Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “I like you, Polly,” I said. “But what am I supposed to be confiding?”

  “Whatever you like,” she said.

  “I keep waiting to figure out when all this is going to be ordinary to me.”

  “That’s going to take a long time, Sicily. You have to be patient with yourself and heal slowly, physically and psychologically.”

  “I’ve done slowly forever! Tell me how I can catch up to everyone else.”

  “Next week let’s talk about feeling left behind.”

  “Next week? For how long?”

  “It’s the law, Sicily,” Polly said.

  “The law?”

  Polly had rarely shown any discernible sense of humor. But now she said, “The law that guarantees full employment for psychologists.”

  As for the photographic documentary, Beth was doing the heavy lifting on what we had named “Fate-to-Face: A Physical Hymn.” She came often to my house and sometimes went with me through my days, photographing me at the computer, at the ballet barre—once even capturing my shadow on the wall while I tried to execute a grand jeté in a small space. Beth photographed me in silhouette against my windows and peering into my bathroom mirror, my hands framing my still-swollen face. One that I still love is of me holding in my hand what appears at first to be an unusual little piece of primitive pottery—in fact, my prosthetic nose. Of all the pictures from that early time, my favorite is of my smile the first time since I was a kid that I fully tasted and felt the texture of a cannoli. The whole photo is one of my eyes and a quarter of my turned-up smile, displaying the mascarpone and powdered sugar on my upper lip. I look like a little kid on Christmas morning. In fact, as I experimented with the joy of eating normally, I no longer could content myself with my supereasy supermodel diet—scrambled eggs for the protein, spinach and nuts for the fiber, apples and peanut butter so I could tell Marie I’d eaten dinner. In six weeks, I gained ten pounds. I started eating crap, like taco chips and doughnuts, stuff my mother never allowed me and for which I had no use as an adult. I got takeout and gleefully devoured quart cartons of lo mein and big, gloppy, dripping-with-everything cheeseburgers, which I could finally, literally, sink my teeth into. Beth brought me a pound of lobster fra diavolo from their restaurant, The Old Neighborhood, which I ate in one sitting. I chugged green tea lattes and mocha lattes and pumpkin lattes. I sampled wine and cheese and more wine. Although I compensated with extra miles on the treadmill, all I could do was walk, at least for another month—no running. There were no weights, no strenuous dance. For the first time in my life, I had trouble zipping my jeans.

  I learned why food is a substitute for pretty much everything else.

  Living the mainstream life to the degree I’d managed seemed to most people more than a sufficient achievement: The common herd would have admired me even for being able to put one foot in front of the other. My face had restored me to the crowd but also upped the stakes—the way April reproaches someone who’s spent the winter hiding her butt under a big sweater. I had done my reading. There’s a hollow feeling some people experience when they think cosmetic surgery is going to change their whole lives totally. They think they’ll get good men and six-figure jobs. They think they’ll dress up and be proud. They’re heartbroken when they end up the same not-terribly-dynamic people but with bigger boobs or smaller noses or tauter chins. I was pretty sure I’d gone ahead with this for something bigger, and yet nothing had changed.

  I loved my face, especially as it slowly emerged from the surgical trauma. Every day there were fewer and lighter bruises. I could begin to see the chin and cheekbones I would have in a few more weeks. Marie accused me of falling in love with my reflection. I had. I could have climbed into a mirror. I looked at the poignant pictures of me in Beth’s house the day I met her, which would not be part of the magazine piece planned for Sense and Sensibility (all was forgiven after they saw Beth’s portrait of Emma, Mrs. Cassidy, and me). I wondered how I had lived so long. When you move out of a house you have sheltered in, you notice that the carpets are worn and the walls scuffed, that your pictures have left holes in the walls and vivid rectangles of the color the paint was before time and sunlight did their work. You once snuggled up and watched old black-and-white movies on the couch you’ll leave at the curb, but outside in the sunlight it looks shabby and disreputable. How did you keep it so long? My face had been dreadful. I had thoughts that made me ashamed, that somehow, down the road—when the first year ended and Beth found the right gallery for an exhibit—I would want to hide the pictures that before had seemed so raw and moving. I would want to leave them at the curb and disown them.

