A Little Change of Face (5 page)

N
ow for the eternal question, the one that has been tormenting humans down through the ages:

How is a woman like a green M&M?

(I'll bet you can tell I was starting to feel better.)

I'd always claimed that the green M&M's were the best in the bag—the precise order, before they started adding new colors, going green, yellow, orange, brown, blue, red—a claim for which I'd encountered many detractors.

My mother: “It's just different-colored dye, you can't taste dye.”

Best Girlfriend: “Okay, I can see where there might be a discernible difference between green and red, since they really are so far apart. But green, yellow and orange? Uh-uh. Too close to call. In a blind taste test you'd never do more than equal the statistical probability of naming them by chance.” (She was right, but it was fun, since we were very drunk.)

Pam: “They all taste exactly alike, for chrissakes—just eat the damn things!”

Despite the reluctance on the part of the world to adopt my candy-theorizing, I'd felt heartened when, in a getting-to-know-you campaign by Mars, Inc., little pieces of informative cardboard began accompanying officially licensed products, in this case a giant plush toy (don't ask). My favorite, of course, was the one that read, “
Read About Green:
Green is quick-witted and intelligent; she says it like it is. She knows she's attractive, so she's flirty, but not in a tacky way. While feminine, she keeps up with the boys; finds the rest of the gang a bit childish. She knows how to handle trouble. She will get what she wants.”

That, in a candy-coated shell, was me.

I was all of those things and—except on days when I was PMS-ing and was therefore less—more. Okay, except for maybe the very last sentence, but I was hoping that, in the fullness of time, that might prove true, too.

Just like Cathy once proclaimed, “I
am
Heathcliff, and he is me,” I
am
a green M&M. Further, as far as I'm concerned, the fact that I'm a green M&M has pretty much well explained for me the reason why getting dates has never been a problem.

Pam, on the other hand, has always viewed the matter quite differently.

O
kay. Okay
okay
OKAY! I know you're not going to let me go any further without first explaining how Pam came to be my best friend and just what exactly a “default best friend” is.

Straight out of college, my best friend—my
real
best friend—known as Best Girlfriend, the woman who thinks men find me scary, embarked on a series of geographical moves purposely designed to keep her out of Connecticut. The distance has only grown farther as the years have gone on. Having started out in New York, six moves later has seen her temporarily settled on the Oregon coast. It's my private belief, one of the few beliefs I have never shared with her for fear of giving her an idea that she hasn't had yet, that she's just one last move away from Alaska. After that, I'm sure I'll lose her to Russia—she'll probably walk across to it one day when the ocean is frozen really good—and then the world.

I know we're supposed to be a mobile society, but mobility is just not something that people in my family
do.
And it's not that I mind Best Girlfriend's independence, her freedom, her sense of adventure. On the contrary, it's one of the many things I admire about her. I just wish the distance between us didn't make it so hard for us to sit on Irwin Lerner's face together.

Perhaps I need to explain that last remark.

While we were at UCONN together—me in Liberal Arts, she in Fine Arts—we fell into a set of fairly regular habits, the kind of habits that helped normalize a life lived during an uncertain time when the drinking age was just beginning its incremental progress from eighteen to twenty-one (hence, we were all doing the constant-slow-IV-drip kind of drinking as opposed to the binge drinking that occurs in the much safer college atmospheres we have now) and AIDS was just thinking of poking its head over the American horizon (meaning that most of us were getting laid, fairly regularly, sometimes by people we barely knew, and none of us were using rubbers). Some of our life-raft habits included practical things, like always letting the other know approximately where we'd be when we went out (“A party, I think over in South Campus”) and approximately when we'd return (“Tomorrow morning? Tomorrow afternoon? Definitely sometime in there”). All right, so maybe we never were so exact with the information that any efficient sort of police report could ever be filed, should such a thing prove necessary, but it was just barely enough to technically pass the telling-the-truth test whenever I told my mother, “Not to worry: Best Girlfriend is keeping tabs on me.” Did it really matter how close those tabs on me were?

Other life-raft habits included: eating breakfast together
(8:15 to 9:45 a.m.), but only if we were still up from the night before, because otherwise we'd never be up by then; lunch together (10:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.); and dinner together (4:15 to 6:45 p.m.); oh, and milk shakes at the snack bar set up in the cafeteria after dinner (8:00 p.m. to whenever). So maybe we didn't make it to a lot of our classes, and maybe that does sound like a lot of time devoted to eating (which might also finally explain the notorious weight problem known as the Freshman 15), but I swear to God we did not spend all of that time eating. It was just that we always seemed to have a lot of stuff that we needed to talk about, and food was always in the immediate vicinity whenever we did so.

