.”
“Oh, well…” Nancy Davis’s voice trailed off as if there was nothing left for us to say.
I looked at Sarah. Damn! But with that black hair and those brown eyes, not to mention the hairy knees, she looked like a mini-me. She also looked like she could use a friend.
“Hey,” I said to Sarah, “if you’re ever in town…”
24
As I navigated my way through my new job, as I decorated my new home, I found myself constantly wondering: “What would Lettie do now? What would Lettie say about this? What would Lettie want?” It was weird, like there was more than one person living inside of me, or maybe like I was finally getting in touch with a part of myself that I hadn’t even known existed before.
T.B. had offered to help me paint the dingy walls. Pam had claimed that paint fumes always made her queasy and Delta couldn’t find anyone to stay with Mush and Teenie for an entire Sunday—no surprise there—so it had fallen to T.B. to be my sole partner in brushes.
“I like this sienna color you picked out for the dining room,” said T.B., watching as I swirled the paint in the can. “Makes it feel like you’re going to Italy without having to pay the plane fare.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you think the owner might mind it being so dark, whenever he gets back from wherever he is?”
“Naw, I think he’ll like it. Why wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” I looked around me at the dingy walls, still the color of funky urine. “Maybe he likes the subway-station look. I just figured that Lettie would like—”
“I gotta tell you, Scarlett, it creeps me right out, the way you talk about Lettie like she’s some kind of real person.”
“I’m just trying to get into the spirit of things.” I shrugged, bending to dip my brush in the can, rising to put the first neat stroke on the wall. What I couldn’t admit aloud to her was that Lettie had indeed become very real to me. Mostly, I was curious as to what Lettie would be like, once she completely became herself, and I also really did want to know just exactly what Lettie wanted from the world.
“What’d you do last night?” I asked, hoping to deflect conversation about my weird and sort-of fake life by talking about her real life.
“I went out with Al,” she said.
I turned to look at her, but her back was to me as she worked the other side of the room.
“You went out with Ex-Al again?” I asked. “What’s up with that? I swear, you’ve been out with him nearly every weekend this month.”
“He’s safe,” she said softly.
“Safe?”
“And fun. He’s a lot of fun.”
“So why’d you ever divorce him in the first place?”
“You know why—he was unpredictable and he made me miserable.”
“I don’t know. It’s different when you’re married.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, wondering idly if Lettie wanted to get married.
“Lucky you,” she laughed.
“How’s it different?”
“Tough to say. But it’s like you start expecting your spouse to be someone other than who they are.”
“So, you expecting Ex-Al to be a, I don’t know, dependable husband sort of forced him into acting unpredictable?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” she laughed. “But, yeah, in a way, yes.”
“What are you talking about? You mean that what you wanted made him somehow feel like rebelling?”
“I don’t know. ‘Rebelling’ is such a strong word.”
“What then?”
“I think he just felt like he had to assert himself, to be seen.”
“And to assert himself he had to make you miserable.”
“It’s not that simple, not that syllogistically ‘if X, then Y.’ Love’s never that simple.”
I nearly dropped my brush. “We’re talking about love now? You don’t think you’d marry Ex-Al again, do you?” I asked, thinking the absolute worst thing about that would be that I wouldn’t have the fun of calling him Ex-Al anymore.
“Marriage? Who the hell’s talking about marriage?”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
I could have sworn she blushed.
“Maybe we’ll just live together this time around,” she said.
“Really? No shit?” I felt like the little dog scampering annoyingly around the big dog in the cartoon. “Do Pam and Delta know about this yet?”
“Who the hell knows if I’ll do it or not, Scarlett? And you best not be talking to Pam or Delta about it. I’m not ready to have the harsh light of girlfriendship shining its nasty little glow on what I’m thinking about.”
“I best won’t tell them,” I said, unable to prevent a smug smile from sneaking its way onto my lips. “I best keep your secret.” Then, I started singsonging, “T.B. might be moving in with Ex-Al, T.B. might be…”
“And don’t you be singsonging that schoolyard crap at me.” She pointed her brush at me like it was a weapon, but I could see she was fighting back her own smile. “Besides, who are you to be laughing at someone else’s weird life? Aren’t you the one who’s painting your house the colors you think will please some weird little alter ego in your head named Lettie?”
This was true.
“Just so long as those voices you’re hearing don’t go telling you to shoot somebody.”
Just so long.
25
Getting used to being Lettie at home was somehow easier than getting used to being Lettie in my new job.
At home, it was somehow comforting, channeling Lettie, trying to figure out what kind of drapes she’d like to hang (lace curtains), what kind of food she’d like to eat (nothing too rich, but the occasional éclair was okay), what she liked to watch on television (surprisingly, or maybe not so much, a lot of Lifetime).
But work was harder.
The director insisted I call him Roland, which was fine since I was used to dealing on a first-name basis with anyone I worked with. But Roland insisted on looking at me—during the daily morning staff meetings or whenever I passed by his office on my way to the lunchroom or to fill out my time sheet—with a certain looking-straight-through-the-nonexistent-new-worker kind of air that was somewhat less fine. I was not yet used to men not reacting to me in a positive way, and his lack of any reaction to me was disconcerting, like I was some kind of tabula rasa, waiting for the world to write a more interesting story on me.
