Autobiography of a Face

  I was still experimenting, unsuccessfully, with making myself ill. Pneumonia remained my pet plan, though I was still unable to inhale the water. Summer had arrived, so there was no hope of catching cold outside, but I'd seen enough trapped-in-the-desert movies to hope for heat stroke. I didn't have a clue what heat stroke was, but the word stroke made me envision some sort of tender caress. I did know that it involved seeing mirages. I wasn't allowed to go into the sun because of the extra radiation, so any exposure that might give me a tan was out.

  I wrapped myself in a blanket and went to lie in my private spot in the back yard. I lay there and felt the ants crawl up on my skin. Although I liked ants and bugs in general, I occasionally tortured them, then felt guilty and sinful afterward. I'd vow not to, but I always did it again. I was finally cured after reading a German fairy tale that described a horrible little girl who liked to pull the wings off flies. When she died and went to purgatory, she was doomed to have all the flightless little lives she'd ruined crawl all over her and get in her mouth and eyes. I stopped my tortures not out of morality but from a combination of self-preservation and disgust.

  Sunlight came through the blanket in pinhole streams. Birds and chainsaws sang and wailed in the background. It was sweltering. I sat up and pulled the blanket cowl-like around my head and stared into the distance. Sweat rolled down the side of my rib cage, a rib cage so skinny I could feel the drops momentarily rest above the ridge of each bone. I stared into the distance. I was looking for my mirage. In the movies they saw either water holes or beautiful women, sometimes both. My eyes scanned the back yard: nothing. My T-shirt now was drenched with sweat. Even the backs of my hands were sweating, and my scalp, which itched against the blanket. I realized this wasn't going to work. Lifting myself up with great effort, I walked back into the air-conditioned house, the wave of cold hitting my face like a bucket of water when I opened the door.

  The one time I actually got out of having chemotherapy, I wasn't even feeling particularly ill. But when the blood test showed a high white blood cell count, I was overjoyed. Deciding I should be put into isolation for a bit, a porter came down to the clinic to collect me in a wheelchair. I loved riding in wheelchairs, and I waved gaily to Dr. Woolf as I was chauffeured past him.

  "Better not look too happy," my mother advised me. Immediately I went into my waif mode, a style I'd been perfecting for some time. Since becoming slowly aware of my odd appearance, I'd decided to use it for all it was worth to have an effect on people, to matter somehow.

  Isolation wasn't such a thrill after all. Because my admission was unexpected, I hadn't come prepared with books or toys, and, horror of horrors, the room had no television. I wasn't permitted to have any of the ward's shabby toys brought in because of germs, and there was no view, because the only window was blocked by a broken air conditioner. I kept opening the door to stick my head out, but someone always yelled at me to shut it, to stay inside and get back into bed. I felt perfectly fit. How could I really be ill? Lying face down on my bed, I felt my hipbones jut down into the overstarched sheets. Sleep was a long way off. I saved myself only by pretending I was a prisoner put "in the hole," which I'd read about in a book about a group of men in prison, a book I knew I wasn't supposed to read because in it the men had sex with the prison's mascot, a donkey. I lay there and pretended I'd been framed.

  That week was the exception, though. Most weeks Friday was still D-day. The chemotherapy became my entire life for two and a half years. To fill the time as I waited to see Dr. Woolf, I'd go to the public bathroom down the hall. I loved the feeling of my small body traveling in the same direction as all those large bodies in suits and white jackets striding effortlessly past me, street shoes clicking on the tile.

  It was an old bathroom with only two stalls. Each stall door was wooden and closed on the inside with a silvery metal latch. There was no graffiti anywhere in the bathroom except on these latches. Someone, certainly the same person, had scratched onto each rectangular piece of metal a message. Sitting on the toilet in the first stall you could read God Is Near, and on the second, Be Here Now. I always pictured the person who wrote these messages sitting on the same porcelain as myself, bending forward, one arm raised up and resting against the warping wood of the door, a nail file in the other hand. I sensed that it had been done a long time ago, before my time. What was wrong with them? I wondered. Why were they here? I never asked myself what might have happened to them.

