Autobiography of a Face (16 page)

At school the taunts were becoming only harder to take. Somehow I had reasoned that if a bad thing happened often enough it would get easier. It worked with pain, so why wasn't it working with teasing? Every time I was teased, which usually happened several times a day, it seemed incrementally more painful. I was good at not listening, at pretending I hadn't heard, but I could sense myself changing, becoming more fearful. Before I'd been an outgoing person, and in the right circumstances I still was, but now meeting new people was laced with dread. Except for the one time I went to my guidance counselor to complain, I discussed this with no one. Besides, I reasoned, what could I do about it? I was ugly, so people were going to make fun of me: I thought it was their right to do so simply because I
was so
ugly, so I'd just better get used to it. But I couldn't. No matter how much I braced myself, the words stung every time they were thrown at me. It didn't seem to matter that I was doing everything I could to know the truth, to own the fact that I was ugly, to make sure I was prepared for it, to be told nothing I didn't already know.

One afternoon I went to the hospital for some outpatient surgery. A tooth in the back of my mouth had to be pulled, and I was knocked out for about ten minutes. Afterward I waited in recovery for my mother to take me home. When she came in, she pulled the blood-soaked gauze out of my mouth and gasped. In the course of the surgery two of my lower front teeth had been partially knocked out, leaving two very ugly stumps. Apparently no one had been planning to tell us about this complication, and it was only by chance that my mother discovered it while we were still there. Justifiably, she exploded in anger. The surgeon's response was predictably patronizing, and a full-fledged battle ensued as I sat there feeling a bit woozy and slightly bewildered, still pleasantly lost in the fading buzz of the anesthetic.

Once home, my mother, still fuming, turned to me and said, "You don't have to go to school tomorrow if you don't want. I understand that you might not feel very good about the way your teeth look." We looked straight at each other. Something had just happened, but I wasn't sure what. All I'd ever wanted was to be left alone and allowed to stay at home. I had spent a great deal of energy trying to convince her that I had to stay at home because of some counterfeit physical ailment, and suddenly it wasn't what I wanted at all.

She stood over me in the living room, the cats howling for their dinner because we'd returned home so late from the hospital, and offered me, what, compassion? As I think of it now, I'm certain her offer to let me stay home was an attempt to understand what she must have known instinctively. But it was too late. I'd already given up that fight. I understood my mother's offer only as barbed verification of what I believed to be the indisputable truth: I was too ugly to go to school. I pretty much stopped going to the seventh grade, but I was moved along with everybody else to the eighth. My grades were mediocre, and my passing surely had to do more with ineptitude on the school's part than with academic accomplishment on mine.

 

I relished that summer as no other. My friend Jan and I took our infatuation with horses to ridiculous proportions. We spent all of our play time pretending we were horses, galloping around her yard, jumping over whatever obstacle we could set up. Whoever got around better was given a homemade blue ribbon, and afterward we would kneel on her lawn and dare each other to graze, the curiously familiar and sour flavor of grass filling our mouths and turning our front teeth green.

Jan's parents were paying for her to take riding lessons that summer, and I was filled with envy. We couldn't afford them. Sometimes she'd invite me to go with her and I would, though I hated the superior tone she took with me then. I went because the very presence of horses overwhelmed me, filled my whole body with a sensation so physical and complete that I'd be transported during those hours. I did nothing but fear the passing of each moment as I sat by the fence watching Jan ride, because I knew that eventually we'd have to go home and all I would have left was the wonderful, peaty smell on my palms to remind me of the horses. Jan started boasting that her parents were going to buy her a horse, that they'd build a stable for it in the empty field by the lake, and that, maybe, just maybe, she'd let me help her take care of it. We spent long afternoons thinking up names for the horse, though according to my taste, her ideas were sentimental, unoriginal choices such as Beauty and Black.

