About Face

by Carole Howard

  “And we’re here to help you,” he said with emphasis, as much to his sidekicks as to Ruth. He walked over to the white board and drew a square in the middle of it. She’d never noticed how tall and thin he was. Ruth wondered if his heart, lungs, liver and kidneys were similarly elongated. Did he have a chest X-ray in his family photo album?

  He wrote “female beauty” inside the square. “This is what we’re talking about, right?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “There’s internal beauty—you know, being a good person, doing good works—and there’s external beauty, the Catherine Deneuve type,” Ruth said.

  Marty wrote “internal” and “external” on opposite sides of the white board with arrows from each to the central square. “Since we’re in the cosmetics business, I assume we’re talking about the external type?” He started to draw a check-mark above the word “external.”

  “Not so fast,” Ruth said. She suggested they try to think outside of Marty’s box. She asked if they didn’t agree that, sometimes, when you admire the kinds of things someone does, you also think they’re beautiful.

  “Example?” Marty asked.

  Ruth looked at all the photos around the room. She thought of the women she admired. Finally, she said, “How about Christiane Amanpour? She wouldn’t necessarily win a beauty contest, but you perceive her as beautiful because you know how great she is.”

  “Who’s she?” the pipsqueaks asked simultaneously.

  “Well, never mind. How about Coretta Scott King? Or Sandra Day O’Connor who, now that I think about it, looks a little like Lauren Hutton.”

  “You think Sandra Day O’Connor’s beautiful?” bald-boy asked.

  “Well, maybe not beautiful like Brigitte Bardot—”

  “Who?” hair-of-many-colors asked.

  “In a Brittany Spears kind of way, then. Maybe she looks good enough that she doesn’t need to worry about being beautiful. What you see when you look at her is who she is, not just how she looks.”

  “I still don’t get how this sells cosmetics,” she said, but minus the truculence. “You want to tell people they don’t need to worry about what they look like as long as they’re good people? To sell make-up?”

  “You’ve got a point,” Ruth said. “Let’s back up. The original idea for About Face was that middle-aged women don’t need to try to look young to look good.”

  A chorus of agreement.

  “Question,” Marty said. “Are we saying that middle-aged beauty and youthful beauty are two different things? Just as good as each other? Or that middle-aged beauty is actually better?”

  “Or,” Ruth said softly, “are we saying that beauty isn’t so important when you get older? I keep coming back to that. Even though you’re right, kids, that it doesn’t exactly seem to be the way to sell cosmetics.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Ruth shook her head and said, “No, no, that’s not it, I’m not saying beauty isn’t important when you get older. I do want to sell cosmetics. But I am saying middle-aged beauty is different. It’s not about winning beauty contests, it’s about something else. It’s why you see Christiane Amanpour’s face as beautiful—and by the way, guys, you see her face on CNN—even though it’s not a beauty-contest kind of beauty.”

  Marty erased what was on the white board and said, “Try this. Take a paper and write the names of women who are middle-aged and beautiful. No, not necessarily beautiful, but attractive. No matter if we know the people. Just so you know who you find attractive. Then we’ll look for conclusions.”

  The five made their lists silently. Then they discussed them, sometimes arguing over people they knew in common, and whether they really were attractive or not. They described members of their personal lists so that, by the time they were done, everyone felt they knew bald-boy’s Aunt Frances and striped-head’s piano teacher Mrs. Russell, as well as Marty’s wife and Ruth’s sister.

  After feeling lost in the murk of indefinable qualities, a sense of direction eventually began to emerge. They thought they knew why, for example, bald-boy’s Aunt Frances was more attractive than his Aunt Simone. And why the piano teacher was attractive but the French tutor wasn’t.

  They concluded that, besides objectively-beautiful types like Sophia Loren, the middle-aged women they considered attractive fell into two groups. First were those who were loved, or at least respected, by the judges. The love colored the perception, created open arms, saw beauty whether it was there or not. The piano teacher and Ruth’s sister fell into this group.

  But there were also people whom the nominator thought beautiful even though he or she didn’t particularly love them. After awhile, the group decided these people—like Aunt Frances—were those whose bearing suggested they considered themselves attractive. Their own opinion helped form others’.

  “With young people, then,” Marty said, “attractiveness is a stand-alone kind of quality. Later, it’s more connected to your ‘you-ness.’ Complicated. Interesting.”

  “I like this,” Ruth said.

  And the assistants, in their own way, echoed her sentiments.

  “Cool.”

  “Way cool.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Two Ruths

  A WEEK LATER, things were moving right along. The decision to use existing products meant a vastly compressed process of getting to market: no research, no lab testing, just packaging the elements into a line with its own identity.

  The new focus groups were providing the results she’d hoped for and expected, and Packaging was sending samples daily. The ad agency, too, had jumped on the new idea for a campaign.

  She was looking at the head-shot photos the agency had sent for her evaluation. They were just what she’d wanted: young and old versions of the same women, ordinary women. Of the few who were celebrities, most were famous for their work, not their beauty. The effect was perfect: these older women were warm and inviting and radiantly beautiful, not Barbie-doll beautiful. Showing was definitely better than telling.