  Still spending my private moments trying to engage God in conversation, alternately attempting to barter him into answering my questions and silently trying to listen to the answer, these bathroom communications seemed important to me.

  Each Friday I'd plod down to this bathroom, killing time before the inevitable, and I'd pause for a moment before the two doors, trying to decide which message I wanted to read. God Is Near. Well, okay, how near? Did this mean he was near in the way someone is near when they're coming toward you, moving closer and closer, not yet here but expected sooner or later? Or did it mean he was neat but not showing his face, present but unseeable, someone breathing quietly in a closet? Be Here Now. I didn't want to be here now. My wanting was inconsequential. I was here now, whether I liked it or not. But something about this saying attracted me, either despite or because of its seeming simplicity, and two out of three times I went for door number two.

  Some weeks I stared at it dumbly, thinking only of what was happening back in the waiting room with my mother, how many more rows of knitting she'd finished. Some weeks I thought of the impending injection, or I simply continued with my fantasy life: the pony express rider seeks relief in the town's saloon, the alien ponders the wonders of waste disposal. Some weeks, especially when it was hot, I thought of nothing and only listened to my urine hiss into the water below my legs as I leaned forward, pressing the coolness of the inscribed metal against my forehead, and wept.

  SEVEN

  Masks

  HAVING MISSED MOST OF FOURTH GRADE AND ALL but a week or so of fifth grade, I finally started to reappear at school sometime in sixth grade during my periodic "vacations" from chemotherapy. I'd mysteriously show up for a week or two weeks or sometimes even three or four, then disappear again for a couple of months.

  Most of the sixth-grade class consisted of children I'd grown up with. They were, for the most part, genuinely curious about what had happened to me. They treated me respectfully, if somewhat distantly, though there was a clique of boys who always called me names: "Hey, girl, take off that monster mask—oops, she's not wearing a mask!" This was the height of hilarity in sixth grade, and the boys, for they were always and only boys, practically fell to the ground, besotted with their own wit. Much to their bewilderment and to the shock of my teachers, I retorted by calling out to them, "You stupid dildos."

  Derek used to say that word all the time, and I thought it a wonderful insult, though I didn't have a clue as to what a dildo was. After being reprimanded enough times for wielding this powerful insult, I finally asked my brother what it meant: an artificial penis, he informed me. I gave up using the word. I'd known children in the hospital with artificial limbs, and I'd known children with urinary tract problems.

  The school year progressed slowly. I felt as if I had been in the sixth grade for years, yet it was only October. Halloween was approaching. Coming from Ireland, we had never thought of it as a big holiday, though Sarah and I usually went out trick-or-treating. For the last couple of years I had been too sick to go out, but this year Halloween fell on a day when I felt quite fine. My mother was the one who came up with the Eskimo idea. I put on a winter coat, made a fish out of paper, which I hung on the end of a stick, and wrapped my face up in a scarf. My hair was growing in, and I loved the way the top of the hood rubbed against it. By this time my hat had become part of me; I took it off only at home. Sometimes kids would make fun of me, run past me, knock my hat off, and call me Baldy. I hated this, but I assumed that one day my hair would grow in, and on that day th
e teasing would end.

  We walked around the neighborhood with our pillowcase sacks, running into other groups of kids and comparing notes: the house three doors down gave whole candy bars, while the house next to that gave only cheap mints. I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.

  For the end of October it was a very warm night and I was sweating in my parka, but I didn't care. I felt such freedom: I waltzed up to people effortlessly and boldly, I asked questions and made comments the rest of my troupe were afraid to make. I didn't understand their fear. I hadn't realized just how meek I'd become, how self-conscious I was about my face until now that it was obscured. My sister and her friends never had to worry about their appearance, or so it seemed to me, so why didn't they always feel as bold and as happy as I felt that night?

