A Little Change of Face (6 page)

I
believed in three things, beliefs I formed not while reading a book, but rather—gasp!—while watching a movie.

The movie, the name of which I no longer remember, had one character spouting off about Greeks, obituaries and passion, something along the lines of when a Greek man dies, his obituary isn't about what he's
done,
but about whether or not he had
passion.

This is a wonderfully, wildly romantic notion of funerary rites that I have no way of proving or disproving, not having ever been to Greece or being much of an expert on Greek culture or even worldwide obituary practices in general.

“But,” you'll say, raising your finger in the air as you make your indisputable winning point, “you
are
a librarian.”

“True,” I will concede.

“Surely,” you'll go on, “you of all people should be able to place your finger on such information within moments. I mean,” you reiterate, “hel-
lo!
You
are
a
librarian.
”

To which I'll finally have to respond, grumpily, “Fine. So maybe I don't want to know.”

And it's true. I
don't
want to know if that stupid thing about Greeks/obituaries/passion I got from that stupid movie is true or not, particularly if it's not true. And, even if it seems unlikely that a culture foolish enough to center their dietary menu around things like lamb and massive olives should come up with such a vast improvement on our distillation of a person's entire life down into one short, fairly boring paragraph (plus inclusions about where to send flowers) by cutting right to the only thing that matters—whether a human being who lived had lived with
passion
—it seems equally likely that that same culture that built the Parthenon and that treats flying tableware as objects of joyful expression could have indeed accomplished such a thing.

Having admitted that I got the inspiration for my own life philosophy from a movie, here are the three things that I have chosen to stake my passionate claim on:

1. books

2. friendship

3. men.

The order changes from day to day; so sue me.

You probably can readily understand the books and friendship parts, at least why those things would matter to me so much, given what you already know about me. But here is where I take confession one step further. Here is where I tell you something about category three that you might not agree with, having perhaps grown too cynical.

I believe…I believe…I believe…

“Oh, God, Scarlett! Would you just fucking say it?”

Please don't ask where that voice just came from.

Fine. Here goes.

I believe, not only in being passionate about men in general—which I am, always have been, can't see myself ever not being—but I further believe that while you can go through an incredible number of men in a lifetime, and that there's nothing wrong in doing so, and it can even be an interesting way to live, and you can love them all, and you can even love two at once, I believe, really believe, that for each person there is only ever one true love, and that if you fail to find that love, then at the end of your life the Greeks will eulogize you by saying, “Yes, Scarlett did some things passionately, perhaps, but she did not have
passion.
” I also believe if you give up too soon, if you settle down and marry someone before locating that one true love, then that's exactly what you're doing: settling.

One true love.

One—in my case—man.

Only one.

And I got all this—fucking A, as we librarians are known to say—from some stupid movie.

T
he only great thing about owning a condo in Danbury is that you get the use of a huge swimming pool, at least at my condo complex. And the view's not bad. And it's nice not to have to worry about the lawn. And the neighbors who aren't psychotic are mostly okay. But other than that, I mean, come
on,
it's not like living in the Waldorf-Astoria or something.

But the pool certainly is a plus. At least, the way Pam and Delta and T.B. saw things, it was. And they put their money where their mouths were by showing up on my doorstep every Sunday morning between Memorial Day and Labor Day, like it or not.

Truth to tell, I suppose I did like it, most of the time. For one thing, it gave me a built-in excuse not to cope with my mother until much later in the day, and for another, it wasn't like I was seeing anybody special where it might make the disruption caused by three women showing up
with a ridiculous quantity of paraphernalia on a Sunday morning after having had wild sex all of Saturday night, well, disruptive.

And they
did
always arrive with a ridiculous quantity of paraphernalia: the more normal items were sunblock, sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats, books, magazines, flip-flops. The less normal included yet more bottles of sunblock, only these had been emptied and rinsed thoroughly, making way for vodka apple martinis (Delta), since the condo rules were no consumables except for water by the pool. It was Delta's theory that the Absolut-filled brown bottles of Tropical Sun or Deep Hawaiian were less conspicuous than see-through water bottles. I failed to see the reasoning for this, but in our group, I was in the minority.

Yes, I know it's not very mature of us, still drinking so much as we age. What can I say? We were working on being Northern belles, except for Delta, who really was a Southern belle. Plus, whenever we went out, we appointed a designated driver—it doesn't do for attorneys to rack up DUIs—and whenever we drank at my pool, everyone stayed put afterward until they were sober enough to drive again.

The other less-normal items for poolside use consisted of whatever new outfits had been purchased in the interim week (Pam), the runway show from cabana to diving board commencing only when enough Absolut tanners had been quaffed; and four copies of the Sunday edition of the
New York Times
(T.B.), which might sound like intellectual over-kill, but which T.B. brought every week in the hopes of getting us to compete in a four-way contest to see who could finish the puzzle in the magazine section the quickest. I was the only one who was ever willing to do this with her, but not because I felt the need to compete; it was more like that
it was nice to enjoy what was traditionally a solo activity for me with company.

