A Little Change of Face (12 page)

A
s I navigated my way through my new job, as I decorated my new home, I found myself constantly wondering: “What would Lettie do now? What would Lettie say about this? What would Lettie
want?
” It was weird, like there was more than one person living inside of me, or maybe like I was finally getting in touch with a part of myself that I hadn't even known existed before.

T.B. had offered to help me paint the dingy walls. Pam had claimed that paint fumes always made her queasy and Delta couldn't find anyone to stay with Mush and Teenie for an entire Sunday—no surprise there—so it had fallen to T.B. to be my sole partner in brushes.

“I like this sienna color you picked out for the dining room,” said T.B., watching as I swirled the paint in the can. “Makes it feel like you're going to Italy without having to pay the plane fare.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Do you think the owner might
mind it being so dark, whenever he gets back from wherever he is?”

“Naw, I think he'll like it. Why wouldn't he?”

“I don't know,” I looked around me at the dingy walls, still the color of funky urine. “Maybe he likes the subway-station look. I just figured that Lettie would like—”

“I gotta tell you, Scarlett, it creeps me right out, the way you talk about Lettie like she's some kind of real person.”

“I'm just trying to get into the spirit of things.” I shrugged, bending to dip my brush in the can, rising to put the first neat stroke on the wall. What I couldn't admit aloud to her was that Lettie had indeed become very real to me. Mostly, I was curious as to what Lettie would be like, once she completely became herself, and I also really did want to know just exactly what Lettie wanted from the world.

“What'd you do last night?” I asked, hoping to deflect conversation about my weird and sort-of fake life by talking about her real life.

“I went out with Al,” she said.

I turned to look at her, but her back was to me as she worked the other side of the room.

“You went out with Ex-Al
again?
” I asked. “What's up with that? I swear, you've been out with him nearly every weekend this month.”

“He's safe,” she said softly.

“Safe?”

“And fun. He's a lot of fun.”

“So why'd you ever divorce him in the first place?”

“You know why—he was unpredictable and he made me miserable.”

“So now suddenly, what, he's changed his spots?”

“I don't know. It's different when you're married.”

“I wouldn't know,” I said, wondering idly if Lettie wanted to get married.

“Lucky you,” she laughed.

“How's it different?”

“Tough to say. But it's like you start expecting your spouse to be someone other than who they are.”

“So, you expecting Ex-Al to be a, I don't know, dependable husband sort of forced him into acting unpredictable?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” she laughed. “But, yeah, in a way, yes.”

“What are you talking about? You mean that what you wanted made him somehow feel like rebelling?”

“I don't know. ‘Rebelling' is such a strong word.”

“What then?”

“I think he just felt like he had to assert himself, to be seen.”

“And to assert himself he had to make you miserable.”

“It's not that simple, not that syllogistically ‘if X, then Y.' Love's never that simple.”

I nearly dropped my brush. “We're talking about
love
now? You don't think you'd marry Ex-Al again, do you?” I asked, thinking the absolute worst thing about that would be that I wouldn't have the fun of calling him Ex-Al anymore.

“Marriage? Who the hell's talking about marriage?”

“Then what?”

“I don't know.”

I could have sworn she blushed.

“Maybe we'll just live together this time around,” she said.

“Really? No shit?” I felt like the little dog scampering annoyingly around the big dog in the cartoon. “Do Pam and Delta know about this yet?”

“Who the hell knows if I'll do it or not, Scarlett? And you best not be talking to Pam or Delta about it. I'm not ready to have the harsh light of girlfriendship shining its nasty little glow on what I'm thinking about.”

“I best won't tell them,” I said, unable to prevent a smug smile from sneaking its way onto my lips. “I best keep your secret.” Then, I started singsonging, “T.B. might be moving in with Ex-Al, T.B. might be…”

“And don't you be singsonging that schoolyard crap at me.” She pointed her brush at me like it was a weapon, but I could see she was fighting back her own smile. “Besides, who are you to be laughing at someone else's weird life? Aren't you the one who's painting your house the colors you think will please some weird little alter ego in your head named Lettie?”

