A Little Change of Face (17 page)

I hadn't felt this rattled, this insecure, this completely and totally first-date heebie-jeebie weird since…since…I'd
never
felt this way!

By the time the credits rolled, I honestly couldn't have said if I'd been watching Sean Penn or Elmer Fudd.

Saul looked like he'd enjoyed himself, so I said, “Wow, powerful stuff,” hoping I'd hit the mark. For good measure, I added, “I really liked the director's use of the color blue,” since the one lasting impression I did have was that the film had had a lot of blue in it.

He looked at me strangely, then smiled. “Would you like to go get a coffee and some dessert?”

I wasn't much of a coffee drinker, except for maybe once or twice a year; I couldn't imagine he was still hungry after downing that whole thing of popcorn; and I certainly didn't need more dessert to go on top of the M&M dessert I'd just had, but I was grateful he wanted to extend the evening. I mean, sure, I was anxious for our first kiss to take place—oh, how I wanted him to kiss me!—but we hadn't really done any talking yet, other than about my decorating skills, who was going to pay, what we were going to eat and the director's use of blue. Surely, he was right: we should do some more talking before we got to the kissing.

As Saul pulled his blue Lexus into a spot out front of Mister Caffeine, I experienced an immediate sense of nervousness, half expecting to find Steve Holt in there as Saul held the door, all covered with Steve's Halloween painting.

But there was no Steve inside, just other after-movie people and a half-dozen teenagers, waiting to be old enough to go to a proper bar on Saturday night rather than a coffee bar.

Remembering the rule that states that even if you're not hungry or thirsty, if your date is interested in eating and drinking you must engage in same, because otherwise you look weirdly ascetic or like a potential eating disorder and most men really don't want a girl who is no fun or who they have to visit in the hospital while she's being force-fed through an IV, I ordered a small black decaf and a slice of mudcake I could fork around my plate. He ordered a large mocha-something and apple pie, which seemed like a strange combo to me, but what did I care? He was going to be kissing me soon. First dates always ended in kisses at the very least. I'd never had one that hadn't.

Perhaps, feeling overly enthusiastic and anxious about the kissing yet to come, I blurted out, “I can't remember the last time I was on a first date that involved going to see a movie! I was probably fifteen the last time—”

Something about the way he dropped his pie fork cut me off mid-anecdote.

He reddened slightly, looking unsure about what to say. Then: “You thought this was a
date?
”

“Well, I…” I became flustered, no doubt reddening some myself.

“When I called you up and asked you what you were doing tonight, you assumed I was asking you out on a
date?
”

“Yes, well, that usually is the way that…”

“I'm sorry, Lettie,” he said, looking more embarrassed now for me than for himself as he covered my hand gently with one of his beautiful hands. “This isn't a date.”

“Oh.”

“It's just that…”

“Just that what?”

“When I met you at Chalk Is Cheap, you just seemed so lonely, like you could use a friend.”

“Oh, I see. You just had a free night and figured you would, oh, I don't know, do me a favor.”

“Don't make it sound like that. It's not like that at all.” He paused, perhaps looking for the right words to explain what it
was
like. “I like you. I really do. And everyone can use friends. Even me. I just thought we could be friends, you know, do things together occasionally. You seem like the kind of woman who'd make a great friend.”

It's hard to remove your hand from someone else's without appearing either dismissive or wounded, but I decided to risk giving both of those impressions as I disengaged my hand from his.

“That's okay.” I forced a good-natured laugh. “Did you think I was serious before about that first-date stuff? Well, I wasn't. I was just joking around, that's all.”

And, in order to salvage my pride, I proceeded to spend the next hour being the best sport I could be. I encouraged him to talk about himself, about his work, his family, his favorite sports teams, smiling at everything he said, all the while thinking on the inside,
When the evening's over, when he takes me home, he's not going to kiss me. Of all the things that might happen tonight—a fender bender, a falling star landing at my feet—the one thing I know for sure that is not going to happen is that he is not going to kiss me.

