A Little Change of Face

“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.

“Well,” I said, “better you should learn that now than later.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” Delta laughed.

But Pam still looked bummed by the whole thing.

“So,” I said, as if we’d been talking about what I really wanted to be talking about all along, “if I were to deliberately sabotage my own looks—you know, in order to see how the world treated me if I no longer looked the same—how would you suggest I go about it?”

Pam shot me a look of almost victory as she moved over to the aluminum ladder, lowering herself into the pool.

“You’re not serious, are you?” T.B. asked, looking suspiciously over at Pam.

Was this a thing that my friends talked about behind my back? Strange to think that the paranoid voice in your head, the one that whispers, “People are talking about you,” was probably right.

Whatever.

“I’m not sure how serious I am,” I said, “but I am curious about what it would be like. And I’m also curious what y’all think I’d need to do.”

Y’all? See how easy it was, when with T.B. and Delta, to lapse into the kind of phrasing they used? I didn’t want to ask myself what it meant that, however much more time I spent in Pam’s company than theirs, I never had the desire to sound like her.

Pam eyed me appraisingly. “You’d need to start dressing down,” she said.

“Hah!” hah-ed Delta, the woman who’d never met an oversize piece of paste jewelry she didn’t love. “If Scarlett dressed any more down, she’d be…she’d be… Well, I don’t know what she’d be, but I just don’t think it’s possible. Maybe she’d be Toto.”

I knew that Delta was referring to the fact that I tended to dress, um, anonymously. It really wasn’t what you’d call dressing down—I mean, I was always clean—but my wardrobe mostly consisted of simple pants and shirts and dresses, things that were anti-fashion to the extent that I could have worn them ten years before, would be able to wear them ten years hence, and they’d never make a ripple of sensation. Timeless classics, I guess you would call them. But, like my condo, “lacking in personality or apparent ownership” is probably what Delta would call them.

As for the Toto remark, Delta, who had something nice to say about nearly everybody—well, she even occasionally found nice things to say about those two kids of hers, didn’t she?—had always nursed a somewhat rabid antipathy toward the little dog in The Wizard of Oz; “Damn thing looks like the business end of a mop,” she’d say.

“True,” Pam conceded, referring to my wardrobe, not the little dog. Having pulled herself up onto a big black inner tube, she was lazing around the pool, using her hands to gently provide the motion. “But Scarlett’s clothes still have some shape to them. She needs to go in the other direction.” Then she looked at me, smiled. “I could help you out with that. I could take you shopping.”

“Well,” said Delta, leaning over to finger my raven mane, “the hair would have to go.” She fluffed her own Dolly Parton-wannabe tresses. “Can’t be trying to slum it with pretty hair.”

“Oh,” said T.B., getting into the spirit of things, although I could tell she didn’t believe I’d ever do it, “and you’d need to get some glasses.”

“I could do that,” I asserted. “I wear contacts. I’ll just switch.”

“No heels,” warned Delta. “Ever.”

“Great,” I enthused. I’d reached an age where I was tired of the pain of occasionally wearing heels, even if those heels were sometimes the only things standing between me and regular teasing by my gal pals at my lack of significant height.

“And no makeup,” T.B. laughed. “Not that you ever wear any to speak of, anyway,” which was true. A little lipstick in the winter, just enough so that the chapping wouldn’t make me look like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and I was pretty much well ready to face the world.

“Hey,” Delta laughed, “and if you really want to make it challenging for a man to fall in love with you, you could borrow my kids for a while!”

“Um, no, thank you,” I said. It wasn’t that I was put off by the idea of kids in general so much as I was put off by the idea of Delta’s kids in particular.

“Oh, come on,” Delta encouraged. “Believe me, it’ll make it nearly impossible to find Prince Charming, if you’ve got a couple of kids at home.”

“Who ever said I was searching for Prince Charming?” I asked.

“Heh,” T.B. laughed softly. “Ain’t we all?”

“Well, no,” said Delta, going all literal on us. “I don’t think lesbians are looking for Prince Charming at all.”