About Face

by Carole Howard

  To avoid her usual operatic head-flopping, she’d read the English translation of the libretto and listened to the music before coming. And she was glad she had: knowing what was going on helped, even if what was going on was a fairy tale. Familiarity with the music made the arias more beautiful, too.

  Maybe the plot isn’t exactly twentieth-century realistic, she thought, but that’s only if you take it literally. Longing for what you can’t have is universal. And emotionally accessible.

  Everyone wanted something they couldn’t have. Or maybe they just don’t want the right things. Some of them don’t even know what they want. Like Turandot. The ice princess. And that poor slave girl, so faithful to her master while also obviously in love with his son.

  Ruth was completely swept up by the music, the colors, the emotion. When the lights announced intermission, she was gratified to realize she’d done none of her usual mental flitting, had no negative fantasies about retirement or To-Do lists or Jeremy-the-enigma. All she’d done was wrap her attention around the opera.

  However, like Pavlov’s dog, her bladder responded to the break. She bolted for the women’s room and her heart sank at the ten-person line. It was the cold, hard fact of restroom life: Women waited, men didn’t.

  “I’ll bet the men don’t have to wait,” she groused.

  “Do they have more stalls, do you think? Or are they just faster?”

  “Wanna find out?”

  “We need to level the peeing field.”

  Giggles all around. Then, as if they’d rehearsed, everyone got serious about waiting patiently. As she advanced from the anteroom to the main room, she counted: Four stalls, and I’m ninth on line. That’s like being third on line for a single stall. Not too bad.

  She turned to the long horizontal mirror to her right and multi-tasked. Hair, lips, cheeks, eyebrows. And check out the tummy. How could David say he didn’t see it?

  Finishing her personal mirror-work, her eyes brushed past the reflections of the women in line. She was struck—who wouldn’t be?—by the wild head of light-brown frizzy hair on a woman near the end of the line. Thick, curly, with no attempt at good manners or any other form of restraint. It reminded her of kids at a swimming pool who yell to their parents, “Look at me, look at me. See what I can do. Look, watch me do a trick. Look at me.” Beneath it all, the woman had one thick eyebrow.

  Among all the black sequins, rhinestones, and silk, she wore a huge blue and green print creation, the kind of dress usually referred to as a flowing robe.

  The hair may be different, she thought, but not the mono-brow. That’s Vivian.

  SHE’D FIRST SET EYES ON VIVIAN, her Peace Corps Volunteer hut-mate, after six dusty hours on a washboarded red-clay road in a crowded bush-taxi. Emerging from the closely-packed vehicle, her brain shaken like a malted from the bumpy ride and the fatigue, she saw the village where she’d be living for two years. The huts were various shapes and sizes, but were all the color of the ground. There was an occasional fromagier tree whose base looked like the rich folds of a wedding gown spread out at the bride’s feet for the traditional picture.

  A large white woman emerged from one of the mud brick structures. She wore a faded blue version of the standard wax-dyed cloth wrapped around her waist like a beach cover-up, a reddish version around her head, and, separating the two competing patterns, a tee-shirt that had once been white. Ruth thought it hadn’t taken her Peace Corps hut-mate very long to go native. Vivian, as she later recounted, was awed by how clean Ruth was.

  “RUTH, OHMYGOD, RUTH, is that you? Is that really you? Here on the same bathroom line as me? Is it really you?” Vivian’s eyes widened as her voice got louder and louder.

  Everyone looked up.

  Busted, thought Ruth. “Vivian? Vivian Denise Cassidy? Is that you? Geez, it must be … thirty years now? How are you?”

  Plum-sequined Ruth and wild-haired Vivian tentatively stepped off the line, meeting half-way to talk. The women who had followed each of them in line kept their spaces empty as the line advanced. Everyone was rapt.

  How lame, Ruth thought. What do I mean by ‘How are you?’ How are you now? Or how have you been for thirty years? Or what?

