A Little Change of Face (7 page)

“Well,” I said, “better you should learn that now than later.”

“Ain't it the truth?” Delta laughed.

But Pam still looked bummed by the whole thing.

“So,” I said, as if we'd been talking about what I really wanted to be talking about all along, “if I were to deliberately sabotage my own looks—you know, in order to see how the world treated me if I no longer looked the same—how would you suggest I go about it?”

Pam shot me a look of almost victory as she moved over to the aluminum ladder, lowering herself into the pool.

“You're not serious, are you?” T.B. asked, looking suspiciously over at Pam.

Was this a thing that my friends talked about behind my back? Strange to think that the paranoid voice in your head, the one that whispers, “People are talking about you,” was probably right.

Whatever.

“I'm not sure how serious I am,” I said, “but I am curious about what it would be like. And I'm also curious what y'all think I'd need to do.”

Y'all? See how easy it was, when with T.B. and Delta, to lapse into the kind of phrasing they used? I didn't want to ask myself what it meant that, however much more time I spent in Pam's company than theirs, I never had the desire to sound like her.

Pam eyed me appraisingly. “You'd need to start dressing down,” she said.

“Hah!” hah-ed Delta, the woman who'd never met an oversize piece of paste jewelry she didn't love. “If Scarlett dressed any more down, she'd be…she'd be… Well, I don't know what she'd be, but I just don't think it's possible. Maybe she'd be Toto.”

I knew that Delta was referring to the fact that I tended to dress, um, anonymously. It really wasn't what you'd call dressing down—I mean, I was always clean—but my wardrobe mostly consisted of simple pants and shirts and dresses, things that were anti-fashion to the extent that I could have worn them ten years before, would be able to wear them ten years hence, and they'd never make a ripple of sensation. Timeless classics, I guess you would call them. But, like my condo, “lacking in personality or apparent ownership” is probably what Delta would call them.

As for the Toto remark, Delta, who had something nice to say about nearly everybody—well, she even occasionally found nice things to say about those two kids of hers, didn't she?—had always nursed a somewhat rabid antipathy toward the little dog in
The Wizard of Oz;
“Damn thing looks like the business end of a mop,” she'd say.

“True,” Pam conceded, referring to my wardrobe, not the little dog. Having pulled herself up onto a big black inner tube, she was lazing around the pool, using her hands to gently provide the motion. “But Scarlett's clothes still have some
shape
to them. She needs to go in the other direction.” Then she looked at me, smiled. “I could help you out with that. I could take you shopping.”

“Well,” said Delta, leaning over to finger my raven mane, “the hair would have to go.” She fluffed her own Dolly Parton-wannabe tresses. “Can't be trying to slum it with pretty hair.”

“Oh,” said T.B., getting into the spirit of things, although I could tell she didn't believe I'd ever do it, “and you'd need to get some glasses.”

“I could do that,” I asserted. “I wear contacts. I'll just switch.”

“No heels,” warned Delta. “Ever.”

“Great,” I enthused. I'd reached an age where I was tired of the pain of occasionally wearing heels, even if those heels were sometimes the only things standing between me and regular teasing by my gal pals at my lack of significant height.

“And no makeup,” T.B. laughed. “Not that you ever wear any to speak of, anyway,” which was true. A little lipstick in the winter, just enough so that the chapping wouldn't make me look like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist,
and I was pretty much well ready to face the world.

“Hey,” Delta laughed, “and if you really want to make it challenging for a man to fall in love with you, you could borrow my kids for a while!”

“Um, no, thank you,” I said. It wasn't that I was put off by the idea of kids in general so much as I was put off by the idea of Delta's kids in particular.

“Oh, come on,” Delta encouraged. “Believe me, it'll make it nearly impossible to find Prince Charming, if you've got a couple of kids at home.”

“Who ever said I was searching for Prince Charming?” I asked.

“Heh,” T.B. laughed softly. “Ain't we all?”

“Well, no,” said Delta, going all literal on us. “I don't think lesbians are looking for Prince Charming at all.”

“Prince Charming, Princess Charming,” said T.B., “it's the same thing.”

All the while, Pam had been floating around in the pool, a smile playing on her lips as she tilted her face to the sun, eyes closed. She had the look of someone who was content to let others do her dirty work for her.

“Okay,” I said, feeling that I needed to object to some
thing, but reluctant to address the particularly objectionable things that they were saying, “let's say I do all this. What do I do about where I live, where I work?”

“Huh?” asked Pam, nearly falling off her float as she sat up too quickly.

“Think about it,” I said. “I can't just show up at work one day looking radically different—people will think I'm nuts. I can't stay living in the same place after going from swan to anti-swan. Did I mention that people will think I've gone nuts? All my neighbors will think I've gone nuts. People would ask questions. I'd have to give explanations.”

