A Little Change of Face (2 page)

I
f you ever feel the need to hide in plain sight, you can do it by becoming a librarian.

I swear to God, sometimes I feel as though I'm some sort of nonwoman forty hours a week. Which is a good thing, in a way, since it gives me a nice bumper of time not to contend with my breasts and how the world sees them. Oh, sure, I still see people registering them first thing when they walk up to the reference desk, but it's a passing registration, more fleeting than if, say, I were a nurse (people always check out nurses' breasts) or a go-go dancer (ditto) or a guest star on the
Bay-watch
reunion movie (no parenthetical aside necessary). Since the public pretty much views librarians as some sort of asexual alien life force, and since the wearing to work of braless tanks is kind of frowned upon by the city that employs us, it's a pretty safe place for a spectacularly-breasted woman to hide.

Not that hiding my breasts was the original impetus for my career choice, a choice that had ultimately landed me at
Danbury Public Library. No, the real reason I had originally gone after my Master in Library Science was that I love books. Duh. And librarians make much more money than bookstore clerks. It just never occurred to me that instead of recommending great books to read, which was the chief joy in working in a bookstore, I'd spend my days called upon to answer questions ranging from, “Where can I find information on the economy of the Galapagos?” to “Why can I never find the books on the shelves where they're supposed to be?” to “Why
can't
I download porno from the Internet on your computers?”

But the pay was good, thepaywasgood,
thepaywasgood.
(If that sounds like a mantra, it's because it is, itis,
itis.
)

Plus, the way I figured it, someone had to be an under-achiever so that all of those overachievers out there could feel superior about what they'd achieved. In a way, I was performing a social function here.

When I had originally declared my intention of becoming a librarian, I got this from my mother:
“A librarian?”
Like I wanted to be a welder or something. “I sent you to the best schools so you could become
a librarian?
”

“It's not like I'm going to be selling crack. I
will
get to use my mind there.”

“I didn't name you Scarlett so that you could grow up to be
a librarian.
”

“Oh, yeah, right. And I'm sure if I became a lawyer named Scarlett, I'd just get a ton of respect.”

“Maybe not.” She'd shrugged. “But the pay is good.”

Seven years into what was now my twelve-year stint at the library (four weeks vacation a year! The pay is good, thepayisgood,
thepayisgood!
), I'd run into an old high-school boyfriend at a party at Pam's.

“So what do you do?” He'd leered at me over the vodka punch.

“I'm a librarian.”

“A librarian?”
He'd gaped at me as if I'd just sprouted a bun or something.

“Why? What'd you think I'd grow up to be—a welder? a nurse? a stripper?”

“I don't know,” he'd confessed, looking slightly sheepish. “It's just hard to picture you behind the reference desk.” His gaze settled on my chest. “It just seems…I don't know…
wrong
somehow.”

“Call me when you grow up,” I'd said, walking away.

“He always was a dick,” Pam had said when I found her in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” I'd sighed, “but he was always such a good-looking dick. Too bad he's so narrow-minded.”

Pam, of course, had never been narrow-minded about my career choice. No, in Pam's case—Pam, who really was a lawyer—it was downright hostility.

“You have a great brain, Scarlett. So what if your breasts get in the way a little bit? You could do what I do.”

Duh.

(Sometimes, I can't believe I'm thirty-nine and still saying “duh.”) “Okay, so maybe you couldn't do exactly what I do— I mean, with those breasts, you could hardly be in litigation—but you could certainly be a tax attorney. Hell, if you became an entertainment lawyer, you'd probably clean up!”

I didn't even want to know what she meant by that.

“Really, Scarlett, I'm sure that if you just put your mind to it, you could become one of us.” The “us” referring to
Pam herself and T.B. and Delta, the two other women that made up our quadrangular friendship.

“I suppose I could,” I conceded, “except for one small fact.”

“That being?”

“I'm not one of an ‘us.' I'm one of a ‘me.'”

“So you say. I just think it's a shame that you feel the need to waste this brain that God gave you.”

I tried the same not-a-crack-dealer line I'd used on my mother, but Pam wasn't having any.

“It's a waste, Scarlett, I don't care what you say, it's a waste. Locking that mind of yours away in a library is like winning the lottery and then just putting it all in the bank for the rest of your life, it's like some kind of brain-cell chastity or something.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Don't get defensive. But, I mean, come on. Wouldn't you like to find out what you could really become in life, if you weren't so downright weird about the career world taking you at breast-face value?” Then she'd given a heavy sigh. “You've always been so pretty, though, with everything handed to you because of it—why would you ever have to know what it's like to have to maintain the drive to go after something in life and earn it on sheer merit alone?”

You're probably wondering right around now just exactly why this woman, this woman who could be considerably more hostile than she's being here, was considered by me to be my best friend. Well, I did feel sorry for her a lot, and she did have some endearing qualities that are perhaps not so easy to see.

