A Little Change of Face

Crossing the Line

“A terrific read—a story that is dryly funny, brightly written and emotionally satisfying.”

—Peter Lefcourt, author of Eleven Karens

“A delight! Buckle up and hang on for a joyride with Jane, an admirably eccentric heroine. This fast-paced, fun-filled novel about babies and breaking the rules brims with laughter, love and a unique and buoyant wisdom.”

—Nancy Thayer, author of The Hot Flash Club

“Chick lit with a twist!”

—Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries

The Thin Pink Line

“Faking it—hilariously… Wonderfully funny debut with a fine sense of the absurd and a flair for comic characterization.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Baratz-Logsted’s premise is hilarious and original.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Here written with humor and scathing honesty, is the diary of a (mad) pregnant woman chronicled with acid glee by Lauren Baratz-Logsted in a debut novel to share with every girlfriend you know before, during or after the baby comes. It’s a winner!”

—Adriana Trigiani, author of Big Stone Gap

“A sassy and beguiling comedy of reproduction that proves once and for all that a woman can indeed be half-pregnant. Bridget Jones is snorting with laughter and wondering why she didn’t think of it.”

—Karen Karbo, author of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

A Little Change of Face

Lauren Baratz-Logsted

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my husband, Greg Logsted, for half a lifetime’s worth

of love and patience above and beyond

Acknowledgments

Thanks, as always, to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, for being a joy of an editor to work with, and to the rest of the RDI team. Special thanks this time to Annelise Robey for being the kind of agent a girl can really love.

I’d also like to thank Sue Estabrook and Lynn Kanter for being great first readers and great friends. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve such support and encouragement, but I’ll take it.

Another special thank-you goes to librarians everywhere, since librarians form the inspiration for this book. In particular, I’d like to thank Danbury Public Library, my current hometown library, and Bethel Public Library, which figures prominently here: I hope you’re all in your lovely new quarters by the time you read this.

Thank you to my family and friends for loving me and for not leaving me over my being the self-involved person I am.

Finally, thank you to Greg and Jackie for everything.

prologue

“Come here often?”

“God, what a line,” seethed Pam, who happened to be my best friend as well as being a world-class seether. “Yes, she does,” she added, summarily turning away Bachelor #1 from our table, “but not to meet people like you.”

“Buy you a drink?” Bachelor #2 asked me, somewhat timidly I thought, but maybe he’d already seen #1 get shot down by Pam. Despite his timidity, he was steely in his determination not to make eye contact with her, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on me.

Pam tapped his elbow. “Can’t you see she already has one?” Pam asked him with the kind of overly sweet tone of voice that was petrifying in its Stepford extreme.

That was all Bachelor #2 could take; off he slouched.

“Now, I know I don’t know you from anywhere…yet…but I’d sure like—”

“Get OUT!” screeched Pam, finishing off Bachelor #3 before he could even finish off his first sentence.

“Gee,” I said ruefully, sucking off the vodka from one of the ice cubes that had been clinking around in the bottom of my empty glass, “you could have at least let me accept a drink.”

“Oh, right, and then sit here for yet another Saturday night, watching one man after another fall in love with you? No, thank you!”

“I’d ask you who pissed in your Wheaties, but somehow I’m getting the impression it was me.”

“You know, Scarlett, it’s not always that easy being your best friend.” For a world-class seether, Pam was looking awfully deflated.

And, for the record: yes, my mother did have the balls to name me Scarlett.

“Scarlett O’Hara, the Scarlet Woman—okay, so maybe that only has one t, but still—you’re going to love it once you get older!”

I’d heard this repeatedly for thirty-nine years—i.e., the entire length of time I’d been alive—all thirty-nine of which I’d spent hating my name.

“You’re going to love it one day! I promise you!” my mother had promised.

As if.

With forty beginning to stare me in the face, along with what friends were warning me was going to be one hell of a midlife crisis—which I preferred to think of as an LRWS (Life Reassessment Way Station)—it seemed increasingly less likely that my mother would see her promise fulfilled. Of course, with forty beginning to stare me in the face, it was probably also a good time for me to begin thinking about giving up using the phrase “as if,” but I supposed I could always worry about that another day.

But back to our story.

I’d rather have a seething Pam than a deflated Pam any day of the week. Her deflation was deflating me.

“Why, Pam?” I asked, deflated, all seriousness now. “Why isn’t it always easy being my best friend?”

“Because you’re…you’re…you’re…you.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Fine,” Pam seethed one last time, seething at me for once. “Did you ever wonder if you’d still get so much male attention if you weren’t so goddamned pretty, if you weren’t so goddamned thin, if you didn’t have those two—” and here she gave voice to what I had secretly suspected most people thought of first when they looked at me, but hoped was not the case “—spectacular breasts?”