Pam shrugged, settled back, smiled. “So you'll get a new job. So you'll move.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

“Sure.” Pam shrugged again. “Why not?”

I thought about it. Would it really be that hard to do? I wasn't that attached to my job. I certainly wasn't that attached to where I lived. Except for the pool. But it would be Labor Day again before I knew it, which meant no more swimming for nine months, anyway. And leaving the library would get me away from Mr. Weinerman….

“You know,” Pam said in a devilishly seductive tone, “you could also bind your breasts.”

“I'm not going to bind my breasts!”
I half shouted. Sheesh. A girl had to draw the line somewhere.

“Just a suggestion.” Pam smiled.

“Well,” I said, thinking about it all, everything, all at once, “if I do all that, I might as well change my name, too. People still do that sometimes when they get married or if they go Hollywood, so why can't I? I could even change it legally.
No sense in creating a new life, a new persona, and then keeping the same name.”

“No sense at all,” said T.B., in a tone that clearly revealed that she'd gone back to thinking me nuts.

“Naw,” said Delta, “Scarlett's the name of a femme fatale. It's the kind of name men can't resist. We can't have that.”

“So,” asked Pam, “just what are you going to call yourself in your new life? Who is the new and de-improved Scarlett going to become?”

“Who the hell knows?” I answered.

“Are you really gonna do this thing?” T.B. asked a few minutes later, once Delta had joined Pam in the pool, the two others caught up in talking TV.

“Yes,” I said. “I don't know.” I thought about it some more. “Maybe?”

“But,” T.B. said, “forgive me if this is a dumb-ass thing to ask—
Why?
”

I thought about how Pam had planted the seed when at the bar, had been planting the seed for years, that my luck with men was unearned. I thought about how having the chicken pox had harvested the seed that I might not be as lovable if I didn't look as good. I thought about my realization, while watching
Extreme Makeover,
that my looks might have brought me attention, but they hadn't brought me love.

“Because Pam's got me curious,” I said. “Because for thirty-nine years I've done things one way, and it hasn't gotten me anywhere, not really. Has being attractive got me that Prince Charming you were talking about? No. So maybe doing something drastically different will get me what I want. Do I even want him? Who knows? Some days, yes. Some days, no. Maybe I want to do it because I worry that
Pam might be right, that my good looks have earned me a free ride. Maybe I want to do it because I want to prove something to myself, that I'm likable just for me after all. Or maybe I want to do it simply because,” I finally sighed, “who the hell knows why? What can I say? I'm a confused and conflicted and ambivalent woman. I have murky motives.”

“Ah,” T.B. said. “I getcha now.”

I
stood before the mirror in my bathroom, studying my hair.

Yes, I know. That does sound a bit too much like navel-gazing. But I had a purpose to what I was doing. And, besides, it was hair-gazing instead of navel-gazing, so didn't that somehow make it okay?

Looking at all that long black hair, I thought about how long it had been a part of who I was. Ever since I'd been little, with the singular exception of a college flirtation with the shag, I'd always been the girl—now woman—with the long black hair. It was something I'd always received compliments on: from babysitters who had liked to play with it, turning it into long braids or trying to get it to take a wave with the curling iron, to men who had liked to see it splayed out against their pillows. Hell, there had even been a few women who had made passes at me because of it. Unlike some of my acquaintances, who were made uncomfortable by lesbian advances, I'd merely turned those women down
in the same way I'd have turned down a man whom I wasn't interested in dating: “Thank you so much for the compliment, but I'm just not looking to date right now. What can I say? It's a character flaw.”

Even my mother had always claimed to love my hair, calling it my “crowning glory.”

Was I really going to get rid of it now?

I heard Best Girlfriend's voice, admonishing me not to shave my head.

But I wasn't going to shave it, just cut a dozen or so inches off. And besides, my local girlfriends had said that my hair was the first thing that had to go….

I went to the bedroom, lifted the receiver on the phone, thinking to call Helen at Snips & Moans, the combination styling salon and massage parlor I always went to whenever my split ends reached the unbearable point or when I needed to be touched by someone who would be unlikely to have sex as part of the agenda. The place was pretty rustic, and there was something vaguely scary about Helen, but in a pinch it worked.

But then I heard Pam's voice distinctly, as though she were right there in the room with me, saying, “But that's cheating, Scarlett! If you go to Helen, sure you'll get your hair cut, but you'll also be tempted to do something
stylish,
something that the world will approve of. Put down the phone!”

For whatever reason, I listened to her.

Having decided to listen to the voice of Pam in my head as opposed to—oh, I don't know—
reason,
I returned to the bathroom, looking in the drawers and cabinets for a decent pair of scissors. You would think I'd own a pair, but I never sewed anything, never hemmed anything that could be
rolled up, so I was forced to settle on a teeny-tiny pair of gold scissors from my manicure kit.

