A Little Change of Face (9 page)

“Oh,
shit,
” Pam muttered. “It doesn't matter what I do to you, does it? Someone still finds you attractive.”

B
est Girlfriend did not like any of it, had said as much during a long phone conversation recently, and she certainly wouldn't like what Pam was telling me now.

“It's your breasts.”

“It is
soooooooo
not my breasts.”

“It's your breasts.”

“And if it were, what do you propose I do…bind them?”

I couldn't believe we were back on this subject again. Pam had dropped by, unannounced, and we were sitting in my living room, drinking the wine coolers she'd brought. People might not think anyone still drank wine coolers, but Pam did.

“Hey…”
Her eyes gleamed.

“Oh, no. What in the world are you thinking about? Did I ever mention how I hate it whenever you get that particular look in your eye? I positively
hate it
whenever you get that look in your eye.”

“Listen, Scarlett, believe it or not, there are days I don't completely love you, either. But this isn't about that.”

“You're talking about talking me into binding my breasts, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there are times you don't completely love me?”

“Who said anything about binding your breasts?”

“Uh,
you
did,” I said. “You said it that last time we were at the pool with T.B. and Delta and you said it again when we were shopping at Filene's.”

“You must be mistaking me for someone else. I never said anything about binding your breasts. I mean, how gross. How geisha-y. How
Asia.
”

“Now, there's a whole continent you don't completely love?”

“Put it like this—are you going to ever go there?”

I thought about my bank account; did some quick mental calculations. My bank account was actually in good shape, given my father had left me nearly as well off as he'd left my mom, but still: “Probably not.”

“Me, neither. See what I mean? Why bother?”

The sad thing was, I did kind of see what she meant, which made me feel very small and very much like I was a part of what constituted the least attractive part of being born an American, like maybe I was still on the flag, but I was the star that had gotten mustard spilled on it at the baseball game or something. Know what I mean?

“Hello, Scarlett. Earth to Scarlett. Is anybody still at home?”

“Ouch,” I said, fending her off. “You don't need to tap on the side of my brain like that.”

“Maybe if you stayed with me, I wouldn't. But as T.B. always likes to say, ‘You
does
like to wander.'”

Somehow, hearing Pam mimic T.B. never seemed the same as when I did it or when Delta did it, especially since we knew T.B. hammed it up for us, anyway. And in Delta's case, she wasn't exactly mimicking. Regardless, T.B.'s voice coming out of Pam's mouth seemed just plain
wrong
somehow, making me feel like I used to feel when I was a kid and I'd run into a teacher in some out-of-school place like the grocery store or the town pool or whatever and I'd think to myself, “What's wrong with this picture?” only to answer my own question: “Everything.”

So, yes, everything was wrong with T.B.'s words, real or mock, coming out of Pam, but, like with those wandering teachers who wouldn't stay where they belonged, it was nothing I could articulate to other human beings, certainly nothing I could ever properly articulate well enough to still sound sane.

“Well, Pam,” I said, finally returning to her definition of Earth, “if you could ever just once tell me what it is you're thinking from start to finish, it might make it easier for me not to get distracted or even completely lost in the details.”

“Do I need to keep spelling out in so many words that nothing I'm about to suggest has anything remotely to do with binding your breasts?”

I reflected for a moment. “Yes,” I finally decided, “you do need to keep spelling it out in so many words. Until we reach a point in this conversation where at least five minutes have passed without the words ‘binding' and ‘breasts' appearing together in the same sentence, you absolutely do need to keep spelling out in so many words that you're not going to suggest that.”

“Fine.” She looked at her watch, started timing herself.
“This is what I've been trying to suggest, if you'd only just let me get the words out.”

“Yes?”

“Except for the breast-binding part, how would you feel about giving me your looks for a while?”

“W
ho
are
you—the devil?”

It'd taken me longer than the five minutes Pam was supposed to be timing her success at not simultaneously using “breast” and “binding” in the same sentence—a success that had turned out to be a complete failure, I might point out, as evidenced by that last question of hers.

“And, by the way,” I added, “wasn't having me moderate my appearance what we've been doing all along here?”

I don't know why I was so bugged exactly. Maybe it was simply that I'd never felt she'd voiced her idea, her plan, in such cold terms.

“No, I'm not the devil,” she said, answering my first question and ignoring my second. “I'm your friend. I'm trying to help you find out if people like you merely for what you look like and not who you are. Besides, what kind of a devil would offer you a deal to make yourself look worse? It seems to me, that all the devils I've ever read
about only make people deals that will make them look better.”

“Yes—” I tried to sound sage and mystically in-the-know, but only succeeded in sounding like a complete and utter ass, even to my own ears “—but you might be the cleverest devil of all, the devil that does the exact opposite of what all other devils have ever done so that no one will ever suspect that you're the devil, and not just any devil, but the real one, the tricky one, which is what you are, the realest and the trickiest.”

“Whoa, you really need to stop watching the same supernatural shows that all of those preteen girls get hooked on, Scarlett.” She held up her hands defensively, looking like she was going to go for the garlic next. “Watching them like you do is really starting to turn you into some kind of flake.”

