A Little Change of Face (23 page)

O
ver the course of the next week, Sarah came by the library less than before. And when she did come, she seemed less naive, more serious. But I thought that in time she'd be okay. What had happened to her was awful, no doubt; but the truth of the matter was that, in light of the horrible stories every day on the news and on TV, it was a blessing that the worst that had ever happened to her so far in life was nowhere near as bad as the worst life could be. Hopefully, she'd use the experience to learn how to separate shallow guys, like the detestable Jeff Polanski, from guys more worthy of her attention.

Also over the course of the next week, as Best Girlfriend talked to me during the days and slept on my couch at night, I began the slow process of returning to myself.

It was proving to be surprisingly true what people say, that it's a lot easier to gain a few pounds once you've reached a certain age than it is to lose them once again. Almost every
thing in life is somehow easier to lose than to gain—keys, sunglasses, high-school French, return receipts when you need them—but not those damned few pounds.

And then there was the rest of the process necessary to de-frump myself. I'd come to realize that it was a lot easier, a lot less time-consuming, never worrying if I'd run afoul of the Fashion Police. But if I was going to become myself again, then I was going to have to start paying attention to at least whether one item clashed with another; I was going to have to show at least some modicum of interest in accessorizing.

I started small, that first Monday back at work wearing my contacts instead of my glasses. I didn't really think it would be such a big deal, didn't think anyone would notice really, but I was in for a surprise. You'd have thought I'd had an Extreme Makeover or something.

“You have such pretty eyes,” said Jane.

“You look like a whole different person,” said Roland.

“What do you
mean
you always had the contacts but just chose not to wear them for a while?” Pat practically shrieked, coming on afternoon shift. “What kind of a crazy person does things to make themselves
less
attractive? If I could stand to put contacts in my eyes without getting the complete heebie-jeebies, I'd do it in an instant, probably find me a new husband tomorrow.”

I was still too intimidated by Pat to tell her that I didn't think that exchanging her glasses for contacts would increase her appeal to anybody, man or woman.

“What can I say?” I said instead. “I was going through a dowdy stage, but now I'm coming back.”

I'd added the last to kind of pave the way for the changes I'd be making in the days to come.

On Tuesday, I dug out my lipstick, pretty dried out as usual but at least it gave me some color.

On Wednesday, I put some gel in my hair, not enough to make me look like Elvis, but just a touch so that I looked kind of wild and fun.

On Thursday, I traded in my sensible shoes for a sexy pair of high-heeled boots that Best Girlfriend and I had each picked up pairs of at the mall. Underneath my oversize dress, they lost something in the translation, but they did give me some badly needed height that I'd been missing.

On Friday, figuring that some of the other women wore jeans to work so long as they were neat and not too faded, I crowbarred on a pair of ultratight dark jeans, over which I put a simple black turtleneck and a tweed jacket. Having combined them with the sexy black boots, when I looked in the mirror before heading to work, I thought that I looked like I could be a cat burglar or something, like maybe a twenty-first-century Audrey Hepburn about to pull off a heist.

“Stop,” Roland finally said. “I can't take any more. If you make yourself look any better, I might have to give you a raise.”

I thought that last part might be legally actionable, but then I saw by his smile that he was kidding. I also saw that he was confused.

One day, I realized, if I kept on working here, I was going to have to eventually change back my name. After all, being Lettie Shaw had been okay for a while, but I didn't want to do it for a lifetime. If I was going to go back to being me, the journey was going to have to be complete somehow. Then I'd have to legally change my name back, too.

“I just don't get you, Lettie,” Roland said. “You have to
be the strangest woman I've ever hired. But I'll tell you one thing. I've never had
anyone
who could check out patrons quicker.”

Feeling that while he was dwelling on my strong points, it was probably the best chance I'd ever have to fess up without getting fired, I fessed up.

“Wow,” he whistled when I was done. “You're even stranger than I thought.”

I waited for the ax to fall.

Roland must have seen my wincing expression. “What?” he asked. “Did you think I was going to
fire
you?”