  Our sacks filled up, and eventually it was time to go home. We gleefully poured out our candy on the floor and traded off: because chewing had become difficult, I gave Sarah everything that was too hard for me, while she unselfishly gave me everything soft. I took off my Eskimo parka and went down to my room without my hat. Normally I didn't feel that I had to wear my hat around my family, and I never wore it when I was alone in my room. Yet once I was alone with all my candy, still hot from running around on that unseasonably warm night, I felt compelled to put my hat back on. I didn't know what was wrong. I ate sugar until I was ready to burst, trying hard to ignore everything except what was directly in from of me, what I could touch and taste, the chocolate melting brown beneath my fingernails, the candy so sweet it made my throat hurt.

  The following spring, on one of the first warm days, I was playing with an old friend, Teresa, in her neat and ordered back yard when she asked, completely out of the blue, if I was dying. She looked at me casually, as if she'd just asked what I was doing later that day. "The other kids say that you're slowly dying, that you're 'wasting away.'" I looked at her in shock. Dying? Why on earth would anyone think I was dying? "No," I replied, in the tone of voice I'd have used if she'd asked me whether I was the pope, "I'm not dying."

  When I got home I planned to ask my mother why Teresa would say such a thing. But just as I was coming through the front door, she was entering from the garage, her arms laden with shopping bags. She took a bright red shirt out of a bag and held it up against my chest. It smelled new and a price tag scratched my neck.

  "Turtlenecks are very hard to find in short sleeves, so I bought you several."

  I was still a tomboy at heart and cared little about what I wore, just so long as it wasn't a dress. But turtlenecks—why on earth would I want to wear turtlenecks in the spring? I didn't ask this out loud, but my mother must have known what I was thinking. She looked me straight in the eye: "If you wear something that comes up around your neck, it makes the scar less visible."

  Genuinely bewildered, I took the bright-colored pile of shirts down to my room. Wouldn't I look even more stupid wearing a turtleneck in the summer? Would they really hide my "scar"? I hadn't taken a good long, objective look at myself since the wig fitting, but that seemed so long ago, almost two years. I remembered feeling upset by it, but I conveniently didn't remember what I'd seen in that mirror, and I hadn't allowed myself a close scrutiny since.

  I donned my short-sleeved turtlenecks and finished out the few short months of elementary school. I played with my friend Jan at her wonderful home with its several acres of meadow and, most magnificent of all, a small lake. There was a rowboat we weren't allowed to take out by ourselves, but we did anyway. Rowing it to the far shore, a mere eighth of a mile away, we'd "land" and pretend we'd just discovered a new country. With notebooks in hand, we logged our discoveries, overturning stones and giving false Latin names to the newts and various pieces of slime we found under them.

  Jan had as complex a relationship to her stuffed and plastic animals as I had to mine, and when I slept over we'd compare our intricate worlds. Sometimes, though not too frequently, Jan wanted to talk about boys, and I'd sit on my sleeping bag with my knees tucked up under my nightgown, listening patiently. I never had much to offer, though I had just developed my very first crush. It was on Omar Sharif.

  Late one night I'd stayed up and watched Dr. Zhivago on television with my father. Curled up beside him, with my head against his big stomach, I listened to my father's heart, his breathing, and attentively watched the images of a remote world, a world as beautiful as it was deadly and cold. I thought I would have managed very well there, imagined that I would have remained true to my passions had I lived through the Russian Revolution. I, too, would have trudged across all that tundra, letting the ice sheet over me and crackle on my eyebrows. For weeks I pictured the ruined estate where Zhivago wrote his sonnets, aware that the true splendor of the house was inextricably bound to the fact that it was ruined. I didn't understand why this should be so, and I didn't understand why reimagining this scene gave me such a deep sense of fulfillment, nor why this fulfillment was mingled with such a sad sense of longing, nor why this longing only added to the beauty of everything else.