My friends had been right about one thing: the new women I worked with—and they were all women, save for Roland and Pete, a guy who worked part-time in Reference—were absolutely thrilled at how little training I needed. The first day on the job, when the person I was working with in the morning, Jane, switched places with Pat, the woman I’d be working with in the afternoon—most of the other workers were part-timers—I heard Jane say, “You should have seen her! The computers went down, and without even asking me what to do, she just called Bibliomation and got it fixed,” to which Pat had replied, “Not much to look at, though, is she?”
That last stung a bit, I’ll grant you, but I tried to remind myself that this had all been part of the exercise. After all, wasn’t the point to prove that people would still like me for myself no matter what I looked like? Still, I supposed that, without realizing it, I’d grown used to the personal sense of validation I’d gotten from people I worked with complimenting me on the little things (like how pretty my hair was) or seeking out my esteemed opinion (on how to catch men). It fast became apparent that at Bethel Library, neither of those things was going to happen, since my hair was now as plain as could be (at least someone could compliment me for washing it) and I no longer looked like I’d had much experience with the latter.
Not that Jane and Pat were any great shakes. Both had been made grandmothers more than once already and were deeply committed to the large stash of minichocolates we at Circ kept stashed in a Danish cookies tin beneath the counter. The chief distinctions between the two were that Jane was much taller and wore her long gray hair tied in a braid on top of her head, while Pat was, obviously, not as nice.
Not five minutes into my first shift with her, having seated herself to call patrons to remind them that they had books on hold and that we’d only hold them two more days, Pat asked, “Never been married, huh?”
It had struck me before that there’s a certain kind of woman, devoted to watching daytime talk shows, who believes that anyone she meets is fair game, right away, to be asked the rudest questions; as though life were some kind of studio setting, with her being the audience and everyone else panel guests up on the stage.
“Uh, no,” I answered.
She looked at me for a long moment, considering. In fact, she looked at me so long that I began wondering if she were waiting for Oprah to pop in and ask me what kind of diet I was following. Finally:
“Does that bother you?” Pat asked.
“Only when people like you ask me if it bothers me,” I answered, not thinking to stop and channel Lettie before letting my mouth speak what I really thought.
“Huh,” said Pat, picking up the phone and punching in the numbers of the next patron on her list, “who would’ve thought? There’s more spunk to you than meets the eye. Not much, but some.” Then she turned her attention to: “Mrs. Calloway? Bethel Library here…”
You’d think that a library in a small town would be different from a library in a small city, but not really. Once you made allowances for the differences in square footage between the two buildings—okay, the bigger library, by definition, did have more stuff in it than the smaller one—it was all basically the same. People, to a certain degree, are the same anywhere you find them. Sometimes, there’s just fewer of them, like maybe only 20,000 instead of 80,000.
In Bethel, I quickly found, just as I’d found in Danbury and in my years in the bookstore before that, there were certain people who liked to play games; people who liked to say that they had no idea how they could have amassed twenty dollars in fines and that they’d never taken out the latest Richard Gere movie, much less sixteen times and failed to return it on the last, no matter what the computer said. There were also mean people, people you could never move quickly enough for, people who were never pleased, people who were looking for someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong in their lives and tag!—the taxpayers are paying you, aren’t they?—you were it. But these were, thankfully, a tiny minority, and there were also the nice ones, the ones who loved books and people, the ones who reminded you of why you had become a librarian in the first place.
26
“Why in the world did you ever choose to become a librarian?”
I sighed upon hea
ring this question I’d heard so often, but had hoped to never hear from this particular quarter.
It was odd, after all, being asked that question, in this of all places—the library—by one of the patrons. It was like if a prospective client of Pam’s were to ask her why in the world had she ever chosen to become a lawyer. It was the kind of question that smacked of doubt, as though the questioner was assuming that either the questionee was not properly equipped for the job or had chosen poorly. Either way…
Remember when I said before that good-looking men are never found in bookstores or libraries?
Well, I was wrong.
All right, so, maybe the guy standing on the other side of my counter—with his thick auburn hair, kind of shaggy on the edges and parted on the side, his warm brown eyes, his orthodontist-somewhere-in-the-background smile, his paint-spattered shirt opened just enough to reveal the optimum amount of chest hair and his tight-jeans-clad hip pressed lightly against my counter—wasn’t about to give Tom or Brad a run for their box-office money, but for a guy in a library, he looked pretty damn okay.
I looked at the name on his library card—Stephen Holt—before scanning it into the system and processing his order: a pulp mystery (he had low-brow tastes), an older Rushdie (he had high-brow tastes), a coffee table book on trompe l’oeil (who knew what that said about him?).
Putting prestamped cards inside the flaps of his books, I was finally ready to answer his question. But how was I going to answer it: as Scarlett or Lettie?
Deciding the Borscht Belt approach would be best in this situation, I answered the overly familiar question with a wincing question of my own. “Because the job of supermodel of the decade was already taken, and besides which, I wouldn’t have qualified, anyway?”
He looked puzzled. “Why would anyone want to do that for a living?”
I repeated the Stein family motto: “Be-cause—the pay is good, thepayisgood, thepayisgood?”
A Little Change of Face Page 11