I nodded meekly, like Lettie might.

He thought about it. “I'm not sure I legally can. After all, what did you really do wrong? So, you changed your name. But how is that so different from Pat wanting to be called Pat instead of Patricia? Or, oh, I don't know. And, so maybe you doctored your transcripts a bit, but it's not like you upgraded yourself or anything. It wasn't like you were one of those guys pretending to be a surgeon with a degree they bought off a donkey cart. You actually made
less
of your accomplishments. You doctored things in a way that you wound up getting
less
money.”

I could see that from where he was sitting, I was a bargain.

“I suppose it will take some getting used to,” he said, “all of us having to learn to call you Scarlett instead of Lettie. But it's a small price to pay. I mean, have you ever
seen
how slow Pat is at checking patrons out? And how
rude?
The woman could scare the balls off a tiger.”

He had a point there.

“Lettie. Scarlett.” He chuckled. “Damn, but you're a strange woman. If I weren't already married, I'd want to date you.”

Of course the scariest part, in terms of my library life, was coming clean with Sarah. The way I shuffled my high-heeled boots in front of her, you'd think she was the mother figure and me the preteen in need of guidance.

She looked at me long: my improved hair and clothes, my lack of glasses.

“Well,” she finally said, “I
did
used to see you looking like this at Danbury Library. Well,” she added, “with longer hair, of course. So it's not like I didn't know….”

I had always wondered what she thought about my appearance downgrade. When I'd run into her and her mother that first time in Super Stop & Shop, she'd started to ask, but I'd cut her off. She never tried again, and I, grateful that she was probably just preoccupied with her own youthful preoccupations, never offered.

Now, for the first time, she told me what she'd thought.

“I just figured something bad had happened to you or you were confused about something,” she said. “I thought maybe you were just hiding out for a while.”

She was so forgiving.

But I still had to tell her the last part, that even the name she'd been calling me by, the only name she knew me as, wasn't my real name.

She chewed on that one a little longer than she did the appearance changes.

“Yeah—” she finally nodded “—I can see it. It's like when I was little and I wanted my mom to call me Andi and start getting everyone else to call me Andi, but of course she never would. Everyone wants a name change sometimes, a tomboy name for sports or a more exotic name just because. But Scarlett to Lettie? What in the world were you thinking of?”

 

Even though I didn't owe it to them—what were they, after all, my keepers?—I told Pam and Delta and T.B., each in phone conversations that week, that I was going back to being myself. The hair was going to take some doing. And, who knew? I was getting older. I might never grow it back, was kind of starting to like it short, so long as I felt free to de-frump it. But everything else was going back to being the way it was before; better, if I could manage it.

T.B. was relieved, Delta was relieved and hoped I'd forgive her for the part she'd played in siccing the kids on me, but Pam seethed.

I even called my mother, who wholeheartedly approved.

“You know,” she said, “I was thinking the same thing. There's something wrong with the world if when I look at my daughter's clothes, my immediate thought is, Hey, that would look good on me.”

In fact, the only person I didn't telegraph my changes to was Steve.

In the week since the Saturday when I'd gone out for about five minutes with Saul, not even making it past the door, Saul hadn't called once. No surprise there.

Steve, on the other hand, had called every day, but I'd been putting him off. I'd told him right away that Best Girlfriend was visiting, length of stay unspecified, and he readily understood.

“Wow,” he said. “I wish I had a friend that I'd known for a quarter of a century.”

“Well,” I said, “you've had your brother for a lot longer than that. I'll bet he could teach you to limbo.”

“I hope I still know you twenty-five years from now,” he said.

I was glad we were on the phone and that he couldn't see my face, glad he couldn't see the fear and wanting that was surely there.

In order to make sure he couldn't see my face, I played with my hours at work, made sure I'd never be behind the desk at any of the times that he typically came in. I couldn't have said why. All I knew was that I was only able to talk to him over the phone. I wasn't ready to have him see my face.

