A Little Change of Face (4 page)

D
r. Berg was right: my illness got worse.

Oh,
did it get worse.

The hardest thing about living alone is being sick all by yourself.

Home for me was a condo three-quarters of the way up a high hill in Danbury. I'd purchased it the year after I got the job at the library, so I'd been living there for a long time, but you couldn't really call it a home. Maybe that's the thing about condos; even when you own one outright it still feels like temporary lodging, like the place you're living only until you get serious about what you're going to do in life. At any rate, that was certainly the case with my condo, which I'd only decorated in the most marginal sense. Sure, I'd hung things on the wall—framed photographs that Best Girlfriend, who had made a whole career out of being something of a camera buff, had taken. And of course there was furniture, mostly of the looks-like-Domain-but-
bought-at-a-shop-cheaper-than-Domain variety. I'd even painted: yellow in the tiny kitchen, leaf in the bathroom, heather in the dining and living rooms, periwinkle in the master bedroom. Every now and then I bought a few plants; but, with my black thumb, none of them ever survived for very long. So, despite my meager efforts, it still all had the look of a way station, a place to provide temporary shelter until I found where I was really meant to be.

For a week I remained there, alone in my temporary shelter, contemplating my current pain and the past life I had lived.

There are really no words to describe the physical pain of chicken pox at thirty-nine. I'd certainly experienced my own fair share of pain in my life—the usual sprains and broken bones brought on by a life lived both athletically and carelessly. (Okay, I'm a klutz.) And I'd even had a fair amount of dental work done without benefit of Novocaine. (I hate needles.) But nothing had prepared me for this. (Nothing.)

I wondered, through my pain, if this was what it had been like for Sarah, the girl who'd given me the chicken pox. Had she been this miserable? A part of me, the part that was still irrationally mad at her for giving the disease to me—when really it was her mother I should be mad at, for letting her out of the house!—was glad in a vengeful way. But then I remembered what Dr. Berg had said about it being much harder the older you are and I was suddenly glad to realize Sarah hadn't suffered as much. After all, it wasn't her fault she'd been out and about,
it was her mother's.

For the first three days, my fever raged at 103. And, as the pocks spread downward from my face and chest, eventually covering my entire body—even places that it would be indelicate of me to mention, but damn!—it became as though
a thousand painful bonfires were roaring beneath my skin. When awake, I tried to obey Dr. Berg, tried not to scratch; but whenever I would actually fall asleep, I'd wake to find that I'd been involuntarily scratching while unconscious. I took the oatmeal baths as recommended—gross!—but they were just a stopgap measure, only serving to relieve the pain for the two twenty-minute periods a day I was submerged in the tub.

Of course, my mother offered to come over and take care of me.

“Scarlett, you shouldn't be alone!”

“Um, really, that's okay, Mom.” Please don't come, pleasedontcome,
pleasedontcome,
I fervently prayed. The last thing I needed was for her to walk in the door and, first thing, tell me how awful I looked.

As if I didn't already know.

Each morning, as the illness progressed, I rose, dragged myself to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. And then really-really wished I could avoid looking in the mirror. For, each day, I looked less and less like the me I'd always known. What had started out as a few pinkish-red spots had turned into an angry eruption, the spots multiplying and taking on the appearance of a plague until I no longer recognized myself. I didn't know this woman. This woman was ugly.

Again, I found myself wondering what it had been like for Sarah, encountering an ugly version of herself in the looking glass. True, Dr. Berg said kids didn't get it as bad, but I was sure he was referring to the pain and not the pocks. Surely, the quantity of pocks would still be great. Had Sarah felt as horrified at her image as I felt at mine now? Had she been scared, or at least reluctant, to have her friends see her?
Why, when I had first seen her, I'd been sure her problem was prepubescent acne and I'd pitied her.

I pitied me now.

What, I began to wonder, would life be like if I always looked like this? What if this was the face that the world saw all the time?

As Pam had pointed out, and as I well knew, I'd never had any problem attracting men, being that literature-defying rarest of birds: an attractive librarian with a good sex life. Okay, maybe I'd never managed to marry any of those men but I'd never had trouble attracting them. I'd always assumed, unlike what Pam implied, that men were attracted to me because, well, I was just so damned much fun to be with.

I was the girl that, never mind men needing excuses to justify playing poker, played poker with.

