At My 45th Reunion, Three Women Asked Me Who Did My Work

The question

It was Debbie Harmon who asked first. We were standing by the dessert table at our 45th high school reunion, and she leaned in close and said, "Okay, you have to tell me. Who did your work?"

I laughed because I thought she was joking. Debbie was always the funny one. But she wasn't laughing. Then Karen and another woman whose name I honestly couldn't remember came over, and Debbie told them, "Look at her. She won't tell me who she sees."

I said, "Nobody. I promise." They looked at each other the way women our age look at each other when they think someone is lying about her hair color.

I drove home that night smiling, but also a little unsettled. Not because of what they said. Because two years earlier, I would never have believed anyone would say it to me.

Two years earlier

I retired from the library in the spring of the year I turned 61. I'd worked there 29 years. The first thing I did with all that time was nothing at all. I slept late, I stopped wearing makeup, I lived in the same two pairs of slacks.

That fall my son sent me a picture from my grandson's birthday party. I was holding the cake. I remember zooming in and thinking, who is that tired woman? It wasn't the wrinkles exactly. I'd had those for years. It was that my face looked like it had given up a little. The skin along my jaw had gone soft, and my cheeks looked flat in a way I didn't recognize.

I didn't tell anyone that it bothered me. It felt vain to mind. My mother never fussed about her face and I always admired that.

The jars in the cabinet

Here is something embarrassing. When I finally went through my bathroom cabinet, I found five face creams. Two were nearly full. One had expired in a year that started with 20 and ended with a number I'd rather not say.

I'd bought every one of them the same way. Someone at a counter or on television told me it was what women my age needed, and I believed them, and then I used it for a week and forgot about it.

I didn't want to do that again. So I did what a librarian does. I started reading.

What I read

I had time, so I went to the pharmacy and the department store and I read labels the way I used to read the backs of book jackets. Slowly, and with suspicion.

Most of the long ingredient lists meant nothing to me. But two words kept coming up in the articles I looked up afterward. One was collagen, which I learned is a protein our skin already makes and makes less of as we get older. The other was ceramides, which my reading described as something our skin uses to hold in moisture, and which also drop with age.

I'm not a scientist and I won't pretend to explain it better than that. What made sense to me was simple. If my skin was making less of certain things, I wanted something that put a little of them back, instead of something that just sat on top of my face and smelled nice.

I found a balm that had both, called Vitro. It came as a plain stick and didn't promise to take twenty years off my face, which, honestly, is part of why I trusted it.

The rule I made for myself

Before I opened it, I made myself one rule. I would use it every morning and every night for three months, and I would not judge it before then. I'd quit too many things after a week.

I also did something I've never done in my life. I took a photo of my face in the bathroom mirror, in the same light, on the first day. I wrote the date on a sticky note and stuck it inside the medicine cabinet.

The routine itself was nothing. A few swipes after washing my face, blended in with my fingertips, then my usual moisturizer. It took less time than brushing my teeth.

The first few weeks

I want to be honest about this part because I think people leave it out. For the first two weeks, I didn't notice a thing. My skin felt nice, a little softer maybe, but I could have been imagining it.

Around week three I almost stopped. I remember standing at the sink thinking, here you go again, Linda. But I'd made the rule, and I'm stubborn about rules.

Somewhere around the sixth week, I was putting on lipstick for a church luncheon, which I hadn't done in months, and I noticed my skin didn't look papery around my mouth the way it had. It looked smoother. Not young. Just smoother, like it had been drinking water.

The first person who noticed

It wasn't me who said it out loud first. It was my neighbor Ruth, who has known me for 22 years and does not give compliments. She stopped me at the mailbox and said, "You look rested. Did you go somewhere?"

I hadn't gone anywhere. I'd been in Dayton the whole time, same as always.

At the three month mark I took the second photo, same mirror, same light. I put them side by side on my phone. My jawline looked firmer to me. The lines around my eyes were still there, but the skin under them didn't look as thin and creased. My cheeks had a bit of fullness back. I looked like myself on a good day, instead of myself after a bad night.

I didn't show the photos to anyone for a long time. I'm not sure why. I think I didn't want anyone to tell me I was seeing things.

Back at the reunion

So that was where I was when Debbie asked me who did my work. I'd been using the same balm for a little over a year by then. I'd never stepped inside a clinic.

I didn't answer her properly that night. Partly because it felt strange to talk about it at a reunion, and partly because I wasn't sure she'd believe me.

The next morning she sent me a message on Facebook. It just said: "Seriously. Who?"

So I told her. I told her about the photo in the medicine cabinet, the three month rule, the two weeks of nothing, Ruth at the mailbox. I told her the name of the balm. She wrote back, "That's it?" and I wrote, "That's it."

Karen messaged me a week later asking the same thing. Then the woman whose name I couldn't remember, who turned out to be Patty Greer from my homeroom.

What I think about now

I used to believe that minding how your face changes was a kind of vanity. I don't believe that anymore. I think it's allowed to want to recognize yourself in a photograph.

I also think I spent a lot of years letting other people tell me what my face needed. The counter girl, the television, the magazine. The thing that finally helped was the one I chose myself, slowly, after reading about it, and then had the patience to stick with.

I still don't wear much makeup. I still live in the same two pairs of slacks. But when my son sends me photos now, I don't zoom in looking for the tired woman. Most days she isn't there.

And if someone asks me who did my work, I tell them the truth. Nobody did. I did it at my bathroom sink, twice a day, for a long time.