A Little Change of Face. Lauren Baratz-Logsted
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4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
1
Actually, Pam was wrong about a couple of things.
I wasn’t “so goddamned pretty,” and I wasn’t “so goddamned thin.”
(Okay, so maybe I did have spectacular breasts, but still. Besides, that was a whole other issue, and one that even sometimes bothered me.)
Regard my face for a moment, if you would, please, a face that will henceforth be known as Exhibit A: Note the long dark hair, the root color of which currently needs assistance from the bottle it’s been getting assistance from for over a decade, the assistance made necessary by the prematurely gray hair that, rather than being prematurely seductive, had caused coworkers to run shrieking from my path. Note (admittedly pretty) dark eyes beneath brows that have passed their expiration date for plucking. Note the slightly imperfect nose (erring on the side of largeness), the slightly imperfect chin (erring on the side of pointiness), the slightly imperfect chee—
No, actually, that would be a lie. My cheekbones kick butt.
Yes, I do know that this is coming perilously close to tipping into that odiously annoying territory that has been heretofore uniquely occupied by that hair-product commercial that used to run all the time years ago, the one in which the actress says “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” making the viewer long for technology to be advanced enough so that the actress would be able to hear it when viewers everywhere shout back at their TVs: “We don’t hate you because you’re beautiful! We hate you because the you that you are in this commercial is the single most annoying woman IN THE WORLD!” I do know how close I am coming to that awful-awful place, but please bear with me.
Regard the body now for a second moment, please, the body to appropriately be called Exhibit B: Note the lack of significant height (a smidgen below five feet, but just enough to make claiming a full five feet qualify me as a breaker of one of the Ten Commandments), which, when combined with the genetic legacy of good skin, is what makes people always howl, “Omigod! You don’t look that old!” whenever I say I’m thirty-nine. (That and “Omigod! You don’t look that short!” and “Omigod! You don’t look Jewish!” are the three phrases I’ve heard repeatedly all my life. And, yes, my full name is Scarlett Jane Stein; so sue me.) Note, also, the all-American flaw: the slight swell of lower belly that nothing short of lipo and a tuck would ever eradicate.
And, when I say all-American flaw, I really do mean that all American women have that flaw. I mean, come on: After you rule out those who’ve been sucked or sewed, and then you take away the actresses/models/overly wealthy who have had actual ribs removed, who do you have left? Oh, okay. So maybe you have the growing legion of anorexics and anorexic-wannabes; but after them, who do you have left? Answer: the rest of us. You’re left with the rest of us and our, at minimum, slightly swelling lower bellies.
And, yes, I am aware that I have much to be thankful for in that I’m located at the minimum end of the spectrum of swelling.
True, back in high school, I’d had one of those freakish metabolisms that necessitated my going home after school and eating a banana split just so that I wouldn’t get any thinner (Pam would have really hated me if she’d known me then…and I was not bulimic!), but those days were long gone and I had finally joined the female race. If I wanted to still fit into my size 6s, 4s and 2s (which one was always dependent upon mitigating factors like time of the month, emotional need for Ben & Jerry’s, which jeans I was wearing, etc.), and I did, then I needed to walk regularly, press weights regularly and engage for the short term in whatever latest exercise fad came down the pike.
Overall, though, not bad: This was the body that Pilates had built for me.
I guess then that what had rankled so much wasn’t Pam’s implication that I had a reasonably good body, because I guess I did, so much as the undertone that had suggested it was some kind of an unearned perk. I’d done my sweating, I’d done my pumping and, as a result, gravity was yet to become my sworn enemy. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t earned my face, but I’d earned my body.
Time to cut to the chase.
(Besides, we can talk about my breasts later.)
In short, then, while the only runways I’d ever been on had all involved planes, no one on the beach had ever begged me to put more clothes on. Objectively speaking, on bad days, I was acceptable; on good days, I was substantially more than.
The basic building blocks for Exhibit A and Exhibit B, with the exception of the color-enhanced roots and the weights-at-the-gym flab-free upper arms, were what God had started me out with in life. Just like the spectacular breasts, I hadn’t earned those building blocks; they were with me when I arrived. Exhibit A and Exhibit B had been with me my whole life so far.
Exhibit A and Exhibit B were what the world first saw whenever they saw me. (Untrue, that nasty little voice in my head, the one I heard upon occasion, niggled. What the world sees first about you are your breasts. You remember, don’t you? Exhibit C?)
Exhibit A and Exhibit B were the face and body I took to work with me every single day.
2
If you ever feel the need to hide in plain sight, you can do it by becoming a librarian.
I swear to God, sometimes I feel as though I’m some sort of nonwoman forty hours a week. Which is a good thing, in a way, since it gives me a nice bumper of time not to contend with my breasts and how the world sees them. Oh, sure, I still see people registering them first thing when they walk up to the reference desk, but it’s a passing registration, more fleeting than if, say, I were a nurse (people always check out nurses’ breasts) or a go-go dancer (ditto) or a guest star on the Bay-watch reunion movie (no parenthetical aside necessary). Since the public pretty much views librarians as some sort of asexual alien life force, and since the wearing to work of braless tanks is kind of frowned upon by the city that employs us, it’s a pretty safe place for a spectacularly-breasted woman to hide.
Not that hiding my breasts was the original impetus