Even before the Army, I pursued a messy, physical life, wrapping myself up in men who didn’t bathe or whose tattoos threatened to rub off on my skin. We dirtied ourselves together, lay in our filth, fucked in ways that made love seem something clean and dry and distant. I lived a life in sullied sheets and torn jeans, but always, I could take a hot shower and emerge alone with my cheekbones, reminding me of decency and balance and beauty. Then I would go home to my mom, or later, when I lived on my own before joining up, go back to my small loft, which was Japanese in its minimalist cleanliness. I could retreat into my nothing space and lay naked on my crisp white sheets, running my hands from my toes, over my ridgepole shins to my thighs, then rest my hands on my knobby hips. In this way, I dangled myself over the precipice — I faced down unsightliness and retreated unscathed. I loved unbeautiful men, felt that they were somehow closer to the reality of things than me. I think ugliness was one of the primary reasons that I joined the military. It promised unending fields of rough-faced men with bodies they’d beaten into submission. I knew I would have to beat my feminine body, too, iron out the curves that marked me soft and undisciplined. When I was discharged, I had a cruel stomach and dictatorial biceps, my changed body telegraphing its ability to snuff out life. Only my leg betrayed vulnerability.
When I left Unit 57 after six months of physical and psycho-therapy, I wasn’t prepared for the strain of the unspoken deadline. Leaving the hospital meant, unofficially, that the state was done with me. That now I had to make my way in the world without the help of nurses and aides, not that they had been around that much when I got moved to “outpatient” status. Budget cuts, I’d heard. Walter Reed was due to be shut down in 2010, but sometimes it felt like it had already been closed. Like we were living in a ghost town. Once I became an “outpatient,” I lived in a building across the street from the hospital. Occasionally, caseworkers would come by to check on us, but we were essentially on our own. We were stuck in a purgatory bulging with the limbless.
On my last day there, standing awkwardly in front of the sliding glass doors, waiting for Helen to pull the rental car around, I felt the familiar, cloistered hospital world falling away rapidly. I felt freakishly disproportionate. Clyde, my physical therapist, told me that when you lose a leg, you have to learn to walk all over again. You become balanceless as a baby. As my left side, I felt my face slowly following, my left cheek slouching. I would ask Clyde if he saw the tick, and he told me that those physical twitches, those feelings of absence and presence, were a normal part of recovery. We heard the word “recovery” a lot in the hospital. I often wondered what exactly we were trying to recover, but no one would say. I had a recurring dream that I was the leader of a search and rescue mission at sea, and I would plummet to the bottom of the ocean, bubbles forming a tower over my descending head. At the sea floor, I would find my leg, tangled in a plume of seaweed, green with the phosphorescence of drowned plant life.
On the flight home from Washington, my mother and I didn’t talk. She flipped through Vogue, and I read “The Stranger”. It was the same copy Jed had read and sand would occasionally slip out when I turned the pages.
My first morning home, I awoke to a ripped-out magazine page taped to my door. It was from Vogue — a woman in a green jersey knit sheath with a peacock feather in her hair. One of my mom’s old tricks. She’d put up photos she found particularly captivating and talk about the model’s “air of mystery,” her intelligent mouth and clean posture. I took the page down, balled it up and threw it in the trash. That night at dinner, my mother spoke about a charity ball she would attend.
“I just don’t know if I should wear the navy taffeta or the lavender crinoline,” she said.
“I’m not sure, Ma. What makes you feel the best?” I asked.
We didn’t discuss my leg. I felt I had failed her in some way, and now the only way she could function was to avoid discussing it altogether. At the time, I accepted it. I wasn’t ready for depth. I wanted to float, to skim, and by the time I was ready, her indifference was habitual and I’d become immune.
