A Little Change of Face (18 page)

“No. I mean, yes, I did still think you'd let me in. But no, that's not what I was surprised about.”

“What, then?”

“You just look so…incredibly different.”

“Thanks, I guess. Would you like to meet everyone?”

He nodded, but I could see he was having trouble taking his eyes off me; well, my cleavage, if you want to know the truth.

I took him around the room, feeling quite the dominatrix as he trailed behind me, curiously obedient.

“This is my mother, the Jewish princess.”

My mother offered her hand for him to kiss and he obliged with a little bow.

“This is the actress who played Helen and the actor who played Tom on
The Jeffersons.
”

“Hey, Roxie Roker!” Saul said to T.B.

“Who?” I said.

“The actress who played Helen,” T.B. said, pleased, “Lenny Kravitz's mother. That's her name.”

I turned to Saul. “Do you also remember who played Tom?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“This is Little Bo Peep,” I said.

“Delta,” Delta cooed in his direction. “I'll hunt for your sheep anytime.”

“And Pat from the library,” I moved on, figuring there was really no way for him to rightly answer Delta's remark.

“And what are you supposed to be?” Saul asked Pat, somewhat gently.

“Didn't you hear what Lettie said?” she barked at him. “I'm Pat, Pat from the library.”

“Ah,” he said.

“And this is…” But as we arrived in front of Pam, I couldn't bring myself to introduce her as I'd done with the others, as what she was dressed up as. I didn't need to, though. She did it for me.

“I'm a giant pumpkin,” she said sourly, reaching out one orange-painted hand that was attached to one green-clad arm from out of her enormous pumpkin costume. Then she tried to turn on the flirt switch, brightening. “But you can call me Pam.”

 

Even when a crowd is evenly matched between men and women, there's a tendency for the men to converge around the alpha female, with the women around the alpha male. Until the story's finally written, until the alpha of either sex decides upon whom to bestow his or her charms, the others figure they might as well still compete since they're technically in the running. Imagine, then, how much more competition would ensue if there were only one man—gorgeous Saul—facing off against five women. I figured it as being five against one, since T.B. and Ex-Al didn't really count in this; Ex-Al, because he was taken out of the running by his obvious love for T.B.; T.B., because she had taken Frank Sinatra to heart and knew that if you come to the party with one guy, it's not nice to blow on another guy's dice.

Truthfully, though, even T.B. and Ex-Al were somewhat taken with Saul. He was that good.

“Damn,” said Ex-Al, “he knew who Roxie Roker was. I didn't even know who Roxie Roker was.”

“And he even makes those stupid glasses look good,” said T.B. “I might get me a pair.”

No one seemed to notice or mind that Saul had brought nothing but himself to contribute to the occasion, and, thankfully, T.B. and Ex-Al were at least enough into each other that they left the Saul field clear for the five of us.

And it really was quite a competition.

I saw a side of my mom that I'd never seen before as she pulled out all the flirting stops. It was a side I'd only imagined before, a side I was sure my father had known all too well. Meanwhile, Delta did that thing that Southern women do so well, swearing like a truck driver while making it
sound as though she were talking about barbecues with Rhett Butler on the rolling lawn of her family's estate. Even Pat got into the act, smiling more than I'd ever seen her smile at each word out of Saul's mouth. And Pam did the best a giant pumpkin could do to look alluring, giving Saul come-hither looks from behind her orange face paint.

As for me, well, I didn't really have to do anything. Just sitting on the couch in my Morticia getup, leaning forward occasionally to pick up an hors d'oeuvre or a vodka glass, was enough to secure Saul's attention. Sure, he was polite to all the other women, but he only really had eyes for me.

As the evening wore on, the field naturally became less populated as others moved off or threw in the towel.

The first to leave were T.B. and Ex-Al. Walking them to the door, as T.B. hugged Delta good-night, I leaned tipsily into Ex-Al.

“You know,” I said, “you two make a great couple. You really should give it another try.”

“We are,” he said with a wink, closing the door behind them.

That made me glad.

Then my mom gave up. “I might as well leave you kids to your fun,” she said. And Pat followed suit with, “I've got to work the afternoon shift tomorrow. Do you think anyone will notice if I'm still drunk?”

That left Delta.

“Omigod,” she said, “is it really after midnight?”

“Only by about two hours,” Saul said, smiling at my breasts.

“Shoot!” Delta said. “The sitter's probably been tied to a pair of chair legs for hours. She'll never come back again. I better go.”

And then there were two: me and the giant pumpkin.

The giant pumpkin looked just about as pissed as an oversize gourd could look. I could see she was determined to play the waiting game with me: whoever waited the other out the longest would win the guy.

Maybe she'd had more to drink than I had, or maybe she hadn't eaten enough to go with the drink. Whatever the case, she'd been schnapps-ed, and, before another hour passed, the giant pumpkin was out cold on my couch.

