Second Nature (20 page)

Hollis said, “Sicily, it’s early yet, but can you try to move your face? Don’t do anything that feels unnatural. Just try to do something. This isn’t a test, my dear.”

I expected it to feel like trying to use a robot arm to grasp one of those toys in a vending machine. It did feel slow and a little stiff. But I smiled.

Eliza burst into tears.

Kit said, “My God, Sissy. It looks like your smile. It looks like your own teeth.”

“They are my own teeth,” I told her. But I was caught on the prongs between joy and distress myself. I said, “Propose. Pompous. Propaganda. Primate. Profligate. Priest. Popular. Bubbles. Bunches. Benefits. Booster … Baby.”

Aunt Marie said, “This is a miracle. Oh, Sicily. Oh, my Sicily. Oh, Dr. Grigsby, thank you. Thank you. If her mother could see this.”

I smiled then, again. I had a dimple. It was as though I was cherishing something newborn but also familiar, back after a long while. I smiled and my throat closed and, though I did not cry, I felt as though something frozen was melting.

I suppose something was.

CHAPTER TEN

N
ow began the loneliest period of my life.

Something was missing. I assumed it was that singular purpose for which I had strived and had expected would descend upon me, like some raiment from heaven, conferring a sense of achievement. But I had achieved nothing. Hollis had. Mrs. Cassidy had. Even lost Emma had, in her way, if I believed in a consciousness after death, by endowing a community of mortals with her generous spirit.

But I?

I should have hit my knees, morning and night, and thanked God for my reclamation. But to what purpose was the reconstituted Sicily? What was I meant to do beyond the completion of my facial surgery? I had no larger ambitions than any other twenty-five-year-old with an adequate job. I did have an insufficiency of guts and enterprise to search out what more I could do. I’d spent my life building a tough, supple body that I daily put behind a desk in front of a computer. Had all that sweat equity been to foster vanity and defeat depression? Should I actually try choreography now? Should I train as a volunteer paramedic and literally put my strong back and my medical knowledge out on the street? I certainly had the spare time. Hollis told me that my ordinary life was exemplary and that if there was to be something further required of me, it would become apparent. She added, furthermore, that life was not a horse race. I met with Polly Guthrie weekly—which I would do, apparently, until one of us died.

“I like you, Polly,” I said. “But what am I supposed to be confiding?”

“Whatever you like,” she said.

“I keep waiting to figure out when all this is going to be ordinary to me.”

“That’s going to take a long time, Sicily. You have to be patient with yourself and heal slowly, physically and psychologically.”

“I’ve done slowly forever! Tell me how I can catch up to everyone else.”

“Next week let’s talk about feeling left behind.”

“Next week? For how long?”

“It’s the law, Sicily,” Polly said.

“The law?”

Polly had rarely shown any discernible sense of humor. But now she said, “The law that guarantees full employment for psychologists.”

As for the photographic documentary, Beth was doing the heavy lifting on what we had named “Fate-to-Face: A Physical Hymn.” She came often to my house and sometimes went with me through my days, photographing me at the computer, at the ballet barre—once even capturing my shadow on the wall while I tried to execute a
grand jeté
in a small space. Beth photographed me in silhouette against my windows and peering into my bathroom mirror, my hands framing my still-swollen face. One that I still love is of me holding in my hand what appears at first to be an unusual little piece of primitive pottery—in fact, my prosthetic nose. Of all the pictures from that early time, my favorite is of my smile the first time since I was a kid that I fully tasted and felt the texture of a cannoli. The whole photo is one of my eyes and a quarter of my turned-up smile, displaying the mascarpone and powdered sugar on my upper lip. I look like a little kid on Christmas morning. In fact, as I experimented with the joy of eating normally, I no longer could content myself with my supereasy supermodel diet—scrambled eggs for the protein, spinach and nuts for the fiber, apples and peanut butter so I could tell Marie I’d eaten dinner. In six weeks, I gained ten pounds. I started eating crap, like taco chips and doughnuts, stuff my mother never allowed me and for which I had no use as an adult. I got takeout and gleefully devoured quart cartons of lo mein and big, gloppy, dripping-with-everything cheeseburgers, which I could finally, literally, sink my teeth into. Beth brought me a pound of lobster fra diavolo from their restaurant, The Old Neighborhood, which I ate in one sitting. I chugged green tea lattes and mocha lattes and pumpkin lattes. I sampled wine and cheese and more wine. Although I compensated with extra miles on the treadmill, all I could do was walk, at least for another month—no running. There were no weights, no strenuous dance. For the first time in my life, I had trouble zipping my jeans.