While we were talking, I could see he genuinely did like me. Well, what wasn't to like? I was a good listener and I made him laugh. It seemed a shame, really, the idea of a world in which someone like him would never kiss someone like me.

When the time came to leave a tip for the pie he'd eaten
and the cake I had not, I tossed a generous twenty-five percent on the table. When he tried to stop me, I said, “No way. Friends share expenses.” I even made myself smile when I said it.

As he dropped me off in front of my house a few minutes later, I looked for a falling star, didn't see any. A good sport to the end, I asked, “Are you busy for Halloween?”

“No,” he said, a bit surprised. “Why?”

“Because I'm having a little party here that night and I thought you'd like to come. You know, as just friends.”

“Thanks for asking me,” he said. “I'd like that. I haven't dressed up for Halloween in years.”

E
ver since her first visit to see me at Bethel Library, Sarah had taken to stopping by regularly when she got off school or sometimes on weekends, just to chat. When she came in the afternoons, she even got along with Pat—not an easy thing. But Sarah was a nice girl (despite the fact that she'd given me the chicken pox) and impossible not to like. She'd even become one of the library's volunteers, making sure the alphabetization of the books remained an exact science and not an approximate art, to justify to Roland the inordinate amount of time she spent there with me.

I'd promised her, on her first visit, that I'd help her find a way to get around the problem of her changing body and her mother's reluctance to let her take appropriate measures, but as the Halloween deadline drew near I still hadn't done anything. Now that Saul had accepted the invitation to my party, however, the thought came to me that it was now do or die.

But what to do, what to do…?

Well, I was a research librarian by trade, wasn't I, even if a former one? Surely, I could figure out
something
.

While Pat was on break and Sarah was off making sure Ross Thomas never got ahead of D. M. Thomas again, I went into the library's computer system, looked for patron information on Nancy Davis in Danbury.

There she was.

Feeling like I was doing something wrong, I looked around me for witnesses, saw only one patron looking at the video racks and picked up the phone, punching in the Davis phone number.

Sarah's mother picked up on the second ring.

“Ms. Davis, you probably don't remember me. This is Lettie Shaw. We met when—”

“Of course I remember you,” she said. “You're the librarian, the woman Sarah told me she's been working for over at Bethel Library.”

“Well, she doesn't exactly work for me…”

“Oh, no? That's not what she says. She loves it there, by the way.”

“Well, yes, libraries can be great places.”

“She says she's become invaluable to you.”

What to say to that? The woman was probably jealous I was usurping her place with her daughter or something; I knew my mother would have been.

I looked up at the ceiling. “Yes, well…”

“Hey,” she said, “don't get me wrong. I think it's great.”

“You do?”

“Sure, if not for you, she'd probably be hanging out at the mall, getting into all sorts of trouble, buying inappropriate clothes like all her friends.”

“Funny you should say that…Ms. Davis, would it be all right if I took Sarah shopping?”

“Shopping?”

I explained to her, as delicately as I could, about the Sadie Hawkins dance and Jeff Polanski, hairy legs and no bra, Monkey and Jiggles.

“They call her Monkey and…Jiggles?” she asked when I was done. I could almost see her wince through the phone.

“I'm afraid so.”

I could hear her thinking now.

“And you say you'll take her to get whatever she needs, so that nobody calls her Monkey or Jiggles anymore?”

“Yes,” I said, letting out a big breath I didn't know I'd been holding. “Everything.”

“But no push-up bras,” she warned, “no bikini waxes.”

“I promise,” I swore.

“How much do you think this will cost me?” she asked.

“Never mind that,” I said. “It's my treat.”

“Gee,” she asked, “if you take her to get the things she wants, do you think this Jeff Polanski will say yes to her invitation?”

“Who knows?” I said.

“Oh, lordy, lordy,” she said, “her dad'll probably kill us all.”

