The Beautiful Anthology (6 page)

It looks like a jail uniform! Go put something else on. Please!

Do I have to?

No, but … it looks bad. If you don’t care what you’re wearing …

I don’t care. I like these clothes.

The little girl runs out, goes off to play with her young neighbors. The screen door bangs shut behind her. The girl’s long, wavy brown hair flies – free and barely brushed – in the wind.

Everything is shiny here at the Jackson’s house. The wallpaper has spots of foil intertwined in areas of fuzzy, olive-green leaves. Nice to rub with fingertips, to see your hopeful, eager face reflected in the tiny mirrors.

There are books full of metallic wallpaper samples for crafting. Cut with scissors. Paste.

Boys and girls play happily together, then disband. Boys ride Big Wheels and bicycles in the driveway. Girls keep playing with the pretty paper.

Mrs. Jackson has been consumed with redecorating her ranch house. The foyer near the front door is tiled with small squares that look like tiger’s-eye jewelry.

The five-year-old girl walks quickly to the front door. She plans to call to the boys outside. Tease them. But suddenly, she slips on the tiny tiger’s-eye tiles, swirled as they are in variegated shades of brown, yellow, amber.

The flat soles of her girlish white sandals send her flying, crashing into what she’ll later be told was a porcelain umbrella stand.

The girl watches herself fall, as if from a distance. She hears the crash rather than feels it, sees the shards of white china that lie all around her. She feels no pain yet, only wonder. What just happened? What is broken? Did she break it?

A warm pool of blood seeps quickly from her face, encircling her body on the floor. The blood feels soft and deep and almost luxurious. It almost feels as if she is swimming in it.

Oh! My! God! Pick her up! Get her over here.

Use these towels.

Get more towels. Hurry!

Press them to her face.

Get her in the sink. Carry her to the sink. Put her head in the sink!

Call her parents.

No, go and get them. Jessica, go and get them. Tell them there’s been an accident.

Come back! Get back here! Help me.

She won’t stop bleeding!

The next thing the girl knows, she is sitting in the back of her parents’ Volkswagen, going to the hospital.

It doesn’t hurt, Daddy.

That’s good, Princess, he replies calmly. Warmly. Hold that towel to your nose, okay? Just keep holding it there.

The girl does as she is told, but then she feels a sudden curiosity. What is wrong with her nose, anyway? What does it look like? She peels the blood-soaked tea towel away, cranes her neck to see into the rearview mirror.

Don’t do that! Don’t look at it!
Her father is shouting now. Is he mad? The girl nearly faints from the sight of her face, cleanly torn open. Sliced from the corner of her left eye, all the way down the side of her nose, cut straight across her nostrils. Dark red with blood. Darker inside.

The wound is like a ripped envelope advertising its contents. Horrifying.

What happens next? The girl recalls only how she is quickly wheeled down hallways on a gurney. Doors, elevators, flickering fluorescent lights flip past her, like images drawn by an animator. Looming, masked faces look down on her. Strangers speak soothingly.

She briefly sees her mother swooning nearby in the hallway. She hears her father calling for
smelling salts
.

What are smelling salts? Sounds disgusting. Ooh, smells worse.

Then she hears,
Plastic surgeon, plastic surgeon. We’re going to need the best plastic surgeon. Who’s the best? We need that one.

The girl doesn’t even know what a plastic surgeon is, but it sounds serious. She is still in no pain, still in shock. She thinks only,
But I’m not made of plastic …

Cut her clothes off.

Several pairs of frighteningly large shears rip into her favorite jeans, shred her T-shirt, ruin her outfit. The girl watches as the scissors cut close to her flesh. Her eyes widen. Is this happening to her? Is this real?

Now she is lying on a steel table, clad only in white cotton underpants flocked with tiny pink rosebuds. She is cold. Humiliated.

Should I give it to her in the ass?

In the ass?
Ass
is a bad word. Who said that? A bad person.

A nurse with short brown hair is holding a large hypodermic. The nurse’s head swivels, questioning unseen authorities. She nods, then plunges the needle into the little girl’s thigh.

The plastic surgeon arrives. The girl is not sure how much time has passed. But here is Dr. Leonardo, a name she will long remember.

The surgeon surveys the damage to the little girl’s nose and, without comment, sets to work. He’s a fix-it man. His voice is soft.

Dr. Leonardo likes classical music playing while he works. He enjoys humming. He also seems to enjoy hospital gossip.

A bevy of nurses cluster around him, vying for his attention, so close, so close. The nurses are like twittering birds – chickadees, perhaps. They are like groupies surrounding David Cassidy, or just somebody they revere and want to impress.

Dr. Leonardo cleans and sews, and they all gossip about some people they know – some other nurse, some other doctor – who have been “getting it on.”

The girl wonders what this means. Getting what on? Getting on what?

Dr. Leonardo plucks all the pieces of porcelain out of her skin. This hurts, and it seems to go on forever. Then, he lies.
Oh, here’s a big piece of porcelain, last one!
He doesn’t even tell the girl that he is anesthetizing her nose with needles. She whimpers.

Your daughter almost lost her nose. When I first saw it, I thought, “There is nothing I can do to save that nose.” It was barely on her face anymore.

Dr. Leonardo is talking to her mother. He sounds mildly annoyed, but maybe this is because the girl’s mother – and the girl does not understand this at all; it seems so weird – is pulling on his sleeve and weeping, begging, pleading, asking over and over,
What will she look like now? Will she still be pretty?