After that first dinner back, I went up to my bedroom. It was on the second floor, so I leveraged my way upstairs on crutches, which took a quarter of an hour. I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep until I’d concocted a beauty recovery plan. I had to find a way to restore myself — a way to take that hot shower and clean off the crust of my experience again. I had to get clean again. Clean, even and symmetrical. As I fell asleep, I determined I would learn the name of every Texas wildflower. I would learn the constellations, too, and be able to point them out to people, to future loves. I couldn’t be lazy anymore, couldn’t just win men on the promise of waking to loveliness every morning. I would let the wildflowers bloom in my ruined body.
After the surgery, I can’t tell just how smashed up my mother’s face is because the doctor has her wrapped up, mummified in white gauze. Only her mouth and nose poke through, upper lip inflated like a little sofa for her nose to sit on. I half expect the doctor to bring in a hook and pull her brain out through that strange, isolated nose, tell me to hand over my gold bracelet to add to her tomb’s treasure horde. But instead he says:
“I took two inches of skin out of her chin and tweaked her eyelids a bit.”
He smiles, inviting me to complement him on a job well done. Because I’ve recently made up my mind to be less slavishly decorous when dealing with authority figures, I return his smile with a nod.
I sit across from my mother, whose feet are bundled in dirty socks and tucked into gold ballet flats. This is my mom. Still vain enough to wear ballet flats to surgery. I’ve always attributed her vanity to the fact that her name is Helen. For a woman born poor in El Paso, that’s a lot to live up to. I suppose that, given the name, this surgery was inevitable. I am suddenly thankful that my name can also mean just. Even adequate seems a better destiny than beautiful.
“Mom?” I say.
She doesn’t respond, her breathing heavy and wet. She sounds like Jed did, trying to get breath past his pulped tongue; like he was eating really messy spaghetti. I am seized by the desire to find one of those suction devices that dentists use to suck out all the impeding saliva. The nurse comes in to check on us. I’m feeling uncharitable.
“So,” I say, peering at her nametag, “Brandi. Will my mother suffer from phantom chin syndrome?”
I’ve worn shorts on purpose, and I know she’s seen my leg. I ache to make her uncomfortable. My mother’s rattling continues loudly. Brandi gives me a sidelong look as she checks the bandages. She is quick but not rough. She reminds me of the drill team girls I used to know in high school. The Raiderettes. To make the team, your name had to end in “i” or “ie” or “y.” They danced at pep rallies before football games, neatly choreographed moves that suggested an ability to direct and contain the body. It was strangely appealing, dance as science rather than art, the girls moving like falling dominoes. They called each other “sweetie” and “sweetheart,” and then they would secretly stab and shred each other, whispering in the hallways. That was when I came to hate “sweet” and “neat.” False premises. Human bodies, and humans, are unruly. And nothing is ever arranged.
Even before Brandi can respond, I know she will say something that suggests her belief in beauty’s preeminence, because she is lovely. Younger than me, possessed of the common prettiness you see in clothing catalog models — her eyes suitably wide-spaced, her ears and nose small and seemly. Already, I know she believes in what she does, because she cannot imagine a life devoid of prettiness. So she enables other fading beauties to clutch and cling to the faintest suggestion of bedroom eyes; the hint of a Nefertitian profile beneath the cruel sag. She probably sees herself as some sort of charity worker.
“I see this as an act of self-preservation. Your mother has chosen to look as young as she feels,” Brandi says.
I am restless, so I reach for a cigarette.
“There’s no smoking in here, Miss Deacon.”
“I prefer Miz,” I say, buzzing out the Z extra long.
“Well, Ms. Deacon. You shouldn’t smoke around your mother for at least two weeks. Slows the healing process.”
She’s unflappable, and people who cannot be flapped really don’t interest me. I come from a family of amateur thespians, hysteria and hyper-sensitivity passed down from generation to generation like china. My father left us in a flurry of raised voices and arms, a balletic rage, slamming the door so hard that the screen fell off its hinges. We Deacons consider unflappables to be emotionally unwell. Only after I joined the military did I learn the value of the straight face, the still hand. I take the mummy that is my mother by the elbow and walk slowly to the car. My balance is almost completely restored now and I barely limp.
