She was seeing the hokey glasses, the unnecessary few pounds of weight gain that I’d only become aware of myself that morning in the shower, the unattended hair, the nonsexual clothing. But that wasn’t all that she was seeing, for she was seeing past the careful packaging to the person underneath, the person whose core might still be essentially the same but who had allowed herself to change in some small ways to accommodate the package, in ways that were wrong somehow for the lack of conscious choice behind those changes.
I knew exactly what she was seeing, because through her eyes, for the first time, I was seeing myself.
“I came to save you from yourself,” she said one last time. “And from the looks of things—” she moved to embrace me again “—I came not a moment too soon.”
Which was the moment that Mush and Teenie chose to come bounding out of the kitchen, hurling themselves at our legs while shouting, “Mommy, Mommy! Who’s the pretty lady you were hugging? Are you going to be a lesbian now?” Mush punctuated his enthusiasm by attempting to hump himself against Best Girlfriend’s leg, the combination of his and his sister’s behavior providing Best Girlfriend with game, set and match, as she scored the only point she really needed to make, the point she’d traveled across the entire country to make, changing planes four times.
My life had gotten too damned weird, even for me. Something had to give.
It was probably best to start with the small things. I looked at Mush and Teenie.
“What?” I said, sounding like an exasperated Borscht Belt comedian. “What’s with the Mommy nonsense? First, you did it with Saul, then you did it with Steve, now you’re doing it with Best Girlfriend.” I looked at Best Girlfriend. “I swear they’re not my kids.” I turned back to Mush and Teenie. “What? Why are you doing this to me?”
I would not have believed it possible, for the no-neck monsters to blush in shame, but redden they did.
Mush studied his feet. “Mama put us up to it,” he said.
“Don’t blame Mama.” Teenie roused herself out of the depths of embarrassment just long enough to punch her brother. “It was her friend Pam’s idea.”
“Wait a second,” I said, not sure who to question first. “What do you mean it was Delta’s idea, it was Pam’s idea?”
“Well,” said Mush, “it sure wasn’t T.B.’s idea.”
“No way,” said Teenie. “T.B. said it was a sucky idea.”
Even when you know that it’s likely that your friends talk about you when you’re not around, it’s still a shocking and invasive feeling whenever you realize you were right, all your paranoid little fears coming home to roost.
But there was no time to be Woody Allen.
“What was the idea,” I asked, clarifying, “the idea that was Pam’s idea and Delta’s idea, but definitely not T.B.’s idea, no way?”
“Mama said—” Mush started, but Teenie punched him again.
“Pam said,” Teenie said, “that whenever anyone we never met was around you, that we was supposed to call you Mommy.”
“Did they say why they wanted you to do this?” I asked.
“They said it would be a lot of fun,” said Teenie, “seeing what would happen next if we did.”
“Nice friends you’ve got,” Best Girlfriend said.
“They’re mostly okay,” I said, thinking that at least T.B. hadn’t gone along with it.
On the one hand, it was hard to defend my friends’ turning my life into a kind of sideshow. On the other hand, it was hard to criticize, seeing as how I’d turned my life into a pretty big sideshow all on my own.
Still, I was glad when Delta came by a little later to collect the kids. As much fun as we’d had together, I was tired of having fun.
“Did they behave nicely for you?” she asked nervously.
“Yes, Mommy,” I said. “They sure did.”
She looked at me funny, having caught my italics.
“I had a great time with Dave,” she said, very cautiously, “in case you’re wondering.”
“That’s great,” I said, and I actually meant it. “I’m glad.”
“I think I may have a chance with him,” she said, “you know, having him get to know me before introducing him to my kids.”
Sometimes, from the way they talked, it really was hard to believe that most of my friends were officers of the court.
“I’m really glad,” I said, still trying to feel it. Then: “Mommy.”
On the second try, she got it.
“Oh, Scarlett, I’m sorry. We didn’t mean nothin’ by it. We just thought it’d be fun—”
“To play with the circumstances of Scarlett’s life without her consent?” Best Girlfriend interrupted before I could say anything.
It was kind of weird, having my faraway Best Girlfriend, like, clash swords with my Bethel/Danbury life.
“Like I said,” said Delta, “we didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“No doubt,” said Best Girlfriend, arms crossed.
Instinctively, Delta seemed to sense that Best Girlfriend represented some kind of force that was bigger than her and Pam and even T.B. combined.
“You’re the one from out of town, ain’t you?” Delta said with a chin nod, like maybe Best Girlfriend was Gene Hackman in a saddle instead of an extraordinarily pretty woman currently living on the Oregon coast.
“Does that matter in the slightest?” Best Girlfriend asked.
Whether it mattered or not became immaterial, since Delta, deciding perhaps that Best Girlfriend was too big a force to reckon with on a Sunday morning, gathered up the kids and their sleeping bags and left.
Once Delta was gone, Best Girlfriend reached into her backpack, came out with two perfectly wrapped turkey sandwiches and two cans of Pepsi One, my favorite.
“The little place at the airport was open,” she said, offering one of the sandwiches. “I thought you might be hungry.”