This was true.

“Just so long as those voices you're hearing don't go telling you to shoot somebody.”

Just so long.

G
etting used to being Lettie at home was somehow easier than getting used to being Lettie in my new job.

At home, it was somehow comforting, channeling Lettie, trying to figure out what kind of drapes she'd like to hang (lace curtains), what kind of food she'd like to eat (nothing too rich, but the occasional éclair was okay), what she liked to watch on television (surprisingly, or maybe not so much, a lot of Lifetime).

But work was harder.

The director insisted I call him Roland, which was fine since I was used to dealing on a first-name basis with anyone I worked with. But Roland insisted on looking at me—during the daily morning staff meetings or whenever I passed by his office on my way to the lunchroom or to fill out my time sheet—with a certain looking-straight-through-the-nonexistent-new-worker kind of air that was somewhat less fine. I was not yet used to men not reacting
to me in a positive way, and his lack of any reaction to me was disconcerting, like I was some kind of tabula rasa, waiting for the world to write a more interesting story on me.

My friends had been right about one thing: the new women I worked with—and they were all women, save for Roland and Pete, a guy who worked part-time in Reference—were absolutely thrilled at how little training I needed. The first day on the job, when the person I was working with in the morning, Jane, switched places with Pat, the woman I'd be working with in the afternoon—most of the other workers were part-timers—I heard Jane say, “You should have seen her! The computers went down, and without even asking me what to do, she just called Bibliomation and got it fixed,” to which Pat had replied, “Not much to look at, though, is she?”

That last stung a bit, I'll grant you, but I tried to remind myself that this had all been part of the exercise. After all, wasn't the point to prove that people would still like me for myself no matter what I looked like? Still, I supposed that, without realizing it, I'd grown used to the personal sense of validation I'd gotten from people I worked with complimenting me on the little things (like how pretty my hair was) or seeking out my esteemed opinion (on how to catch men). It fast became apparent that at Bethel Library, neither of those things was going to happen, since my hair was now as plain as could be (at least someone could compliment me for washing it) and I no longer looked like I'd had much experience with the latter.

Not that Jane and Pat were any great shakes. Both had been made grandmothers more than once already and were deeply committed to the large stash of minichocolates we at Circ kept stashed in a Danish cookies tin beneath the
counter. The chief distinctions between the two were that Jane was much taller and wore her long gray hair tied in a braid on top of her head, while Pat was, obviously, not as nice.

Not five minutes into my first shift with her, having seated herself to call patrons to remind them that they had books on hold and that we'd only hold them two more days, Pat asked, “Never been married, huh?”

It had struck me before that there's a certain kind of woman, devoted to watching daytime talk shows, who believes that anyone she meets is fair game, right away, to be asked the rudest questions; as though life were some kind of studio setting, with her being the audience and everyone else panel guests up on the stage.

“Uh, no,” I answered.

She looked at me for a long moment, considering. In fact, she looked at me so long that I began wondering if she were waiting for Oprah to pop in and ask me what kind of diet I was following. Finally:

“Does that bother you?” Pat asked.

“Only when people like you ask me if it bothers me,” I answered, not thinking to stop and channel Lettie before letting my mouth speak what I really thought.

“Huh,” said Pat, picking up the phone and punching in the numbers of the next patron on her list, “who would've thought? There's more spunk to you than meets the eye. Not much, but some.” Then she turned her attention to: “Mrs. Calloway? Bethel Library here…”

You'd think that a library in a small town would be different from a library in a small city, but not really. Once you made allowances for the differences in square footage between the two buildings—okay, the bigger library, by defi
nition, did have more stuff in it than the smaller one—it was all basically the same. People, to a certain degree, are the same anywhere you find them. Sometimes, there's just fewer of them, like maybe only 20,000 instead of 80,000.