“Hi,” Saul said softly, saying it as though he were greeting me for the first time.

“Hi,” I said back, not sure what else to say.

“Why, Lettie?”

“Why what?”

“You must know what. Why in the world would you go out in the world looking like you did the first two times I met you, when…”

“When what?” I felt unaccountably angry. “When I can look like this?”

“Well, yeah,” he admitted.

“It's kind of complicated,” I answered, the anger disappearing as fast as it had come. Then, feeling bold: “You want to come upstairs?”

I couldn't believe I was being so openly…
desirous,
but I really couldn't stand it any longer. It had been so long since I'd felt that I was attractive to a man, and Saul was now so obviously attracted to me, I had this overwhelming urge to pin him down before he changed his mind.

His eyebrows rose just a bit in wonderment and then he nodded, clearly pleased as he held his hand out for me to take.

It felt so good, I thought, having in my hand the hand of
a man who wanted me, as I led him up the wooden stairs to the loft above, leaving the snoring pumpkin below.

When he kissed me for the first time, with those lips and mouth and tongue that I'd fantasized about that first night in Chalk Is Cheap, it was like the first time I'd ever been kissed by Danny Wilcox in sixth grade and feeling like a vixen, all rolled into one. I felt something overtake me, a desperate need for validation that could only be met by making love with this man in this moment.

Saul turned me around, slowly undid the zipper on my dress. I felt deliciously like a caterpillar, poised to turn into something else as I felt the dress fall away. Then he unhooked the back of my push-up bra, turned me to face him.

“Oh, Lettie,” he said, looking at me in light that came only from the late moon, “why in the world would you ever hide this? You're so beautiful.”

I wanted to tell him that I was Scarlett, not Lettie. Right then, though, I felt beautiful. I also felt something else, something uncomfortable that I couldn't name, but mostly I felt beautiful.

Wanting to hide from that uncomfortable feeling, wanting to revel in that feeling of beauty, I set to work divesting him of his clothes.

“Um, I don't think you'll be needing these,” I said, removing his Al Franken glasses. “This can go, too,” I said, pulling his black turtleneck over his head. “And this,” I said, using my teeth to undo the black belt on his pants. “And this, and this, and this,” I said, taking off his shoes, his socks and his black pants, in that order. “And most of all this,” I said, sliding his jockey shorts over his perfect hips.

The only thing standing between us now was my panties.

“Do you mind?” he said, laying me down on my bed, ripping the panties off me in his eagerness to get to me.

Maybe if this hadn't all been my idea, him in my room making love with me, I would have minded the financial loss of the panties, the violence of his rip. But I didn't mind. In that moment, getting him inside me was all I wanted.

But he wasn't ready for that yet.

He began kissing my neck, featherlight kisses combined with insistent kisses as he worked his way down my body, stopping a long time at my breasts, trailing his tongue over my flat stomach, moving, moving, until gently, he nudged my legs open, kissing his way up the insides of my thighs.

“You are so incredibly beautiful,” he murmured. “I just want to make you feel good.”

So I let him.

It wasn't until I'd come several times, experiencing the first orgasms I'd had in months that hadn't been self-administered, each time thinking to myself,
Yes, this is what it feels like to be worshipped,
that he moved up again.

All of a sudden, I had an awful realization.

“I'm not prepared,” I said anxiously, thinking how even when I'd been sexually active on a regular basis, I'd never been the kind of woman to keep condoms in her drawer. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being the kind of woman who does keep condoms in her drawer, I'm just saying I'm not one of them. “I don't have any—”

“Shh,” he put his finger to my lips. “It's no problem.”

He gracefully got off me and the bed, and crossed the room, removing a foil-wrapped item from his pants pocket, ripping it open with his teeth.

“You came prepared?” I don't know why, but I felt surprised. “But you were coming to the party as just my friend.”

“Sure,” he said easily, “but who knew in advance who you were inviting? Maybe one of your other guests would turn out to suit me. Besides,” he added, rolling the condom on, rejoining me on the bed, “I was a Boy Scout. I always come prepared.”

I pushed back the residual unease I was feeling as he kissed me again, letting me taste myself on his lips and tongue as he moved his hips between my open thighs and I wrapped my legs around his naked back to pull him deeper into me.

“I just can't get over how beautiful you are,” he kept saying, like I was some kind of eighth wonder of the world or something. “I can't get over how beautiful you are.”

And, in that moment, I was.

I
woke the next morning, just a few short hours later, feeling awful, and not just awful because of my raging hangover or the fact that Saul was gone—I could see that, as soon as I opened my eyes—but truly awful, guilty awful, like I'd done a bad thing that I couldn't take back.

Saul might have been gone, but he'd left behind a note on the pillow:

The note should have made me feel better, but somehow it didn't.
We'll see,
I thought.

