A Little Change of Face

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Yes,” Steve cut me off. “Two of whatever the best thing you have is.” Then he looked at me. “You left fifteen minutes early, and nobody knows but Jane, so you still have time left.”

  I relaxed back into my chair, visions of something chocolate dancing in my head.

  Something chocolate turned out to be homemade chocolate chip fudge brownies with blueberry ice cream and hot fudge on top.

  “Yay, no nuts,” I said, taking a bite.

  “You’re very funny,” he said.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said sourly.

  “Why the sour thank-you?”

  “Because funny is the plain girl’s bone. It’s what the world throws us as compensation.”

  “You’re not plain, Lettie,” he said softly, “but you’re absolutely right about one thing—nuts would spoil it.” He took another bite.

  “So, how was your Halloween party?” he asked. “And what had you so down when I first saw you today?”

  I suppose I could have told him about Sarah, since I was still upset about what had happened to her, but that was her story, not mine to tell people. So, before I had the chance to think about what I was doing, I was telling him about Saul. I didn’t tell him the part about the thing I had going with Pam, about how I’d downgraded my appearance in the last few months. I just told him that I’d met a really attractive guy a while back, I really liked him, wanted him to ask me out, invited him to my Halloween party, and then, when he saw me dressed up more exotically than he was used to, his attitude toward me had changed.

  Okay, I also didn’t tell him the part about sleeping with Saul.

  It might have been selfish of me, spilling my guts to Steve this way after he’d asked me out twice. But I still believed that the first time Steve had asked me out it had been to mock me, the second time had been out of pity, and today, well, today he’d said we were just having lunch as friends. Shouldn’t I be able to tell a friend about the things that were bothering me?

  He laid down his fork.

  “I’m probably the wrong person for you to talk to about this,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Because I like you. Don’t you get it? I really like you.”

  I brushed him off, not believing he meant it. “Of course you like me,” I said, “and I like you. We’re friends now, right?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “How is it,” he asked instead, “that a woman like you never married?”

  “How do you know I never married?”

  “Well, have you?”

  “No. But I almost did. Twice.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I realized it just wasn’t right,” I said, “both times.”

  I sat there, wondering how to explain my whole Greek theory about passion, how it had been a weird sort of beacon in my life, how when I’d realized that neither of the men I’d been engaged to, however nice, had fit into that theory, I’d broken things off rather than settle.

  Finally, I decided to tell it just straight out.

  “Weird,” he said, when I’d finished. “A librarian who loves her job and who is committed to a theory of Greek passion.”

  “That’s me—” I shrugged, tried to smile “—weird.”

  “I’m going to ask you one more time. Lettie, will you go out with me?”

  “Maybe.”

  Not long after I got back to the library, Kelly stopped by the Circ Desk.

  She was wearing gray wool slacks and a pale pink button-down shirt. Apparently, she’d settled down a bit from her overenthusiastic first days and had modified her wardrobe to fit in with the library crowd, which mostly wore slacks, except for me in my Empire dresses.

  “I was disappointed when Jane told me you’d already left for lunch,” Kelly said.

  I was stunned. “Why?”

  “Why?” Apparently, she was stunned, too. “Because I was hoping to have lunch with you today, that’s why.”

  I heard Pat cough behind me. While I’d been at lunch with Steve, the shifts had changed.

  “That’s very nice of you, Kelly,” Pat said.

  I looked at Pat, this woman who’d practically invented the word acerbic, and I could see that she was sincere. She was looking at Kelly all doe-eyed. What was going on with everyone here, I thought, had Kelly reinvented the Dewey Decimal System?

  Not to mention, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why Kelly would want to spend her lunch break with me. I hadn’t exactly been warm to her. Worse, every time I was around her, I turned into an even klutzier version of me: dropping books, dropping due-date cards, dropping doughnuts.

  Kelly must have been reading my mind, because she suddenly leaned in and whispered, keeping an eye on Pat.

  “You’re the only one here who’s close to my age,” she said. “I thought we might be friends.”

  What was she up to? I wondered. Was there really something malevolent about her, or was I just jealous? I wasn’t sure, but there was something about her that made me think of a red M&M.

  “Yeah,” I said, echoing Pat, “that’s very nice of you. But since I’ve already eaten lunch…”

  I let my voice trail off, hoping that was that.

  But it wasn’t.

  “Fine,” Kelly said. “Then we can go out after work instead.”

  “But—”

  “We can go get massages. I’ll drive.”

  Kelly’s car turned out to be a red sports car.

  It figures, I thought.

  And she drove like a maniac.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, as she zoomed out of Bethel.

  “Westport,” she said.

  “Westport? We’re going all the way to Westport just to get massages?”

  I saw her shrug within the dark confines of the car. “There’s a place there I like.”

  Damn, I thought. Westport was thirty-five minutes away. We were going to have a lot of bonding time together. Did I really want to bond with this woman?