  Vivian didn’t seem to notice. “I’m good. I’m really good. Oh, it’s so good to see you. You look exactly the same. Haven’t you gotten any older in all this time? How are you? You look so good. All grown up and everything.”

  “I’m good too. And you look great. So beautiful, so exotic.”

  And then they were at the moment Ruth dreaded. Where to go from here? Again, Vivian seemed oblivious to the awkwardness Ruth felt.

  “I was just saying to Carlos the other day—”

  “You two stayed together all this time? That’s so great.”

  “We knew it was true love or maybe no one else would have either of us but anyway here we are and we have a daughter too. She’s in the orchestra here tonight, she plays the oboe, she’s first oboe, actually, oh I can’t believe I said that but I really am proud of her and that’s why we’re here. We’ve been living in New York for awhile now, and…”

  She stopped for a second. “As you can see, I still talk too much. Tell me about you.”

  “Remember David from Sine Saloum, the one who was just a friend even though everyone wanted us to get together but we insisted that it was just platonic?”

  “Remember him? Of course. I believe my exact words were ‘Platonic, shmatonic.’”

  “You were right. We’ve been married for about twenty-six years now … almost twenty-seven … and we have a son, Josh.”

  The silence during the ensuing pause was interrupted only by flushing toilets. And then they hugged.

  Ruth was mentally wording a question about Vivian’s work life in a way that adhered to the feminist principle that work inside or outside the home was valuable, when Vivian said, “So what do you guys do?”

  “I work in Marketing, here in midtown. And David’s a math teacher. What about you?”

  “I’m at a woman’s shelter and Carlos is with a foundation. We both—” She stopped, looking around in a panicky way, then concentrating very carefully on the paper towel dispenser. She turned red and started fanning herself furiously with the program as beads emerged on her forehead. “Just wait a second and I’ll be back on planet earth again.”

  “You too? Believe me, I know just how you feel. Like you can feel your outline, the boundary between the hot and the normal.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Me too,” chimed the woman who was saving Ruth’s place on line. Her short, close-to-the-skull salt and pepper hair framed a beet-red face.

  The fanners fanned, the toilets flushed.

  A stall door opened and the woman in front of Ruth’s empty space entered. Ruth said, “Vivian, I’m next and I’d let the woman behind me have my turn so we could keep talking, but, believe me, I can’t. I’ve really gotta go and I can’t hold it in a second longer. And then I have to get back to my seat because I’m baby-sitting some people from work. Can you hang out after the performance for awhile?”

  “No, we can’t, cause we promised Ida we’d come backstage immediately so she can introduce us around, before the lines form. But I would love to see you again.”

  “Me too. And I know David would, too. Can you two get together for lunch tomorrow? Or Sunday? Or next Saturday or Sunday?”

  “Let me think.” Ruth wondered if Vivian was trying to figure out how she’d sell Carlos on the idea of a date with the Talbots. He was so wild back then, so pure, so opinionated. Who knows what he’s like now, she thought? Actually, who knows what Vivian’s like?

  “Next Sunday would be good.”

  “Are you in the phone book, Viv?”

  “Yep. Brooklyn. Suarez. With a Z at the end. Just like always.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  She got back to her seat as the curtain was rising, and quickly told David about Vivian in the bathroom. Then, despite all her pre
paration for the opera, and all her involvement in the story, she never heard the second half. She never saw the slave girl kill herself, never saw the prince answer the riddles correctly, never saw Turandot realize her love. She never heard the piercing aria she’d been looking forward to, Nessun Dorma. She was back in Africa.

  VIVIAN TOLD HER she could just dump her stuff anywhere while they went around to greet the members of the family compound, then the village chief himself. “It’s a village. It’s safe. Trust me.”

