A Little Change of Face (19 page)

I
was at the Circulation Desk and I still felt awful. Even though three days had passed since Halloween, I still couldn't shake the bad feelings I'd had the morning after.

“You're not yourself,” Jane said.

It always surprised me somehow, working with nice Jane in the mornings when I knew sour Pat would be with me in the afternoons. Her words surprised me more. After all, it wasn't like I was known around the library for my perkiness, not me, Lettie Shaw, the serious woman in the quiet clothes.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said thoughtfully. “You may not always be the biggest talker, but you seem somehow sad today.”

“I guess I'm just not myself,” I said, agreeing with her.

“Who are you then?”

I looked across the desk, surprised at the voice not being Jane's. It was Steve Holt.

I swear I blushed.

“I'm Madonna,” I said. “Or no,” I said, changing my mind, “I'm your worst nightmare—a librarian with attitude. Hey, don't you usually come in here in the afternoon?”

“So?” He put his returns in the slot under the counter, put his takeouts on top: a literary novel that both the daily and
Sunday Times
had anointed, an early Stephen King and a book on art history. “I can't change?”

“Only if it's for the better,” I said, checking his books out of the system.

“How about we change this.”

“Hmm?”

“I keep asking you out—” Jane's ears perked up when he said this “—but you keep saying no. How about we just go grab lunch together, like two friends. You have to eat sometime and it's close to twelve.”

“Go,” said Jane, deciding for me. “If Roland comes by, I'll tell him I sent you on an errand before your lunch break.”

“What errand?”

“Oh, I don't know.” She looked exasperated with me. “I'll tell him I asked you to make a sign.”

“A sign? For what?”

“I don't know.” Her exasperation was growing. “A sign for the winter discussion series.”

“But the series is still two months away. Besides, I can't draw anything to save my life.”

“Lettie. Just. Go.”

I went.

 

We went to Sandwich Submarine, a new place in town, the interior of which was decorated like the yellow submarine in the Beatles song. I sat in a bright blue plastic chair,
feeling like the nowhere woman, gazing blankly at the menu, waiting for the waitress to come take my order for who knew what.

Steve leaned across the table and whispered, “It's not that bad.”

“What's not that bad?” I whispered back, figuring this was a whispering moment.

“Whatever's got you down,” he whispered again. “I'm sure it can be fixed.”

“How can you be so sure?” I whispered. “And how would you go about fixing it?”

“Because nobody died—I know this because otherwise you wouldn't be at work. As for fixing it, I'd fall back on my profession—I'd throw a little paint at the problem.”

“Oh,” I practically sniffed. “Well. If
nobody dying
is going to be the sole criteria for things not being that bad in a person's life…”

I went back to my menu, only to hear a startling sound: he was laughing!

“What's so—” I started. But then I couldn't help it. I heard myself, how I'd sounded, how utterly young and childish I'd sounded, and I found myself laughing at myself right along with him.

I was feeling so good in that moment that when the waitress came to take our order, interrupting us mid-laugh, I ordered a turkey, melted Swiss and red pepper grinder and a strawberry-kiwi Snapple without remembering that I wasn't supposed to be eating because I was too busy nursing my depression.

Steve ordered something called the Budapest Bulge—I didn't even want to know what was in that—and a large iced tea, despite the cold outside, handing our menus back.

“You have an amazing laugh.” He smiled after the waitress had gone.

“What's so amazing about it?” I snarked, feeling a little self-conscious.

“It's loud, for starters. It's unselfconscious, like you don't care who hears you being happy. And it's, um, well,
loud.
”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling completely self-conscious now. “So how was your Halloween with your brother's kids?”

“Great, great,” he said. “I love kids, hope to have my own some day.”

“Do you have other brothers and sisters?”

“Nope, just Tim. He's two years older. You?”

“It's just me.”

“There's nothing just you about you,” he said.

He was making me uncomfortable again. So…

“What's your brother like?” I asked.

“Tim? He's like an older brother—born with a sense of entitlement, and there's no talking him out of it. Still, we get on.”

Our sandwiches came. I picked up mine, looked at his.

“Is that a moose sticking out the side of yours?” I asked.

He looked at the thing in his hand. “I think it's a walrus.” He smiled, taking a bite. “Mmm, a good walrus.”

I realized how hungry I was and we ate in companionable silence for a moment.

“I guess you could say my relationship with Tim is complicated,” he finally said, still stuck on his brother.

“How so?”

“It's like, on the one hand, I want to dislike him, because he's so superior about everything.”

“And on the other?”

“I idolize him,” he said, as though it should be simply ob
vious. “Because he is good at things, always manages to be the star.”

“That could get annoying,” I said.

“Not always. Sometimes it's fun just to watch someone else do the things you'd never do.”

“For instance?”

“When he was in college, Tim and a few of his friends went to Bermuda for spring break. There was a bar there they went to every night where they did an open mike thing, inviting people to come out of the audience and tell jokes between the musical acts. Anyway, Tim was always good at jokes. He's got this unbelievable memory where if he hears a thing once, he can remember every single detail later. Tim was pretty drunk, though, and couldn't remember any of his own jokes, so one of his friends gave him a dirty limerick to recite.”

Steve stopped talking, obviously embarrassed.

“And the limerick?” I prompted.

“Well,” he said, reddening a little, “if you insist. There once was a girl named Alice/who used a dynamite stick for a phallus/they found her vagina in North Carolina/and the rest of her ass in Dallas.”

I laughed, even though I'd heard that one before. What can I say? I like dirty jokes.

Steve took my laughter as a license to continue.