  But it turned out to be not so bad. Mostly, on the drive down, Kelly wanted to talk about work. Well, what else did we have in common?

  “Did you ever notice,” she asked, “how people there seem to treat me, uh, different from everyone else?”

  Uh, yeah.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, figuring it was the polite thing to do.

  “I don’t even know,” she said, “but I just feel like Roland and everybody else acts different around me.” Pause. “And I don’t like it.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I’d rather just get treated the same as everybody. Who wants to be odd girl out?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe they treat you differently because you’re so, um, helpful.”

  “I guess.”

  She cranked up the radio.

  The special massage place she wanted to go to turned out to be a place called No Hands, in a building overlooking the Saugatuck River.

  “What’s so special about this place that you come so far to get to it?” I asked, getting out of the car, relieved to have survived Kelly’s driving. I mean, jeez, thirty-five minutes to get here; we could have gotten to Snips & Moans in five. “And what’s with that name—aren’t hands the whole point?”

  “I like the view.” She answered my first question. “They specialize in using hot stones.” She answered my second.

  “Ah.”

  Once inside No Hands, we were quickly led to a room. Apparently, Kelly had called ahead and made arrangements.

  “Um,” I said, “we’re going to get massaged together?”

  Kelly was puzzled. “Sure, why not?”

  “Well,” I said, feeling a bit Puritan, “I usually get my massages alone.”

  Not like I was getting massages a lot. In fact, the last time I’d been massaged professionally, it’d been…it’d been…it’d been…oh, hell, it’d been a long time ago.

  “What’s the big deal?” Kelly asked. “We’ll change separately. W
e’ll be under towels.”

  When I emerged from behind the changing curtain to let Kelly take her turn, a big white towel wrapped around me, I could see what she meant by the view. One wall was all windows that were darkened on the outside for privacy. But from where we were, you could see out over the river, the stars shining against the water. It was a lot nicer than the kind of dump that I’d have probably picked out if I were picking out a massage place other than Snips & Moans. I’d have probably picked out a claustrophobic little room, no windows, with a calendar on the back of the door put out by the U.S. Beef Association.

  This place felt so much more sophisticated than Snips & Moans that it made me feel like I was about to have a new experience entirely, like maybe I was a novice who didn’t know what to do here.

  I lay down facing the view on one of the tables, draped the towel over my backside, hoping I’d got it the way I’d seen when I’d seen characters getting professionally massaged on TV programs. In another minute, Kelly was on the table beside mine, backside under a towel.

  “Hey,” she looked over at me, a lazy smile playing her mouth as though she were getting sleepy or on drugs, “you have a beautiful back.”

  What do you say to that?

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I never would have guessed,” she said, “under those clothes.”

  Just then, the masseuses came in, saving me from having to talk about my peculiar wardrobe.

  Kelly closed her eyes and I did the same, as the masseuse went to work on my back. It felt strange, having a stranger touching me like that, not something I was regularly used to, even if there were stones between us. And the stones themselves felt weird, too—not hot to the point of unbearable, but pretty damn warm—and I couldn’t tell if I liked the sensation or not, which for me was seesawing between heavenly and awful.

  “You have no idea what it’s like,” Kelly said, “having people treat you differently.”

  “Mmm,” I pretended to agree, thinking it strange to be holding down a conversation with my eyes closed. It was like Kelly and I were playing a weird kind of sensual version of Blind Man’s Bluff.

  “It’s not easy,” Kelly said. “Guys all treat you like an object, like you must be impossible to get, like you must be vain, like you must be some kind of trophy.”

  “All at once?” I asked. “They do those things all at once?”

  “No, of course not all at once! But they all treat you like an object. The rest of the things they do depends on the individual doing it.”

  “Ah.”

  “It gets lonely,” she said.

  Earlier, when we’d been supposed to be bonding in the car, I’d thought that maybe if things went well, I’d tell her about Saul, tell her about Steve. It would have been a relief to talk about it with someone who was a relative stranger. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, couldn’t bring myself to talk to her about how I’d just slept with this incredibly gorgeous guy not too long ago and had another guy who was really nice and whom I’d said I’d maybe go out with. You can’t tell that kind of stuff to someone who’s just told you how lonely they are.

  “If things are that tough,” I suggested, “why don’t you try something different?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged beneath my towel. “You could try doing what I do. You could dress down for a bit, let the world take you for who you are.”

  “Hah!” she laughed. “I’m not that desperate.”

  I would have been offended, but then I figured, no, most normal people probably weren’t.

  “Hey,” I said, a thought suddenly occurring to me. It was something that had been bothering me ever since I’d first seen her at the library, something I’d been unable to put my finger on until just now. I couldn’t believe I was going to ask another human being that question, the one that I always hated being asked, but… “How’d you ever wind up working in a library?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “My parents didn’t think I was smart enough to be a lawyer or anything like that. They thought I’d be safe in a library.”

