A Little Change of Face (11 page)

“W
here did you get that dress? I love it. Maybe I'll go to the same place to get one.”

“Shush, Mom, the rabbi is talking.”

We were in the United Jewish Center on Deer Hill Avenue in Danbury, the pale blue walls and white trim of the sanctuary providing a feeling of, well,
sanctuary.

“I just love these changes you've made,” my mother said.

Apparently, there was to be no shushing her.

“Oh, Scarlett,” she said, “you look like
such
a librarian.”

I was outraged. “I
am
a librarian!”

“Yes, I know. But now you look so…
Amish.
”

“And that's good?”

“
Shush,
the rabbi is talking.”

When I was growing up, my mother had not been much for synagogue, only going on the High Holy Days. But ever since my father had died, she'd taken to coming nearly every
weekend, claiming that it gave her some kind of peace she couldn't find anywhere else.

“And the little food get-togethers they have right after services, with those minipastries and desserts? Yum,” she always said. “Where do you think they find those tiny éclairs?”

Of course, I still only went on the High Holy Days. And, even then, I only went because it would have hurt her feelings if I didn't. Sure, I still considered myself Jewish. But, for me, it wasn't tied to anything like regular attendance; I'd been Jewish all my life and, for me, I couldn't see ever being anything else.

Naturally, going every week as she did, my mother had social relationships, however tenuous, with all of the regulars. Naturally, only going a handful of times a year like I did, my relationships with people there were secondary; myriad people would say to Mom, “It's so nice, Scarlett coming with you each year,” and she'd reply, as I stood mutely by, “Scarlett's a good girl.”

So why should this year be any different?

“Scarlett?” the rabbi peered at me closely, questioningly, having greeted my mother first, as the congregation all gathered for little plastic cups filled with Manischewitz and apples and honey in the little room off the main synagogue.

“Er, no,” my mother hastily corrected him. “This is Scarlett's cousin from out of town, Lettie Shaw.”

I couldn't believe this: my mother was lying to the rabbi!

“Shaw,” he said, “Shaw…That doesn't sound…?”

“Of course it's not Jewish. It's from her father's side of the family. You know—” and here she leaned in closer to him so she could whisper behind her hand “—intermarriage.”

When I'd told T.B. about the name change, she'd said, “You want to change from your cooler-than-cool name to
something that sounds like you got left over from the Grand Ole Opry? That's your problem. But don't expect me to be calling you Lettie. That dog just won't hunt with me.”

“Are you sure you guys are lawyers?” I'd asked her and Delta. “You talk weirder than Anna Nicole Smith, even if the accents are different.”

“We're having great careers—” Delta had smiled “—we really are.”

Of course, I'd had to tell my mother, too.

“Why in
hell
would you want to do that?” Delta had asked.

“I be wanting to do that,” I'd said, “because she is my mother. What if she needed me for some kind of emergency or something, and she called up the Bethel Library, only to have them tell her that they'd never heard of Scarlett Jane Stein?”

“Or,” Delta had said, “what if she came by your new house once you find one and move in, started going through the mail on your table while you were in the bathroom, and concluded from the name on the envelopes that either something weird was going on or you were living with a woman she'd never seen?”

“That too,” I'd conceded.

As I'd predicted earlier, when presented with my new name as being a way somehow for me to meet a man and settle down—not that I had a clue as to what I meant by that—my mother had been thrilled with the idea of the name change.

“Well, of course,” she'd said, “it makes perfect sense. As Scarlett Jane Stein you've been a complete romantic wash-out, so why not shake things up?”

Why not shake things up, indeed. But I'd never expected her to…

“Mother!” I hiss-whispered, grabbing on to her arm as the rabbi excused himself to go talk to other congregants. “You just lied to your rabbi!”

“Lied, schmied. If being Lettie Shaw finally gets you married in the end, he'll dance with me at your wedding.”

I wished there were a way I could convey to her how uncomfortable her talk of marriage and a wedding was making me.

Instead, I knocked back another plastic cup of Manischewitz. What it lacked in refined taste, it made up for in alcohol content.

But, I had to remind myself before reaching for a third, I wasn't a kid anymore. No one would think it funny if I got tipsy and started dancing the hora by myself in the corner.

“Oh, Scarlett,” my mother said. “I mean,
Lettie—
” she winked “—I can't wait to see your new home once you move in, meet all the new people where you're going to work.” She was practically clapping her hands like a seal.

“What's so great about it?” I was feeling surly and my words were starting to slur a bit. Maybe just the two glasses were getting to me?

“I think it's
wonderful
the way you're reinventing yourself. It's just like Madonna or Fergie or something. Everyone should do it at least once in their lifetime. Maybe
I
should—”

“No, Mom—” I stopped her, scared of what she might transform into should she also try to reinvent herself “—you're perfect already, so why would you ever want to change?”