I settled down on the couch—to hell with crumbs—suddenly realizing how hungry I was.
“What are you really doing here?” I asked, my mouth half full of food, not caring about manners in the not-caring-about-manners way that one can only be in front of a best friend.
“What the hell kind of greeting is that?”
“I didn’t mean it that way. Of course I want you here. It’s just that you’ve never visited me unannounced before.”
“It’s like I said,” she said, also speaking around a mouthful of food. “I’m here to save you from yourself.”
“And?”
“And I’m in the middle of an existential crisis. Like I’ve been saying on the phone, I’m confused about my relationship, confused about my work. I thought that maybe in coming here to help you, I’d help me, too. Besides, one of the nice things about being a photographer is that I can write the whole trip off as work. I’ll take a few snaps while I’m here, call it ‘The Bethel Series.’”
She reached into her backpack again, came out with a camera, snapped me sitting on the couch.
“I’ll call it ‘Best Girlfriend Changes Her Face,’” she said.
“Great,” I said, wishing she’d given me some notice so I could wipe away the mustard I could feel on my cheek.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s been going on,” she said. “Give me a chance to help myself by taking care of you.”
So I told her everything, about the conversations I’d had with Pam that had led up to my making the changes, about Sarah, about Saul, about Steve, even a little bit about my conflicted feelings about my looks and how it all somehow related to my feelings for my mother and my feelings for her.
She used her tongue to work a piece of turkey loose from between her teeth.
“So,” she said, “this is somehow your mother’s fault, or my fault?”
“No,” I said honestly, feeling the need to pull back from the hurt look on her face, but wanting to still be honest, “it just is. I’m just telling you what some of the antecedents and aftershocks are. I know that no one made
me pull the trigger.”
“You know what I think?”
“No, but I bet you’ll tell me.”
“I think Saul sounds like a toad and Steve sounds like a prince.”
“Maybe.”
“And I think something else.”
“Hmm?”
“I think that what you should really do, Scarlett, what you should really-really finally do, is be yourself.”
“Be yourself”—two throwaway words, like something you’d see in a high school yearbook alongside “don’t ever change” and “friends 4 ever.” Two simple words, which were in essence the two words I’d really been saying to Sarah with my longer-winded exhortation to focus on her positive attributes, designed to put people at their ease; in reality, two of the most fear-provoking words in the English language.
Well, they certainly struck terror in me.
“I also think you should tell Steve everything,” said Best Girlfriend. “If he really is falling in love with you, if he’s fallen in love with you, you should give him the chance to see who you really are.”
“We’ll see.”
38
Over the course of the next week, Sarah came by the library less than before. And when she did come, she seemed less naive, more serious. But I thought that in time she’d be okay. What had happened to her was awful, no doubt; but the truth of the matter was that, in light of the horrible stories every day on the news and on TV, it was a blessing that the worst that had ever happened to her so far in life was nowhere near as bad as the worst life could be. Hopefully, she’d use the experience to learn how to separate shallow guys, like the detestable Jeff Polanski, from guys more worthy of her attention.
Also over the course of the next week, as Best Girlfriend talked to me during the days and slept on my couch at night, I began the slow process of returning to myself.
It was proving to be surprisingly true what people say, that it’s a lot easier to gain a few pounds once you’ve reached a certain age than it is to lose them once again. Almost everything in life is somehow easier to lose than to gain—keys, sunglasses, high-school French, return receipts when you need them—but not those damned few pounds.
And then there was the rest of the process necessary to de-frump myself. I’d come to realize that it was a lot easier, a lot less time-consuming, never worrying if I’d run afoul of the Fashion Police. But if I was going to become myself again, then I was going to have to start paying attention to at least whether one item clashed with another; I was going to have to show at least some modicum of interest in accessorizing.
I started small, that first Monday back at work wearing my contacts instead of my glasses. I didn’t really think it would be such a big deal, didn’t think anyone would notice really, but I was in for a surprise. You’d have thought I’d had an Extreme Makeover or something.
“You have such pretty eyes,” said Jane.
“You look like a whole different person,” said Roland.
“What do you mean you always had the contacts but just chose not to wear them for a while?” Pat practically shrieked, coming on afternoon shift. “What kind of a crazy person does things to make themselves less attractive? If I could stand to put contacts in my eyes without getting the complete heebie-jeebies, I’d do it in an instant, probably find me a new husband tomorrow.”
I was still too intimidated by Pat to tell her that I didn’t think that exchanging her glasses for contacts would increase her appeal to anybody, man or woman.
“What can I say?” I said instead. “I was going through a dowdy stage, but now I’m coming back.”
I’d added the last to kind of pave the way for the changes I’d be making in the days to come.
On Tuesday, I dug out my lipstick, pretty dried out as usual but at least it gave me some color.
On Wednesday, I put some gel in my hair, not enough to make me look like Elvis, but just a touch so that I looked kind of wild and fun.
On Thursday, I traded in my sensible shoes for a sexy pair of high-heeled boots that Best Girlfriend and I had each picked up pairs of at the mall. Underneath my oversize dress, they lost something in the translation, but they did give me some badly needed height that I’d been missing.