And then there were those vast forty-eight-hour waste-lands of time at that suitcase college that were more commonly referred to as the weekend; weekends where the dorm cafeteria was closed and we often resorted to the Student Union for our hungover-Saturday and Sunday eating-lunch-for-breakfast meals: tuna melts and milk shakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and Funny Bones, lots of diet soda and lots of cigarettes. Eateateat, talktalktalk.

But the most important Student Union meals of all were the rare ones that occurred late on Sunday afternoons at the tail end of rare weekends when one of us had stayed on campus alone while—gasp!—the other had gone home alone. This meant that, not only did we have a pressing need to discuss the usual pressing-need stuff—guys we were interested in, parties, other girls who annoyed us, diets, whether we'd pass any of the classes we never seemed to be going to, the inherent impossibility (slurp!) of sticking to any milk-shake-free diet while going to a school with its own agricultural college, the fact
that she was indeed now a smoker since she had passed the pack-a-day mark and should therefore probably contribute to our daily nic tab, the fact that I could be petty from time to time—but we also had all of the pressing-need stuff that we'd been acquiring
independently
while (gasp!)
apart.

These extra-special talks, during which we each felt as though we were talking to a whole new other person, given our protracted separation, required foodstuffs that went beyond the usual Nutrasweet/Funny Bones double-whammy. It required something beyond smoking while eating. It required something extra-special to recement us as the friends we'd always been and always would be, reconfirming the fact that it would always be okay for us to grow while apart just so long as we never grew apart. And, leave it to Best Girlfriend to come up with the perfect reconnection ritual climax: miniature peppermint patties consumed while sitting on a bronze plaque commemorating some man we never knew anything about.

“It's gotta be his face,” Best Girlfriend had said, taking a teensy bite from the patty in order to make it last longer.

“Ya think?” I'd asked, taking my own first nip. “How can you possibly know such a thing? How come not the feet? In graveyards, aren't headstones at the head and plaques at the feet?”

“But this isn't a graveyard. I mean, what're you talking about?” It was amazing how, for two girls who'd grown up entirely within the state of Connecticut, in most of our discussions during our college years, we both sounded remarkably like Joe Pesci. “If there were a real person underneath us here, buried on the lawn outside of the Student Union, right around the area where we usually sit for movies some
times, that would just be way too gross for words. It's just a commemorative plaque.”

“So, wait a second, then. The reason you said we're sitting on Irwin Lerner's face is because…?”

“It's because I said so.”

“Ah.”

And Best Girlfriend was just enough months older than me that she always had the edge in any heated debate.

But then she moved away after college, and there was no more sitting on Irwin Lerner's face together for us.

Our friendship was like being married to someone who gets sentenced to a really-really long prison term. On the one hand, you've sworn to wait for him and maybe you even intend to, and maybe you'll even be able to. But in the case of a best friend that moves far away, even though she remains your official best friend, you still need to hook up with someone close by, someone you can go shopping with so that you can reject whatever the current fashion trend is together, someone with whom to attend chick flicks, someone to talk to on a daily basis, sharing each other's soap opera.

Hold on. So maybe it's not like being married to someone who gets sentenced to a really-really long term in prison so much as it is like being the husband who is in fact sentenced: you might start having sex with some beefy bruiser named Bart, but he's not really who you want and everyone knows it.

Pam was my Bart while Best Girlfriend was the real deal.

This might not sound like such a great deal from Pam's perspective, but Pam had known what she was getting herself into—being the Default Best Friend of someone who already had a real Best Girlfriend (and, yes, I do realize how immature I sound right around now)—and had in fact cam
paigned for the position, beating out Delta and T.B. (more on them later). As for me, I'd needed someone to go with me to see the latest Jennifer Aniston movie (you can go alone to dramas, but never comedies, because the laughing part just never works the same, which I suppose says something profound about the fact that people can suffer alone, but to celebrate the joys of living—laughter, success, popcorn, new shoes, finding out that Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't have a better body than you after all, the comical/ironical/blissful sides of love—you mostly need someone to celebrate with. It's like getting a Ben & Jerry jones on: when you share a pint with a friend, it's like, “Hey, I've got a friend,” while if you eat that same pint alone, it's like, “Wow, I'm pathetic,” (and not just because you will have eaten twice as much).

