Brad’s gone, and I hear my mother slide out of bed, her raw silk duvet rustling softly.
“Fair? Are you getting ready?” she calls.
“I’m up,” I say, clutching the side of the bed as I strap on my prosthesis.
As we drive toward town, I see that it is a morning of smashed things. A toad, freshly squelched, guts like a broken watermelon spread over the pavement, all green skin and pink flesh. A dead cat in the middle of the highway, its ringed tail flattened by long-gone tires. Helen and I are on our way to the hospital, and I hope she doesn’t see the cat sashimi in the turn lane. It wouldn’t be pleasant to be reminded of the body’s limitations so soon before surgery. On the car radio, the announcer says that according to a new study 650,000 Iraqis have died since the start of fighting, according to a new study. So Iraq makes number four on the morning’s list, a whole country splattered on our windshield. Soon to complete this litany of ruined things: my mother’s face. At that moment, I think of Maurice and his face like meatloaf as he lay dying. I wonder how many plastic surgeons it takes to undo the ugliness inflicted on the soldiers in Walter Reed. I am suddenly angry at Dr. Vincent, the plastic surgeon my mother is going to see, for not being overseas, helping the teenagers who have unwillingly parted ways with their features as they knew them; for instead being here, in Texas, in an office done up in faux Versailles grandiosity, peddling vanity.
The March rains have come, and I know they will wash away the debris of all these broken things. Although my mother’s face and Iraq pose bigger problems than can be solved by thunderstorms. The rain builds until it sounds like hail against the car, obliterating the radio, filling the air between us. I haven’t spoken to my mother since last night, when she announced her intentions to have a facelift. She’d been planning it for months but failed to inform me because she said she didn’t think she would be imposing since I never leave the house.
“I just think it’s too good a value to pass up,” she shouts over the rain on the windshield, reasoning against my silence.
“Ma, fuck value. It’s your face,” I say.
Saying fuck feels good. I’m glad I broke my silence for the word’s gratifying consonance; a consonance we relied on in the desert. We lived in curses, their clip and crack quick, severe, like automatic weaponry. Pop! Shit! Crunch! Fuck!
“Honey, don’t be silly. It hasn’t been my face for at least ten years. All my features have melted away. Don’t you miss my chin? Besides, I’m starting to look a little like a drag queen.”
I wonder why I feel so possessive of her face. A face I learned in one day, one moment, really, after opening my eyes for the first time; a face that peered over crib’s edge until it became milk and warmth and softness. To stop the natural progression of that face seems criminal, censorial.
“Besides, I hear it’s more like a pedicure now. Isn’t science wonderful?” she says.
I think of the forty titanium screws holding my left femur together. My “good” leg. My remaining leg. Thanks to science, I’m alive, but most days, I feel like Frankenstein’s monster. Living at home since my injury, I have realized that my mom has somehow sidestepped ugliness all her life. Like many middle class suburban people, she lives in a place where the body’s integrity is rarely compromised. When it is, it happens slowly, privately. So different from the developing world, where maiming, killing, and decay are practically street theater; where a house collapsing, or a bomb, or a riot can bring carnage straight into the living room. The intact, medically-maintained body is an assumption here, and so it becomes a matter of buffing and waxing and painting and trimming. Luxuries of development — like formal gardens. It’s been hard for me to adjust to this attitude, after Iraq. Where life is a scramble and a heartbeat makes you the big winner. I wonder if Helen is ready for the cruelty that ensues when the body is compromised; because it’s the same whether you’re cutting to remove excess skin or a leg. The blood, the pus. Scar tissue. Bruising. By any account, thoroughly unpretty.
“Have you even researched this guy at all? Dr. Vincent?” I ask.
“Well, his mother-in-law is in my bridge group, and she just raves…”
“Oh Jesus, Ma. Are you kidding me?”
“Fair, come on. He has his degree. I’ve seen it right there on the wall of the office. Plus, I like his face. He’s handsome,” she says.
She laughs, but her timing is off. I have read about women dying from botched plastic surgery, and here is my mother, entrusting herself to some guy because she has a crush on him. She reaches over the console and puts her hand on my thigh. At that moment, I catch the scent of her fear.
I turn left at the gas station, up into the refined strip mall where she will have her operation. I have finally realized why she can never talk to me about my leg. To acknowledge it would somehow destroy her illusion that we are the blessed, the beautiful. Only her reflection has the power to make her second-guess her blessedness, and it must have been doing just that recently. It must have revealed her chin for what it is, the repository of a life’s expressions, weighing on her jaw. Ugliness has always terrified and fascinated her, and she’s probably been watching it approach from deep in the mirror for years. When I was a child, she referred to the unpretty girl I played with as unfortunate. As if it was not just a matter of aesthetics but one of fortune. And now she is finally willing to bring ugliness into her life, if only briefly, as she strives to reverse the age-induced depleting of her own substantial fortunes.
“Fair, dear,” she says, “It will still be my face when I come out.
She doesn’t sound very sure. I sense her embarrassment. For a natural beauty to stoop to this most unnatural thing. I loosen my grip on the steering wheel slightly. Quickly, I glance at her. She has gathered the hem of her blouse and folded it into triangular edges, which she rubs furiously. It’s what she does when she’s nervous.
The doctor’s brochure, which she showed to me last night, proclaimed “Roll back the decades with Dr. V!” I feel like she’s angling to erase the nineties, when two of her three divorces transpired and Grams died on New Year’s Eve, 1999, going out in a grand finale of diabetic fireworks: lost limbs, milky eyes.
But if she loses that decade, she’ll lose the night I lost my virginity. She told me it aged her three years cold. She would also lose the creases from all the arguments we had, which tic-tac-toed nearly all of my teenage years. It was an angry time, but with the anger came the pure exhaustion of our tears, the joy of our spent fury, when we would find our way back to each other, take one another by the shoulder and say, “Love.” The face as palimpsest, where we write and rewrite but never entirely erase. And she is prepared to lose all that.
We pull into the parking lot in front of Dr. Vincent’s practice. I cannot call him Dr. V, like some funhouse doctor or sports commentator. Not when he’s going to etherize and slice open my mother and suck out her physical memories. I fold my arms up against the steering wheel, rest my chin on top.
“I’ll see you in three hours, OK, Fair?” she says.
“OK,” I say, watching her as she darts through the rain-tinged, bullion-colored morning. “Tell him not to screw it up.”
She’s subsumed into the fluorescent light of the hospital.