“So Tim goes up on stage, gets in line to tell his joke, but he's really drunk, see? There's a guy ahead of him who tells some stupid joke involving a doughnut and there's Tim, reciting his own limerick in his head while half listening to this other guy. Then it's Tim's turn. He gets up to the mike and says, ‘There once was a girl named Alice,' but then he stares out at the crowd, all those people waiting for him to
go on, and all he can remember is the guy talking about doughnuts, and all he can think to say is, ‘so I ate her.'”

I laughed so hard, I felt the strawberry-kiwi drink work its way dangerously up my nose.

“See what I mean?” he said. “Tim does these bizarre things and people just laugh.”

“I can see why,” I said, still smiling. “Imagine a guy wanting to eat a girl just because she was named Alice.”

“But that's not the end of the story,” Steve said, really getting into it now that he knew he had a good audience.

“No?”

“No. The next day Tim's on the beach, recovering from his hangover with all of his hungover friends. He gets up to get a beer and walks into the middle of a limbo contest. All of a sudden, all around him, people start murmuring, ‘That's the guy…' ‘From last night…' ‘So I ate her!' Before you know it, all these people are laughing and clapping and someone's handing Tim an award for second place in the limbo contest. He ranked that high on the applause meter without even having to slither under the bar once.”

“Tim does sound like a fun character,” I conceded, “but I don't know that I'd want to make a steady diet of it.”

The waitress took our plates. “Dessert?”

“No, I have to—”

“Yes,” Steve cut me off. “Two of whatever the best thing you have is.” Then he looked at me. “You left fifteen minutes early, and nobody knows but Jane, so you still have time left.”

I relaxed back into my chair, visions of something chocolate dancing in my head.

Something chocolate turned out to be homemade chocolate chip fudge brownies with blueberry ice cream and hot fudge on top.

“Yay, no nuts,” I said, taking a bite.

“You're very funny,” he said.

“Oh,
thanks,
” I said sourly.

“Why the sour thank-you?”

“Because
funny
is the plain girl's bone. It's what the world throws us as compensation.”

“You're not plain, Lettie,” he said softly, “but you're absolutely right about one thing—nuts would spoil it.” He took another bite.

“So, how was your Halloween party?” he asked. “And what had you so down when I first saw you today?”

I suppose I could have told him about Sarah, since I was still upset about what had happened to her, but that was her story, not mine to tell people. So, before I had the chance to think about what I was doing, I was telling him about Saul. I didn't tell him the part about the thing I had going with Pam, about how I'd downgraded my appearance in the last few months. I just told him that I'd met a really attractive guy a while back, I really liked him, wanted him to ask me out, invited him to my Halloween party, and then, when he saw me dressed up more exotically than he was used to, his attitude toward me had changed.

Okay, I also didn't tell him the part about sleeping with Saul.

It might have been selfish of me, spilling my guts to Steve this way after he'd asked me out twice. But I still believed that the first time Steve had asked me out it had been to mock me, the second time had been out of pity, and today, well, today he'd said we were just having lunch as friends. Shouldn't I be able to tell a friend about the things that were bothering me?

He laid down his fork.

“I'm probably the wrong person for you to talk to about this,” he said.

“How's that?”

“Because I
like
you. Don't you get it? I really
like
you.”

I brushed him off, not believing he meant it. “Of course you like me,” I said, “and I like you. We're friends now, right?”

He didn't answer me.

“How is it,” he asked instead, “that a woman like you never married?”

“How do you know I never married?”

“Well, have you?”

“No. But I almost did. Twice.”

“So what happened?”

“I realized it just wasn't right,” I said, “both times.”

I sat there, wondering how to explain my whole Greek theory about passion, how it had been a weird sort of beacon in my life, how when I'd realized that neither of the men I'd been engaged to, however nice, had fit into that theory, I'd broken things off rather than settle.

Finally, I decided to tell it just straight out.

“Weird,” he said, when I'd finished. “A librarian who loves her job and who is committed to a theory of Greek passion.”

“That's me—” I shrugged, tried to smile “—weird.”

“I'm going to ask you one more time. Lettie, will you go out with me?”

“Maybe.”

 

Not long after I got back to the library, Kelly stopped by the Circ Desk.

She was wearing gray wool slacks and a pale pink button-down shirt. Apparently, she'd settled down a bit from her overenthusiastic first days and had modified her
wardrobe to fit in with the library crowd, which mostly wore slacks, except for me in my Empire dresses.

“I was disappointed when Jane told me you'd already left for lunch,” Kelly said.

I was stunned. “Why?”

“Why?” Apparently, she was stunned, too. “Because I was hoping to have lunch with you today, that's why.”

I heard Pat cough behind me. While I'd been at lunch with Steve, the shifts had changed.

“That's very nice of you, Kelly,” Pat said.

I looked at Pat, this woman who'd practically invented the word
acerbic,
and I could see that she was sincere. She was looking at Kelly all doe-eyed.
What was going on with everyone here,
I thought,
had Kelly reinvented the Dewey Decimal System?

Not to mention, I couldn't figure out for the life of me
why
Kelly would want to spend her lunch break with me. I hadn't exactly been warm to her. Worse, every time I was around her, I turned into an even klutzier version of me: dropping books, dropping due-date cards, dropping doughnuts.

Kelly must have been reading my mind, because she suddenly leaned in and whispered, keeping an eye on Pat.

“You're the only one here who's close to my age,” she said. “I thought we might be friends.”

What was she up to? I wondered. Was there really something malevolent about her, or was I just jealous? I wasn't sure, but there was something about her that made me think of a red M&M.

“Yeah,” I said, echoing Pat, “that's very nice of you. But since I've already eaten lunch…”

I let my voice trail off, hoping that was that.

But it wasn't.

“Fine,” Kelly said. “Then we can go out after work instead.”

“But—”