She was my Default Best Friend. You'd think she'd have known I didn't watch those shows.

“Oh.” I hands-on-hipsed her. “And, like, suggesting that an American woman compromise what looks she has is such a completely
un
flakey thing to do?”

“Relatively speaking.”

“We can talk like this all day, going in circles, can't we?”

“Pretty much.”

“Any time you want to start explaining…”

“Any time you want to start listening…”

“We're doing it again.”

“Yeah, but you started it.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Omigod! Sometimes, I don't even know which one of us is talking anymore!”

Pam gently—very gently, for her—removed my hands from over my ears. “That person—” she wince-smiled “—that person who just screamed? That person was
you,
Scarlett.”

Is it possible to feel both mollified and mortified at the same time? “Thanks for clearing that up,” I said.

“Don't mention it.”

I
wasn't sure if it was Pam's idea or my idea, or if maybe it was simply me domino-reacting to Pam's ideas but Pam and I had decided to switch places in life by switching faces.

Well, sort of.

“You be nuts,” said T.B., seeing my haircut, glasses and new clothes for the first time, and hearing Pam's Official Plan, as she'd finally spelled it out for me during her impromptu visit to my home.

“She be right,” added Delta.

“You both be annoying,” said Pam, sounding completely wrong somehow, and prompting me to say, “I wish we all be stop talking like this. It's giving me a
Fat Albert
headache.”

We were all seated on the floor around the coffee table at Delta's, site for that month's edition of our book club.

For a few months, after Pam had initially introduced me to T.B. and Delta, they'd both taken to attending the once-a-month book-discussion group that I was moderator for
at the library. Pam had been an attendee for some time and she pulled the other two in. This made it nice for me, since it kept the numbers up and made the program look like one that was worth the library maintaining, which was further nice for me since I preferred to spend a portion of my hours preparing for that rather than staring endlessly at Mr. Weinerman. But a few months into it, the glow had worn off. Oh, it wasn't anything so mundane as them finding my discussions too mundane. I mean, really: how could such a thing be possible? No, rather, it had to do with the fact that the library forum wasn't fulfilling the function that we all wanted in a book club together: a reason to meet other than specifically for food or drink, where we could spend five minutes pretending to be literary and then spend the rest of the time talking about our usual girl stuff, the group feeling self-satisfied in having engaged in a communally cultural activity. So we spun off from the library group (which I still moderated).

That night, we'd discussed Anita Diamant's
The Red Tent
—Delta's choice since she was this month's host—for five rip-roaring literary minutes, and now we were back to our favorite topics: us, men, life, and how to be satisfied with any and all combinations of those three.

Delta was the only one of our merry little foursome who had ever taken on multiple marriages and kids. The marriage part was now a dead issue for her, two of her three long-gone exes being card-carrying members of that widening circle of men known as deadbeat dads. True, with Delta's legal talents, she might have run them to earth and demanded some kind of support, but as she so wisely put it, exhibiting a hard-won wisdom that her twin pigtails belied, “Sure, a person can try to get blood from a stone, but
whyever would you want to bother? A stone with blood in it, on the other hand—now, that'd be the kind of man I could still do something with.”

If the marriages were a permanent thing of the past, the two children they had produced were still permanent things of the present.

A half-century ago, Tennessee Williams would have called Mush and Teenie no-necked monsters, and his depiction would have been wholly accurate. The no-necked part was a result of regular consumption of the standard American child's neo-diet of a super-sized Big Mac, fries and milk-shake combination; I cast no aspersions on the notion of body fat in general by relating this, but rather, I'm merely pointing out that they were already well on the road—through no witting choice of their own—to becoming part of a sad national statistic. Mush was exactly what his name stated, while Teenie was anything but. As to the monster part, trust me on this: they just were. And that simple fact—that they were in fact monsters—made it a little difficult for them to come across as sympathetic characters to me, never mind the fact that so much that was awful about them had been created within them by events and circumstances over which they'd had no control.

Plus, any time we were all over at Delta's, which we certainly did all try to avoid, they were always underfoot.

“Let go of my Lego!” yelled Mush.

“Uh-uh,” countered Teenie, snatching what little hold he still had on it out of his reach before somehow managing to
squeeze
herself between T.B. and me, and then
squeeze
herself under the coffee table. “The only way I'll let go of this Lego is if I decide to shove it up your butt!”

Ah, children.

Okay, so maybe it's just possible that those of us who have never
squeezed
a child out of our bodies, or adopted or made one in a test tube or whatever, don't have the accumulated natural sympathy necessary to see the charm in a sentence that includes the words
Lego, shove
and
butt,
all arranged in the worst possible order. Delta, on the other hand, having
squeezed
these particular children out, saw things differently.

“Ain't they just the cutest little things whenever they do like this?” she asked with the absent air of a mother who, hoping to get something done for an hour, informs her kids that it's okay to play in the street so long as they remember to keep an eye out for cars.

“Yeah, real cute,” said T.B., who sounded as though she really meant it, until Teenie, still under the table, bit down on T.B.'s gold-painted toenail, giving the toe beneath the nail a healthy bite in the process and caused T.B. to shriek, “Ah, son of a bitch! That goddamned little Teenie bit my toe!”