Best Girlfriend and I used to do the crossword together. And, even though she was a pencil-with-eraser person while I was strictly pen, sharing just one puzzle between us each day somehow worked.

“You think they think we don't know by now who ‘architect Saarinen' is?” T.B. asked, not bothering to look up from her puzzle as she filled in the blanks.

“They must think we're stupid,” I answered, filling in the same blanks on my own puzzle.

Truth to tell, of the three, T.B. would have made the best Default Best Friend—hell, if the job wasn't already filled until death us do part, she would have made a fine Best Girlfriend—but Pam had been so determined. Plus, T.B. was the only one of us four who was getting laid regularly by the same guy, and she wasn't about to cut into nooky time just to go hold my hand while we went to the mall to laugh at those stupid hip-huggers.

“Child, you white folks are funny the way y'all'll buy something just 'cause that skinny-assed Britney Spears is wearing it. You don't see black folks doing anything so
dumb.
”

T.B. was one of them black folks. And she and I loved to slip into “girlfriend” mode.

“No, that's right, girlfriend,” I said, “ya'll black folks got your own dumb shit going on.”

“We black folks like to do this just to confuse y'all,” T.B. was fond of saying, “keep you on your toes, make you think we're going to steal your silverware—something fun like that.”

“Gee, thanks, but you're a fun girl,” I was fond of saying in return.

And then T.B. would laugh that rich beautiful laugh that I loved so well, the one that was like a swirling whirlpool made up of chocolate and which my skinny-assed Britney Spears self could never duplicate, not in a million years.

Now that you know just about everything else about T.B. worth knowing—that she was nice, smart and a
Times
-toting intellectual—you're probably wondering how she came by the name of T.B. Had someone in her family been hooked up to an iron lung machine a few generations back? Was it perhaps short for “Too Bad,” as in “it's too bad for you, but I've already got someone else I'm doing regular-like”? No, it was neither as tragic as the former nor as rude as the latter.

T.B., quite simply, stood for Token Black.

When I'd first been introduced to her by Pam, I'd returned her warm handshake, responding, “T.B.? Oh, right. If my name was Terebinthia Butterworth, I suppose I'd just go by my initials, too.”

“That's not what T.B.'s for.”

“No?”

“It's for Token Black.”

Since we were at a party at Pam's—it was amazing how many big parties Pam threw, given how few people she liked and how few liked her—where the current population consisted of approximately twenty-nine white men and women plus
her,
it wasn't all that difficult to guess where she might be going with this.

“Under the present circumstances, I can see what you mean.”

“No, you can't.”

“Excuse me?”

“You may
think
you see what I mean—Pam told me all about those liberal tendencies of yours—but you don't.”

I know it was wrong of me to take offense at someone else's accurate assessment of the limitations on my experience of such things, but—what can I say?—I was offended anyway.

I puffed up: “Well, actually…” And I proceeded to tell her about my preteen best girlfriend, the one who came before Best Girlfriend, the one who was black, and about how once her sister had taken us and a carload of her friends—nine of us total, only one other white—to see a movie on the Fairfield/Bridgeport line, and how the movie theater was an every-seat-taken affair and the movie was a comedy and the only two whites in the whole theater were me and that other girl, and how downright
spooked
I'd felt when I'd been forced to recognize the truth: that some of the things we thought were funny were not perceived by those around us that way, at all, and that some of the things the majority found funny made me feel just a little intimidated. “So, you see—”

T.B. had the chutzpah to yawn in my face without making any real attempt to cover her mouth. “Oh, yeah, right,” she said, when she'd yawned long enough to stop my self-conscious flow of words. “Y'all had one minority experience and now you know what it's all about.”

“I wasn't saying that. What I was saying—”

“Look. Try taking your one lousy little experience and multiplying it by just about every day of your life. I didn't go to no
movie
once and have that happen. I
am
the movies, baby, and TV, too.” T.B. shifted into street talk.

“Gee, you don't look like a movie.”

“Well, I is. I's the judge and the pediatrician and the prosecutor and—”

“Well—” I stopped her “—you
is
actually the prosecutor.”

She started to smile at me, and then made herself stop.

“I's the local color, I's the next-door neighbor, I's the best friend who gets killed so the star can get angry—” dramatic pause “—I's
expendable.
”

“Naw,” I said.

“Naw?”

“Ain't I sayin' it right?”

“Naw.”

I shrugged. Well,
I
couldn't hear any difference between us.

“If I ain't expendable, then what am I then?”

“You's the glue. Without you, they ain't no story.”