Plus, when I'd first met her and T.B. and Delta, Pam had made a point of—no other word for it—
courting
me. Like a second-string center on the football team with broken black
glasses held together by masking tape, Pam had called and e-mailed me virtually every day, as though hoping to win a date for the prom. Finally, the will in me crushed under a deluge of daily questions along the lines of “So, what are you making for dinner tonight,” I'd caved and, muttering “uncle” under my breath, conceded, “Okay. Fine. You can be my best friend.”

Actually, though, Pam was my default best friend. But, like my breasts, that would take a lot of explaining, far too much explaining for right now.

 

So there I was, on a lovely Wednesday in July, hiding in plain sight behind the reference desk at the Danbury Public Library. I'd just dispensed with a patron who wanted books on pursuing a writing career, having led her to the 888s, and was hoping to sneak in a couple of reviews in the latest
Publishers Weekly,
which had just arrived. Besides, all working and no sneak-reading make Scarlett a very dull librarian. But this was not to be…

“Excuse me?”

“Hmm…?” I stashed the
PW
away. Damn! I was never going to learn what it had to say about the latest Anne Perry.

The excuser was a harried-looking woman, around my age, with a toddler in a stroller and a girl in tow. The girl looked to be about ten years old, her black hair cut in an old-fashioned pageboy that would have been more suitable on a woman sixty years ago than on a young girl today. Despite that handicap, you could tell she had pretty-potential, what with her warm brown eyes and wide smile, whenever she forgot to be self-conscious and just let one rip. More hampering than the hair was a mild case of premature acne. Poor thing. She was probably going to get breasts early,
which would lead to much teasing at school from both the nonbreasted girls and the prepubescent boys, something I knew much about. Any day now, she'd have too much hair on her legs, her mother wouldn't let her shave yet, and the other kids would all start calling her Monkey. I was sure of it.

Harried Mom put her hand proprietarily on the girl's shoulder. “Sarah here needs to get some books from the summer reading list.”

“That's great,” I said. “Much better than waiting until the end of summer like so many of the kids and then having to cram it all in at the last minute. Just go upstairs to the Juvenile Library—”

“Oh, no.” Harried Mom cut me off. “I want you to recommend specific titles from the list.” She handed me the list. “I don't want her reading just anything.”

“Yes, but upstairs—”

“Please?” she pressed, then she looked up at the sign over my head: Information Desk—Reference. “This is what you're here for, isn't it?”

Well, she kind of had me there. Although I still would have said that upstairs was where she should go for help.

I looked at the list. “Well,” I said, “you can never go wrong with
A Separate Peace
or
The Great Gatsby.
”

“She needs to read three,” Harried Mom said.

“Well, then, how about the
Harry Potter
, too? Might as well, if they're going to put it on the list….”

“Thank you,” Harried Mom enthused, as though I'd just done her a great favor.

Just then, the girl coughed.

“Cover your mouth, Sarah,” Harried Mom admonished. Then she turned to me with an embarrassed smile. “Sarah's
just getting over the chicken pox, but she just can't seem to shake that cough.”

“The chicken pox?” I took an involuntary step backward.

“Oh,” Harried Mom pooh-poohed as she headed off with her kids for the double doors that would lead her upstairs to the Juvenile Library, “she's not contagious anymore. And, besides, hasn't
everybody
had the chicken pox already?”

N
o. Not everybody.

About fourteen days after Sarah coughed in front of me, I developed a fever, along with an all-over achy feeling as though I'd spent the night in the ring with the WWF. At first, I thought it was the summer flu. Having not used any sick days yet that year, I called in three days straight at the library. That's when the spots began to appear.

I'd never been troubled with acne when I was younger. And, yes, I do know that that's another one of those statements that could make some people hate me. But it's true. All through junior high and high school, I could barely buy a zit to save my life. Except for the occasional one or two around my period, I was blemish free. How odd then to suddenly be seeing spots at nearly forty.
Could my period be due again so quickly?
I wondered, studying the spot on my cheek, the one on my forehead.

But then, as the hours went on, and one day turned into
the next, I developed more spots on my face…and a few on my neck…and then on my chest.

I called my doctor's office in a bit of a panic; don't ask me why, but I was certain I had the measles.

The receptionist at Dr. Berg's office was very accommodating when I told her I thought I had the measles, saying that he could see me that afternoon. Since it was usually necessary to call two to three months in advance to get a regular visit with the most popular doctor in the city, and even the average garden-variety emergency complaint still required at least a one-day wait to get seen, I recognized how seriously she was taking my spots. The appointment slot I was given was the first after the lunch break, presumably so I wouldn't infect a bunch of other patients in the waiting room.

Okay, am I the only woman out there who's a little in love with her doctor?