  She spread the photos out on her desk in different formats, like a deck of cards. First all the young ones. Then all the older ones. Then the young ones paired with their older selves. Arranged and rearranged.

  The shuffling reminded Ruth of a photo-juxtaposition that came out of a trip she and David had taken back to their volunteer villages in Africa, their tenth anniversary gift to themselves. It would be a perfect time, they thought, to introduce six-year-old Josh to a part of the world where not everyone watches Sesame Street and eats Cheerios and has bunk beds so their friends can come for a sleepover. It was a photo of a young Ruth and a not-so-young Ruth.

  The trip had been great timing for Ruth, because she’d just made the move from the Human Resources Department of Mimosa to Marketing. Transitions were always tough, but this one was especially so. Just as wrenching as when she’d moved, some seven years before, from the publishing industry to cosmetics.

  She’d tormented herself with the thought that Human Resources was about helping people but Marketing was “only” about selling stuff. Friends tried to help her by pointing out that Human Resources was all about administrivia, while in Marketing she’d have the opportunity to be creative. The new job carried a big raise, and that was the deciding factor, as they were just starting their college fund for Josh. Creative, not trivial.

  A trip back to her Peace Corps past seemed just the thing to help her over the hump.

  THEY SPENT A FEW DAYS in the capital first, hoping to acclimate Josh gradually. They couldn’t bring themselves to stay in the fanciest hotel, but they did indulge in a place with a swimming pool and a TV in the room (“for Josh’s sake,” they told themselves).

  Things in the capital seemed exactly the same—same statuesque women gliding along with baskets on their heads, same beggars, same smell of wood smoke, same heat, same flies. While the lack of change was a comfortable nostalgia for them, they knew it wasn’t a particularly good sign for the country itself.

  A
fter visiting their old haunts, including a courtesy call on the Peace Corps office, they rented a car and drove southeast, most of the way to David’s remote village. They stayed overnight in a hotel that had neither swimming pool nor TV, but it was clean and it had hot water and beds with mosquito nets. The next day, they got to the village and parked just outside the entrance, hoping to walk in quietly with no fuss.

  A tall young man, about twenty years old, spotted them within seconds. He took one look at David and said, “Day-day?”

  “Papp-Gaye?”

  “Daddy, did you just say PopGuy?”

  “Sort of.” Laughter, hand-shaking, hugging and back-slapping, joyful tears and shouts followed, with various villagers coming over to join them. As soon as there was a sufficient lull, David explained to Josh and Ruth that Papp-Gaye had been about six—Josh’s present age—when David had last seen him, and had always said his name as Dayday.

  They spent the morning walking around. The village kids were curious about these rare visitors, white people no less, and followed them around in a gaggle as they stopped to greet people and drink tea.

  After awhile, David asked Papp-Gaye about his father, who’d just started to bake bread when David lived there. Hearing that he was now the baker for the hotel they’d stayed at the previous night, David confessed that, when he was just learning to bake and Papp-Gaye himself would deliver three loaves to David each morning, he’d eat one right away while it was still edible, then secretly bury the others so no one would know he’d discarded them.

  “We knew of the burying of the bread loaves. Thinking it being a white man’s custom. From your country.”

  As they walked, David noticed that several of the wells he’d built with his own hands, some fourteen or fifteen years before, were still functioning.

  “Imagine that,” he said to Josh. “I came here, helped to build some wells, and people are still drinking the water they provide. Without these wells, they’d have to walk for miles to get what they need.”

  “With buckets on their head, dad?”

  “Heavy buckets.”

  “Are you a hero, dad?”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

  “Yes, yes, a hero. Can I Show and Tell you when I get back to school?”

  “I would love to be Show-and-Telled.”

  After a few hours, they headed back to the car, along the way distributing the pencils and crayons they’d brought for the village children. They took along lots of home-made bread, oranges and bottled water, and bought shish-kebabs of well-done mystery-meat from vendors on the side of the road.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, they got to Ruth’s village. The family compounds were where they’d always been, each with a cooking hut in the middle of the ring of sleeping huts. There were more compounds now, established around the periphery of the others, testifying to the growth of the village. The hut Ruth had shared with Vivian on the dunes was gone, as was the vegetable garden, but the ocean, of course, was right where she’d left it. A Club Med had even sprouted down the beach, a few kilometers from where she’d lived.

  When the people in the village saw the toubabs, they immediately ran for the Peace Corps Volunteer currently living there, thinking they’d know each other. The volunteer gave the Talbots a grand tour of the village, explaining where the various families Ruth remembered were now living.

  Ruth had brought along a picture of her twenty-two-year-old self in front of her hut, thinking it might come in handy if no one recognized her. She referred to it as a picture of “Baby Ruth,” but she’d never needed to show it. She’d also brought presents: for the adults, framed photos from her time in the village along with zip-lock baggies; for the kids, crayons and pencils and notebooks.

