Read Online A Little Change of Face by Lauren Baratz-Logsted - Free Book Online Page B

been ill, and with no pool to go to, mojitos had apparently taken my friends by storm.
    â€œNaw,” 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.
    â€œWas 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.
    â€œNaw,” said Delta, “it wasn’t so great. A pair of suits came in who Pam and I thought might turn out to be possibilities—”
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œWell,” I said, “better you should learn that now than later.”
    â€œAin’t it the truth?” Delta laughed.
    But Pam still looked bummed by the whole thing.
    â€œSo,” 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.
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œHah!” 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.
    â€œTrue,” Pam conceded, referring to my