In Bethel, I quickly found, just as I'd found in Danbury and in my years in the bookstore before that, there were certain people who liked to play games; people who liked to say that they had no idea how they could have amassed twenty dollars in fines and that they'd never taken out the latest Richard Gere movie, much less sixteen times and failed to return it on the last, no matter what the computer said. There were also mean people, people you could never move quickly enough for, people who were never pleased, people who were looking for someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong in their lives and tag!—the taxpayers are paying you, aren't they?—you were it. But these were, thankfully, a tiny minority, and there were also the nice ones, the ones who loved books and people, the ones who reminded you of why you had become a librarian in the first place.

“W
hy in the world did you ever choose to become a librarian?”

I sighed upon hearing this question I'd heard so often, but had hoped to never hear from this particular quarter.

It was odd, after all, being asked that question, in this of all places—the library—by one of the patrons. It was like if a prospective client of Pam's were to ask her why in the world had she ever chosen to become a lawyer. It was the kind of question that smacked of doubt, as though the questioner was assuming that either the questionee was not properly equipped for the job or had chosen poorly. Either way…

Remember when I said before that good-looking men are never found in bookstores or libraries?

Well, I was wrong.

All right, so, maybe the guy standing on the other side of my counter—with his thick auburn hair, kind of shaggy on
the edges and parted on the side, his warm brown eyes, his orthodontist-somewhere-in-the-background smile, his paint-spattered shirt opened just enough to reveal the optimum amount of chest hair and his tight-jeans-clad hip pressed lightly against my counter—wasn't about to give Tom or Brad a run for their box-office money, but for a guy in a library, he looked pretty damn okay.

I looked at the name on his library card—Stephen Holt—before scanning it into the system and processing his order: a pulp mystery (he had low-brow tastes), an older Rushdie (he had high-brow tastes), a coffee table book on trompe l'oeil (who knew what that said about him?).

Putting prestamped cards inside the flaps of his books, I was finally ready to answer his question. But how was I going to answer it: as Scarlett or Lettie?

Deciding the Borscht Belt approach would be best in this situation, I answered the overly familiar question with a wincing question of my own. “Because the job of supermodel of the decade was already taken, and besides which, I wouldn't have qualified, anyway?”

He looked puzzled. “Why would anyone want to do
that
for a living?”

I repeated the Stein family motto: “Be-
cause
—the pay is good, thepayisgood,
thepayisgood?
”

“Is that ever sufficient reason to do anything?”

What planet was this man from? I was beginning to get the sneaking suspicion, a really scary suspicion, that maybe the planet he came from was
my
planet.

“Okay,” I said, “how about this for a reason, then. As supermodel of the decade, you get to wear
all
of the awful new fashions before anybody else?”

“Now,
that
I really don't get.”

I didn't get it, either, but I just didn't feel like letting on, so I changed tack.

“Why is it hard for you to understand why I became a librarian?”

“Because you don't look like one?”

Now I felt really offended. I'd worked hard, damned hard to attain the frumpiest look I could achieve (without doing any irreversible damage, of course). Hands on hips, I guess you'd have to say I orated at him. “How
dare
you imply that I don't look sufficiently like whatever your narrow-minded conception of what a librarian should look like is. What's wrong—huh? Is my skirt just a little too short?” I knew it wasn't. “Is my bun a little too loose? Is it that I'm not wearing support hose and black orthopedic shoes?”

“Your skirt's not short at all and you don't have enough hair for a bun,” he countered.

“Well, then, what is it?”

“You're too alive.”

I did a little hand-flapping thing then, the kind of thing that you see game-show contestants do when they want to think of an answer badly but can't, like “Who were the other two presidents besides Kennedy and Lincoln to be successfully assassinated?” and they start fanning themselves rapidly like Melanie Wilkes on amphetamines. It was that kind of motion, and I'm sure it looked excessively over-the-top, but I was that frustrated and that was exactly the motion I made while straining to get out the one word I so desperately wanted to say, which was…

“WHAT?”

“What ‘what'?”

“What
WHAT?
” I hand-flapped some more. “What are you
talking
about?”

He pointed at my hands with a “eureka” gesture of his own. “Yeah,” he said, “that's it right there.”