 

As soon as the clock ticked five-thirty, Sarah and I locked the doors on the library and hit the shops. Rather than the mall, I planned to take her to some of the boutiquey places that lined Greenwood Avenue. It being Thursday night, many were open late.

In a lingerie shop called Underthingies, we had her fitted for a bra. I could tell she was uncomfortable with the saleslady measuring her, just like I'd always been uncom
fortable whenever my mother had yelled, “Foundations? Foundations? Do you sell foundations for my daughter here?” But we laughed through it, and in the end bought her a couple of pretty snow-white bras with tiny satin flowers at the cleavage. They weren't exactly Victoria's Secret Naughty Collection, but they were a far cry from the trainers my mother had bought me and would hopefully put an end to Jiggles.

Then I took her to the Bethel Underground and bought her something funky to wear over her new bra: a long-sleeved, eerily greenish-yellow T-shirt with an image of Paris on it that had opaque red sleeves, and
almost
low-slung black jeans that I thought were icky but knew from what I saw teenage girls in the library wear, her friends would envy.

Then I realized something. “Hey,” I said, “isn't this Sadie Hawkins dance supposed to be on Halloween? Shouldn't we be getting you some kind of costume instead?”

“Nah,” she said, “they only hold it on Halloween because they think Halloween is bad for kids. My school doesn't believe in Halloween.”

“So they think it's better to just have a dance where the girls ask the boys and everyone tries to make out when the chaperones aren't looking?” I asked, remembering my own young days.

She rolled her eyes at me. “I guess.” Every now and then, I'm sure I was just another stupid adult to her.

We hopped into English Drug and picked up a razor for later—we were going to do the deed at my place—before heading over to Snips & Moans. I hoped Ms. Davis wasn't going to mind, but I'd arranged for Helen to do something about that old-fashioned pageboy. It just had to go.

Forty-five minutes later, we were on the way to my place,
a very young Audrey Hepburn at my side. Without all that hair weighing her down, it was possible now to see Sarah's gamine features. I couldn't help but think, too, that her new haircut looked kind of like my new haircut, only hers didn't look ragged, as if she'd done it all by herself with a pair of tiny gold scissors.

Back at my place, we squeezed into the tiny bathroom off my bedroom upstairs.

“So, how do you use one of these things?” Sarah asked, studying the pink plastic razor as though it might be a tiny alien.

I shrugged. “You just scrape it along your legs.”

She looked at me doubtfully.

“Why don't I just leave you alone?” I offered, inching out the door. I mean, I liked Sarah, but I didn't necessarily want to watch her shave.

“Ouch!” I heard a minute later.

“What?” I opened the door.

On Sarah's legs were three tiny drops of blood.

“Are you really sure I'm supposed to dry-shave, Lettie?” she asked, baleful and accusing at the same time. “Isn't there a reason they invented shaving cream?”

“Sorry.” I winced. What did I know? When my mother had finally grown tired of my own complaints at being called Monkey, she'd tossed me in the bathroom by myself with a similarly Pepto-colored razor. Of course I cut myself a lot at first. But, over the course of the intervening thirty-plus years, I'd managed to learn how to do it without drawing blood every single time. “Maybe if you used soap and water?” I winced again.

Another fifteen minutes, some soap and water, and a few tiny Band-Aids later, found us on my couch, sharing a tub
of Ready-to-Spread Frosting with two spoons. They'd only had chocolate the last time I'd gone shopping, which had started to taste more plasticy the past few years, but what the heck.

“Gee,” said Sarah, “do you think Jeff Polanski will say yes?”

All of a sudden, I couldn't believe what I'd let myself become a part of. I'd encouraged Sarah to think that if she made just a few cosmetic changes, she'd get what she wanted; as if those cosmetic changes were the most important thing in the world and not the girl underneath. But she looked so hopeful….

“If he doesn't,” I said, “then he's an idiot.”

I
t was a pretty poor excuse for a Halloween party.

