They left. And. I left, alone. And. How bad could it be, my face?
And sometimes being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with piercings and tattoos and brandings and scarification …What I mean is, attention is attention.
Going outside is the first time I feel I’ve missed something. I mean, a whole summer had just disappeared. All those pool parties and lying around on metal-flake speedboat bows. Catching rays. Finding guys with convertibles. I get that all the picnics and softball games and concerts are just sort of trickled down into a few snapshots that Evie won’t have developed until around Thanksgiving.
Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It’s going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven’t played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French’s mustard, Rice-A-Roni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention.
All that color. A whole shift in the beauty standard so that no one thing really stands out.
The total being less than the sum of its parts.
All that color all in one place.
Except for that name-brand product rainbow, there’s nothing else to look at. When I look at people, all I can see is the back of everybody’s head. Even if I turn super fast, all I can catch is somebody’s ear turning away. And folks are talking to God.
“Oh, God,” they say. “Did you see that?”
And, “Was that a mask? Christ, it’s a bit early for Halloween.”
Everybody is very busy reading the labels on French’s mustard and Rice-A-Roni.
So I take a turkey.
I don’t know why. I don’t have any money, but I take a turkey. I dig the big frozen turkeys around, those big flesh-tone lumps of ice in the freezer bin. I dig around until I find the biggest turkey, and I heft it up baby-style in its yellow plastic netting.
I haul myself up to the front of the store, right through the check stands, and nobody stops me. Nobody’s even looking. They’re all reading those tabloid newspapers as if there’s hidden gold there.
“Sejgfn di ofo utnbg,” I say. “Nei wucj iswisn sdnsud.”
Nobody looks.
“EVSF UYYB IUH,” I say in my best ventriloquist voice.
Nobody even talks. Maybe just the clerks talk. Do you have two pieces of ID? they’re asking people writing checks.
“Fgjrn iufnv si vuv,” I say. “Xidi cniwuw sis sacnc!”
Then it is, it’s right then a boy says, “Look!”
Everybody who’s not looking and not talking stops breathing.
The little boy says, “Look, Mom, look over there! That monster’s stealing food!”
Everybody gets all shrunken up with embarrassment. All their heads drop down into their shoulders the way they’d look on crutches. They’re reading tabloid headlines harder than ever.
MONSTER GIRL STEALS FESTIVE HOLIDAY BIRD
And there I am, deep-fried in my cotton crepe dress, a twenty-five pound turkey in my arms, the turkey sweating, my dress almost transparent. My nipples are rock-hard against the yellow-netted ice in my arms. Me under my butter crème frosting hairdo. Nobody looking at me as if I’ve won a big anything.
A hand comes down and slaps the little boy, and the boy starts to wail.
The boy’s wailing the way you cry if you’ve done nothing wrong but you got punished anyway. The sun’s setting outside. Inside, everything’s dead except this little voice screaming over and over: Why did you hit me? I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me? What did I do?
I took the turkey. I walked as fast as I could back to La Paloma Memorial Hospital. It was almost dark.
The whole time I’m hugging the turkey, I’m telling myself: Turkeys. Seagulls. Magpies.
Birds.
Birds ate my face.
Back in the hospital, coming down the hallway toward me is Sister Katherine leading a man and his IV stand, the man all wrapped in gauze and hung with drain tubes and plastic bags of yellow and red fluids leaking into and out of him.
Birds ate my face.
From closer and closer, Sister Katherine shouts, “Yoo-hoo! I have someone special here you’d just love to meet!”
Birds ate my face.
Between me and them is the speech therapist office, and when I go to duck inside, there’s Brandy Alexander for the third time. The queen of everything good and kind is wearing this sleeveless Versace kind of tank dress with this season’s overwhelming feel of despair and corrupt resignation. Body-conscious yet humiliated. Buoyant but crippled. The queen supreme is the most beautiful anything I’ve ever seen, so I just vogue there to watch from the doorway.
“Men,” the therapist says, “stress the adjective when they speak.” The therapist says, “For instance, a man would say, ‘You are so attractive, today.’”
Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany’s and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.
“A woman would say, ‘You are so attractive, today,’” the therapist says. “Now, you, Brandy. You say it. Stress the modifier, not the adjective.”
Brandy Alexander looks her Burning Blueberry eyes at me in the doorway and says, “Posing girl, you are so god-awful ugly. Did you let an elephant sit on your face or what?”
Brandy’s voice, I barely hear what she says. At that instant, I just adore Brandy so much. Everything about her feels as good as being beautiful and looking in a mirror. Brandy is my instant royal family. My only everything to live for.
I go, “Cfoieb svns ois,” and I pile the cold, wet turkey into the speech therapist’s lap, her sitting pinned under twenty-five pounds of dead meat in her roll-around leather desk chair.
From closer down the hallway, Sister Katherine is yelling, “Yoo-hoo!”
“Mriuvn wsi sjaoi aj,” I go, and wheel the therapist and her chair into the hallway. I say, “Jownd winc sm fdo dcncw.”
The speech therapist, she’s smiling up at me and says, “You don’t have to thank me, it’s just my job is all.”
The nun’s arrived with the man and his IV stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who’d be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased Prince Charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life.
I slam the office door and lock myself inside with Brandy Alexander. There’s the speech therapist’s notebook on her desk, and I grab it.
save me, I write, and wave it in Brandy’s face. I write:
please.
Jump to Brandy Alexander’s hands. This always starts with her hands. Brandy Alexander puts a hand out, one of those hairy pig-knuckled hands with the veins of her arm crowded and squeezed to the elbow with bangle bracelets of every color. Just by herself, Brandy Alexander is such a shift in the beauty standard that no one thing stands out. Not even you.
“So, girl,” Brandy says. “What all happened to your face?”
Birds.
I write:
birds. birds ate my face.
And I start to laugh.
Brandy doesn’t laugh. Brandy says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
And I’m still laughing.
i was driving on the freeway, I write.
And I’m still laughing.
someone shot a 30-caliber bullet from a rifle.
the bullet tore my entire jawbone off my face.
Still laughing.
i came to the hospital, I write.
i did not die.
Laughing.
they couldn’t put my jaw back because seagulls had eaten it.
And I stop laughing.
“Girl, your handwriting is terrible,” Brandy says. “Now tell me what else.”
And I start to cry.
what else, I write, is i have to eat baby food.