I'd been seeing Dr. Berg for about a dozen years, ever since my previous physician—whom I'll call Dr. X—had nearly killed me, which had seemed like a good reason to stop seeing him. Dr. X had been treating me for an infection that wouldn't go away, and when he started me on yet another round of medication, I began feeling weird. Repeated calls to his office to say just how weird I was feeling had merely yielded the usual “just another hypochondriac” tone from his nurse. Well, naturally, once my body broke out in tiny little red spots from head to toe—a nice indicator of anaphylactic shock—they told me to stop taking the medication. Immediately. That another dose might kill me. But when I tried to get them to admit their mistake, that they should have listened to me in the first place, they insisted that standard practice dictated they do exactly what they did
and that they'd do it again tomorrow. That they'd never heard of anyone nearly dying from that particular drug, even though it had nearly killed me. I suspected they didn't want to admit culpability because they were terrified of a malpractice suit. Well, I wasn't interested in a malpractice suit, but I was interested in having a doctor who was a mensch, which clearly was not anyone in that office. And they'd nearly killed me.

Did I mention they'd nearly killed me?

Well, naturally, after that experience, I was leery of doctors.

And I was still leery of doctors when I'd first started seeing Dr. Berg, but he'd quickly won me over. He was just so nice, so reassuring, and he took so much time to just talk to his patients—and not just about their illnesses, answering all questions with extreme patience, but even about their lives or whatever was in the news. I always felt so much better just seeing him—that balding head, those steel-rimmed glasses—that I often found myself telling people, “Who cares if he knows anything about medicine? I still love him.” Too bad he was married and a grandfather already.

“So, I understand you're not feeling so good today, Scarlett,” said Dr. Berg, glancing at what the nurse had written on my chart as he entered the examination room, hand outstretched for a warm shake; Dr. Berg never looked scared that he might catch something from a patient. Dr. X, on the other hand, had always given a can't-you-people-keep-your-distance look at the audacity of patients coming to see him while sick. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“These spots.” I indicated my face. “I think I have the measles.”

“The measles?” He spoke in a soothing voice as he felt
my lymph nodes, examined this, looked at that. “What makes you think so?”

“I don't know,” I said. “All these red spots—it just seemed to me like this is what the measles would look like.”

“No,” he said, sitting down on the stool next to the examining table, pen already flying across his page, “you don't have the measles. I'm pretty sure what you have is the chicken pox.”

“The chicken pox?”

“Yes,” he said, starting to write a prescription. “Have you been exposed to anyone recently that may have been infected?”

I told him about Sarah, the girl with the list in the library two weeks ago.

“Yup,” he said, doing the math on the dates, “that's the incubation period.”

That damned precocious little reader, I thought. Why couldn't she have waited until later in the season, just like the rest of the kids, to come in for her books? Or at least have waited until she
really
wasn't contagious. I suppose that's Harried Mom's fault….

“Here,” he said, handing me the prescription he'd written. “Now, I want to warn you. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

“You mean I'm going to feel even worse than I do now?”

“I'm afraid so. Chicken pox when you're a kid is pretty easy. But as an adult? The older you get, the harder it is. You're also going to be contagious for another seven to ten days, so no going out in public places until all the pocks scab over.”

Great.

“Now, I want you to call the office every day to let me
know how you're doing.” There was my reassuring Dr. Berg again. With all that talk of worse pain and the need to be quarantined, I'd wondered where he'd gone to. “This isn't going to be easy for you and I'm going to want to keep a close eye on you until you start feeling better.”

“Thanks,” I said, glancing up and catching sight of myself in the mirror on the wall. Damn! I already had more spots than I had when I'd first come in there. “Um…can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Am I going to look like this forever? I feel like that animal in
Put Me in the Zoo.
”

“Put me in the zoo?” he asked, puzzled.

I sighed the sigh of the long-suffering librarian. It's amazing how often people don't get book references.

“Kids' book,” I elaborated. “Animal keeps changing his spots. Big spots. Little spots. Red, blue, all the colors, really. Am I going to wind up like that?”

I felt strange, exposing myself that way. Over the years, we'd often talked about socio-cultural issues and he knew that I was big on saying that I didn't think that appearances were as important as people made them out to be, that most women would be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about the outer so much and just focused on the inner. And I'd even backed it up by being the kind of woman who usually dressed casually, almost never bothered with makeup. Would he think now that all that had just been a sham? Would he think me shallow for being so concerned?

But he laughed, that reassuring sound. “Of course not. Provided you don't scratch, before you know it, you'll be just as beautiful as you've always been. Even with the spots, you still look good, Scarlett.”

It really was too bad about that wife and those grandchildren.

“Can I ask
you
a question now?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Why didn't you get the chicken pox as a kid, just like everybody else?”