  They walked from one hut to another, trailed by the dust their feet kicked up, dust Ruth would eventually learn to live with almost constantly, except during the brief rainy season. A throng of children followed them wherever they went, chanting and laughing, dressed in a melange of African fabrics and such exotica as a Detroit Tigers tee shirt. One or another of the kids was occasionally emboldened to wipe a finger across Ruth’s bare arm or leg, then look at the finger to see if her strange color had wiped off.

  Each time Ruth entered a hut for the introduction, she’d take a minute to adjust to the dark, the coolness, and the lingering smell of thousands of cooking fires. The people inside looked up at her and smiled in an international nonverbal welcome even though they didn’t know her and probably thought she might as well be a space alien. Then came the ritual greeting.

  “Asalaam-malekum.”

  “Malekum-salaam,” she said.

  “Nanga def?”

  “Mangi fi rekk,” she said.

  “Naka waa ker ge?”

  “Nunga fe,” she said.

  “Naka sa baay?”

  “Munga fe,” she said.

  “Jamm nge am?”

  “Jamm rekk, alhamdulilay,” she said.

  Taken literally, she was answering questions about her parents and her house—she thought—but accepted the Peace Corps’s wisdom that it was all ritual, like saying “Fine” when someone asks “How are you?” even when you’re sick as a dog. And it was the only currency she had to respond to the warm welcome she was receiving.

  By the time the introductions were over, Ruth had begun her own transition to dusty monochrome. They retrieved her belongings and Vivian delighted the proud guardien of the luggage with a reward of five francs CFA, worth about two cents. Vivian took her to the living quarters she’d built two months before, over by the dunes, while providing a non-stop commentary on the construction process.

  “The walls and roof are made of crintin. I didn’t actually make the crintin, some of the villagers made it for me. They were anxious to do anything they could for me, but I really think they mostly wanted an excuse to just stand around and look at me because I was such a curiosity to them. After all, they’d never seen a creature like me before. It was wild, really wild.”

  Ruth could see that the crintin consisted of the spines of palm fronds woven into a flexible mat, about five feet high and of any length desired. She didn’t ask for any more details, fearing the length of the answer.

  “See, I stuck these poles in the ground. Well, they’re not poles exactly, they’re saplings, but I had to look for saplings that were about eight feet tall and had a ‘V’ at the top, and I stood the crintin up to be the walls, and then I attached it to the poles so they stand up straight. Neat, huh? And then I put more saplings between the V’s to be like rafters, and the rafters hold the crintin that goes horizontally, you know, for the roof, and then I tied the palm fronds on to the horizontal crintin to finish off the roof. It’s different from everyone else in the village, but it was faster and easier to build. And anyway, we are different from everyone else in the village.”

  Ruth liked the look of the place. It was easy to understand: one room, with the “bathroom” over by the dunes. The crintin allowed in air and light, while clearly indicating the border between their space and the other members of the family compound. As Ruth had already experienced, they were a source of immense curiosity in the village, so borders were important. And the eighteen-inch gap between the top of the walls and the roof provided a perimeter of picture-window.

  “Here’s your cot,” Vivian said. “I thought you’d like it in the east part of the hut, so you can watch the sunset in the west, over the ocean, like if you’re having a beer and writing letters at the end of the day, but if you’d rather, we can move it over there, to the corner where the kerosene refrigerator is right now. I call the refrigerator Ada, you know, from refrigerADA. But if we moved the bed, Ada would have to go over there, by the door, and then, when we sweep the floor we’d have to go around Ada on the way to the door and that could be a pain, and we have to sweep the floor all the time, really, or the sand piles up like crazy, so why don’t you just try it this way for a while and see how it feels?” Then she took a breath.

  It took Vivian about a week to exhaust her pent-up need to communicate in English. Other than the few hours a day they spent at their “jobs”—Vivian working with villagers to plant a vegetable garden to provide the vitamins missing from the traditional diet of rice and dried fish, Ruth setting up a dispensary by sorting and labeling American-style medicines—and the time they slept, the remaining time was devoted to conversation. If Ruth had something to talk about, fine. If not, Vivian filled the gap, having no tolerance for silence when English was possible.