  Having a life and having my life, it turned out, were two different things. Polly the psychologist was right. I had trouble reentering the world. For the people in groups who stayed home, mostly alone and out of sight, I’d felt pity. I’d also felt—and this was disturbing—scorn. I’d been quite the adventurer, in a circle so tight and small that, not counting clients, everyone could have gathered at a table for ten. At thirteen, I hadn’t even been old enough to ride the train downtown with my girlfriends. My young woman’s life had been my boyfriend, my job, my few girlfriends, and my family. I had never traveled. That was a big one. Every summer, my parents and I went for a week to Uncle Al’s house on Lake Madrigal. Every winter, my mother and I rode in a sleeper car on the Empire Builder to Grand Central Station for a weekend with Aunt Marie in New York—on Marie’s dime. I’d gone skiing with Kit’s family at her parents’ place in Vermont. Her dad drove. I had never been in an airplane or on a boat or a Ferris wheel or dived off a diving board. I had never obtained a passport or a driver’s license, just a student ID. I’d never seen an ocean.

  Here I was, having lived an epic life. I’d lost my family and my face but had never been in a book club. While I could speak Italian, I couldn’t cook it. I could draw you a snazzy sketch of the gastrointestinal system but not knit a potholder. Now that my life didn’t need to be compact, I had no idea how to expand it. For every disfigured or disabled person who hid away, there turned out to be ten others on a carousel of causes and confraternities. Polly and Kelli encouraged me to reach out to kids on burn wards—to offer hope to them by my example. They suggested I join support or even social groups. Kit proposed I create a romantic personal ad on an Internet service, or, as Aunt Marie said in acid tones, make a date with my very own murderer online. Polly said she would suggest weekly group therapy, along with my weekly one-on-ones, but my emotions were “normal.” Kelli thought it would be good for me just to talk those emotions out with people in different parts of the city, even online. Two months after my surgery, through Polly, I met a guy online four or five years older who’d had a face transplant and a hand transplant—the result of a bad farming accident. (There are no good ones: Everything on a farm, from a cow to a combine, can mess you up completely.) He was very nice and funny. He said he used to imagine his profile for a dating service: FORMERLY FACELESS FARMER SEEKS FRIENDLY FRAU.

  Together, we made up mine: I HAVE: A NEW FACE, A NEW LIFE, NEW ROSES, AND SEVERAL AWARDS FOR DRAWING TUMORS. YOU HAVE: LOW STANDARDS AND A PULSE.

  I thought we might be friends, but when it came to posting a picture for me to see him, he would not do it. What he told me was that he would have been glad to meet me on the street—if I hadn’t known about his surgery—and he would have told me about it later. My knowing in advance made him not confident but self-conscious. I had taken a picture with my computer cam and sent it to him, so I felt cheated, awkward.

  We lost touch.

  All through the long, cicada nights of that long summer, I kept waiting for … something.

  Of course, I worked. In advance I’d planned a few months of working from home. Until the worst of the swelling subsided—and I got that facial “trim”—there would be no disconcerting meetings with clients, no annoying double takes.

  It wasn’t as though I hid under the bed. There was a big dinner for the main doctors and nurs
es and my family. There was Beth. There was Eliza, who turned out to have exactly the personality she would need for the work she wanted to do. She was caring and noticing. On what would have been my wedding day, she made a point of asking me in advance to have dinner at her house. She made Ethiopian food, the hottest stuff I’d ever eaten, so hot it made me sweat while I ate. Stella had Rice Krispies, and, afterward, Eliza let her watch The Little Mermaid until she fell asleep in a big recliner. That night, Ben came home early—for him—at about ten o’clock. I’d met Ben only once, but he was a person you already seemed to know before you met him. I asked about the rest of the family.

  “I had two brothers in Bolivia,” Eliza said. “Older. Alejandro and Cruz. They were good boys. I loved them. The memory of them goes away more every year. I can remember Cruz swinging me up over something, like a well, and pretending he was going to drop me. And when I went to the orphanage, Alejandro cried and gave me blue shoes.”