Unable on such short notice to get together much of a crowd, we were going to be eight in number. Pam, Delta, T.B. and Ex-Al were all coming, plus my mother. Hey, it was a holiday; my mother had always insisted that all holidays be spent with family—she even made me come for Easter every year, even though it was not our holiday and we traditionally ate meatless lasagna rather than lamb or ham—and I hated the thought of her being alone. I'd put up an open invitation on one of the cabinets in the staff room at Bethel Library, but the only one to RSVP with a “yes” had been sour Pat, which was okay with me, since I'd been worried that Kelly might say “yes” and there was no way I could disinclude just one person from the staff. When Kelly told me she couldn't come “—I always like to stay home and hand out candy by myself on Halloween—” she'd added, “But I really hope you and I can have lunch
together someday soon, Lettie. I think we could be real friends.”

As if.

Oh, and Saul Waters, the man who only wanted to be my friend, was coming, too. And me, of course.

To make up in decorations what we didn't have in numbers, I'd added to the Halloween decorations Saul had seen on his previous visit. The living room was festooned in black-and-orange streamers and a gazillion pumpkins of all sizes, each painstakingly carved into jack-o'-lanterns with a different face—happy, sad, silly, scary and even one that looked astonishingly like a young David Letterman. I had enough different-size orange candles burning to qualify me as a psychopathic serial killer waiting to entrap my next victim, and I'd even lined the walk leading up to the front door with those little candle-in-paper-bags things. I can never remember what they're called. Something French. Papiers? Candliers? You'd think a woman who used to be a reference librarian would know such a thing. I'd always thought those things looked vaguely dangerous whenever I'd seen them at other people's houses. Weren't they some kind of fire hazard that should be against the law? But, I figured, if the fire department showed up, it was all to my good. After all, it seemed to me that women in stories were always finding their one true love in the shape of a hunky firefighter who'd caught them in the act of doing something truly stupid.

Not much of a cook, having inherited my mother's sucky-cook gene, I'd settled for a bunch of frozen mini-pizzas. Nobody really came to these kinds of parties to eat, right? Besides, the nice thing about having predictable friends was that I knew that even though I'd told them not
to bring anything, that I had the food situation covered, they would all bring something, knowing how lacking I was in any discernible cooking skills. And, just in case they disappointed me, I'd put together a kickass vodka punch that would make everyone quickly forget the lack of food. Feeling like Martha Stewart in her better days, I'd used orange food coloring to obtain a hue that looked like the pee of someone with a serious vitamin deficiency. The drink itself, though it looked preschool appropriate, was almost pure alcohol. For festivity's sake, I planned to serve it in little glass cups with curved handles that had black cats painted on them for good luck.

During my years in the condo, I'd grown used to having about two hundred kids troop up to my door over the course of each Halloween night. But a talk with one of my new Bethel neighbors, the only neighbor who'd ever really said hi yet, had revealed that it wasn't likely to be busy here. A lot of people took their kids to community celebrations instead, plus the street we lived on had only a few houses, set far apart. Just to be on the safe side, I'd called the party for 9:00 p.m., figuring that if there were any trick-or-treaters, the only ones who would still be out then would be of the thug variety, the teenagers without costumes who expect you to give them something
just because,
and that if I got any of those, it would be a good idea to have a group of people behind single ol' me.

An acquaintance who'd lived on Long Island in a similar setup to my Danbury condo had once told me about how, one year, she hadn't locked her door yet, only to come back downstairs to find a large teenager in army fatigues sitting at her dining-room table; apparently, he'd let himself in. This had impressed my acquaintance as being rather, um,
odd.
Freaking out internally, she'd called back upstairs to an imaginary husband, “Honey! We've got another trick-or-treater and we're all out of candy. Do you think maybe you could run out to the store and get some more?”

Upon hearing this, my acquaintance's uninvited guest rose to his feet and said, “Uh, that's okay. I'll catch you guys next year.”

My acquaintance had thought she'd been smooth, getting herself out of a potentially tricky situation where she could have turned out to be the treat, but I had thought,
What a screwball! What if the uninvited guest had said, “Sure, I'll wait while your husband goes to get my candy”?

