Autobiography of a Face (20 page)

I started imagining my father standing next to me in the hospital, visiting me. With all my might I strained to hear the background noises of the hospital, feel the starch of the sheets, and hear my father's footsteps approaching, hear the rustle of his clothes as he stood near me, his cough to see if I was awake. I'd imagine opening my eyes very slowly, very carefully, and try to see him, standing beside my hospital bed. All I could conjure was the vaguest of outlines, a passing detail that only seemed to obscure the rest of him: how his watch fitted on his wrist, how he would trace the edge of his ear with one finger.

 

Spending as much time as I did looking in the mirror, I thought I knew what I looked like. So it came as a shock one afternoon toward the end of that summer when I went shopping with my mother for a new shirt and saw my face in the harsh fluorescent light of the fitting room. Pulling the new shirt on over my head, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror that was itself being reflected in a mirror opposite, reversing my face as I usually saw it. I stood there motionless, the shirt only halfway on, my skin extra pale from the lighting, and saw how asymmetrical my face was. How had that happened? Walking up to the mirror, reaching up to touch the right side, where the graft had been put in only a year before, I saw clearly that most of it had disappeared, melted away into nothing. I felt distraught at the sight and even more distraught that it had taken so long to notice. My eyes had been secretly working against me, making up for the asymmetry as it gradually reappeared. This reversed image of myself was the true image, the way other people saw me.

I felt like such a fool. I'd been walking around with a secret notion of promised beauty, and here was the reality. When I saw Dr. Baker a few weeks later, I wanted desperately to ask him what had gone wrong, but I found myself speechless. Besides, I knew that the graft had been reabsorbed by my body—the doctor had warned me it might happen. He spoke of waiting a few years before trying any more big operations, of letting me grow some more. We spoke about a series of minor operations that would make readjustments to what was already there, but there was only vague talk of any new grafts, of putting more soft tissue or bone in place. Sitting in his expensively decorated office, I felt utterly powerless. Realizing I was going to have to change my ideals and expectations was one thing, but knowing what to replace them with was another.

That unexpected revelation in the store's fitting room mirror marked a turning point in my life. I began having overwhelming attacks of shame at unpredictable intervals. The first one came as I was speaking to Hans, my boss at the stable. He was describing how he wanted me to tide a certain horse. I was looking him in the eye as he spoke, and he was looking me in the eye. Out of nowhere came an intense feeling that he shouldn't be looking at me, that I was too horrible to look at, that I wasn't worthy of being looked at, that my ugliness was equal to a great personal failure. Inside I was churning and shrinking, desperate for a way to get out of this. I took the only course of action I knew I was any good at: I acted as if nothing were wrong. Steadying myself, breathing deeply, I kept looking him in the eye, determined that he should know nothing of what I was thinking.

That summer I started riding horses for Hans in local schooling shows. In practices I always wore a helmet with my hair hanging loose beneath it, but etiquette required that during shows my hair be tucked neatly up beneath the helmet, out of sight. I put this off until the very last minute, trying to act casual as I reached for the rubber band and hair net. This simple act of lifting my hair and exposing my face was among the hardest things I ever had to do, as hard as facing Dr. Woolf, harder than facing operations. I gladly would have undergone any amount of physical pain to keep my hair down. No one at the show grounds ever commented to me about it, and certainly no one there was going to make fun of me, but I was beyond that point. By then I was perfectly capable of doing it all to myself.

The habits of self-consciousness, of always looking down and hiding my face behind my hair or my hand, were so automatic by now that I was blind to them. When my mother pointed out these habits to me in the hope of making me stop, telling me they directed even more attention to my face, she might as well have been telling me to change the color of my eyes.

I fantasized about breakthroughs in reconstructive surgery, about winning the lottery and buying my own private island, about being abducted by space aliens who'd fix me up and plop me back down in the midst of a surprised public. And there were still acts of heroism waiting to be thrust upon me, whole busloads of babies to be saved and at least one, there had to be at least one out there, wise older man who would read about my heroism in the papers, fall in love with my inner beauty, and whisk me away from the annoyance of existence as defined by Spring Valley High School.

During the eleventh and twelfth grades I had several small operations. The hospital was the only place on earth where I didn't feel self-conscious. My face was my battle scar, my badge of honor. The people in the plastic surgery ward hated their gorgeously hooked noses, their wise lines, their exquisitely thin lips. Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else. If
I
had my original face, an undamaged face,
I
would know how to appreciate it, know how to see the beauty of it. Yet each time I was wheeled down to the surgical wing, high on the drugs, I'd think to myself,
Now, now I can start my life, just as soon as I wake up from this operation.
And no matter how disappointed I felt when I woke up and looked in the mirror, I'd simply postpone happiness until the next operation. I knew there would always be another operation, another chance for my life to finally begin.

In the wake of my recurring disappointment I'd often chide myself for thinking I'd ever be beautiful enough, good enough, or worthy enough of someone else's love, let alone my own. Who cared if I loved my own face if no one else was going to? What was beauty for, after all, if not to attract the attention of men, of lovers? When I walked down a street or hallway, sometimes men would whistle at me from a distance, call me
Baby
yell out and ask me my name. I was thin, I had a good figure, and my long blond hair, when I bothered to brush it, was pretty. I would walk as fast as possible, my head bent down, but sometimes they'd catch up with me, or I'd be forced to pass by them. Their comments would stop instantly when they saw my face, their sudden silence potent and damning.

Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by surviving it. Sitting in math class, I'd look around and try to gauge who among my classmates could have lived through this trauma, certain that none of them could. I had already read a great deal about the Holocaust, but now we were reading first-person accounts by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi in social studies. I was completely transported by their work, and the more I absorbed of their message, the more my everyday life took on a surreal quality. Now everything,
everything
seemed important. The taste of salt and peanut butter and tomatoes, the smell of car fumes, the small ridge of snow on the inside sill of a barely open window. I thought that this was how to live in the present moment, to resee the world: continuously imagine a far worse reality. At these moments, the life I was leading seemed unimportant, uncomplicated. Sometimes I could truly find refuge in the world of my private senses but just as often I disingenuously affected a posture of repose, using it as a weapon against people I envied and feared, as a way of feeling superior to and thus safe from them.

After the section on the Holocaust, my social studies class moved on to art history. One day I walked into class late and found the lights off. My teacher was just about to show slides. Giacometti's sculptures flashed on the wall, their elongated arms simultaneously pointing toward and away from the world, while their long legs held them tall and gracefully but tenuously. Next were de Chirico's paintings, with the shadows from unseen others falling directly across the paths of the visible. I had seen Munch's "The Scream" and had identified it with my own occasional desire to let out a howl, but it was only at that moment, sitting in that darkened classroom, that I understood the figure might not be screaming himself but shielding his ears from and dropping his mouth open in shock at the sound of someone, or something, else's loud, loud lament. Matisse's paintings seemed to be about how simple it was to see the world in a beautiful way. Picasso's were about how complex, how difficult, beauty was.

The poems we read in English class had similar effects on me. My taste was not always sophisticated, but I did read poetry by Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens, which moved me in ways I couldn't understand. It was, in part, the very lack of understanding that was so moving. I would read Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and feel that something important and necessary was being said here, but the moment I tried to examine the words, dissect the sentences, the meaning receded.

Senior year I applied to and was accepted at Sarah Lawrence College with a generous scholarship. Not sure what to do with my life, I decided to work toward medical school. The day senior class yearbook photos were taken, I purposefully cut school, and I threw away all the subsequent notices warning that unless I attended the makeup shoot, my photo would not appear in the yearbook.

CERTAIN PEOPLE GO THROUGH RADICAL OUTWARD
changes their freshman year of college. This is especially true at Sarah Lawrence, with an enrollment of only eight hundred and a program decidedly focused on liberal arts. The college is only an hour from Spring Valley, so my mother drove me there. She helped me carry boxes up to my dorm room, said good-bye, and drove away. From across the parking lot outside my window I could hear a Herman's Hermits song blaring out, "Something tells me I'm into something good." I took it as an omen. For days beforehand I'd been a nervous wreck, but suddenly I felt I belonged. It was an unusual, curious feeling.

Sarah Lawrence is something of a satellite of New York City's Lower East Side. Some students dressed entirely in black or sported bizarre haircuts indicating the overzealous use of a razor blade, while others wore, with enviable grace and style, exotic, ruined clothes that looked as if they'd washed up on shore after the
Titanic's
New Year's Eve party. Everyone cultivated an air of being an outsider, beyond it all, utterly cool. Rather naively, I fell for these appearances instantly, was completely seduced by them. I was shocked to discover that rather than snubbing me, everyone was extraordinarily nice and even interested in me. I was amazed to observe myself so at ease, ready and able to make contact with people. I'd had some friends before college, but they were people I spent time with more than true friends. I would never have considered showing my private self to them. Here, within hours I was having intense discussions about life, art, all the topics I'd been craving for so long.

Yet for all the deep conversations, one's looks still were of paramount importance. Only the aesthetic had changed. In many ways the fashion of cool was every bit as rigorous and unforgiving as the fashion of fitting in had been in high school, only here the rigor depended upon a higher degree of individuality. With amazing predictability—predictability that we the inductees of cool would have scorned had anyone tried to point it out—the freshman class went through its first-semester transformations. I was no exception.

Some of us, after Thanksgiving break, left our embarrassing old chinos and Docksiders at home, and arrived back on campus completely vamped out in retro-punk: dyed magenta hair and green fingernails and long black skirts. Others went for oversized dresses from their grandmothers closets, strange little hats with feathers, pearl necklaces that hung to their navels. Still others went for the sex-toy look: ripped jeans over lace stockings and T-shirts with collars and sleeves tantalizingly torn off. I went with the I-don't-care-I'm-an-artist look, which required that everything I wore come from the Bargain Box, the local thrift store, and cost no more than a dollar-fifty. Extra points went to anything I found lying on the street.

At the heart of this antifashion statement was poetry. Still set on going to medical school, I had signed up for the required science courses, but I had to fill out my schedule with something in the humanities. My mother urged me to take one of the writing workshops the school is well known for, and, deciding that fiction would be too much work, I chose a poetry course. My instructor was a man named John Skoyles, and by the end of the first semester I was hooked.

Reading and writing poetry brought together everything that had ever been important to me. I could still dwell in the realm of the senses, but now I had a discipline, a form for them. Rather than a way to create my own private life and shun the world, the ability to perceive was now a way to enter the world. Language itself, words and images, could be wrought and shaped into vessels for the truth and beauty I had so long hungered for. Most amazing, one could fail, one could make mistake after mistake and learn from each one.

Poetry became a religion for me. I was a fanatic. I'd pull people into a corner and say, without any sense of irony, "You have to hear this, it will change your life." I'd recite anything from Rilke to Ashbery, certain that the deep wonder and awe I felt from these poems would be immediately apparent. I recognized this wonder and awe as intimately connected to the feelings I'd discovered while recovering from chemotherapy sessions, when to simply "be" was reason enough for joy. Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was. And I felt I'd at last discovered the means with which to actively seek out this kind of being, this kind of beauty.