  “Do they write to you? Or call you?”

  “No,” Eliza said. “Ben and I have talked about trying to find them. I don’t want to yet. They knew me as Maria Agata. For a long time, I was surprised to hear ‘Eliza,’ and then ‘Maria Agata’ began to sound odd to me, like it would if you said, ‘Spoon, spoon, spoon,’ over and over until it lost its meaning.”

  “The real reason is Candy,” said Ben. “Her mom.”

  “Your mom doesn’t want you to contact your brothers? Or your mother? Your real mother?”

  Eliza said gently, “Candy is my real mother, Sicily. And I’m not trying to be sentimental or politically correct. I just can’t imagine I would love anyone more than my mother. And she would be fine with my seeing Cruz and Alejandro. It’s me. I don’t want her to feel she failed me.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know and I don’t know. I wasn’t as young when my mother died, but when I think of my mother, I think of Marie first and then of my mother, the way she was when I was little.”

  “I didn’t know my mother after I was four,” Eliza said. “She died. I lived with my brothers and my aunt. And, you know, they were good boys, relatively. But they worked for … the drug trade. And my aunt was a prostitute, as my mother had been.” She said it so matter-of-factly.

  “Is that why she died?” I asked. “Did she die of AIDS?”

  “No,” Eliza said. “A man beat her to death.” I gasped, then tried to hide it with a cough. “It’s okay, Sicily. I didn’t see her death. I don’t remember her really at all. The nuns were pretty cute and terrific, and I had clean clothes for the first time and TV and …”

  “And food,” Ben said. “Regular meals. She doesn’t talk about it, but there were plenty of days when it was a little rice and that was it. The orphanage was her Four Seasons.”

  Eliza, not Ben, drove me home. She said she liked to drive downtown at night. She had gone to undergrad school at Northwestern and sometimes wished that she still lived in the city. “It never closes,” she said. “You watch the people and it’s like a performance.” There was still so little I could say to her, and I was not a person customarily at a loss for words. Eliza’s life had been brutal. Mine had been brutal but also sheltered. I could not imagine wanting for food. Before I got out, Eliza kissed me on both cheeks. “I hope you don’t get sick from my cooking.”

  When I lay down that night, I realized that I had not thought of where I would have been since I’d awakened that morning. Kit was right. I had gotten over Joe.

  In those first eight weeks, Kit also insisted I go out, pointing to the obvious irony. “Out,” she said. “Not to someone’s house. Out. We’ll start slowly. With the deli.”

  So we went to Myzog’s, where the wreck I had been before was as familiar to patrons as the henna on the waitresses’ shellacked updos.

  People stared at me more than they had when I was the girl who had no face. My face now made people uneasy in a different way. With my swollen cheeks and the big dewlap of skin under my chin, which was not removed until July, I looked like I had neurofibromatosis—and, yes, I know how that sounds. Once, back in college, for a life-drawing class (we did have to be able to render perfectly from life, despite the fact that the sixth of seven generations of Illustrator and Photoshop were up and running), I used charcoal to draw a woman who had neurofibromatosis, which is commonly known as Elephant Man Disease. Her tumors were like tentacles, burrowed and bursting under the skin of her face and neck and back. She insisted that she would not risk neurological damage by having them removed. It was better for her to have a face that looked like a kind of root vegetable than a mouth that wouldn’t close. She brought her grandson, and I heard other students—right in front of me—marvel that somebody had married her. The boy was about three. After he laid waste to all the pens and sketch pads we weren’t fast enough to grab, my professor put him on the floor with some old Cray-Pas and a sheet of paper as big as he was. Professor Arneson told him if he could fill the whole thing with different-colored squiggles, there would be a giant Kit Kat at the end. (Arneson weighed about eighty pounds and ate supersize Kit Kats all day, washing them down with cold black coffee. I’m sure she threw it up or had some disease like pica that made her eat strange things because her body needed trace minerals.) The little kid was diligent. He took forty minutes to cover that page with snakes and lightning strikes, but he did it. The drawing of his grandmother, with her strange fairytale-creature face, looking down at him is one of the only pictures of my own I’ve ever framed.