I was the girl at the ball game, always rooting for the right team.

I was the girl who was nice.

I was the girl who was fun.

You're probably wondering right now, “If she's so godawful wonderful, so
nice,
then why hasn't anyone asked her to marry them yet?”

Actually, I had been asked, more than once, but that's not the point here. Because this isn't so much a “Why isn't she married yet?” story, as it is a “Why doesn't she seem to care that she isn't married yet?” story.

I guess I don't want things just because everyone else has them.

I guess I don't want to settle.

I guess I've just been—gasp!—waiting for the right man.

Best Girlfriend always maintained that not only am I too nice, but that I also scare men.

“
I
scare men?”

“Of course you scare them, Scarlett. Men are more terrified of a woman who seemingly
isn't
looking for something than they are of a woman who obviously
is.
”

“You mean they worry about what I might have up my sleeve?”

“Oh, who the hell knows why they think like they do?
They're men!
”

“So then why do they keep asking me out, if they're so scared?”

“Because they're men!”

“You're kind of working that angle both ways, aren't you?”

“Not really. They ask you out because you're bright and you're beautiful and you're funny and you're available. They may be men, but they're not totally stupid.”

“But you think they're all scared of me?”

“Yup.”

Nice and scary; scary and nice—what a combination.

But, I wondered now, how many men would ask me out if this face and body—this
Put-Me-in-the-Zoo
face and body—was always the first thing they saw upon meeting me?

Naturally, my local friends—Pam, T.B. and Delta—all of whom had been smart enough to have chicken pox when they were kids, offered to come over, to bring me things, to keep me company.

But I declined.

At first, I declined because the pain was too intense; it was all I could think about. But as the third day of confinement turned into the fourth, and the pain began to abate somewhat—and even thoughts of Sarah, as both agent of and imagined companion in my misery, had receded—I realized
that I just really did not want the world to see me this way. If it meant eating packets of ramen noodles three meals a day, which was pretty much all that was left in the house, so be it. I had on my giant T-shirt from my UCONN days—big enough that it barely touched any skin when I was standing—and I had my remote control for the TV. I ask you, what else did I need?

Of course, being a librarian, having spent my entire life in books really, I wasn't much for TV. But when you get that sick…and then you get that depressed…it's a whole new ball game.

Pam, T.B. and Delta always spent part of the time we were all together rehashing whatever the hot programs were on TV. For three attorneys, they sure watched a lot of what I thought of as junky TV. Didn't anyone else read anymore? And they particularly loved reality shows. They'd been following
Real World
ever since it was launched and were constantly mentioning shows with words like
temptation
and
fear
in the titles. Fear and desire seemed to be the great motivating factors of these programs; love and death lay behind everything.

I clicked through the channels, clicking past comedies (not funny enough), dramas (I didn't have the concentration) and political talk shows (who cared what was going on with the world? I was sick!).

Click, click, click.

I thought about looking for a legal show. I'd always liked legal shows, especially when I was younger. It seemed like, back then, the shows were reinventing the justice system so that things were as they
ought
to be, rather than how they were: common sense prevailed over racism and last-minute stays of execution were granted just in time. But lately I'd
noticed TV had grown more cynical, and the legal shows, rather than restoring order to the universe, portrayed a hellishly topsy-turvy world in which the guilty always walked on a technicality and the innocent fried.

Click, click, click.

Then, all of a sudden, my screen was filled with…plastic surgery?

But I was fascinated. For a whole hour I watched as three people, none of whom I thought ugly but I was sure the world had called each just that at one point or another, were nipped, tucked, reconstructed, cut and dyed—you name it—until they'd each undergone an
Extreme Makeover,
intended to change their lives forever.

Well, they certainly looked better.

If not exactly swans now, they no longer had the residue of facial or body features that had no doubt earned them all kinds of insults as children and probably even as adults. At the end of the show, they were all dressed in great clothes—they'd received wardrobe makeovers, too—and were now ready to embark on their new lives.

I wondered, sitting there with my spots, which had finally stopped spreading and were finally starting to ease up a bit in terms of the anger of their appearance, if their lives would really be changed. I mean, they had to change, right? But would those changes all be good changes?