Oh, well,
I sighed, taking a hank of hair in my hand and holding it straight up in the air as I'd seen Helen do, watching my own reflected hand as it made the first decisive cut,
this is probably going to take all night.

 

So…it didn't take all night. But by the time I got done with my self-styling, working one hank and snip at a time, it had taken quite a while, and left me with some pretty sore fingertips.

And what else was I left with?

Very short hair, that was what I was left with: a completely naked neck with very short hair, still all black and parted on the side, but now looking like an uneven patchwork quilt. I looked like a little kid who had gone wild in the bathroom while Mom yakked for too long on the phone. Except for the fact that I wasn't a kid and nobody was yakking on the phone, I looked exactly like that.

Oh, well,
I sighed. The goal had been for me to look radically different….

Now, let's see. What was next on the list?

I got out my contact lens case, removed my lenses, gently stowing them away as though they were a beloved pet I was sending off to the Great Rover Beyond.

Looking in the mirror, I saw…absolutely nothing but a blur. Without any assistance, I was blind as a bat, unable to pick O.J. Simpson out of a lineup of dwarves.

Reaching for my eyeglasses case, I removed the pair I wore at night before bed and first thing in the morning. They were on the small side, with tortoiseshell arms and gold rim
ming just the top half. Anne Klein II, maybe? I can never remember these things without looking.

I put them on, hearing Pam's voice again in my head, only this time, it was from a dinner we'd had the spring before. Suffering from an eye infection, I'd worn my glasses for once. Pam had looked at me over the top of her menu.

“You know, Scarlett, I've never missed work because of a hangover or lack of sleep in my life. But if my only two choices were calling in sick or being seen in public with my glasses? I'd call in sick.”

Unbothered, I'd merely pointed out, “That's what makes the world go round. People like us being so different and yet not killing each other.” Then I'd ordered the salmon.

I looked at myself in my glasses. I didn't look too bad…did I? I'd always thought my glasses looked kind of neat on me. But then I tried to think of movie stars whom men made passes at, despite their glasses, and I drew a blank. Nicole Kidman had put on a big nose to be Virginia Woolf, but that was hardly the same thing.

Sophia Loren!

There was one, I thought, tamping down my own enthusiasm an instant later. Somehow, I doubted that the same sort of people who were drawn to Sophia Loren were going to be drawn to me. Besides, her glasses were a lot different than my glasses. I'd look silly in her glasses.

I tried to tell myself that the short hair looked good on me. I tried to tell myself that the glasses made me look like a funky kind of chic, if not necessarily a Sophia Loren kind of chic.

Then I called my mother.

 

It had been long overdue. Calling my mother, that is. Having been unable to face her while I was sick, now that I'd been well more than a week, it was time to bite the mother bullet.

My mother,
Mom,
was the kind of woman for whom the phrase “She means well” was originally coined.

Meaning well, in this instance, however, meant me meaning well and going to see her for lunch in her oversize house on Candlewood Lake—at least the swimming was good, theswimmingwasgood,
theswimmingwasgood!
—so that she could ply me with the homemade chicken soup that I'd cheated her out of plying me with when I'd been really sick.

As I eyed a suspicious-looking piece of chicken bone floating around in the greasy liquid, I refrained from telling her I thought that maybe I liked ramen better.

Needless to say, Mom's a lousy cook.

But she had been living in a great home, ever since Dad died, and I liked visiting there, if not too often, liked gazing out her big picture window at the sun shining down on the lake, the children playing near the shore, the boats in the distance.

Mom had changed a lot in the seven years since Dad had died. Sure, she'd loved him—or seemed to, in the way that people who have been married a long time often do—but once he was gone, it was like some sort of door had opened for her. She no longer wore jeans, having adopted polyester for the duration; she'd stopped dyeing her hair, letting her short cut go steely, which somehow complemented her brown eyes; and she'd taken to decorating parts of her home in what I could only think of as “
TV Guide
Style.” No, I don't mean she got inspiration from decorating articles in
TV Guide.
Are there any? I mean she decorated
with TV Guide.
She'd done a quarter panel of one living room wall from floor to ceiling in
TV Guide
covers as well as the support pole in the garage. Somehow, whenever Sam Waterston got his picture taken, I doubted he pictured himself ending up here.

She'd also taken to paying extra for any and every sports station cable had to offer.

“Your father always hated sports,” she'd said the first time that, having picked up the clicker, she'd turned on the TV during one of our dinners.

“Um, yeah,” I'd said, thinking I had after all known the man for more than thirty years, “I did know that.”

“Go Yankees!” she'd yelled at the screen, apparently not hearing a word.