Anyway, to set the mood for my own Halloween party, I'd put together a tape so that my guests would be treated to a constant loop of “The Monster Mash,” lots of Warren Zevon, and an old Hollies song, “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.” Even though I wasn't
long,
I was determined to be the
cool
woman in the black dress in the song. While I was dying to know what everyone else was going to dress up as, not wanting to reveal my own costume in advance, I'd made everybody swear not to reveal theirs until the night of the actual party. Growing up, I'd noticed a trend in the costume choices of boys and girls: a large percentage of girls wanted to be princesses, while a large percentage of boys wanted to be something scary. The whole Women Are From Disney, Men Are From The Black Lagoon thing confirmed my belief that females cared more about pleasing, while males wanted to intimidate. Of course, we were all adults now. But I still believed that a choice of Halloween costume said something about the person doing the choosing.

Ding-dong!

As I moved to answer the door, I spared a thought for Sarah, wondering how her Sadie Hawkins dance was going, if Jeff Polanski had said yes.

I would have bet any amount of money the first guest would be my mother, a woman for whom tardiness was the equivalent of adultery with your best friend's husband, but—surprise!—it was T.B. and Ex-Al.

T.B. looked positively soignée, decked out in a matching fuchsia belted top and pantsuit, circa midseventies, her hair poofed up in a mushroom shape with bangs that looked more like a black helmet than hair. Beside her, Ex-Al, bearing a plate of what looked like stuffed artichokes beneath the cling wrap—did I know my friends or what?—was dressed in a boring business suit, his black hair dusted with powder, his black face painted as close as he could get it to white.

“Um,” I said, taking the plate of good food, inviting them in, “y'all are supposed to be…?”

“Tom and Helen,” said T.B., like I was supposed to know.

“Who?”

“Tom and Helen,” she repeated, “the mixed marriage from
The Jeffersons.
”

“T.B. wanted to be Lenny Kravitz's mother,” said Ex-Al, referring to the rock star, “but neither of us knew what Lenny's father looked like, so this was the closest we could get.”

As I looked at how ridiculous Ex-Al looked, and all to please my friend, I wondered yet again why she had ever divorced this man.

“But never mind us,” T.B. said, taking in my own getup, “oh, is Pam gonna be pissed when she gets a load of you.”

Ding-dong!

Saved by my mother, something I never thought I'd be.

“Mom…um—”

“I'm a Jewish princess!” she said, thrusting a plate of chopped liver in my hands I knew would go back home with her, untouched, at evening's end.

She had a paste tiara on her head, her body wrapped in a blue-and-white tallis, toga-style.

“Isn't wearing that, um, like that…sacrilegious?”

“Sacrilegious, schmacrilegious,” she pooh-poohed me. “I always wanted to be a princess, but who in their right mind would want to be Cinderella? All those chores to do first. So what? I'll repent next Yom Kippur.” Then she looked at me, wagged her finger. “Pam's not going to like this.”

Ding-dong!

And there was Delta, obviously dressed as Little Bo Peep, with a hoop skirt that barely made it through my door for all the crinolines, her hair in loose curls, a shepherd's staff in one hand, a plate of chocolate cheesecake brownies in the other.

“I lost my sheep,” she said, “and damn am I glad! I got a sitter for Mush and Teenie. I'm going to leave them alone and not come home until I'm tired of wagging my tail behind me. But shit, Scarlett,” she said, in the midst of her astonishment messing up and using my old name, “Pam's gonna kill you.”

“I don't even know who Scarlett and Pam are,” said Pat from the library, coming up right behind Delta, “but I'll bet Pam will kill you, too.”

I tried to figure out what Pat was supposed to be, but she looked no different than she did every afternoon when I worked with her at the library: pleated slacks belted above a slight bulge, matching turtleneck tucked in, glasses in place, sour.