  Until the surgeons removed the flap of skin that was left over under my chin, I wouldn’t go shopping with Kit—or almost anywhere in daylight. Which was nuts. I’d gone shopping at the freaking Mall of America when I looked like a baseball that had been whacked once too often. Now, however, I wanted to be … not transitional. When I went out into the sun, I wanted to be finished.

  Loyally, Kit took me to the Green Mill and listened to Nicky Hixon sing Ella in the darkness that smelled of salt and vodka. We did not go to Slicker Sam’s or Jimmy O’s. I had unreasonable fears that I’d run into Paul LaVoy—or even worse, Neal. What would I do? Scream? Slap them? The one open-range outing Kit and I took, to a street fair near my hometown, was just terrific. We did encounter several high-school friends. They could not have reacted with more dignity or enthusiasm. Sissy! they cried. We heard your voice and knew it was you! Or, This is so amazing … You look like … yourself! You’re beautiful, Sicily!

  They were right. In some eerie way, the more time passed, the more the swelling subsided, the more I looked like I would have looked. When the excess skin under my jaw was removed, it was a cursory procedure by an ordinary cosmetic surgeon that left a tiny line of a scar. The swelling subsided within what seemed days, revealing my strong, firm jawline. And I was pretty, as pretty as I would have been, as pretty as sweet lost Emma deserved to grow up to be.

  My art-major professor at UIC had been Gary Gottfried, which is like saying I was taught to be a medical illustrator by Walt Disney. Dr. Gottfried was a real artist, whose medical paintings hung in museums and public buildings—the one tracing the history of ophthalmologic surgery took up a whole wall at the Eye Institute in Philadelphia. The program at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle accepted only twelve candidates a year. Some of Professor Gottfried’s best had gone on to be movie animators, biomedical engineers, and fine artists, although none, I think, ended up doing what I finally ended up doing.

  In the second week in September, he asked me to visit his senior class for a small seminar.

  “When Sicily began her studies here, I knew she was one of the few who would actually be a medical illustrator,” Dr. Gottfried said. “Because of her history, she had a passion for helping to show the how and why of the mysteries of the body, in sickness and in health, the macro and the micro, the beautiful and the fearsome. She was the illustrator’s illustrator, with an eye for precision and beauty and a knack for speed.”

  I was blushing. Blushing was one of the new weird sensations that accompanied
this perfect skin, along with no visible pores.

  “But I never knew that my personal destiny would intersect with Sicily Coyne’s in the way it has.” It was Dr. Gottfried, back in the 1980s, who had created the software for age progression, which was originally used to help the FBI find missing children, based on how they would have looked years after they were abducted. At UIC, the transplant team used that software to design the way that my face, last seen at thirteen, would look at twenty-five. In fact, it was also used with Ben Cappadora, when he turned up, nine years after he was kidnapped, with the husband of the nut-job woman who’d taken him—a nice guy who never knew that the little boy he adopted as his own was stolen from someone else.

  Identity is a weird thing.

  Now in the mirror I began to see Sicily—but it was a Sicily I had never seen. Sicily a woman. Sicily with Emma’s turned-up little Irish nose.

  When I had coffee with Mrs. Cassidy after Dr. Gottfried’s class, she asked if she could touch my skin. She started to cry, and I held her while she did. She said, “Emma … Emma.” That very night—I could have predicted this—I woke up screaming, so loudly that my aunt came pounding on the connecting door between our apartments. I dreamed I opened my eyes and Emma was standing there in her long lace nightgown, and she had no … well, you can imagine. She said, “Bitch, give me back my face.”

  That week, Polly finally had to do her job as it was construed. Something was finally not a normal reaction. I was certifiably depressed, more than I had been after my parents’ deaths. I didn’t get excited when I woke up. Music didn’t set me in motion. Polly said that if it lasted too long, she would refer me to a psychiatrist who could prescribe something. Why, I asked Polly? Why now? I had been sad. I had been frightened. I had been fiercely angry. But never, ever, until I looked like a pretty girl with a barely visible necklace of scar in the curve of her neck, had I been depressed.