And, somehow, since Dad's death, she'd also grown taller.

“How did you
do
that?” I'd asked her once, looking slightly up at her as we'd stood side by side at services on Rosh Hashanah the autumn before. I was sure she used to be shorter than me. “Aren't women supposed to get shorter as they age? You know, osteoporosis?”

“Who knows?” she'd said. “Maybe I was slouching all those years? Anyway, shush, the rabbi's glaring at us.”

As I spooned my chicken soup, watching her watch the game, it was as though she were reading my mind.

“And you'll go to services with me again this year? The High Holy Days will be here again before you know it.”

“Do I have to?”

Sometimes, I could sound soooo
twelve.

“No, you don't
have
to. If you don't want to be religious anymore, that's between you and God.”

“Good.”

“So, I'll buy tickets for both of us?”

“Okay.”

“Are you seeing anyone special?”

“No.”

“Still working at the library?”

“Well, it is my job.”

“Feh.”

What I didn't tell her was that I was in the midst of a two-week leave. Having decided to devote myself to My Transformation, I'd put in for the vacation time I hadn't taken yet that year. True, they didn't love the idea on such short notice, but they did feel bad I'd been so sick, and I had worked there for a long time and was a good employee.

“You could always change your job,” my mother suggested.

“We'll see.”

A commercial came on, something involving talking fruit that could also dance pretty good, and my mother finally tore her eyes away from the screen.

“Omigod,” she said, “there's something different about you.”

Hard to believe, we'd been together for an hour already. You'd think she'd have noticed when I first walked in the door, but the TV had been on. With one eye on the game and the other on the pot, she'd served up my bowl of chicken soup without looking at me once.

“What?” I asked, hopefully. “Maybe I look taller?”

“No—” she pooh-poohed the suggestion “—you're still shorter than me.”

Rats.

“Omigod,” she said. “Your hair! It's…gone!”

I waited, dreading to hear her cry over the loss of my “crowning glory.”

Then: “I
love
it!” she cried. “Where did you get it done? I want to get a cut like that!”

Oh, God: it was even worse than having her cry over the loss. Apparently, I was now sporting my polyester mother's ideal haircut.

I told her I'd done the snipping myself, but she wasn't listening. She was already on to something else.

“And those glasses!” she enthused. “You just look so…kind-of
smart.
”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Oh, are they going to love you at synagogue this year!”

 

In part to make myself feel better over the fact that my mother now wanted to look like me, I accepted Pam's suggestion we spend the evening at Chalk Is Cheap. Besides, I needed to try out my new look in the Real World, didn't I?

Chalk Is Cheap was somewhere on the middle of the continuum between the high-end pool halls that refused to admit anyone wearing a leather jacket and the grunge bars I'd frequented when I was younger; there was plenty of leather in sight but the carpeting was still intact, there was only minimal risk of getting shot, and the police never raided the place after hours for allowing gambling.

As I sat there at a tall but tiny round table with Pam, I noticed there was something different about her.

“Your hair!” I said.

Indeed, her hair. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who'd been doing some changing. In place of her previous overdone-for-nights-out-on-the-town coif, Pam was now sporting a look that would have been at home on any of a number of sexy sitcom stars: an uneven part separated the strands that had been tinted in pretty col
ors ranging from a white gold to chestnut. The hair itself had been straightened, with just the ends turned up in a perky flip.

“You like it?” she asked, preening.

“Yes,” I said. And I did. It was beautiful hair.

“Thanks.” She smiled. “You know, I just figured, why not? Why not shake things up a bit?”

Her hair wasn't the only thing Pam had shaken up, I noticed, peering at her more closely in the dim light. She'd also done something new with her makeup, her previous too-much attempts having been muted down to a pretty and tasteful technique that made her eyes pop without looking as though she had pop eyes. I would have complimented her on that, too, but I've never felt comfortable complimenting other women on their makeup, the underlying message akin to: “I'm glad to see you're getting professional help. You look sooo much better now!”

“I had the girl at the Macy's counter do me,” she said, answering my unasked question. “Usually, when I do that, I don't buy anything afterward. But she did such a good job on me, that I bought it all. Good move, you think?”

I thought.

Too bad she hadn't done something about her clothes. Still determined to look like a Joan Collins throwback, she appeared to be wearing every sequin in her collection for her night on the prowl. I, on the other hand, had on a pair of old tight jeans—no way was I going to engage in the belly-baring low-riders that had taken the nation ill-advisedly by storm—and a tight white T-shirt that bore the faded pink legend “National Cha-Cha Champion”; not that I'd ever cha-cha-ed, but the cotton felt good.

“Your hair looks good like that, too,” Pam said, returning
the compliment, although her smile seemed a little wicked. “I like the glasses, too. They're, um, very anti-chic.”