Jan never got her horse, but that June, shortly after my fourteenth birthday, I got my job as stable hand at Diamond D. It was the perfect environment for me. Most of the other hands were girls who were a couple of years older than me, and there were two boys, Sean and Stephen. The girls were nice enough to me and eventually became my friends, though I never felt completely at ease with them. We came from different worlds. They were raucous and wild, and I loved them for this. Epithets the likes of which I'd never heard even from my own wild brothers flew from everyone's lips, and there was a glorious delight in getting as muddy and dirty as possible. When I came home at the end of the day my mother always made me undress in the garage. I was proud of the mud all over me and the tired ache from trying to hoist bales of hay, however ineffectually. As the summer wore on I got tanned and gained weight and grew physically stronger every day.

I loved how basic were the needs of the animals, how they had to be fed and watered even if you were tired or hot or late. There was a primacy to it, a simplicity I recognized from coping with the pain of my treatments, a shedding of all extraneous grievances to reveal a purely physical core, a meaning that did not extend beyond the confines of one's body. When feeding time was near, pandemonium broke out among the horses, filling the barn with neighing and kicking and squealing. And as soon as our work of dragging buckets and hauling hay was over, peace descended. It was a quiet filled with chewing sounds and soft snorts and a sense of rest that felt ancient and good. Sometimes late at night, when I couldn't sleep, I would call the barn, knowing no one was there, and imagine the sound of the phone echoing in the horse-filled barn.

I kept my new world, with its physical pleasures and new social experiences, completely hidden from my family, who did not seem particularly interested anyway, though they were glad I'd found something "healthy" to do with my time. School was coming around again, and I actually looked forward to returning: horse fever is common among junior high school girls, and I thought my new job at the stable might improve my status at school. Everyone at the barn was preparing to return to school as well, including Jeanne, who was boy crazy and had a crush on Sean.

The day before school began, some six of us girls were sitting on top of the hay pile. Jeanne stood on top, pointing to each person and asking, "If Sean asked you out, would you go with him?" The girls were mixed in ages and in physical development, Jeanne being the oldest at sixteen. Alison and I, at fourteen, were the youngest. Alison looked fourteen, but I, my body still reeling from the effects of all the chemotherapy, looked about ten. Puberty was still a year away. Jeanne seemed to be asking everyone systematically, but she wasn't actually thinking of asking me, was she? Sean would never ask me out; it was a completely ridiculous question, and the thought that we all might have to acknowledge this fact together seemed worse than anything else in the world.

Finally, Jeanne turned to me and, only because she didn't know how to politely leave me out, asked the question. I hesitated, not sure how to respond, but then Chris came to my aid and answered for me. "Why would Sean want to go out with her?" "Well, I'm just asking," Jeanne replied. I shifted uncomfortably on the hay, glad Chris had spoken for me. This was the moment when I knew definitively that I would never have a boyfriend, that no one would ever be interested in me in that way. I suppose I had learned this already from the boys at school, but never had I actually formed the inner sentence, expressed it in real terms to myself.

Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love. Instead of proving my worth on the chemotherapy table, I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world. I decided that it was my very ugliness that allowed me access to this other beauty. My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn't my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to? At the end of each day, as I lay in the bathtub, I looked at my undeveloped child's body. I considered the desire to have it develop into a woman's body a weakness, a straying from my chosen path of truth. And as I lay in bed at night, I considered my powers, my heightened sense of self-awareness, feeling not as if I had chosen this path, but that it had been chosen for me.

Beauty had nothing to do with the ephemeral world of boys, of this I felt sure. This was driven home to me when junior high school started again and I watched my sister and her friends begin their own puberty. They put on blue eye shadow, blow-dried their hair, and spent interminable hours at the local mall. My own notions of what made a woman beautiful were more classically oriented: if I could look like anyone in the world it would be either Marlene Dietrich or Botticelli's Venus. I definitely did
not
aspire to look like Farrah Fawcett, of this much I was sure. I looked at girls in my class, with their perfect faces, and wondered why on earth they ruined them with so much makeup, such stupid hair. If
I
had a face like that, I told myself—then harshly reprimanded myself for any stirrings of desire. My face was my face, and it was stupid to wish it any other way.

