Autobiography of a Face

by Lucy Grealy

  This sense of comfort continued in the following days and weeks. There were definite problems to face here, but to me they seemed entirely manageable: lie still when you're told, be brave. It didn't seem like so much to ask, really, considering what I got in return: attention, absence from school, occasional presents, and, though I wouldn't have admitted it to anyone even if I could have articulated it, freedom from the tensions at home. My father would stop by after work to say hello when he wasn't working too late, while my mother, who hated driving into the city, came in less frequently. Some of the other visiting parents, the ones who came in every day, felt sorry for my lack of visitors and sneaked me contraband food items. I played up to this expertly whenever I sensed a particularly orphan-sensitive audience. My mother would have been appalled if she'd known. I slipped in and out of my various personae with great ease, even flair. Being a child, my past was not yet a burden to me. It was merely there, and I felt a certain freedom to suit the present to my needs, doing whatever might get me an inch somewhere.

  I felt perfectly fine. Each day one test would be scheduled, typically an intricate scan or x-ray, and these were relatively painless. I made friends with the other children, quickly discovering the hierarchy on that and all other wards. The truly sick were at the top, but of course being too sick worked against you as you couldn't enjoy the status. Anyone having an operation also ranked, though we always factored in how long your operation would take, how many you'd had before, and how gruesome the resultant scar would be. But the true deciding factor was seniority, how long you'd been on the ward, and in this, Derek was king.

  Derek was a handsome boy with a serious case of asthma, and, I would find out much later, he was from an unstable home, which inclined doctors to keep him in the hospital, with its warmth and wealth of food, albeit bad, longer than was medically necessary. He had been in and out of the hospital many times already, and by the time I arrived he had a week's stay under his belt. Despite his asthma he seemed to feel fine, and the two of us together, relatively healthy and with far too much time on our hands, spelled trouble.

  Afternoons were long. Sunlight pushed in past the barred windows and lay down heavily on the green floor like an algae-infested lake. When the nurses shut off the bright overhead lights you could almost hear them sigh, and this was the moment Derek and I waited for each day, naptime, when the ward was quiet and the nurses sat around their station, pretending not to care what we were up to as long as we didn't make noise.

  Sometimes the afternoons were planned for us. We were taken to another floor with a playroom that boasted a large, ornate dollhouse, a real collector's item probably, donated by some well-meaning person. You could only look at it from behind a glass partition, but it was too nice to be played with anyway. It was really a doll's mansion, with dozens of intricate rooms filled with luxuries like tapestries and fluffy feather comforters on brass beds. There were perfect little spoons and forks, neatly made beds with teddy bears in the children's room, a bowl of milk in the pantry with Kitty stenciled on it. There were also old-fashioned items, possibly of a sort still in use when the house was donated: washboards and iceboxes and chamber pots. This house had absolutely nothing to do with any of our lives. Most of the children in the hospital came from the surrounding poor neighborhood, and this little house was a rarefied version of everything they would never have and, with its protective glass partition, were not allowed to touch even in miniature. Sometimes you'd see a child standing there, staring, but for the most part the giant miniature house, despite its prominent position near the door, was ignored.

  Every once in a while they showed a movie, usually just cartoons, in a lecture hall in another part of the hospital. Getting there was half the fun, passing through the main halls in our slippers and bathrobes, passing people in their street clothes. It was as if clothes spoke to each other, our childish pajamas murmuring something special about us as we brushed past the suits and white coats and work clothes. The movie itself was usually awful, but Derek and I enjoyed making fun of it later and guessing what was wrong with the other kids who filed in with us, pushing their IV poles, holding parts of themselves delicately. Anyone who looked truly shocking or particularly ill or sported an impressive piece of machinery was treated with respect. There was an implicit honor code: you never stared openly, you always did whatever you had to to help, you were always extraordinarily patient. Not that we weren't perfectly capable of being right little assholes, and indeed were in other settings, but in the hospital a kind of dignity reigned.

  It was when nothing official was scheduled that Derek and I got up to our own tricks. At first we stayed on the ward, sneaking around in the storage room or any other place that carried a forbidden air. Gradually we took to sneaking off the ward, where we risked getting caught by a dutiful nurse. The lobby was attractive for its gift shop. We stole get well cards and gave them to other patients, signing them Love and Kisses, Michael Jackson. We thought this was hysterical. A few times we ventured down near Emergency. That waiting room had all the good magazines, and there we lived in eternal hope that someone covered in blood would stagger in through the door, maybe even clutching a knife sticking out of his heart. It never happened. Over in Postnatal we could see the minuscule preemies. They hardly looked human, caged in their incubators like rare specimens on display, hooked up to all kinds of fascinating tubes and machines. It was a good thing they'd never remember any of it, we decided, and thought this lack of memory gave us leave to ogle them in the painful technological aftermath of their precarious entrance into this world.