Not just yet.

L
ife is unpredictable.
A
does
not
always follow
B,
no matter how much we might like it to. The ending we most dearly hope for becomes lost in the actions of others and our own folly.

“Are you
proud
of being a crazy woman?”

I sat on the edge of Steve's couch, contrite, hands dangling between my knees. “No, I wouldn't use the word
proud
exactly—”

It was another Saturday night and I'd been hoping to have somebody, but it was beginning to look like I was wrong. I'd called Steve up, inviting myself over. Then I'd arrived, dressed as Scarlett, ready to come clean.

If I'd been seeing Steve's place for the first time under better circumstances, circumstances under which he was
not
totally annoyed at me, I'm sure I would have been impressed. His house was so homey and artsy, all at once, like somewhere that van Gogh might live if he'd let Barbara Bush help
him decorate. All over the wall were huge paintings, Steve's work, each one startling in how good they were, jumping out from walls that had been painted an off shade of red. The furniture in the high-ceilinged living room was off white, big and cushiony, each piece offering the comfort of an entire bed.

I could easily picture myself living there.

“So, basically,
Scarlett,
you've been lying to me, about damn near everything, since the very first moment I met you.”

Sarah had been so much easier than this, so incredibly forgiving. Funny, you'd expect a twelve-year-old girl to have more trouble than a grown man at understanding human nature—granted,
my particular
human nature—but there you have it.

“Not
every
thing,” I said. “Those were just some particulars that I lied to you about, but it wasn't everything.”

“Oh, right. It wasn't everything. You only lied to me about what you really look like, about what your name is, about having kids—”

“I didn't lie to you about the kids. They were the ones who insisted on calling me Mommy.”

“Right. And you didn't correct them.”

“Right, but I didn't lie to you about everything.”

“What's missing on my list? What part of ‘everything' didn't you lie about?”

The word came out in a whisper. “Me.”

“What?”

“I didn't lie to you about what's inside of me. For the first time in my life, I let a man see inside of me.”

He laughed, a kind of bitter-sounding laugh that didn't suit him at all.

“How would I know if that was the real you or not at all,
Scarlett?
” he said.

“Because you drew me, in that picture. You couldn't have done that if you weren't really seeing me.”

“I don't know,” he said. “I
liked
that stuff you said about Greeks and passion, and about being a librarian. I wanted to know that woman, I wanted to be with her.”

“I'm still that person,” I said, “maybe more so.”

A part of me was surprised in a way by the bitterness of his reaction. A part of me thought he should have been happy about it. After all, he was getting a better-looking woman than the one he'd had before. He was upgrading. Shouldn't he have been sort of pleased with that, like Roland had been when he'd learned that he'd gotten a far more experienced librarian for the price of an inexperienced one?

And there was something else weird about his reaction, something underlying it that was tough to put a name to, something that would have smacked, if I didn't know better, of guilt.

“Don't you like the way I look?” I asked, perplexed.

“Of course I do,” he said. “But I liked the way you looked before, too. Not that it made any difference. I would have liked you no matter what you looked like.”

“Why?” I couldn't help asking.

“Because you're you. Because you're funny and you're different and you're quirky and abrasive sometimes in a way that makes me want to draw closer rather than pulling away.”

“I could still be that way,” I offered, still campaigning.

“Could you?” he asked, and I saw the tide turning behind his eyes. “Could you really? Because if you could be the same person, the same person I was originally attracted to, then we might have a chance.”

Okay. There I was, on the brink of having exactly what I wanted. He was going to give me another chance, I knew he was, if only I could say the right thing.

“What is it you want?” I asked.

“I just want you to be yourself,” he said. “That's what I want. Just be yourself.”

There that was again.

Instinctively, perversely, I drew back from it.

“I'd like to try,” I said, my actions belying my words as I inched backward toward the door. “But maybe we need to wait and see. This is an awful lot for you to think about. Maybe you'll feel differently in the morning.”

“I won't—”

“No. Really. You might.”

Then I fled.