I learned why food is a substitute for pretty much everything else.

Living the mainstream life to the degree I’d managed seemed to most people more than a sufficient achievement: The common herd would have admired me even for being able to put one foot in front of the other. My face had restored me to the crowd but also upped the stakes—the way April reproaches someone who’s spent the winter hiding her butt under a big sweater. I had done my reading. There’s a hollow feeling some people experience when they think cosmetic surgery is going to change their whole lives totally. They think they’ll get good men and six-figure jobs. They think they’ll dress up and be proud. They’re heartbroken when they end up the same not-terribly-dynamic people but with bigger boobs or smaller noses or tauter chins. I was pretty sure I’d gone ahead with this for something bigger, and yet nothing had changed.

I loved my face, especially as it slowly emerged from the surgical trauma. Every day there were fewer and lighter bruises. I could begin to see the chin and cheekbones I would have in a few more weeks. Marie accused me of falling in love with my reflection. I had. I could have
climbed into
a mirror. I looked at the poignant pictures of me in Beth’s house the day I met her, which would not be part of the magazine piece planned for
Sense and Sensibility
(all was forgiven after they saw Beth’s portrait of Emma, Mrs. Cassidy, and me). I wondered how I had lived so long. When you move out of a house you have sheltered in, you notice that the carpets are worn and the walls scuffed, that your pictures have left holes in the walls and vivid rectangles of the color the paint was before time and sunlight did their work. You once snuggled up and watched old black-and-white movies on the couch you’ll leave at the curb, but outside in the sunlight it looks shabby and disreputable. How did you keep it so long? My face had been dreadful. I had thoughts that made me ashamed, that somehow, down the road—when the first year ended and Beth found the right gallery for an exhibit—I would want to hide the pictures that before had seemed so raw and moving. I would want to leave them at the curb and disown them.

Having a life and having my life, it turned out, were two different things. Polly the psychologist was right. I had trouble reentering the world. For the people in groups who stayed home, mostly alone and out of sight, I’d felt pity. I’d also felt—and this was disturbing—scorn. I’d been quite the adventurer, in a circle so tight and small that, not counting clients, everyone could have gathered at a table for ten. At thirteen, I hadn’t even been old enough to ride the train downtown with my girlfriends. My young woman’s life had been my boyfriend, my job, my few girlfriends, and my family. I had never traveled. That was a big one. Every summer, my parents and I went for a week to Uncle Al’s house on Lake Madrigal. Every winter, my mother and I rode in a sleeper car on the Empire Builder to Grand Central Station for a weekend with Aunt Marie in New York—on Marie’s dime. I’d gone skiing with Kit’s family at her parents’ place in Vermont. Her dad drove. I had never been in an airplane or on a boat or a Ferris wheel or dived off a diving board. I had never obtained a passport or a driver’s license, just a student ID. I’d never seen an ocean.

Here I was, having lived an epic life. I’d lost my family and my face but had never been in a book club. While I could speak Italian, I couldn’t cook it. I could draw you a snazzy sketch of the gastrointestinal system but not knit a potholder. Now that my life didn’t need to be compact, I had no idea how to expand it. For every disfigured or disabled person who hid away, there turned out to be ten others on a carousel of causes and confraternities. Polly and Kelli encouraged me to reach out to kids on burn wards—to offer hope to them by my example. They suggested I join support or even social groups. Kit proposed I create a romantic personal ad on an Internet service, or, as Aunt Marie said in acid tones, make a date with my very own murderer online. Polly said she would suggest weekly group therapy, along with my weekly one-on-ones, but my emotions were “normal.” Kelli thought it would be good for me just to talk those emotions out with people in different parts of the city, even online. Two months after my surgery, through Polly, I met a guy online four or five years older who’d had a face transplant
and
a hand transplant—the result of a bad farming accident. (There are no good ones: Everything on a farm, from a cow to a combine, can mess you up completely.) He was very nice and funny. He said he used to imagine his profile for a dating service:
FORMERLY FACELESS FARMER SEEKS FRIENDLY FRAU
.