“No shit?”

“Naw shit.”

“If you stop imitatin' me—” she smiled “—I'll let you be my friend.”

“If you forgive me when I can't help myself or I just do it, anyway, I'll take you up on it.”

“Well, I guess we'll just have to wait 'n' see how often you do it.”

“Hey,” I said, serious again and feeling foolish, but more serious about anything than I'd felt in years maybe. “I'm sorry.”

And I could tell I didn't really need to explain, but she pressed me, anyway, her voice soft. “For what, baby?”

“For everything I had no part in creating, for everything I'll never change.”

Still soft: “Me too, baby.” Then much brighter: “But you know what?”

I shook my head.

“At least it'll give you and I something other than the usual ‘being-a-woman-these-days-sucks-because-the-hemlines-are-too-high' bullshit to talk about.”

“True.”

“Now, then. See her? See that one over there?” And she pointed her finger at the woman I would later come to learn was Delta from the Delta.

“You mean the one the men all seem to notice a lot?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You mean the one with the hair teased so high it practically touches the ceiling?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“The one with the too-tight capris and the fuchsia chiffon scarf and the really big…”

“…acres of Tara? Mmm-hmm. That's be her.”

“What about her?”

“She really talks like this.”

“For real?”

“Naw shit.”

“And ya know somethin' else?”

“What?”

“I actually
like
her.”

“Naw shit?”

“Naw shit, baby.”

 

And they
were
always disruptive.

Given that this was the first Sunday since getting the chicken pox that I'd been well enough to have them over for a swim, if anything, they were
more
disruptive than usual.

It's always struck me as funny how minigroups of like-situated people tend to cluster together. One of my male neighbors hadn't married until age thirty-four. Previously, he'd had a group of friends who were all of similar age, all unmarried. Then, when he fell, they fell, too. For the first year or two afterward, he'd still laugh about people he knew
from work who had kids, their lives all occupied with Little League and ballet recitals. But then his wife had gotten pregnant and, like a row of dominoes redux, all his friends had followed suit.

Our minigroup's unifying theme was that we were all currently unmarried. T.B. had been married once and was still on good terms with her ex, Al, whom she even still dated occasionally, and who was in fact the person I'd been referring to earlier when I said she'd been getting laid regularly by the same guy. Delta had been married and divorced a whopping three times already, producing two bundles of mixed joy out of her efforts. Pam, like me, had never even said “I do” once.

I sat there in my lounge chair, a white beach robe covering my conservative olive tank suit. A sprinkling of faded pocks still marred my face and chest. Dr. Berg swore that they'd disappear completely in time, but I had my doubts. Unused to being blemished, I felt disfigured by the two spots that remained on my face, both on the left side, one just under my cheekbone, the other closer down to my chin. And my chest! Who would have thought that I, who had been previously bugged by all the attention the world paid to my unearned breasts, would be so bothered by having this smattering of flat, pale pinkish-red spots mar the previously creamy terrain? Well, even I was human.

As I sat there, I listened to my minigroup do the postmortem on their respective Saturday nights. T.B. had gone out with Ex-Al again, this time to a movie she'd badly wanted to see. To me this was a good sign of his earnest intent, since whenever a man consents to see a chick flick rather than a dick flick it means he cares enough to let his woman think Colin Firth is hotter than he is.

T.B. looked gorgeous in a strapless turquoise swimsuit, her long hair done in cornrows that she'd wrapped together in a matching turquoise scrunchie. I envied her the hairstyle (but knew I'd look like an idiot if I ever tried to imitate it).

“Are y'all possibly going to get back together again?” Delta voiced for all of us, readjusting her ample bosom with one hand to the chest of her ill-advised fuchsia two-piece suit as she knocked back a surreptitious mojito from her suntan-lotion bottle with her other. While I'd been ill, and with no pool to go to, mojitos had apparently taken my friends by storm.

“Naw,” said T.B. “I don't think so. It's more like having a man who has the same tastes and can be depended upon for good sex whenever the need arises.”

That didn't sound like such a bad arrangement. It'd be convenient, anyway.

Delta had had one of her three ex-mothers-in-law stay with her gruesome twosome while she and Pam had spent the evening at Chalk Is Cheap, the pool hall/bar we usually frequented when we went out together.

“Was it fun?” I asked wistfully, wishing I'd been out with them rather than spending the night at home with reality television, feeling sorry for myself.

“Naw,” said Delta, “it wasn't so great. A pair of suits came in who Pam and I thought might turn out to be possibilities—”

“But then they turned out to be gay,” Pam finished. Pam's choice of a sedate one-piece black swimsuit that could not begin to camouflage a world of sin indicated that she was still depressed from the night before. If she'd scored, she'd have been wearing the white one, in hopes of a wedding to come.