At school the gang of boys from last year appeared to have dispersed, and I was free to eat in the lunchroom again. But a new group had formed, and they tracked me down every day between fourth and fifth periods as I went from gym to English class, which were at opposite ends of the school. By the time I reached the staircase near my English classroom, nearly everyone else was already there, leaving me to climb the stairs alone. Alone, that is, until that group of six boys discovered they could find me in this stairwell each day at the same time and took to waiting for me. Their teasing was the most hurtful of all because it wasn't even directed at me but at a boy named Jerry.

"Hey, look, it's Jerry's girlfriend. Hey, Jerry, go on, ask your girlfriend out." I heard Jerry meekly protest, but I knew that he was as much at their mercy as I was, and I knew that to have me called his girlfriend was just about the most malicious insult the other boys could level at him. I even felt sorry for Jerry, though I never saw him, for I refused to lift my gaze from the floor. What morons, I thought to myself, what misguided morons. Martin Luther King, one of my heroes, had said, "I will not allow my oppressors to dictate to me the means of my resistance." That seemed like a far truer thing, a far deeper thing. I wanted to hate them, but instead I tried to forgive them. I thought that if I could do this, the pain they caused would be extinguished. Though I had genuine glimpses of what charity and transcendence meant, I was shooting for nothing less than sainthood; often, after my daily meeting with them, I only ended up hating myself instead.

The horses remained my one real source of relief. When I was in their presence, nothing else mattered. Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me. Horses neither disapproved nor approved of what I looked like. All that counted was how I treated them, how my actions weighted themselves in the world. I loved to stand next to them with no other humans in sight and rest my head against their warm flanks, trace the whorls in their hide with the fingers of one hand while the other hand rested on the soft skin of their bellies. All the while, I'd listen to the patient sounds of their stomachs and smell the sweet air from their lungs as attentively as if I were being sent information from another world.

 

In the middle of the school year, several months before my fifteenth birthday, I went to see Dr. Conley, the surgeon who had removed my jaw, to discuss plans for reconstructing it. I had known all along that something was going to be done to "fix" my face, but up until this point I don't think I had really believed it.

Without the threat of chemo or dental work, being in a doctor's office seemed so simple and easy. As Dr. Conley examined me, he held my head in his hands, touching my face as no else had in years. It was only then that I realized how guarded I had become about my face; simply relaxing and allowing him to touch me there was akin to surrender, the closest I ever got to experiencing trust. After the examination, he sat down and spoke to me in the tone of someone speaking to a child, which served to both instantly destroy and strangely build the trust in him I had felt only moments before.

He explained that the biggest obstacle to reconstruction would come from all the radiation treatments I'd undergone. Irradiated tissue tends not to take grafts too well and presents a higher rate of reabsorption; even if the graft wasn't actually rejected, it might simply be "taken back" by my body and shrink down to nothing. He proposed a technique that required the use of "pedestals," which would require several operations. In the first operation, two parallel incisions would be made in my stomach. The strip of skin between these incisions would be lifted up and rolled into a sort of tube with both ends still attached to my stomach, resembling a kind of handle: this was the pedestal. The two incisions would be sewn together down its side, like a seam. Six weeks later, one end of the handle would be cut from my stomach and attached to my wrist, so that my hand would be sewn to my stomach for six weeks. Then the end of the tube that was still attached to my stomach would be severed and sewn to my face, so that now my hand would be attached to my face. Six weeks after that, my hand would be cut loose and the pedestal, or flap, as they called it, would be nestled completely into the gap created by my missing jaw. This would be only the first pedestal: the whole process would take several, plus additional operations to carve everything into a recognizable shape, over a period of about ten years altogether. Ten years! I was horrified. I would be twenty-five years old in ten years: ancient. Did I have to devote the next ten years of my life to one surgery after another? Ten years—my God.