I lay in bed, trying to figure out why I felt so awful. It wasn't, after all, like an adult woman sleeping with an adult
man was some kind of crime or something. I hadn't killed anybody.

So why did I feel as though I
had
killed somebody?

Admittedly, feeling as though I'd killed somebody was a little bit extreme. Still, I did feel as though I'd somehow lured Saul into my bed under false pretenses. But wasn't that insane? It was the Lettie person I'd become who was the false pretense, with her Mother Hubbard dresses and her tentative speech. It had been Scarlett who had slept with Saul last night. Well, okay, a Halloween version of Scarlett, but still Scarlett, right?

But it didn't feel that way. It felt as though the woman I had been the night before, the woman who had invited Saul to sleep with her, was a woman not myself.

Who
was
that woman?
I wondered.

But I knew the answer: she was a woman who just wanted and needed attention, validation and, yeah, maybe love, I guess.

I wrenched myself away from the pleasure of beating myself up, went to the bathroom, threw water on my face, brushed the grit from my teeth and threw on a navy silk robe, tied the sash around my waist and headed downstairs. I may not have been a coffee person, but I was going to need something caffeinated to help me restore my physical sense of balance. Maybe if I felt physically better, I'd feel less like someone should take me out in the yard and shoot me.

Unfortunately, when I got down to the living room, there was someone waiting there to shoot me.

“Well, at least one of us had a good time.”

Apparently, the angry pumpkin had never left, because she was still on my couch, some of her orange makeup having faded overnight.

“I had an okay time,” I said. “Coffee?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Even I could boil water for instant. As I put that together, along with a serving of leftovers from the night before, the phone rang.

“Scarlett!”

“Mom!” I tried to sound equally enthusiastic, but: “Um, didn't I just see you last night?”

“I just wanted to know how things went with you and Saul after I left. Did Pam succeed in waiting you out?”

Clearly, my mom was a pro at how that little game was played.

“Uh, not quite,” I said, eyeing my pumpkin friend.

“So, is he Jewish?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It hasn't come up.”

“But Saul's a Jewish name.”

“Well, sometimes it is, but I don't think we have a patent on it or anything.”

“And will you be seeing him again?”

“I don't know,” I said. “We'll see.”

“You know, I've been thinking,” she said. “I know I said I liked the new clothes you've been wearing lately and all, but maybe it's not such a good idea? Saul did seem to like you very much the way you were last night.”

Saul had liked me very much the way I'd been last night. He'd liked me in a way he hadn't liked me before. It got me thinking that in a weird way, even though the Lettie part of me was supposed to be the ruse, it hadn't been
me
Saul had wanted at all.

“I don't know,” I said, not wanting to talk about it anymore. “Mom? Pam's here, so—”

“She's
still
there? Oh, well. You should have said.”

We hung up.

“So you're going to be seeing him again?” Pam said, drawing her own conclusions from my share of the conversation.

“I don't know,” I said, maintaining my party line. I wasn't even sure if I wanted to see Saul again or who I wanted to be when I saw him.

“You do realize,” she said coyly, “it's the next day. It's not Halloween anymore. You have to go back to being the Ugly Stepsister.”

“Don't you mean Cinderella?”

“So? You still have to do it.”

“Why?”

She chose to ignore that. “Apparently,” she said, thoughtful, “making you cut your hair and frump yourself out just isn't enough to scare men off.”

“Apparently.”

She mulled over the problem for a long time, toying with her coffee. Then her eyes got that nasty gleam in them again. “I've got it!” she said.

“Uh-oh.”

“I know what you need to scare men off. What you really need is a couple of
kids.
”

“Did I ever say that I wanted to scare this particular man off?”

“Maybe not in so many words. But think about it, Scarlett. Wouldn't you really like to know, for once, if a man really likes you for you, or if it's just something to do with the whole package you present? Don't you think you—oh, I don't know—
owe
it to yourself to make it as hard for him to fall in love with you as possible?”

Maybe it was sick for me to think this, but what she was saying was starting to make a sick kind of sense.

Her voice wheedled. “How will you ever know if it's re
ally you that Saul loves, if he does in fact start to love you, unless you make it as hard as possible for him to love you?” Her voice became seductive. “Come on, Scarlett. You know what you need: you need to get a couple of kids. You need to really test him.”

And I realized something: For once, Pam was absolutely right. Oh, maybe not about the kids. But if I was going to go any further with Saul, I was going to need to know whether he was growing attracted to something he was finally seeing
inside
of me, or was it really all just cleavage in a good dress?

 

I was cleaning up the debris from the night before and wondering what my stomach could tolerate in the way of input when—

Ding-dong!