As I said, I needed a pal to go to the movies, and Delta had to work late and T.B. had a first date, so—tag!—Pam was it. She called me that one extra time, I said “uncle” and the rest was Default Best Girlfriend history. It was that simple. The two other friends in our foursome were busy and thus Pam became my Default Best Friend.

But, just like sex with beefy Bart, it just wasn't the same. Pam could laugh with me in a crowded theater, and agree that hip-huggers sucked and that most of the people who wear them shouldn't without it sounding like sour grapes, but she could never be someone who saw me for everything I was and hoped to be, and everything I wasn't while loving me just the same, with the clarity of a god, nor, I suppose, could I see her in that way.

Best Girlfriend was the only woman who'd ever been able to actually see me; Best Girlfriend was the only woman I could honestly say I knew.

Did it suck for Pam? Probably. I don't know; she never said. And besides, we did have fun most times. But it also sucked for me and it sucked for Best Girlfriend, too.

But Best Girlfriend needed to actualize herself in ways that never tempted me, career-wise, adventure-wise, relationship-wise. And, if I was going to love her like I loved no other woman on the face of this planet, then I was just going to have to let her lead her life in whatever way she needed to.

So, in a nutshell, it's not so much that I mind her being there; I just want her
here.

“W
hat the
fuck
do you think you're doing?”

Apparently, Best Girlfriend was not best pleased with some of the life decisions I was making.

“Are you fucking nuts, Scarlett?”

Having reached nearly the end of my quarantine period, I'd decided to call her up, looking for a little support, a little support that seemed to be sadly lacking.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Why don't you tell me what you really think?”

“Fair enough. Maybe that was a little harsh. But do you realize that what you're telling me sounds, uh—no, there's no nicer way to put this—slightly crazy?”

“Which part are you referring to?”

“Well, most women, when they get to be our age, put their efforts into making themselves look better, not worse. I'd say that pretty much covers the ‘slightly crazy' part.”

“I didn't say I was definitely going to do it.”

“What then?”

“I said I was
thinking
about doing it.”

“Oh. Well, that's radically different.”

“Come on, be honest. Haven't you ever wondered?”

Best Girlfriend was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known who wasn't in movies. I know it may sound elitist to say this, but there's a real continuum of attractiveness. Someone has to occupy the high end; Best Girlfriend was at the very top, and I was close up there.

“Haven't you ever wondered,” I asked, “what your life would be like, what your relationships with men would be like, if you didn't look the way you do?”

“No. I haven't.” She said it so simply that I realized it must be true.

“Oh,” I said.

“You never did say, Scarlett. Just what—or who—put this idea into your head?”

“Pam?” I winced.

“Oh.”

Pam and Best Girlfriend had met once or twice, when Best Girlfriend flew into town for her occasional visits. While I'd had high hopes for those meetings—who, after all, wouldn't flat-out adore Best Girlfriend?—the meetings hadn't gone as planned. Pam had insisted on spending the entire time talking about mutual acquaintances that Best Girlfriend, living clear across the country, had nothing mutual with. And Best Girlfriend, usually so self-confident and secure, had been uncharacteristically miffed. The resultant conversations that began with “I don't know what you see in her” from both of them had been enough to keep me off the idea of ever willingly bringing the two together again. Maybe, if I ever finally got married, I'd need to have them
both in the same place again. But until such a time occurred…

“Oh,” Best Girlfriend said again.

And then she changed the subject, and we talked about politics and Israel and books and movies, and men of course. It was our usual greatly fulfilling kind of conversation: we got to solve the problems of the world, trade ideas on popular culture and remember yet again why we were and would always be best girlfriends.

Naturally, none of that stopped her from obeying her in-grained instincts by getting in the last word. I mean, she was those few months older than me, after all.

“Just promise me one thing, Scarlett.”

“Shoot.”

“Promise me you'll really
think
about it before embarking on this crazy road.”

“Okay.”

“‘Okay' is not the same as ‘I promise.'”

“Okay. I promise.”

“Good. And one other thing?”

“Hmm?”

“Promise me you'll think twice before shaving all your hair off?”