  Ruth learned that Vivian was the oldest of three children, that her father owned a bar and, when his first child disappointed him by being a girl, and no other children appeared to be forthcoming, he resigned himself to teaching her the business, including training her to be tough as nails. When her two brothers followed, ten and fourteen years later, he not only dropped Vivian’s training and withdrew his special attention, but also did a complete turnaround, suddenly expecting her to wear pink and bat her eyes.

  “Lots of luck, Pop,” Vivian said as she took a long drink of beer, then continued with the story of her parents’ divorce. “They divided us up like so much property. I went with mom and my brothers went with dad. So I lost a parent and two brothers. I haven’t seen them for about four years now. Or maybe it’s five.”

  “Oh, Vivian, you poor thing, how terrible.” Ruth secretly thought she could have done with a little estrangement from the suffocation of her own family.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way it is. What about you?”

  Vivian’s interest turned out to be genuine, not just a step she had to go through until she’d get another turn in the spotlight. Ruth could gradually open up about her own family bones, not knowing if they qualified as skeletons or not.

  There was her father, effusive and loving until things weren’t perfect. “Then he just blows up. It’s like he’s just got all this rage inside and it’s only a thin layer of skin holding it in. Meanwhile, Mom is flitting around, repeating her theme-song, “It’s all right, he didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Sisters and brothers?” Vivian asked.

  “Just one. My sister Marge.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Neither. She’s a twin. Don’t make a big deal about it. Please.”

  “Really? A twin? Is it like you hear in magazine articles? Like a double? Like you know what she’s thinking and she knows what you’re thinking? A twin, wow.”

  “No, not for us. We’re fraternal, so we’re no more alike than regular sisters. Except maybe, being the exact same age, it’s a little different. I don’t know. But we’re definitely different from each other.”

  “Different how? Do you look different? Do you both like coffee or tea? Stuff like that?”

  “We look like sisters, I guess. But the physical resemblance is stronger than any other kind. We’re just different. It’s like she’s the evil twin. She yells, she throws tantrums. She actually stamps her feet if she doesn’t get her way. It’s one thing for her to be like that with me, but she actually goes up against our father. The two of them go at it, and there I am, on the sidelines, hoping it will go away. Miss Goody Two Shoes. Which I have to be, to keep the peace. So, that’s how we’re different. The
evil twin and the good twin. One can stand up for herself, one can’t. But she got first choice.”

  “Maybe it’s the evil twin and the scared twin.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “I guess I’m more like your sister. When I’m mad at someone, it’s like they have their hand in front of my face and I can’t see anything else until I say something and get that hand away. I could do with a little of your restraint.”

  “Well, I pay a price. I wish I had a little of your balls.”

  “Balls aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Speaking of which, what do you think about hum jobs?”

  Ruth’s head spun with the non sequitur, the raunchiness, and the nosiness. After a second or two, Vivian continued with another non sequitur, and Ruth realized that not all of Vivian’s questions required an answer.

  “So, let me tell you about the wild family stuff here in the village. People marry each other, but for only about five or six years. Then they switch partners. Really, I’m not kidding, they switch. But there’s more. The village is divided into seven sections, and everyone tries to get a spouse from a different section from the last one they had. The idea is that, when they die, they want people from as many sections as possible dancing at their funeral. Neat, huh? Kind of like spinning as many tops as possible at the same time. Oh, and speaking of sex….”

  Even their disagreements were stimulating, like the times they argued over Vivian’s macho attitude toward the health precautions.

  “Come on,” Vivian said. “What are the odds that one tiny little microscopic amoeba will happen to wind up in the one ice cube made with unboiled water that I happen to have in my coke? And that the amoeba will be in the part of the ice cube that melts into my drink? Besides, the Africans have been drinking the water long before we got here with our superior knowledge, and they’re not all sick and dying, are they? They’re doing a whole lot better than some Americans I know.”