  Elementary-school graduation day approached. I remembered being in second grade and looking out on a group of sixth-graders preparing for graduation. It had seemed like an unimaginable length of time before I'd get there. But now I was out there mingling in the courtyard, remembering the day when I laid my head down on the desk and announced to the teacher, "I'll never make it." I could even see the classroom window I had gazed out of. So much had happened in four years. I felt so old, and I felt proud of being so old. During the ceremony I was shocked when the vice-principal started speaking about me, about how I should receive special attention for my "bravery." I could feel the heat rising in me as he spoke, my face turning red. Here I was, the center of attention, receiving the praise and appreciation I'd been fantasizing about for so many years, and all I could feel was intense, searing embarrassment. I was called up onto the platform. I know everyone was applauding, but I felt it more than heard it. In a daze I accepted the gift Mr. Schultz was presenting me with, a copy of The Prophet. I could barely thank him.

  Later, alone in my room, I opened the book at random. The verse I read was about love, about how to accept the love of another with dignity. I shut the book after only a page. I wanted nothing to do with the world of love; I thought wanting love was a weakness to be overcome. And besides, I thought to myself, the world of love wanted nothing to do with me.

  The summer passed, and junior high school loomed. Jan, Teresa, and Sarah were all very excited at the prospect of being "grownups," of attending different classes, of having their own locker. Their excitement was contagious, and the night before the first day of school, I proudly marked my assorted notebooks for my different subjects and secretly scuffed my new shoes to make them look old.

  Everyone must have been nervous, but I was sure I was the only one who felt true apprehension. I found myself sidling through the halls I'd been looking forward to, trying to pretend that I didn't notice the other kids, almost all of them strangers from adjoining towns, staring at me. Having seen plenty of teen movies with their promise of intrigue and drama, I had been looking forward to going to the lunchroom. As it happened, I sat down next to a table full of boys.

  They pointed openly and laughed, calling out loudly enough for me to hear, "What on earth is that?" "That is the ugliest girl I have ever seen." I knew in my heart that their comments had nothing to do with me, that it was all about them appearing tough and cool to their friends. But these boys were older than the ones in grade school, and for the very first time I realized they were passing judgment on my suitability, or lack of it, as a girlfriend. "I bet David wants to go kiss her, don't you, David?" "Yeah, right, then I'll go kiss your mother's asshole." "How'll you know which is which?"

  My initial tactic was to pretend I didn't hear them, but this only seemed to
spur them on. In the hallways, where I suffered similar attacks of teasing from random attackers, I simply looked down at the floor and walked more quickly, but in the lunchroom I was a sitting duck. The same group took to seeking me out and purposely sitting near me day after day, even when I tried to camouflage myself by sitting in the middle of a group. They grew bolder, and I could hear them plotting to send someone to sit across the table from me. I'd look up from my food and there would be a boy slouching awkwardly in a red plastic chair, innocently asking me my name. Then he'd ask me how I got to be so ugly. At this the group would burst into laughter, and my inquisitor would saunter back, victorious.

  After two weeks I broke down and went to my guidance counselor to complain. I thought he would offer to reprimand them, but instead he asked if I'd like to come and eat in the privacy of his office. Surprised, I said yes, and that's what I did for the rest of the year whenever I was attending school. Every day I'd wait for him, the other guidance counselors, and the secretaries to go on their own lunch break. Then I'd walk through the empty outer office and sit down in his private office, closing the door behind me. As I ate the food in my brown paper bag, which crinkled loudly in the silence, I'd look at the drawings his own young children had made. They were taped to the wall near his desk, simplistic drawings in which the sky was a blue line near the top and the grass a green line near the bottom and people were as big as houses. I felt safe and secure in that office, but I also felt lonely, and for the very first time I definitively identified the source of my unhappiness as being ugly. A few weeks later I left school to reenter chemotherapy, and for the very first time I was almost glad to go back to it.