I thought I saw her eyes mist over. “Oh, that's so sweet,” she said. “Thank you, dear. But isn't this great? Look how
differently people are treating you here this year than on previous years.”

It was then I noticed that, since the rabbi had moved off, no one else had approached us. In previous years, I'd been the centerpiece for the matchmakers, every yenta in sight trying to persuade “Scarlett” to take the number of her son, her grandson, even a few ex-husbands! But now…

“See what I mean?” my mother said. “Isn't this better?”

“Well, it's better for me,” I said. “It's certainly quieter. But how is this better for you? I thought your lifelong dream, because you keep telling me it is, is to see me settled.”

“Of course. But who can hear Mr. Right with all of the noise that was going on before?”

“Oy.”

“Oy? You never say oy.”

“Can we stop with the Mr. Right, Mom?”

“Oh, look,” she said, leaning in, “but don't look!”

“How am I supposed to—”

“David Gladstein is looking this way.”

“But I can't marry David Gladstein! Then I'd be Scarlett Jane Stein-Gladstein!”

“Don't be ridiculous. You'd be Lettie Shaw-Gladstein.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that's certainly much better. Now, which one is David Gladstein again?”

“Over there,” she said with a nod.

How could I have forgotten? David Gladstein and I had gone to Hebrew school together, although he'd been two years ahead. Everyone, parents and children, had known who David Gladstein was: if the rabbi needed someone to help out on the pulpit, as David had indeed done just that day, he called on David Gladstein; if a kid needed an ounce of pot for the weekend, they also knew who to call. Ex
tended pot usage having robbed him of any kind of maturation regarding his personality, David Gladstein was kind of like a yeshiva version of one of the more stupid permutations—Vinnie Barbarino, perhaps?—of John Travolta. Naturally, none of the parents had ever caught on, decades later still thinking he was the greatest catch a girl could find.

In previous years, he'd ignored me on the High Holy Days, because, well, I was too good at stringing words together.

But now?

Now, apparently, he didn't recognize me as the woman I'd been before. Now he was eyeing me across the apples and honey like I was the hottest gefilte fish in the sea.

My mother, in her excitement, grabbed on to my arm. I really wished she'd stop doing that; my arm was starting to hurt. “I think he's coming over here!” she cried with joy.

Oy.

T
o look at my mother now, with her commitment to polyester and her love of my new asexual wardrobe, you'd never guess that she was once a floozie.

Well, maybe
floozie
is too strong a word. Let's just agree then to call Mom a
party girl.

Long before she'd met my dad, she'd been declared the prettiest girl New Fairfield had ever produced. Many felt that she should have gone the Hollywood route—which would have made her the Meg Ryan of New Fairfield before Meg Ryan was ever the Meg Ryan of Bethel—but being elected Homecoming Queen had proved to be the extent of her aspirations regarding any kind of public arena.

But she did love the parties she was endlessly invited to, loved being the prettiest girl in whatever room she ever found herself in, loved having men fight over her.

It's always kind of weird, thinking of your mother as the kind of woman men once fought over.

Once Mom married Dad, whom she was as madly in love with as he was with her—I'm nearly sure of this—people expected her to settle down a bit. After all, her friends had all settled down with the men they'd married.

But Mom wasn't ready to settle down. She was only twenty when she got married and she liked the hippie clothes that soon burst on the fashion scene (even if she couldn't pick Vietnam out on a map), she liked all the blue makeup (even though electric-blue mascara looks silly on a brown-eyed woman) and she liked the parties where the lines were blurred as to who came with whom (okay, maybe I wasn't there, so I don't really know, but I'll bet I'm right).

Dad, on the other hand, wore suits every day and hated those parties, which he could only be dragged to because he was so besotted with Mom. I mean, of course he hated them—the man sold insurance! (This was also why he was smart enough to be so heavily insured that, when he died, Mom was so well taken care of that she'd been able to afford the house she'd always wanted on the lake.)

Anyway, I remember them going off to those parties, Dad dragging his feet all the way and Mom all merry, and then, lying in bed later, hearing them come home, always arguing, the arguments always being about what men Mom had been talking to for too long, standing too close to, what men she'd disappeared for a while with.

For years, I tried to tell myself that Dad was just a jealous guy; that he was seeing things that simply weren't there.

But somehow, deep down inside, I knew that wasn't true. Somehow, I knew that Mom had cheated on Dad—and that she'd done so repeatedly. She'd cheated repeatedly because she liked the attention, couldn't give up on her idea of herself as being the prettiest girl who every guy wanted.

Naturally, I never discussed any of this, either with Mom or Dad, but I was always aware of his love and his pain. I would have liked it if things could have been somehow different for him.

Of course, in rebellion against her, I'd grown up makeup free, almost daring the world to like me without the gimmicks. But somehow, along the way, I'd come to rely on gimmicks, even if I'd been unaware of them, even if all my gimmicks amounted to was a contact lens here, a high heel there.