A thin, white line. That’s what the doctor is saying the scar will look like if – and this is key – the little girl’s skin is properly protected while it heals. Dr. Leonardo keeps explaining about the thin, white line.

Use vitamin E. A sunhat. Put a Band-Aid over the scar whenever she’s in the sun. That scar can get no sun.

What about swimming?

Not for a couple of weeks. But then, fine. Remember! No sun on the scar. Cover the scar at all times.

The mother finally seems to understand.

The girl is driven home. First, though, a stop at the drugstore for vitamin E. Tylenol. Hershey bars. Ice cream.

She gets into her parents’ bed. She is happy with the treats and attention. She feels like jumping on the bed, but this is not allowed.

Ring!!
goes the phone.
Ring!! Ring!!

Everyone who calls wants to know the same thing:
How many stitches?

The girl wonders about this herself. She touches – gingerly, unsure – the long line of fuzzy black sutures. They cling to the side of her nose like a hairy caterpillar. They are ugly. Her nose feels at once tender and numb.

It’s rude to ask how many stitches. Can you believe people keep asking that?
Her mother is talking to her father, still shaken, still – it seems – on the verge of crying. She says, almost mournfully, This would have to happen when Elizabeth was wearing that terrible outfit.

The girl’s mother believes in dressing up for doctors. Even though they always make you take your clothes off. Even though the clothes the girl had on before ended up in the garbage.

The parents confer for a minute and then sneak up on the little girl, sporting fake grins, like Halloween masks. One holds a glass of water, one a large, translucent yellow capsule.
You have to swallow this
, they say. The girl shakes her head no. The capsule is
gigantic
.

Her mother and father try to teach her how to swallow a pill. The girl cries. There’s no way. She doesn’t want to try it. It’s frightening. Water runs down the girl’s chin; the capsule ends up somewhere in the middle of her throat, pointing out through her pale skin like a lump, a stone.

The mother’s voice rises, quavers.
This is important. You need to do this. The doctor said so.

There is also a bottle of vitamin E oil that has a little brush inside, like nail polish. The oil gets brushed onto the girl’s nose twice a day. What is vitamin E, anyway, the girl wonders? A vitamin for emergencies?

Appearances obviously matter. Appearances reflect on the person in charge. If it looks good, perhaps people will think it
is
good.

The girl does not know where this philosophy originated, if it was borne out of the times when her mother’s home was surprise inspected to see if she was worthy enough to adopt a child.

The mother might simply be a product of her generation, one that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s – a generation that says mothers should always make sure that their daughters look nice. Girls should wear a ribbon in their hair. Dinner really ought to be on the table every night by six.

Wiping at some dust balls in the corner, the mother says she wants her house to
look
clean. She says she doesn’t care if it actually
is
clean.

The mother sews fancy clothes and knits sweaters with elaborate blackberry and basketweave stitches. She weaves wreaths out of found pinecones, and embroiders complex, pastoral scenes with curly fleeced sheep, vivid flowers, rushing rivers.

She spends hours kneading, braiding, baking, and glazing fat, glossy loaves of challah bread. Her daughter aches with hunger, smelling the baking bread, watching it cool on the counter. But this bread is not for eating; no, instead, the mother hangs these shiny loaves of bread
on the wall
. They hang for years, until they crumble.

Their house is bedecked with these carefully made objects. Giant jars of olives, and gifts of homemade jam (some that the girl made herself) adorn an open shelf in the kitchen, plaid bows gracing their fat, crystal necks.

These things are for appearances. These beautiful, useless objects are for public display. They exist only to make an impression:
Look how homey it is here, how pretty.

The girl grows older. Her mother tells her that she needs to wear some makeup. When the girl leaves the house barefaced, her mother says,
You look like death warmed over. You need some blush, some lipstick.

It is deeply ironic that the girl’s mother says this because she barely wears makeup. She cares little about such things, and even washes her face with Irish Spring.

When she looks at herself, the mother sees nothing wrong. When she looks at her daughter, she thinks:
Her hair could be neater. She always looks so terribly pale.

A pretty girl should live up to expectations, says the mother. If one has the capacity to be pretty, then one should be – no excuses – perpetually attractive. A gift, such as beauty, should be used and appreciated, not taken for granted.

The girl learns all this, but years later, she still does her own thing. She looks the way she looks. She brushes her hair, but doesn’t obsess over it, and refuses to use “product” if it makes her hair feel sticky. She wears makeup, but only a little of the very best makeup, artfully applied after much study of technique, so that it looks natural.

No matter what, however, she hears in her mind the muttered admonitions:
You should cover up that scar with makeup. If only you hadn’t run away screaming when Dr. Leonardo was going to do the dermabrasion.

I’d like to see you lie still while a masked man comes toward your face with a belt sander, the girl said in reply once, and that ended the hounding.

The girl doesn’t see her own scar anymore. Funny how that is. Some people still ask her about it, which is always jarring, but to her, the scar is not an issue. It is simply there, as if it has always been there.

There are other questions, though, also having to do with appearance, also annoying and closer to home:
Why don’t you buy an elegant, expensive overcoat? You need a very special, very pretty couch. Custom-made. Don’t you agree? And when are you going to have a beautiful house, a showplace?

Her mother doesn’t have to say these things. The girl, fully grown now but still a child in her own memory, will always – despite not caring about such superficial things – always hear them.

J. E. FISHMAN

SPINNING

This is the story of the most beautiful serve I ever hit in my life.

I should begin by noting that I didn’t learn to hit a tennis ball with any significant degree of competence until my mid-thirties. That isn’t to say that I’d never hit a tennis ball before.