  The volunteer explained that there was no longer a vegetable garden because the village had grown sufficiently for there to be a nearby market where vegetables were sold. The villagers used the money they got from selling their rice and fish to buy vegetables at the market.

  “So they’re eating vegetables?” Ruth asked.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?”

  Before leaving, they took hundreds of pictures. There was the village and the villagers. There were the Talbots in the village and with the villagers. And there was the photo of Ruth holding her “Baby Ruth” photo.

  LOOKING AT THE AGENCY’S SPREAD, Ruth-the-Marketing-Executive conjured up that photo of “Married Ruth Holding Baby Ruth.” She remembered when she’d first seen it, all she saw was how she’d aged. She wondered if she’d be kinder to herself now, after having learned to appreciate an older woman’s kind of beauty from the agency’s photos. Or would she still hate the photo, maybe even more than when she’d first seen it?

  She called the agency and told them she loved the spread and specified which pictures she liked best. Then she went to the Packaging Department to talk about some of their recent samples of bottles, pumps, and cartons. Back in her office, she started constructing a flow chart of the process: packaging, advertising, media selection, retail outlets, the whole enchilada.

  She left work at four-thirty, the earliest she’d left in a long time.

  CHAPTER 27

  It is About Me

  DAVID WAS READING the paper when she got home, with a glass of red wine next to him and Bach’s cello suites on the CD player. “Hey, you’re home early. Nice surprise.”

  “I have to find something.” She ran upstairs to their main storage closet. Locating the suitcase where they kept all the photos that didn’t make it into the albums or onto the wall, she lugged it downstairs, set it on the table and opened it.

  Explaining to David what she was looking for, he joined her and they started sifting through it. After a few distractions, all of which started with “Remember this one, when we … ?” Ruth found it and took a long hard look.

  “Why did this picture get buried in the suitcase? It’s a great picture. I love this picture. Married Me holding Baby Me. It’s great.”

  “You didn’t think it was so great at the time, as I recall. Looking older, etcetera etcetera.”

  “I was so wrong, David.”

  Still holding the photo, she went downstairs and over to the couch, folded her knees and let gravity take her down. David sat next to her with the newspaper. She took off her shoes and extended her feet into his lap, wiggling her toes and crumpling the paper.

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” As he rubbed her feet, she told him about her day at work and he told her about his.

  Ruth asked him what he thought about the ad campaign.

  “It’s good.”

  “Good-plus or good-minus?”

  “You’re being pretty demanding, especially for someone who’s getting a foot rub.”

  “You’re right. I’ll shut up if you keep rubbing.”

  “It’s actually kind of perfect.”

  “Perfect, you say?”

  “It’s not the end of the world to get older. Badda bing, badda bam.”

  With all her research and analysis, that’s what he reduced it to? “Isn’t that a little simplistic?”

  “Simple, maybe, but not simplistic. A lot of wisdom is simple. Look at ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ Or ‘E=mc squared.’ Or ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”

  “It’s just that—ow, be careful with that big toe on my right foot—it’s just that it’s also about demographic segments and societal influences and … you know, stuff like that.”

  “I’m just boiling it down is all.”

  “Whatever you say. Just keep rubbing and I’ll be your best friend.”

  After a while, the rubbing became softer, less concerned with relieving tired muscles than with tracing outlines. Ruth understood David’s unspoken invitation and sent her RSVP; instead of brusque movements pushing her foot into David’s hands and indicating “Continue the foot rub please,” her gentle reciprocity said “yes.”

  David threw the cushions from the back of the couch on the floor
and they lay down together, facing each other. They kissed slowly, and she gave her full attention to David’s lower lip. It was full and expressive, soft, and she explored it with her tongue. He gave himself over to her exploration until, inevitably, the kissing accelerated.

  David took the lead in undressing, first himself, quickly. Then her, not so quickly.

  “Wish I’d known to wear my nice underwear,” Ruth said.

  “I’d just have to be a little more careful about taking it off,” he said as he slowly slid her white cotton panties down to her knees. He stood up very slowly and took her legs out of their white cotton handcuffs, kissing the inside of each ankle as he did so. He drew the curtains and retrieved his wine glass. He took a sip, then got back down and offered it to Ruth. He removed Ruth’s remaining article of clothing, her watch.

  Later, David cooked dinner while Ruth took a bath. After dinner, they watched a movie on TV, then read for awhile, she a woman’s magazine in which she saw three photos of inside-out sweaters, he the ever-present stack of papers to grade.

  When they went to bed, Ruth expected to be able to fall asleep quickly, what with feeling loved, with her belly full of food and wine and her body smelling of lavender bath-oil. But, instead, her mind returned to the end of last night’s Brain Trust meeting, after the discussion of envy. Blanche had asked for the group’s wisdom about a problem employee, whom everyone agreed she should fire even though they knew that was the answer Blanche was hoping to avoid.

  Then Ruth had asked for a sounding board. “I’m not looking for an answer, just some help thinking something through.”

  “Of course. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re called women,” Sarah said.

  “Besides, it will be a relief to talk about your problems instead of mine,” Blanche said.

  “Is it the middle-aged makeup thing?”