Together, we made up mine:
I HAVE: A NEW FACE, A NEW LIFE, NEW ROSES, AND SEVERAL AWARDS FOR DRAWING TUMORS. YOU HAVE: LOW STANDARDS AND A PULSE
.

I thought we might be friends, but when it came to posting a picture for me to see him, he would not do it. What he told me was that he would have been glad to meet me on the street—if I hadn’t known about his surgery—and he would have told me about it later. My knowing in advance made him not confident but self-conscious. I had taken a picture with my computer cam and sent it to him, so I felt cheated, awkward.

We lost touch.

All through the long, cicada nights of that long summer, I kept waiting for … something.

Of course, I worked. In advance I’d planned a few months of working from home. Until the worst of the swelling subsided—and I got that facial “trim”—there would be no disconcerting meetings with clients, no annoying double takes.

It wasn’t as though I hid under the bed. There was a big dinner for the main doctors and nurses and my family. There was Beth. There was Eliza, who turned out to have exactly the personality she would need for the work she wanted to do. She was caring and noticing. On what would have been my wedding day, she made a point of asking me in advance to have dinner at her house. She made Ethiopian food, the hottest stuff I’d ever eaten, so hot it made me sweat while I ate. Stella had Rice Krispies, and, afterward, Eliza let her watch
The Little Mermaid
until she fell asleep in a big recliner. That night, Ben came home early—for him—at about ten o’clock. I’d met Ben only once, but he was a person you already seemed to know before you met him. I asked about the rest of the family.

“I had two brothers in Bolivia,” Eliza said. “Older. Alejandro and Cruz. They were good boys. I loved them. The memory of them goes away more every year. I can remember Cruz swinging me up over something, like a well, and pretending he was going to drop me. And when I went to the orphanage, Alejandro cried and gave me blue shoes.”

“Do they write to you? Or call you?”

“No,” Eliza said. “Ben and I have talked about trying to find them. I don’t want to yet. They knew me as Maria Agata. For a long time, I was surprised to hear ‘Eliza,’ and then ‘Maria Agata’ began to sound odd to me, like it would if you said, ‘Spoon, spoon, spoon,’ over and over until it lost its meaning.”

“The real reason is Candy,” said Ben. “Her mom.”

“Your mom doesn’t want you to contact your brothers? Or your mother? Your real mother?”

Eliza said gently, “Candy is my real mother, Sicily. And I’m not trying to be sentimental or politically correct. I just can’t imagine I would love anyone more than my mother. And she would be fine with my seeing Cruz and Alejandro. It’s me. I don’t want her to feel she failed me.”

“I know,” I said. “I know and I don’t know. I wasn’t as young when my mother died, but when I think of my mother, I think of Marie first and then of my mother, the way she was when I was little.”

“I didn’t know my mother after I was four,” Eliza said. “She died. I lived with my brothers and my aunt. And, you know, they were good boys, relatively. But they worked for … the drug trade. And my aunt was a prostitute, as my mother had been.” She said it so matter-of-factly.

“Is that why she died?” I asked. “Did she die of AIDS?”

“No,” Eliza said. “A man beat her to death.” I gasped, then tried to hide it with a cough. “It’s okay, Sicily. I didn’t see her death. I don’t remember her really at all. The nuns were pretty cute and terrific, and I had clean clothes for the first time and TV and …”

“And food,” Ben said. “Regular meals. She doesn’t talk about it, but there were plenty of days when it was a little rice and that was it. The orphanage was her Four Seasons.”

Eliza, not Ben, drove me home. She said she liked to drive downtown at night. She had gone to undergrad school at Northwestern and sometimes wished that she still lived in the city. “It never closes,” she said. “You watch the people and it’s like a performance.” There was still so little I could say to her, and I was not a person customarily at a loss for words. Eliza’s life had been brutal. Mine had been brutal but also sheltered. I could not imagine wanting for food. Before I got out, Eliza kissed me on both cheeks. “I hope you don’t get sick from my cooking.”

When I lay down that night, I realized that I had not thought of where I would have been since I’d awakened that morning. Kit was right. I had gotten over Joe.