It was Sarah. Behind her I could see her familiar bicycle propped up in my driveway. She had on jeans and a sweatshirt with the name of some rock band I'd never heard the music of and a sad, too-tired expression on her face. In her arms was a brown paper bag.

“What's wrong?” I asked, letting her in.

“This is what's wrong,” she said, opening the bag and removing the shirt we'd so happily bought at the Bethel Underground. The shirt was no longer intact. Instead, there was now a tear, about three inches long, from the neckline downward.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Jeff Polanski happened,” she said.

“How…? What…?”

“He said yes to my invitation to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I was so happy about it. He said he was glad I had finally
discovered what a razor was for and that my new hair made me stop looking like a dork.”

Jeff Polanski didn't exactly sound like Robert Browning, but he probably meant it as a compliment. Twelve-year-olds weren't exactly known for their verbal finesse. Not to mention that boys in particular felt the need to maintain constant cool. He was probably, at this stage in his life, constitutionally incapable of a simple, “You look pretty.”

“So we met at the dance,” Sarah went on. “I had my new clothes on. I was so happy. For once, I looked just like all the cool girls.”

“And?”

“And we danced a couple of times, mostly really fast songs. But then at the end of the night, they played one old slow song, ‘Last Dance,' and we danced close and I really liked that, it was nice, even though it made me feel a little funny, and then while we were dancing he worked us over toward one of the corners and I thought that maybe he was going to kiss me, and I was real happy about that, because no one had ever kissed me before and I wanted to know what it was like, but then he put his hand on my shirt and said, ‘Hey, let's see your breasts,' and when I tried to pull away, the shirt ripped.”

“Oh, Sarah…”

“So then—”

“But wait a second. Where were the chaperones? Didn't anyone see this?”

“No. Two boys had started fighting and they were too busy dealing with that to notice anything else.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him he was a jerk, that I never wanted to talk to him again. He said it didn't matter that I wasn't a monkey
anymore, that I was still Jiggles and that was the only reason he said yes to me, but now he was sorry because he could see I was still just a big dork.”

“Oh, Sarah…”

“So I got a sweatshirt from my locker and put it on over the ripped shirt so my mom wouldn't see it when she picked me up. I knew if she saw it, she'd get so mad she'd call the school and make a fuss and that would just make everything worse. But Jeff'll probably still make up stories to tell people, probably say that I was easy or that I wasn't worth the time.”

I knew she was right. He probably would say that to salve his ego, to feel cool. Only he'd probably say she was easy
and
not worth the time.

“What am I going to
do,
Lettie?” she asked.

I heard my stomach make an unpleasant sound.

“Well,” I said, trying a smile, “first you're going to help me figure out what there is to eat around here that won't kill us. I'll bet you haven't eaten yet today and you're starting to feel hungry right around now.”

Her blush told me I was right. When in misery, young girls either overeat or starve. Sarah looked like a starver to me.

Leaving the subject of grabby Jeff Polanski to one side for one moment, we located a few leftover chocolate cheesecake brownies, eating in silence until the sugar was running good and high in our veins.

“What's your favorite thing about yourself?” I asked.

“My favorite thing?” She made a funny face.

“Yeah, your favorite thing. Everyone's got one thing they really like about themselves.” I was almost sure of it.

“Well, this is going to sound really dorky, but…”

“Yes?”

“I'm nice.” She finally exhaled.

“Yes,” I said quietly, “you are nice.”

“I mean really nice,” she said, starting to get enthusiastic about it. “When other kids make fun of the kids who are real dorks—you know, the ones who have it even worse than being Monkey or Jiggles—I never play along.”

“That's a good way to be.”

“I even
talk
to those kids no one else talks to.”

“Not only nice,” I said, “but brave, too. Good for you. What else?”

“You mean besides being nice?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“But I thought I only had to name one.”

“Well, try for two.”

“I'm good at reading and writing. I love to read books, and I think I'm a pretty good writer.” She looked down at the table, shy. “I may even become one some day.”

She looked so wistful. I knew I couldn't guarantee her future dreams would come true, but maybe I could make her feel a little better now.

“Here's what you're going to do,” I said, covering her hand with mine. “Whenever the kids give you a hard time, and they probably will, or when you think they're talking about you behind your back, and they probably will, you just tell yourself, ‘I'm a nice person, nicer than all of you, braver, too, and someday I'm going to use those things to go after my dreams.'”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Um, Lettie? That's kind of lame.”

I deflated. She was right.

“But that's okay,” she said, smiling for the first time since
she walked in the door. “I know you mean well. And really, it's going to be okay.”

And somehow I knew that Sarah would be okay, that it was going to be hard for her over the next few days and that it wasn't going to be the last time in her life that things would be hard, but she'd be fine.

Still, Jeff Polanski had taken something sweet, a night that should have been a little tiny form of magical for her, and turned it into something bitter and ugly.

I would have liked to kick his butt.