  Though it seemed like an eternity, that hospital stay probably lasted only two weeks or so. Every day I'd have some test, and it never occurred to me to ask what was going on, what the tests were for, what the results were. At least this is how I remember it, though my mother tells it differently. In my version, when the day came, the doctors took both my parents into my room alone. They stayed in there a long time. Finally my mother emerged, explaining that I was going to have an operation on my jaw, but that I could come home for the weekend first.

  I remember being thrilled, as if I'd only heard the part about going home for a weekend. My mother looked at me aghast. She was acting strangely, I thought, not herself. I had to explain that it wasn't the operation I was excited about. I knew that if I went home for a weekend I'd get special treatment, and I did. My father let me go horseback riding not once, a big treat in itself, but twice. When my sister complained about the favoritism, my father virtually snapped, an uncharacteristic response, but I was too excited by the proximity of horses, with their sweet, grimy smell, to even try to figure it out. I don't remember going to visit my school at all.

  In my mother's version, when she came out of my hospital room I jumped up, hearing only that I was going home. But after that, she says, the doctor asked to speak to me, as if I were an adult. He told me I had a malignancy. He explained they would do everything they could, that I should do my best to get well and they would help. As my mother tells it, I did go to school, where I thanked my teachers and classmates for the cards they'd sent me. I told them I had a malignancy. My mother said I seemed rather happy about it, and my teachers were shocked by my attitude. I told my teacher and all of my friends, probably with pride: I had a malignancy, I was going to have a big operation now.

  Some years later, I don't remember exactly how many, as my family was milling about the kitchen and I was leafing through the paper at the table, someone dated an event as something that had happened "before Lucy had cancer." Shocked, I looked up.

  "I had cancer?"

  "Of course you did, fool, what did you think you had?"

  "I thought I had a Ewing's sarcoma."

  "And what on earth do you think that is?"

  My family seemed rather incredulous, but it was true. In all that time, not one person ever said the word cancer no me, at least not in a way that registered as pertaining to me.

  It was as if the earth were without f
orm until those words were uttered, until those sounds took on decisions, themes, motifs. There may have been thousands, millions of words uttered before those incisive words, but they had no meaning, no leftover telltale shapes to show that they had existed. I loved words, the sound of them. One of my favorite experiments was to pick a word and repeat it ceaselessly to myself until I was in awe of it, until it transformed itself entirely into an absurd sound having nothing at all to do with the thing it signified. Gull. Truck. Banana. Formula. And then, malignancy. I can reconstruct now that its important syllables probably charmed me, its promise of rare and dangerous implications made me feel important, but its lack of meaning provided me with just enough echo to act as background to my shock at hearing the word cancer.

  Lack of meaning had its own shape; it groped in the darkness, spoke to me only from a hole in the wall late at night, when I dreamed of witches who apologized profusely before inserting their singing knives into me, explaining that they were sorry, they didn't want to kill me but they had to, they were witches, it was their job. I never recognized these dreams as related to what was happening to me. I thought only of what was right in front of me, like my experiments with words, shredding their meaning through repetition. My experiments seemed no more significant than my attempts to observe the moment when I fell asleep at night, watching in the dark like some prowler for that thin line between conscious and unconscious.

  I remember all the things I did with Derek very clearly and even nostalgically—going to the movies, peering through the glass at that dated dollhouse, blowing up surgical gloves into mutant udders. Yet the random dreams, the casually forgotten words, point elsewhere, strike me as inelegant and incomplete. Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things? I can think of several interpretations to ascribe to a girl who doesn't remember invoking the word malignancy, yet what do those theories have to do with me, who resists feeling anything other than bewilderment at the image of a child walking casually down a hall chanting agreeable, historyless words?

  Sunday afternoons in the hospital were the stillest and longest—formless hours to be gotten through. With all the departments closed, there was none of the weeks bustle. The familiar nurses were off, leaving us in the hands of unsympathetic aides who didn't care if we were entertained or not. In the stillness, the traffic on the street below sounded louder. There were more of the other patients' visitors to watch, obscure relatives who made the trip from out of town bearing useless flowers and ornately wrapped toys. But I grew tired of scrutinizing them, grew to recognize the swirling patterns and dynamics of every family that walked onto the ward complaining of how hard it was to park around here, how long the elevators took. Some older brother or father would find a surgical mask and put it on and laugh, believing he was the first to discover this antic. I'd sit on my bed looking for words hidden in a jumble of letters or vainly attempting to put together an incomplete jigsaw puzzle I'd found in the game room. The stiff sheets made the bottoms of my feet red, and I was always in trouble for not wearing my slippers when out of bed. A tart smell drifted down the hall from the sluice room, where they cleaned the bedpans and kept the sterilizer.

  I could always count on Derek, who would appear beside me when I most needed him, decked out in his blue bathrobe with Columbia Presbyterian spelled out in fading black letters across the chest. There was one particular Sunday we'd been waiting for all week. Several days earlier we'd overheard a conversation between two of the staff nurses and a resident, something about the building where they kept the animals. Eavesdropping on adult conversations was something I did automatically, but the word animals pricked at me.