Even Delta couldn't let this one slide by. “Teenie! Get your butt out from under that table!” Now, we all knew where Teenie had gotten her curious grasp of the English language from. “What the hell do you mean by biting your Aunt T.B.'s toe for?”

Teenie looked a little puzzled; maybe even she herself wasn't completely certain of why that impulse had come over her. “Uh,” she asked her mother, “because I wanted to see if black people's toes taste any different than Mush's stupid dirty ones?”

“Shit, Teenie! That ain't no reason to
bite
her! My God. You think my friends come over to see me so that they can get
bit
by you just because you take it into your head to per
form some kind of weird
sociology
project on them? If you'd wanted to know such a stupid thing, you could have just asked one of us, and we'd've told you. Of course black people's toes taste different from Mush's toes. They taste
better.
Hell, everybody's toes taste better than Mush's, that ain't no big mystery. Now, then, say you're sorry to—”

“Hah!” yelled Mush, having snatched back the Lego from Teenie while Teenie was busy being chewed out by Delta. He raced, as best as he could race, toward his bedroom door, shouting over his shoulder to Teenie, “The only way you'll ever see this Lego again, is if you're willing to reach up my butt to get it back, 'cause that's where I'm gonna be hiding it from you!”

The over-the-shoulder-shout technique soon proved to be a tactical error on Mush's part, when the side of his face crashed into his own doorjamb.

Five minutes, one washcloth filled with ice cubes and a single admonishment to “stay in this room until my friends are gone and I don't care if y'all kill each other in here because if you even think about coming back out into that living room and interrupting us again I'm going to be up both your butts” later, Delta was back among us.

“Lord,” she said, flopping down on the couch, wineglass in hand, “y'all have no idea what it's like to have kids.”

Uh, yeah, we do,
I wanted to say but didn't.
We got a real good idea from watching you. And what we see makes us think maybe we'll all procreate like…uh…let me see, now…never?

Delta eyed me suspiciously. “Did you just say something, Scarlett?”

“Me? Uh, no.”

“Huh. I don't know why, I could've sworn you just said something about having kids. Oh, well.” She shrugged it off,
tilting her head to rest her neck on the back of the couch, two fingers massaging the inner corners of her eyes. “Never mind.”

“Well, you sure do make it look easy,” T.B. spoke softly, hoping perhaps to give Delta the necessary confidence to soldier on, even though T.B. was the one who was going to need a rabies shot after tonight.

“Oh, right,” Pam snorted. “Nobody could make being those kids' mother look easy.”

“Pam!”
I cautioned.

“Well, it's true,” she insisted.

Well, of course it was
true,
but
still
—

But Delta waved me and T.B. down before we could stage a credible defense of her offspring.

“Pam's right, you know,” she said.

“Now,” T.B. said in an effort to lighten the moment, “there're two words—
Pam
and
right
—a person doesn't hear uttered in the same sentence every day.”

“Fuck you,” seethed Pam.

“Fuck you right back, Pam,” smiled T.B. “Oops,” she added, “I just made it twice in one day.”

“Can y'all save your natural animosity for one another for a day when I'm not in the middle of a personal crisis?” Delta asked. “I'm
trying
to talk to y'all about my
life
here.”

“Sorry,” said T.B. “You were saying? I believe it was something about Pam being
right?
”

“Well, she is,” said Delta. “You know, when you get pregnant, nobody ever really tells you, in any way you could ever possibly grasp, just how hard it's gonna be to
squeeze
a baby out into the world.”

There was that
squeeze
word again,
I thought.

Delta went on. “And then, once you've had the baby, no
body ever really tells you just how hard those squeezed babies are going to make the rest of your life. Oh, I don't mean that it never makes me happy. Hell, being Teenie and Mush's mama makes me happier than anything else I do in this life—”

It
does?
I translated the looks Pam and T.B. and I flashed to one another.

“—but it's harder than anything else in my life, too. And you know what the hardest part is?”

Removing Legos from their butts?
was what I wanted to ask but didn't.

“Dating. That's what. You have no idea how hard it is to meet some nice man, some man I think I might
like,
have him ask me out, tell him I was already married once before, have a good time, want to get to know him better, invite him back here, finally get up the nerve to tell him I've got two kids from three previous marriages, have him tell me that's just fine, and then…and then…have him meet…
them.
”

“I can imagine,” said Pam.

“No,” said Delta, and her gaze was rock steady, “you can't. You really and truly cannot even begin to imagine.”

Despite the fact that it was no fun seeing the usually bubbly Delta feeling so dejected, it was nice, for once, to have the conversation shifted away from how nuts I was to be doing what I was doing, this plan Pam had concocted. Or was it my idea, too? See? It was too confusing to think about and a relief to be thinking about something else.

“Hey!” Suddenly, Delta was looking much happier. In fact, she looked so happy as she looked at me, I could swear her pigtails were dancing. “I've got an idea, Scarlett. If you
ever
really
want to test if some beau really wants you for yourself, you could always borrow Mush and Teenie!”

Well,
she
thought it was hysterical.