A Little Change of Face

“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?”

11

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.

12

The 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.”