And that’s basically how it all got started.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 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 for my career choice, a choice that had ultimately landed me at Danbury Public Library. No, the real reason I had originally gone after my Master in Library Science was that I love books. Duh. And librarians make much more money than bookstore clerks. It just never occurred to me that instead of recommending great books to read, which was the chief joy in working in a bookstore, I’d spend my days called upon to answer questions ranging from, “Where can I find information on the economy of the Galapagos?” to “Why can I never find the books on the shelves where they’re supposed to be?” to “Why can’t I download porno from the Internet on your computers?”

But the pay was good, thepaywasgood, thepaywasgood. (If that sounds like a mantra, it’s because it is, itis, itis.)

Plus, the way I figured it, someone had to be an under-achiever so that all of those overachievers out there could feel superior about what they’d achieved. In a way, I was performing a social function here.

When I had originally declared my intention of becoming a librarian, I got this from my mother: “A librarian?” Like I wanted to be a welder or something. “I sent you to the best schools so you could become a librarian?”

“It’s not like I’m going to be selling crack. I will get to use my mind there.”

“I didn’t name you Scarlett so that you could grow up to be a librarian.”

“Oh, yeah, right. And I’m sure if I became a lawyer named Scarlett, I’d just get a ton of respect.”

“Maybe not.” She’d shrugged. “But the pay is good.”

Seven years into what was now my twelve-year stint at the library (four weeks vacation a year! The pay is good, thepayisgood, thepayisgood!), I’d run into an old high-school boyfriend at a party at Pam’s.

“So what do you do?” He’d leered at me over the vodka punch.

“I’m a librarian.”

“A librarian?” He’d gaped at me as if I’d just sprouted a bun or something.

“Why? What’d you think I’d grow up to be—a welder? a nurse? a stripper?”

“I don’t know,” he’d confessed, looking slightly sheepish. “It’s just hard to picture you behind the reference desk.” His gaze settled on my chest. “It just seems…I don’t know…wrong somehow.”

“Call me when you grow up,” I’d said, walking away.

“He always was a dick,” Pam had said when I found her in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” I’d sighed, “but he was always such a good-looking dick. Too bad he’s so narrow-minded.”

Pam, of course, had never been narrow-minded about my career choice. No, in Pam’s case—Pam, who really was a lawyer—it was downright hostility.

“You have a great brain, Scarlett. So what if your breasts get in the way a little bit? You could do what I do.”

Duh.

(Sometimes, I can’t believe I’m thirty-nine and still saying “duh.”) “Okay, so maybe you couldn’t do exactly what I do— I mean, with those breasts, you could hardly be in litigation—but you could certainly be a tax attorney. Hell, if you became an entertainment lawyer, you’d probably clean up!”

I didn’t even want to know what she meant by that.

“Really, Scarlett, I’m sure that if you just put your mind to it, you could become one of us.” The “us” referring to Pam herself and T.B. and Delta, the two other women that made up our quadrangular friendship.

“I suppose I could,” I conceded, “except for one small fact.”

“That being?”

“I’m not one of an ‘us.’ I’m one of a ‘me.’”

“So you say. I just think it’s a shame that you feel the need to waste this brain that God gave you.”

I tried the same not-a-crack-dealer line I’d used on my mother, but Pam wasn’t having any.

“It’s a waste, Scarlett, I don’t care what you say, it’s a waste. Locking that mind of yours away in a library is like winning the lottery and then just putting it all in the bank for the rest of your life, it’s like some kind of brain-cell chastity or something.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Don’t get defensive. But, I mean, come on. Wouldn’t you like to find out what you could really become in life, if you weren’t so downright weird about the career world taking you at breast-face value?” Then she’d given a heavy sigh. “You’ve always been so pretty, though, with everything handed to you because of it—why would you ever have to know what it’s like to have to maintain the drive to go after something in life and earn it on sheer merit alone?”

You’re probably wondering right around now just exactly why this woman, this woman who could be considerably more hostile than she’s being here, was considered by me to be my best friend. Well, I did feel sorry for her a lot, and she did have some endearing qualities that are perhaps not so easy to see.

Plus, when I’d first met her and T.B. and Delta, Pam had made a point of—no other word for it—courting me. Like a second-string center on the football team with broken black glasses held together by masking tape, Pam had called and e-mailed me virtually every day, as though hoping to win a date for the prom. Finally, the will in me crushed under a deluge of daily questions along the lines of “So, what are you making for dinner tonight,” I’d caved and, muttering “uncle” under my breath, conceded, “Okay. Fine. You can be my best friend.”

Actually, though, Pam was my default best friend. But, like my breasts, that would take a lot of explaining, far too much explaining for right now.

So there I was, on a lovely Wednesday in July, hiding in plain sight behind the reference desk at the Danbury Public Library. I’d just dispensed with a patron who wanted books on pursuing a writing career, having led her to the 888s, and was hoping to sneak in a couple of reviews in the latest Publishers Weekly, which had just arrived. Besides, all working and no sneak-reading make Scarlett a very dull librarian. But this was not to be…

“Excuse me?”