“What's it right there?”

“That thing you're doing with your hands. I've never seen any librarian do anything like that before.”

“So? You just made me feel so fucking frustrated and…”

He eureka-pointed again. “And that, too. You just did it again.”

“Did what again?”

“Acting too alive. And swearing. I've never heard a librarian get so emotional that they couldn't stop from swearing before.”

Now I was really exasperated. “We
swear.
We just do it in the staff lunchroom, that's all. But of
course
we swear. What do you think a librarian is?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “Someone really intelligent who's too scared to use her intelligence someplace else. Someone who's supplementing someone else's income. Someone who's playing it safe.” He paused, looking like he had more to say but hesitating as though fearful to offend. “Someone who wants to hide. Someone who's decided it was easier to settle.”

This time I didn't hand-flap at all. This time, I just gave him the hands-on-hips, steely-eyed, out-of-the-corners-of-my-eyeballs glare. “Oh…that is just soooo…inaccurate.”

His eyebrows shot up. “It is?”

I sighed, giving in, relenting. “You want to know the real reason why I became a librarian?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. I'll tell you.” I couldn't believe I was going to actually do it, I couldn't believe that I was finally, for the very first time, going to tell another human being the honest-to-God truth about why I'd chosen the profession I had.

He waited, expectantly.

“I became a librarian because, to me, anything,
anything
to do with books—except for burning them or banning them, of course—is the noblest profession there is.”

There went those eyebrows, rising up again. “No shit?”

I stood my ground. “No shit.”

Then he stared at me for a long time and then he smiled, and when he smiled it was the biggest—you heard it from the librarian first, folks—shit-eating grin I'd seen on his face yet. And, if I wasn't mistaken, there was just the barest hint of awe mixed into all the joy in that grin.

“Omigod,” he whisper-smiled.

“What?”

“I think you're the most romantic woman I've ever met in my life. Will you please go out with me?”

I was in no mood to be mocked by this guy. Whether I was Scarlett or whether I was Lettie, I was in no mood to be mocked.

“Don't I hear your mother calling you?” I demanded rather than asked. “Don't you have somewhere else you need to be right now?”

He tried to stare me down, but I wasn't having any of it. Still, it was something of a shock to realize how unintimidated he was by my best steely librarian's stare.

“I guess,” he admitted with a slow grin. “But I'll be back.”

“How's that?” I asked, feeling as though I were being threatened somehow.

He waved his pulp, his Rushdie and his arty stuff in the air over his shoulder as he walked away. “I'll have to return these in a few weeks, won't I?”

“Maybe I won't be here that day,” I muttered.

“We're not really supposed to swear at the patrons” came
Pat's voice from where she was seated at the desk behind me. Stephen Holt had ruffled so many of my feathers, I'd forgotten they never let me work alone since I was so new.

“I know,” I said, only half wondering if she'd report me to Roland.

“You said ‘fucking' to a patron, Lettie,” she said. “The town that employs us kind of frowns on that sort of thing.”

“Did I really?” Even I was shocked at me.

“It was kind of funny,” she said.

“Thanks. I'm glad you liked it.”

“And he did kind of have it coming.”

“You think so?”

I couldn't stop myself from wondering: Was he a Stephen or a Steve?

“Not that you'd want to make a regular practice of that sort of thing,” Pat cautioned.

“Of course not.”

“But you are kind of, oh, I don't know what it is exactly, but you're
different
whenever you forget about yourself.”

“Uh, thanks, I think.”

Stephen? Steve? Stephen? Steve?

“And that sure was one good-looking piece of man,” Pat said.

“You think so?” I looked at her closely, wondering if she'd seen something I hadn't seen. I mean, he'd looked
okay
…. “Really?”

“You mean to tell me you didn't notice?”

“I just assumed he looked so good because of the context.”

“How's that?”

“It's just that we're in the library. I'll bet that if we ran into him out in the real world, he wouldn't look half so good to us.”

Pat pondered this.

“Besides,” I added, “he's rude.”

“Yeah, well.”