It’s after that Sister Katherine starts matchmaking. To save me from Brandy Alexander, she offers me the lawyer without a nose. She offers a mountain-climbing dentist whose fingers and facial features are eaten down to little hard shining bumps by frostbite. A missionary with dark patches of some tropical fungus just under his skin. A mechanic who leaned over a battery the moment it exploded and the acid left his lips and cheeks gone and his yellow teeth showing in a permanent snarl.
I look at the nun’s wedding ring and write:
i guess you got the last really buff guy.
The whole time I was in the hospital, no way could I fall in love. I just couldn’t go there yet. Settle for less. I didn’t want to process through anything. I didn’t want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn’t want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. I just wanted my face fixed, if that was possible, which it wasn’t.
When it’s time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it’s puréed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed.
You are what you eat.
The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through her glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it’s true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills.
Sister Katherine tells me, “These men you can write to in prison don’t need to know how you really look.”
It’s just too much trouble to try and explain my feelings to her in writing.
Sister Katherine reads me the singles columns while I spoon up my roast beef. She offers arsonists. Burglars. Tax cheats. She says, “You probably don’t want to date a rapist, not right off. Nobody’s that desperate.”
Between the lonely men behind bars for armed robbery and second-degree manslaughter, she stops to ask what’s the matter. She takes my hand and talks to the name on my plastic bracelet, such a hand model I am already, cocktail rings, plastic ID bracelets so beautiful even a bride of Christ can’t take her eyes off them. She says, “What’re you feeling?”
This is hilarious.
She says, “Don’t you want to fall in love?”
The photographer in my head says: Give me patience.
Flash.
Give me control.
Flash.
The situation is I have half a face.
Inside my bandages, my face still bleeds tiny little spots of blood onto the wads of cotton. One doctor, the one making rounds every morning who checks my dressing, he says my wound is still weeping. That’s his word.
I still can’t talk.
I have no career.
I can only eat baby food. Nobody will ever look at me like I’ve won a big prize ever again.
nothing, I write on my pad.
nothing’s wrong.
“You haven’t mourned,” Sister Katherine says. “You need to have a good cry and then get on with your life. You’re being too calm about this.”
I write:
don’t make me laugh. my face, I write, the doctor sez my wound will weep.
Still, at least somebody had noticed. This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.
The instant the accident happened, I knew I would die if I didn’t take the next exit off the freeway, turn right on Northwest Gower, go twelve blocks, and turn into the La Paloma Memorial Hospital emergency room parking lot. I parked. I took my keys and my bag and I walked. The glass doors slid aside before I could see myself reflected in them. The crowd inside, all the people waiting with broken legs and choking babies, they all slid aside, too, when they saw me.
After that, the intravenous morphine. The tiny operating-room manicure scissors cut my dress up. The flesh-tone little patch panties. The police photos.
The detective, the one who searched my car for bone fragments, the guy who’d seen all those people get their heads cut off in half-open car windows, he comes back one day and says there’s nothing left to find. Birds, seagulls, maybe magpies, too. They got into the car where it was parked at the hospital, through the broken window. The magpies ate all of what the detective calls the soft-tissue evidence. The bones they probably carried away.
“You know, miss,” he says, “to break them on rocks. For the marrow.”
On the pad, with the pencil, I write:
ha, ha, ha.
Jump to just before my bandages come off, when a speech therapist says I should get down on my knees and thank God for leaving my tongue in my head, unharmed. We sit in her cinder-block office with half the room filled by her steel desk between us, and the therapist, she teaches me how a ventriloquist makes a dummy talk. You see, the ventriloquist can’t let you see his mouth move. He can’t really use his lips, so he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth to make words.
Instead of a window, the therapist has a poster of a kitten covered in spaghetti above the words:
Accentuate the Positive
She says that if you can’t make a certain sound without using your lips, substitute a similar sound, the therapist says; for instance, use the sound eth instead of the sound eff. The context in which you use the sound will make you understandable.
“I’d rather be thishing,” the therapist says.
then go thishing, I write.
“No,” she says, “repeat.”
My throat is always raw and dry even after a million liquids through straws all day. The scar tissue is rippled hard and polished around my unharmed tongue.
The therapist says, “I’d rather be thishing.”
I say, “Salghrew jfwoiew fjfowi sdkifj.”
“No, not that way,” the therapist says. “You’re not doing it right.”
I say, “Solfjf gjoie ddd oslidjf?”
She says, “No, that’s not right, either.”
She looks at her watch.
“Digri vrior gmjgi g giel,” I say.
“You’ll need to practice a lot, but on your own time,” she says. “Now, again.”
I say, “Jrogier fi fkgoewir mfofeinf fcfd.”
She says, “Good! Great! See how easy?”
On my pad with my pencil, I write:
fuck off.
Jump to the day they cut off the bandages.
You don’t know what to expect, but every doctor and nurse and intern and orderly, janitor, and cook in the hospital stopped by for a peek from the doorway, and if you caught them they’d bark, Congratulations, the corners of their mouths spread wide apart and trembling in a stiff, watery smile. Bug-eyed. That’s my word for it. And I held up the same cardboard sign again and again that told them:
thank you.
And then I ran away. This is after my new cotton crepe sundress arrives from Espre. Sister Katherine stood over me all morning with a curling iron until my hair was this big butter crème frosting hairdo, this big off-the-face hairdo. Then Evie brought some makeup and did my eyes. I put on my spicy new dress and couldn’t wait to start sweating. This whole summer, I hadn’t seen a mirror, or if I did I never realized the reflection was me. I hadn’t seen the police photos. When Evie and Sister Katherine are done, I say, “De foil iowa fog geoff.”
And Evie says, “You’re welcome.”
Sister Katherine says, “But you just ate lunch.”
It’s clear enough, nobody understands me here.
I say, “Kong wimmer nay pee golly.”
And Evie says, “Yeah, these are your shoes, but I’m not hurting them any.”
And Sister Katherine says, “No, no mail yet, but we can write to prisoners after you’ve had your nap, dear.”