“I came as me,” she said, reading my expression. “What the hell kind of adults play dress-up on a kids' holiday?” She
looked at the brownies Delta was still holding. “Oh. Was I supposed to bring something?”

“Help yourself to some vodka punch,” I offered.

“Oh, is there vodka in here?” my mother asked, already halfway through her first glass. “I thought it was just juice.”

Ding-dong!

Saved by the bell one last time.

Pam.

Pam dressed as a giant pumpkin.

Angry Pam dressed as a giant pumpkin, staring at me with serious anger in her eyes.

There was going to be no saving me this time.

“You…
bitch!
” Pam seethed.

“You must be Pam,” said Pat, vodka glass in one hand, brownie in the other, shaking her hips to “Werewolves of London.”

I took Pam's green elbow—she was wearing a green turtleneck under the giant pumpkin costume—and led her through a tentative chorus of “Hey, Pam” to the kitchen.

“What seems to be the problem?” I asked, arms crossed beneath the generous helping of cleavage created by the long V in my long and, okay, tight black dress. I noticed that, unlike the others—well, except for Pat—Pam had arrived empty-handed, save for a bottle of pumpkin schnapps. I didn't even know anybody
made
pumpkin schnapps.

“You,” she spat, “you're the problem. By wearing that costume, you're breaking the rules.”

The costume in question involved the aforementioned dress, which had fringe on the ends of the bell sleeves and at the hemline, mile-high black heels, perfectly applied makeup, and hair, while still short, that had been gelled into a sporty, slightly spiky shape. I'd left off my glasses in favor of contacts.

“Am not,” I replied. “It's Halloween. People get to dress up as whomever they want to on Halloween, even people like Lettie Shaw. It's the Halloween Rule.”

“Who are you supposed to be, anyway? Vampirella?”

“I'm Morticia Adams,” I huffed.

“But Morticia had long hair,” she objected.

“So,” I said, hands-on-hipsing her as I leaned forward, the better to get myself in her face, “Morticia cut it. She cut it because she let her best friend in Danbury talk her into some insane idea.”

“But—”

“Besides,” I said, feeling very testy, “is it my fault you chose to come as a pumpkin? That with all the possible costumes in the world you could pick from, you chose a
pumpkin?
”

“Can I help it,” she huffed, “if I lack imagination?”

“No,” I said, “but that's not my fault, either.”

“But—” She tried to “but” me one last time, but I stopped her.

“Look,” I said, suddenly feeling bad for her, suddenly feeling as though maybe I had done something slightly wrong, behaved deceptively, “it's not like there are any guys here to compete for,” which was a slight lie, since I had invited Saul, but it was getting later—almost ten—and I was beginning to think he wouldn't be coming.

“Ex-Al's here,” she said, still pouting.

“He doesn't count,” I said. “He's so in love with T.B., he wouldn't notice us if we were both naked.”

“He really is in love with her, isn't he?” she asked.

“No doubt.”

“How do some women get that lucky?” she wondered wistfully.

“Who knows?” I said. “The point is, the only people at
this party are you, me, Delta, my mother, Pat and a couple in love, so what does it matter if you're a pumpkin and I'm Morticia?”

 

Ding-dong!

Just when I'd given up on my last guest arriving—it was a quarter to eleven, after all—the doorbell rang one last time. Glass of punch in hand—that cat on my glass was starting to look a little drunk—I threw the door open, only to find…

“Al Franken?”

Okay, so maybe it wasn't really Al Franken, just Saul Waters in an Al Franken disguise that involved, well, a pair of glasses. Other than that, he had on his regular black-over-black costume. I was thinking that, really, his regular outfit could have formed the springboard for something other than a political humorist—with a cape and mask, for just one example, he could have been Zorro, mmm—when he said:

“Am I too late for the party?”

“Not at all,” I said, waving my arm. “Come on in.”

“Lettie?” he said, sounding surprised.

“What? You didn't think I'd still let you in—” I checked my watch “—if you were an hour and forty-five minutes late?”