And how did Mom go from being the party girl to being the chicken-soup wielding maven of practical shoes she now was? Who the hell knows?

I'd tried to ask her once, not long after Dad died, but all she would sadly say was: “You know, Scarlett, sometimes you just get tired of being the same person after a while. Everyone needs change.”

I had my own theory, albeit a warped one: without the audience of my dad, who was the best audience she ever had, it was no longer any fun playing dress up.

Needless to say, between Mom and Best Girlfriend, I'm conflicted on the subject of women's appearances, both in terms of what it does to the women themselves and what it does to the world. I'm certainly conflicted about my own appearance.

Two hundred years from now, some anthropologist will dig me up and wonder, “Was she bothered by having great breasts? Was she proud of them?”

Okay, I know that will never happen; I'm going to be cremated. But still, somehow, they're worthwhile questions, even if I may never know the answers.

I
was shopping the Super Stop & Shop in Danbury, looking for cake mixes with which to christen my new home. The Queen of England may use champagne over the bow to break in a new battleship, but we girls from Danbury know that it's Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix and Betty Crocker Ready-to-Spread Instant Buttercream Frosting that make up the real blessing of choice.

Of course, I wasn't a Danbury girl anymore, I was now a Bethel girl, and so should more properly have been shopping my new local store, but old habits die hard. Just ask any politician.

So there I was, looking at the back of the box to see how much oil and how many eggs I'd need, since it had been so long since I'd pulled out my limited culinary talents to make a cake from mix that I'd forgot, when I heard an allergic sneeze and looked up to see a familiar head of hair over the bow of my cart.

Old-fashioned pageboy of black hair, pretty brown eyes: it was Sarah, the girl who'd given me the chicken pox, only now her complexion was cleared up, she was wearing the red-and-blue school uniform of a coed Catholic school in Danbury, including navy knee socks, and, lordy-lordy, she now had hairy knees.

She sneezed again. Weird how in a world where only a few people used to suffer from allergies, now nearly everyone I saw had problems with them. But of course there wasn't anything wrong with the environment.

“Gezundheit, Sarah,” I said.

She shot me a quick look, confusion on her face.

“It means God bless you.” I answered her look.

“Not that,” she said warily, looking around for the safety of other shoppers as if I might be about to snatch her. “How did you know my name?”

“From Danbury Library,” I said, hopefully allaying her fears. “Your mother brought you in over the summer to get books from your reading list.”

She still looked puzzled.

“I helped you with the list,” I said. “I recommended some books for you.”

“You?” She looked shocked.

“Me.”

She looked at me more closely and I knew what she was seeing: the much shorter hair, cut weird, the glasses.

“Huh,” she said, “I'd have never recognized you. But why did you…?”

“Hey, I see you got over the chicken pox!” I said, not wanting to answer what I knew her question would be—why had I deliberately sabotaged my own looks?—perhaps
because I wasn't sure I even
could
answer it, not even to myself.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, completely forgetting me and remembering herself, just like any kid would. “It was awful!”

“Tell me about it,” I said, trying to be companionable. “I caught it from you.”

Now she looked horrified.

“But it's okay,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “Honest. It wasn't bad at all,” I lied, “and it gave me a great excuse to stay home from work for two weeks and watch TV.”

“Hello, do we know you?” I heard the feminine voice first and then turned to see the woman I recognized as Sarah's mother, with the toddler she'd had in the library with her now in her arms. A part of me had been wondering who Sarah was with and where they'd gone to, since she wasn't old enough to be doing the family shopping alone. From the look of the diaper bag over her mother's shoulder and a slight whiff of something less than appetizing in the air, I guessed she and the toddler had needed to make an emergency trip to the Super Stop & Shop bathroom.

“I'm Lettie Shaw.” I introduced myself to her, hand outstretched, figuring she'd never known my old name, so I might as well introduce myself with the new one. “I helped you with Sarah's summer reading list at Danbury Library several weeks ago.”

It was obvious that Sarah's mother, a once-pretty woman with brown hair and a tired smile, was as puzzled by my change in appearance as her daughter.

“Nancy Davis.” She reluctantly shook my hand, as though whatever had made me suddenly look worse might be catching. Then she added brightly, “Those were great sug
gestions you gave Sarah. She loved the books. We'll have to come back and see you…”

“Oh, no,” I cut her off. “I'm afraid I don't work there anymore. I'm at Bethel Library now.”

“Oh, well…” Nancy Davis's voice trailed off as if there was nothing left for us to say.

I looked at Sarah. Damn! But with that black hair and those brown eyes, not to mention the hairy knees, she looked like a mini-me. She also looked like she could use a friend.

“Hey,” I said to Sarah, “if you're ever in town…”