A Little Change of Face (10 page)

B
est Girlfriend really was worried about me.

“I don't like these turns your life is taking,” she said during our regular Sunday-night phone conversation. “And I really don't like the idea of Pam having so much control over you.”

This was an old story: Pam hated the very idea of Best Girlfriend and Best Girlfriend was eternally suspicious of Pam. Oh, to be loved by too many women…

But if Best Girlfriend was worried about me, I was worried about Best Girlfriend, too. When we'd first got on the phone, she'd mentioned that she'd been feeling in crisis lately. She wasn't sure if photography was the right profession for her.

“But it's what you've wanted,” I said, “ever since we were children.”

“People change,” she said. “Plus, I've realized it's not everything I thought it was going to be.”

“How so?”

“It's hard to say. But I think that, sometimes, getting your dream is worse than not getting it.”

“How can you say that?”

“Uh, because I just did?” But then she must have decided that sarcasm wasn't the most effective approach here. “It's kind of like, as long as you have the dream, you have something to shoot for, you can keep telling yourself, ‘Once I get X, I'll be a happy person. My life will be great.'”

“But then you get it—” I started.

“—and you're still not a happy person,” she finished softly.

And then there are no excuses left.
I was sure we both thought this, but neither of us had whatever it would have taken to speak the words aloud.

So when she started trying to shift the focus of our conversation on to me and Pam, naturally I rebelled.

“Can we not talk about me and my problems for once?” I said.

“Then what would we talk about?”

“You.”

I heard her sigh. From hundreds upon hundreds of miles away, I heard her sigh.

“I'm just not
happy
anymore, Scarlett. I'm not happy with work. I'm not happy with Bob,” she referred to the man she'd been living with for five years. “I'm just not
happy.
I'm thinking of moving.”

“Where to?”

“I don't know. Maybe Canada?”

 

Best Girlfriend and I had been friends for what sometimes seemed like forever. Both being only children, it was more like we were each other's families than two people who shared no common blood.

Peculiarly enough, it was the only relationship I had in which the balance of power shifted in the other direction, meaning that Best Girlfriend was so drop-dead gorgeous that men literally fell at her feet. All through high school, all through college, I did fine for myself where guys were concerned, except for when she was around. When she was around, it was like guys couldn't push me out of the way fast enough to get to her. Well, except for the ones who, as part of their strategy, became my friends so they'd have an excuse to hang out with her.

Did this bother me? Did I resent it?

No, I honestly thought I never had. After all, I thought Best Girlfriend was the most amazing female who ever lived. I mean, I'd made her Best Girlfriend after all, right? And if I thought that, then why shouldn't everyone else?

But, yes, it could sometimes make a person feel just a little insecure, like a dying star trying to hang out with the Northern Lights. Sometimes, I wanted to say to some of those guys, “Hello! Don't you see another girl here? Don't you see how great I am? Besides, Best Girlfriend is so busy…” So, I guess, in a way, having grown up to be something of a Northern Lights myself, I could kind of understand what bugged Pam so much.

But I still believed—I had to believe, despite the niggling doubts Pam instilled in me—that people liked me for me, just like once upon a time people had liked Best Girlfriend for Best Girlfriend.

Q
uitting a job that you no longer love, a job in which you are required to be with Mr. Weinerman forty hours a week, is just as easy as it sounds. Having taken advantage of the four weeks' worth of vacation that I still had coming to me, was I going to devote that time to finding a new job?

Nah. I wasn't worried about that. For some reason, any profession that has to do with reading can always make room for one more person who is good at what she does.

I was going to use all of that free time to work on becoming as much not like me in appearance as I possibly could. If not a female version of Mr. Weinerman, I could at least make myself a little less good-looking, a little less in shape.

I would become a sloucher.

Okay, so maybe there wasn't much I could do about the spectacular breasts, but I was determined to level the playing field between Pam and me, to tilt the scales of dating justice more firmly in her favor, so that, at the end of the
day, I could still prove that it was
me
and not my looks that attracted other people.

After I was done with that,
then
I could worry about finding a new job.

 

“Frump,” Pam declared, holding up a brown wool skirt.

“Frumpier,” she said with delight two minutes later, lofting a beige shirtwaist.

“Frumpiest,” she concluded triumphantly. The object in question? Something that looked suspiciously like a house-dress.

“I can't believe it,” I said.

“I know.” Pam shook her head, the disillusionment apparent. “Who would have suspected something like
this
—” she indicated the unlikely garment “—could be found in a place like
this?
”

“Oh, I'm not talking about that,” I pooh-poohed her.

“What then?”

“It's just that, I can't believe what I'm doing here. I can't believe I keep letting you take me out to purposely select clothes that will make me look less attractive. I mean, isn't that the opposite of normal female behavior or something?”