Reality shows hadn't been around for that long and I began to wonder if anyone had done any kind of follow-up studies on this sort of thing yet.
Were
people really happy afterward? I knew that they'd done many studies with lottery winners, all showing that, in general, becoming wealthy did not make people's lives better; in fact, it often made their lives worse.

Well,
I sighed, clicking off the TV and praying for sleep, not to mention praying that I'd wake to a face more recognizable than the one I'd wakened to that morning,
being one of life's sort-of swans had not made my life better, not if the definition of
better
was some kind of lasting romantic love….

A
s I said, one of the things about being home sick for an extended period of time is that it gives you the chance to ponder the little things in life, like, say, how I had come to be thirty-nine and was still seriously unattached. After all, even if I wasn't overly concerned with getting married, it still didn't mean I wanted to be alone forever.

Maybe, I was beginning to think, it had been my career choices?

If you want to meet good-looking men, don't expect to do it in a library or a bookstore. Trust me on this: it only happens in movies, that two cinematically perfect human beings fall in love over the dusty stacks while doing research on the mating rites of the South African tree frog or bump lattes at the local chain. Real life in a library looks more like this:

Regard Mr. Weinerman, if you will, please (I know you might not want to, but you kind of have to, since this is my
story): Mr. Weinerman is your prototypical library patron. He is here every day. He sits at the same chair at the same table every day. He sits there and he reads all day long—newspapers, magazines, books—and he only moves to either (a) go outside to smoke a cigarette; (b) go to the bathroom for twenty minutes at a clip (you can hear him eating his lunch and snacks in there, among other things you can hear that you'd rather you couldn't [the acoustics in this building
suck
]); (c) read things on his favorite computer terminal (he intimidates other patrons into moving whenever he wants to sit there).

Mr. Weinerman is omnipresent in my library life. He is here waiting when we open in the morning, he is the last to leave before the staff at night, he has a complete nervous breakdown if we have to close because of a severe snowstorm or power outage. He is omnipresent and he is perhaps the single most physically hideous human being that I have ever set eyes on in my life.

Not that looks matter, mind you, but does he have to take every poor building block that he started out with in life and then make what looks like a
conscious effort
to exaggerate every hideous feature to its worst extreme?

He is just so…
rubbery
is really the only word for it. He is the kind of person that when asked a question that necessitates your taking a library material and passing it on to him, you dread that his hand might glance against yours and that you would actually be forced into social contact with that very antisocial-looking hand, that hand that looks like it only ever gets social with its owner, and in places I didn't like to think about.

Granted, every library patron didn't look like Mr. Weinerman, but the whole lot were a far cry from anything half-
way good, and believe me: every library does have its Mr. Weinerman.

And bookstores are the same. I know that for a fact, because I worked in one before I got my MLS. The sighting of a decent-looking man in a bookstore is so rare that the few times one passed through, I was dumbstruck. Oh, sure, I saw plenty of great-looking men whenever I went to the bar or the beach or even Super Stop & Shop, but almost never in the bookstore. When it did happen, it made me feel like I was the lone gas station attendant at the only stop within a hundred-mile radius in Nebraska on a hot July day when there comes Brendan Fraser pulling up in a Jag, looking for a full tank of octane, a Vanilla Coke and a tube of Rolos. Really, it felt exactly like that.

Now, then: If you ask me why you never see good-looking guys in these places, what do you think I'll say—that hunks don't read? That they're too stupid? That they'd rather watch it on the video? That they're too busy getting fucked?

Nah.

I think the real reason is that they all have good-looking girlfriends, that they have these good-looking girlfriends fully trained in what their own tastes in reading material are (as well as exactly how they like their blow jobs, standing or sitting or on the hood of a Jag in the middle of the Nebraska desert while drinking a Vanilla Coke), and they send their girlfriend minions out to do their book-shopping for them, so that they don't have to undergo the bug-under-the-microscope discomfort of having the desperate women working in the libraries/bookstores across the land ogle them.

Just so you know: You do see an awful lot of good-looking women in libraries/bookstores.

Too bad I'd never been interested in women
in that way.

Over the years, when people asked me why I was a librarian, they always said I should be a writer instead—not because I had any talent that anyone knew of, but because I loved books so much. And I'd tried. In secret. Oh, how I'd tried. But I was just no good at it. Like a music lover with no ear, I was doomed to listen and never play.