“Hmm…?” I stashed the PW away. Damn! I was never going to learn what it had to say about the latest Anne Perry.

The excuser was a harried-looking woman, around my age, with a toddler in a stroller and a girl in tow. The girl looked to be about ten years old, her black hair cut in an old-fashioned pageboy that would have been more suitable on a woman sixty years ago than on a young girl today. Despite that handicap, you could tell she had pretty-potential, what with her warm brown eyes and wide smile, whenever she forgot to be self-conscious and just let one rip. More hampering than the hair was a mild case of premature acne. Poor thing. She was probably going to get breasts early, which would lead to much teasing at school from both the nonbreasted girls and the prepubescent boys, something I knew much about. Any day now, she’d have too much hair on her legs, her mother wouldn’t let her shave yet, and the other kids would all start calling her Monkey. I was sure of it.

Harried Mom put her hand proprietarily on the girl’s shoulder. “Sarah here needs to get some books from the summer reading list.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Much better than waiting until the end of summer like so many of the kids and then having to cram it all in at the last minute. Just go upstairs to the Juvenile Library—”

“Oh, no.” Harried Mom cut me off. “I want you to recommend specific titles from the list.” She handed me the list. “I don’t want her reading just anything.”

“Yes, but upstairs—”

“Please?” she pressed, then she looked up at the sign over my head: Information Desk—Reference. “This is what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

Well, she kind of had me there. Although I still would have said that upstairs was where she should go for help.

I looked at the list. “Well,” I said, “you can never go wrong with A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby.”

“She needs to read three,” Harried Mom said.

“Well, then, how about the Harry Potter, too? Might as well, if they’re going to put it on the list….”

“Thank you,” Harried Mom enthused, as though I’d just done her a great favor.

Just then, the girl coughed.

“Cover your mouth, Sarah,” Harried Mom admonished. Then she turned to me with an embarrassed smile. “Sarah’s just getting over the chicken pox, but she just can’t seem to shake that cough.”

“The chicken pox?” I took an involuntary step backward.

“Oh,” Harried Mom pooh-poohed as she headed off with her kids for the double doors that would lead her upstairs to the Juvenile Library, “she’s not contagious anymore. And, besides, hasn’t everybody had the chicken pox already?”

3

No. Not everybody.

About fourteen days after Sarah coughed in front of me, I developed a fever, along with an all-over achy feeling as though I’d spent the night in the ring with the WWF. At first, I thought it was the summer flu. Having not used any sick days yet that year, I called in three days straight at the library. That’s when the spots began to appear.

I’d never been troubled with acne when I was younger. And, yes, I do know that that’s another one of those statements that could make some people hate me. But it’s true. All through junior high and high school, I could barely buy a zit to save my life. Except for the occasional one or two around my period, I was blemish free. How odd then to suddenly be seeing spots at nearly forty. Could my period be due again so quickly? I wondered, studying the spot on my cheek, the one on my forehead.

But then, as the hours went on, and one day turned into the next, I developed more spots on my face…and a few on my neck…and then on my chest.

I called my doctor’s office in a bit of a panic; don’t ask me why, but I was certain I had the measles.

The receptionist at Dr. Berg’s office was very accommodating when I told her I thought I had the measles, saying that he could see me that afternoon. Since it was usually necessary to call two to three months in advance to get a regular visit with the most popular doctor in the city, and even the average garden-variety emergency complaint still required at least a one-day wait to get seen, I recognized how seriously she was taking my spots. The appointment slot I was given was the first after the lunch break, presumably so I wouldn’t infect a bunch of other patients in the waiting room.

Okay, am I the only woman out there who’s a little in love with her doctor?

I’d been seeing Dr. Berg for about a dozen years, ever since my previous physician—whom I’ll call Dr. X—had nearly killed me, which had seemed like a good reason to stop seeing him. Dr. X had been treating me for an infection that wouldn’t go away, and when he started me on yet another round of medication, I began feeling weird. Repeated calls to his office to say just how weird I was feeling had merely yielded the usual “just another hypochondriac” tone from his nurse. Well, naturally, once my body broke out in tiny little red spots from head to toe—a nice indicator of anaphylactic shock—they told me to stop taking the medication. Immediately. That another dose might kill me. But when I tried to get them to admit their mistake, that they should have listened to me in the first place, they insisted that standard practice dictated they do exactly what they did and that they’d do it again tomorrow. That they’d never heard of anyone nearly dying from that particular drug, even though it had nearly killed me. I suspected they didn’t want to admit culpability because they were terrified of a malpractice suit. Well, I wasn’t interested in a malpractice suit, but I was interested in having a doctor who was a mensch, which clearly was not anyone in that office. And they’d nearly killed me.