Even though I'd said that I wanted to prove that it was me and not my looks that attracted people, to purposefully be seeking out the frumpiest… What can I say? Not only did I have murky motives, but I was fickle.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Not if you're self-destructive, it's not.”

“But I'm not.”

“But you do want to prove some kind of point.”

“Wait a second here. Isn't it
your
point that you're having me see if I can disprove?”

She shrugged her shoulders again. “Details.”

My life had become some sort of weird Halloween party where I was seeking to costume myself as anything
but
the fairy princess.

 

There was an ad in the paper from Bethel Library, looking for an entry-level librarian. Bethel is a small town bordering on Danbury and I figured this was the chance I needed to start somewhere fresh.

But how to keep the person I'd been at Danbury Library and the person I was going to be at Bethel Library, provided they gave me the job, separate? After all, if I gave Danbury as a reference, the person Danbury described would be far different from the person Bethel would be getting.

Delta had the solution.

“I'll doctor your transcripts,” she offered.

“You can do that?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, between keeping Mush from killing Teenie, or maybe it was between keeping Teenie from killing Mush. “Just give me your school transcripts. I'll just change the dates, so it looks like you just got your degree.”

“But wouldn't that be, um, deceptive?”

“Well, if y'all want to be
technical
about it.”

“Can you really distinguish between technical and non-technical deception?”

“Oh, who the hell knows?” Her attention was momentarily deflected by: “Teenie Beauchamp! Stop pouring pepper on your brother's Pop-Tart. It ain't nice.” Then she turned back to me with a shrug. “Look at it this way. In actuality, Bethel'll be getting a librarian with twelve years' experience, but they'll be thinking they're getting someone at entry level and, unfortunately, will probably pay you same.
How bad off does that make them? Actually, sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

When she put it like that…

“So, I'll kind of be offering them the librarian deal of the century?” I asked.

“Exactly!”

I suppose it should have given me some financial pause to be considering taking a job at entry level, but I did have that money my dad had left me and the job was full-time, so there would be good benefits.

“There's just one other thing,” I said.

This was when I told her about wanting to change my name to fit my new identity. It just seemed, oh, I don't know,
fitting.

“So,” she said, finally grabbing the pepper from Teenie, “you're going to go from being Scarlett Jane Stein to being who exactly?”

I'd given this a lot of thought.

I took a deep breath. “Lettie Shaw,” I said.

Well, at least she didn't laugh at me. She laughed at something Mush was doing to get back at Teenie. At least, I
think
she was laughing at Mush and not me.

“You're going to go from being a Scarlett to being a Lettie?” But then she looked at my new hair, my glasses, my clothes. “Yeah, I guess Lettie sounds about right now. But
Shaw?
What the hell's your Jewish mother going to say? You are going to go on being Jewish, aren't you?”

“I hadn't really worked that out yet,” I said, and I hadn't. “I mean, I'm still going to go on being Jewish. But Mom? Oh, hell. I'll just tell her that the name change has to do with meeting men. She'll be all for it then.”

“You still haven't said.
Shaw?
”

“Oh, that. It's a nod to George Bernard. I know what I'm doing is the opposite of
Pygmalion,
but, somehow, it's still the same thing.”

Feeling a little like I was making a deal with a counterfeiter, I got my transcripts and left them with Delta, who promised they'd be ready the next day, in time for my interview at Bethel Library.

 

“You're a little, um,
experienced
—” I was sure the director wanted to say
old
“—to have only just decided on a career in Library Science, aren't you?”

“My mother always said I was a late bloomer,” I said.

He eyed me, obviously concluding that my mother was right, about everything.

We were in the Bethel Library, of course, that beautiful white building with black shutters that sits on the corner of Greenwood Avenue—Bethel's version of Main Street—and Library Place. I loved the old building: its large white pillars out front, its brick walkways. It was so different from where I'd come from.

The director, Roland James, looked to be only about five years or so older than me, with fading blond looks that had an “I coulda been a contenduh” air about them. He also wore glasses, not all that different from my own, and a lean body that was either the gift of metabolism or the result of some serious effort.

Once upon a time, I would have expected a man in his position to give me a different once-over than this critical one he was doing. Sure, it wasn't politically correct, that I'd become accustomed to men in power pleasantly ogling me, but what one is accustomed to and political correctness do not always go hand in hand.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but I was hoping to get someone with a bit more experience. Uh, I mean,” he amended, obviously recalling his earlier remark, “
practical
experience. It's so much more trouble, training someone from scratch.”

“But I thought this job was entry level,” I said.

“Well,” he looked embarrassed, “the pay is…”

“I'm a quick learner,” I said, feeling as though I were selling myself.