On Friday, figuring that some of the other women wore jeans to work so long as they were neat and not too faded, I crowbarred on a pair of ultratight dark jeans, over which I put a simple black turtleneck and a tweed jacket. Having combined them with the sexy black boots, when I looked in the mirror before heading to work, I thought that I looked like I could be a cat burglar or something, like maybe a twenty-first-century Audrey Hepburn about to pull off a heist.
“Stop,” Roland finally said. “I can’t take any more. If you make yourself look any better, I might have to give you a raise.”
I thought that last part might be legally actionable, but then I saw by his smile that he was kidding. I also saw that he was confused.
One day, I realized, if I kept on working here, I was going to have to eventually change back my name. After all, being Lettie Shaw had been okay for a while, but I didn’t want to do it for a lifetime. If I was going to go back to being me, the journey was going to have to be complete somehow. Then I’d have to legally change my name back, too.
“I just don’t get you, Lettie,” Roland said. “You have to be the strangest woman I’ve ever hired. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve never had anyone who could check out patrons quicker.”
Feeling that while he was dwelling on my strong points, it was probably the best chance I’d ever have to fess up without getting fired, I fessed up.
“Wow,” he whistled when I was done. “You’re even stranger than I thought.”
I waited for the ax to fall.
Roland must have seen my wincing expression. “What?” he asked. “Did you think I was going to fire you?”
I nodded meekly, like Lettie might.
He thought about it. “I’m not sure I legally can. After all, what did you really do wrong? So, you changed your name. But how is that so different from Pat wanting to be called Pat instead of Patricia? Or, oh, I don’t know. And, so maybe you doctored your transcripts a bit, but it’s not like you upgraded yourself or anything. It wasn’t like you were one of those guys pretending to be a surgeon with a degree they bought off a donkey cart. You actually made less of your accomplishments. You doctored things in a way that you wound up getting less money.”
I could see that from where he was sitting, I was a bargain.
“I suppose it will take some getting used to,” he said, “all of us having to learn to call you Scarlett instead of Lettie. But it’s a small price to pay. I mean, have you ever seen how slow Pat is at checking patrons out? And how rude? The woman could scare the balls off a tiger.”
He had a point there.
“Lettie. Scarlett.” He chuckled. “Damn, but you’re a strange woman. If I weren’t already married, I’d want to date you.”
Of course the scariest part, in terms of my library life, was coming clean with Sarah. The way I shuffled my high-heeled boots in front of her, you’d think she was the mother figure and me the preteen in need of guidance.
She looked at me long: my improved hair and clothes, my lack of glasses.
“Well,” she finally said, “I did used to see you looking like this at Danbury Library. Well,” she added, “with longer hair, of course. So it’s not like I didn’t know….”
I had always wondered what she thought about my appearance downgrade. When I’d run into her and her mother that first time in Super Stop & Shop, she’d started to ask, but I’d cut her off. She never tried again, and I, grateful that she was probably just preoccupied with her own youthful preoccupations, never offered.
Now, for the first time, she told me what she’d thought.
“I just figured something bad had happened to you or you were confused about something,” she said. “I thought maybe you were just hiding out for a while.”
She was s
o forgiving.
But I still had to tell her the last part, that even the name she’d been calling me by, the only name she knew me as, wasn’t my real name.
She chewed on that one a little longer than she did the appearance changes.
“Yeah—” she finally nodded “—I can see it. It’s like when I was little and I wanted my mom to call me Andi and start getting everyone else to call me Andi, but of course she never would. Everyone wants a name change sometimes, a tomboy name for sports or a more exotic name just because. But Scarlett to Lettie? What in the world were you thinking of?”
Even though I didn’t owe it to them—what were they, after all, my keepers?—I told Pam and Delta and T.B., each in phone conversations that week, that I was going back to being myself. The hair was going to take some doing. And, who knew? I was getting older. I might never grow it back, was kind of starting to like it short, so long as I felt free to de-frump it. But everything else was going back to being the way it was before; better, if I could manage it.
T.B. was relieved, Delta was relieved and hoped I’d forgive her for the part she’d played in siccing the kids on me, but Pam seethed.
I even called my mother, who wholeheartedly approved.
“You know,” she said, “I was thinking the same thing. There’s something wrong with the world if when I look at my daughter’s clothes, my immediate thought is, Hey, that would look good on me.”
In fact, the only person I didn’t telegraph my changes to was Steve.
In the week since the Saturday when I’d gone out for about five minutes with Saul, not even making it past the door, Saul hadn’t called once. No surprise there.
Steve, on the other hand, had called every day, but I’d been putting him off. I’d told him right away that Best Girlfriend was visiting, length of stay unspecified, and he readily understood.
“Wow,” he said. “I wish I had a friend that I’d known for a quarter of a century.”
“Well,” I said, “you’ve had your brother for a lot longer than that. I’ll bet he could teach you to limbo.”
“I hope I still know you twenty-five years from now,” he said.
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