  Forty minutes later, we were completely massaged, back in the clothes we’d come in, and on the street again. We were also one hundred dollars lighter each, which seemed kind of steep for a couple of stones.

  35

  “Borrow your kids?”

  Delta looked surprised by my offer.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You’re always saying how you could use a break, if only you could find someone who’d take them off your hands for a while. It’s what you’re saying right now, what you’ve been saying for the past half hour. Don’t you trust me with them?”

  “Oh, it’s not that. It’s just that, well…”

  “Well what?”

  “It’s just that, well, I never got the idea you really wanted kids.”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “The fact that you never talk about them, maybe?”

  “Maybe I never talk about them, because, oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m just not the type to think about them unless I’ve found someone I’d want to have them with first?”

  “Really? Maybe?”

  “Really maybe.”

  “But—” she hesitated again “—are you sure that if you’re going to try on parenthood for the first time, the two kids you really want to try it on with are Mush and Teenie?”

  I regarded the Mush and Teenie of which she spoke; the former had his hand down his trousers, engaging in his favorite activity, which was making sure his pecker was still there and that it still felt good to touch it; the latter had peanut butter all over her nose, a result of her unusual preferred method for consuming her daily PBJ.

  “Sure I’m sure.” I took a deep breath. “Really maybe.”

  In fact, this conversation hadn’t quite started with my request to borrow Delta’s kids. It had started with her inviting me over for a visit, ready to tear her hair out or kill somebody, because she just couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I love my kids, Scarlett, don’t get me wrong.”

  “I know you love them,” I’d assuaged her pangs of guilt, all the while wondering how she could love them, since they were so, well, Mush and Teenie. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Exactly.” She’d been relieved. “It’s just that it’s impossible for me to bring a man home and have a normal evening with them here.”

  “Really?” I’d pretended disbelief.

  “You don’t know the half of it. But I’ve, well, I’ve met someone new. His name’s Dave, and I really like him, I’d like to invite him over this Friday night, and if the evening goes well, I was hoping he could stay the weekend. But it’s not even worth the bother of having him over here if they’re going to be here when he comes.”

  “What choice do you have? Even if you can find a place to stow them for the weekend, what are you going to do when the weekend’s up—somehow pretend forever that you don’t have any kids?”

  I could see that she was sorely tempted by the idea, but then she shook it off. “Of course not,” she’d said. “I just wish, just for once, that a man I like could get a good, long chance to get to know me first, to fall just a little bit, before having to meet them.”

  I’d secretly thought the same thing I always secretly thought, what I’d been telling myself my whole life: that if someone was going to fall in love with Delta, or any woman, it was going to be not because of external things, like looks or kids, but for who she was inside. But you can’t tell one of your best friends that her bad luck with men was that, for whatever reason, men didn’t find enough in her to love to make it worth overcoming the obstacles.

  Still, I’d felt sorry for her, could see how isolated from what she wanted having kids made her feel. Wanting to make it better for her, I’d figured: What the hell? Why not step up to the plate for one measly weekend? I’d had some kid experience with Sarah lately. How much worse could Mush and Teenie be? This was when I said:

 
; “Borrow your kids?”

  And this in turn had led to my commitment of:

  “Really maybe.”

  Which Delta took as a most emphatic yes.

  “Oh, Scarlett—” she practically knocked me over with her big-boobed hug “—you won’t be sorry. I mean, you probably will be sorry, probably very sorry…but I’ll be so happy! And really, however you want to do it, it’s perfectly fine with me. If you want to have your mother come to stay with you to, you know, reinforce you should any difficulties too big to handle befall you, I perfectly understand. Or if you have to go out yourself at all, if you can somehow manage to get an alternate babysitter, don’t even worry about it—just tell me how much it is afterward and I’ll be glad to reimburse you.”

  Delta couldn’t seem to stop herself from talking. She was suddenly like that cartoon bird on the old Cocoa Puffs commercial—“I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”—just happy-dancing her way off into a rainbow sunset of dizzy happiness.

  “Oh, I just can’t believe it,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Do you know the last time I had a man in this house without kids underfoot?”

  I shook my head at her rhetorical question as I caught sight of Mush checking out his pecker again and I began to get a glimpse of the enormity of what I’d offered to take on.

  “Well, I can’t, either!” Delta barked a laugh that was downright scary in its near-hysteria.

  “Borrow your kids?”

  Three more insane words were never spoken.

  36

  An hour into my weekend with Mush and Teenie—a whole weekend?—and already I was regretting my impulsive generosity towards Delta. These kids weren’t kids; they were monsters!

  When Delta dropped them off Friday at six, I already had a home-cooked dinner on the dining-room table, which I’d set with my best tablecloth and serving dishes, figuring that while they were with me, I’d try to provide a nurturing environment. I was sure that under my care, however brief, Mush and Teenie would blossom into the truly great kids they must surely be under all that noise and dirt.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t home-cooked. It was Chinese takeout from Noodle Fun, but don’t all kids love takeout?