“A late bloomer
and
a quick learner?” he laughed. “Maybe if you'd learned quickly first, you wouldn't have bloomed so late.”

I laughed at myself right along with him, hoping that amiability would be a selling point. Then, for good measure, I crossed my legs.

Well, shameless as it is, it had always worked for me in the past.

But I'd forgotten that I'd become A Wearer of Long and Shapeless Garments. So my crossing of my still-in-great-shape-for-thirty-nine legs didn't even cause a ripple in the office. The man didn't even look up from his perusal of my falsified records.

“Well,” he finally said, perhaps deciding a woman like me couldn't possibly do any harm, or, more likely, that the town would save a lot of money by hiring someone like me instead of someone experienced, “when can you start?”

“Whenever you want?” I offered, feeling surprisingly meek.

“Good. You can start in Circ, see how it works out.”

T
o go with my new job, I needed a new place to live.

“Isn't this, um, taking this thing a bit too seriously?” T.B. had asked when I'd told my friends about it.

“I don't know,” I'd said. “I've already qualified for Loon of the Year, so why stop now? Besides, I never really felt like I lived in the condo, no matter how long I'd lived there, you know? Why not start fresh?”

As the Realtor showed me places in Bethel, I wondered what kind of place Lettie Shaw would buy.

“No, definitely not a condo,” I told the Realtor, Sue Buchanan, when she pulled up in front of one.

“All right,” she said, in a tone of voice that indicated she thought I was the stupidest woman who ever lived. “But condos are really hot right now and they represent the best value for a person living alone.”

A person living alone.
That had always been me. Sometimes, I thought it always would be me.

Sue had taken my future salary, my current savings and the projected earnings from the sale of my Danbury condo, plugged it all into her calculator, added some more mumbo jumbo, and decided I could actually afford quite a bit of house.

So, of course, she tried to show me quite a bit of house.

“This is really more than I want to spend,” I pointed out, looking at the mini-McMansion she showed me.

“What?” she sniffed. “You mean you'd like some pin money left over?”

“Maybe.” It was getting late in the day. If I was going to get home in time to change for services with my mother, this being the eve of Rosh Hashanah, I was going to have to move quickly. When I said as much, Sue's eyes brightened with recognition.

“Oh! You're
Jewish!
I guess the Shaw name confused me. This explains everything.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you do seem to be savvy about numbers….”

It really was late in the day, too late for me to find a new Realtor before sundown, or I'd have fired her sorry ass.

“Given that you're so, er,
finance-conscious,
” she said, “I've got one more place I think you'll want to see.”

The one more place turned out to be a tiny house, more like a cottage really, set far back from the road on a half acre of land. Tall trees lined the property, and the house itself was made of naturally stained shingles and had peaked roofs and a covered porch held up by four wooden posts. As we walked through, I saw that on the lower level, there was a cozy living room with a stone fireplace, in front of which was a wooden rocking chair, a Mexican throw over the back. There was also a small dining room with a Shaker dining set and an even tinier country kitchen.

Natural wood stairs and banister led up to a recessed loft bedroom on the second floor. The design of the bedroom echoed the southwestern accent of the Mexican throw down below, with a big ash bed that looked as though it had been handmade, covered in a spread of aqua and coral. Off the bedroom, there was a small but perfectly modern bathroom with a skylight over the marble tub.

I wondered: would Lettie Shaw live in a place like this?

Lettie would, I decided, she really would.

“It's charming!” I said.

“Oh, it is, it really is,” Sue said eagerly, seeing the end in sight. “It's the perfect place for someone like you to live.”

I didn't dare think what she meant by that.

“There's just one catch,” she said.

“Catch?”

“The owner's in Europe for a year, working on a book. He's not sure he definitely wants to sell it. So, for now, it's just a rental with a possible option to buy at the end of the year.”

I felt so disappointed. Having decided to change my life, I wanted to make a total change.

“But I was looking to buy something. Why would you show me a rental?”

“Because it's
perfect
for you!” Sue had gone back to being perky. “And besides, you know how writers are.”

I did?

“In a year,” she said, “he'll probably have fallen in love with Florence so much that he won't want to come back to Bethel. He'll probably sell long-distance!”

She was right about one thing: it was perfect for me. It was certainly perfect for Lettie.

“So all the furniture stays?” I asked.

“Definitely,” she said.

I looked at the walls, which were kind of dingy. The one thing wrong with the place was that it could really use a fresh coat of paint on all the interiors.

“But what if I wanted to paint it?” I said. “The owner probably wouldn't like me changing anything, not until he's completely sure he doesn't want to move back here again.”

“Oh, sure you can paint it.” She dismissed my concerns. “He's a writer. You know how they are—so oblivious. If he ever comes back home again, he probably won't even notice the difference.”