  "They have animals here?" I interrupted.

  "A whole floor of them, over in one of the other buildings. They try out new drugs and operations on them, to help humans."

  I was very sensitive to being patronized, and I resented the tone in which this was said, but I was interested too. "How do you get there?"

  The nurses and the doctor were all young and good-looking. Though couched in jargon, their conversations often held overtones of flirting, their true meanings as clear to me as a shiny present, unseen by the intended receiver, held cumbersomely behind the besotted one's back. I was probably annoying them.

  "You have to go outside, across the street," the young doctor said.

  "Aren't there tunnels to it?" a nurse asked.

  "I guess so, but I've never been down there. I'm not even sure how you get to them."

  Then they were off again, talking to each other, ignoring me, but it was too late. This was the adventure I'd been waiting for all my life. As I raced off to tell Derek, the doctor shouted at me to walk. Just to annoy them, I stopped short suddenly and surfed a good three feet along the well-polished floor on my socks.

  Our main problem was that we didn't know how to get to the tunnels. Finally we were able to dupe a recently arrived teenaged candy striper into taking us, artfully making sure she didn't spill the beans to the nurses, who surely would have forbidden such an expedition. We convinced the candy striper that the nurses had said it was okay, and, just our luck, she even knew where the animal labs were because she used to work there as a messenger. She fell for it so perfectly that she even invited two of the other children to come along. Sunday was the brilliant choice because the regular staff, who were always suspicious of us, were off duty, and there was almost no chance of a doctor or technician coming to seek us out for some boring test.

  This particular Sunday coincided with the first uncomfortably warm day of spring. All the windows were open, but they offered no relief. My T-shirt clung to my back as I slipped off the bed. Whenever possible, I dressed in street clothes. Wearing pajamas during the day, even though everyone else was wearing theirs, made me nervous and depressed. It brought to my mind the old practical joke of getting someone to show up in a chicken suit for a formal ball.

  Once assembled in the hallway, Derek, the candy striper, the two other children, and I headed for the elevators. I knew there was a basement beneath the ground floor, but I didn't know there were levels even beneath that. Our bodies were transported through space to the very bottom, the terminus, SB2, subbasement level 2. The elevator doors opened on a long hallway with concrete walls, illuminated intermittently with bare light bulbs cradled in bell-shaped cages of wire dangling from the ceiling. It smelled cold. You could clearly see the imprints of the wood used as forms for the concrete, like vast slabs of petrified wood.

  Derek leaned over and whispered in my ear, "This is where they keep the dead ones."

  The notion that at any moment we might see a white-sheeted body being rolled down the hall made my fingers fall asleep. I shook them, bewildered by the effect. The candy striper walked forward authoritatively. But only fifty yards further, faced with an intersection, she faltered. We scanned the walls for signs pointing toward the building that housed the animal labs.

  For days I'd been looking forward to this. Once or twice a year a traveling petting zoo was set up inside the local mall. For a small fee you could walk around the sawdust-filled pen and pet the obese goats and sheep. For an extra ten cents you could buy feed out of a converted bubblegum machine. I couldn't get enough of the animals, their smell, the clicks their cloven hooves made on the tile floor showing in patches through the sawdust. I was crazy for animals. Any book or television show or movie about animals I consumed greedily, though I shied away from the ones that anthropomorphized the animals. I thought it degraded them to be too closely aligned with the human species.

  Uncharacteristically, Derek allowed me to walk in front of him. Normally there was a silent battle between us about who was in charge, but this morning he seemed distracted, or perhaps he wasn't as excited as I was. There were things about Derek I didn't understand; he could get sullen like this sometimes. Though I never would have admitted it to him, I envied the fact that he live
d in the city year-round. I thought it made him exotic. Once I awakened to find him standing over me and two other boys peering in from the doorway: he'd kissed me. Perhaps they had wanted to watch, thinking I'd be grossed out, but my reaction obviously disappointed them. All I felt was somewhat confused as to why Derek, who looked equally confused, would want to do such a bizarre thing.

  Eventually we found the tunnel that led to the correct building. We piled into the elevator and took it all the way up. The doors opened onto a large foyer. Open windows with spectacular views of the city took up most of two walls. A cool, strong wind came through the windows, whose unbarred expanses struck me as dangerous. With the unpainted ceiling and concrete floors, they gave the place a tenuous feeling. On either side of the foyer were sets of swinging doors. We went through one set and down a hallway, realized it was wrong, turned back, and went through the foyer again. As we opened the second set of doors the stink hit us head on. The tang of natural urea and ammonia mixed with the chemical fumes of disinfectants burned the inside of my nose. This probably should have been an omen, but we continued on down the hall, following the smell, until we saw the doors: Authorized Personnel Only. There wasn't an authorized human in sight.