Autobiography of a Face

by Lucy Grealy

She went off to get the car, and I was ushered into Hannah's room. "How do you feel?" she asked. I began to cry. Just a little bit at first, but soon I was sobbing and my whole body was shaking. I tried to stop, but it was out of control, and I gave myself over to it. Hannah bent over and put an arm on my shoulder for a second, only for a second, then withdrew it and straightened up. She stood there for a few moments holding her hands together over her stomach, then, without asking, busied herself making me the cup of tea she'd been offering me for years. Through my sobs, which were getting loud now, I heard the water rattle and hiss inside the electric kettle. My lungs were already filled with sorrow, and though I didn't think it was possible, I cried even harder.

  A few minutes later, Hannah handed me the tea in a mug with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it. Holding the hot mug in my hands, I cried just as hard, though conscious now that I mustn't spill the tea. My head was pounding. Slowly the crying began to stop. I felt so tired all of a sudden, but quietly tired, in a restful way, not the usual exhaustion. By the time my mother returned, I had stopped, not because of any effort on my part but because the crying had run its course. We said good-bye to Hannah and walked out. No one on the streets, bending their heads down into the cold wind, seemed to notice or care that this day was different from others.

  EIGHT

  Truth and Beauty

  ONE DAY, WHEN I HAD A FULL THREE OR FOUR INCHES of hair, I was leaving the house with Susie. At the last minute I turned and ran back up the stairs, calling out, "Just a minute while I get my hat."

  "You don't need it anymore, Lucy, your hair is fine, come on already," she called back to me, frustrated that we were going to be late.

  I stopped in the middle of the stairs and, genuinely surprised, considered what she had said. Running my fingers through my hair, I had to admit she was more or less right. It wasn't nearly as long as it used to be, but I wasn't bald. I went out with her into the world, bareheaded for the first time in years. A warm and gusty breeze parted my hair and stroked it like a caress. We went to the store, and people gave me second looks as they always did, but not one person called me Baldy.

  The next day I went to school bareheaded, and no one mentioned it. Had I been wrong in thinking that I needed to hide behind my hat, had it all been a mistake on my part? Except people still looked at me. Though I had given up eating in the lunchroom, there were plenty of relentless daily attacks of teasing in the hallways. Girls never teased me, but out of the corner of my eye I could see them stating at me, and when I turned toward them, they glanced away quickly, trying to pretend they were concentrating on something else. Outside of school I'd catch adults staring at me all the time. I played games with them in stores, positioning myself just so and pretending I was absorbed in examining some piece of merchandise, only to turn my head quickly and trap them as they averted their embarrassed stares. Groups of boys were what I most feared, and I gladly ducked into an empty doorway if I saw a group coming my way that looked like trouble. It was easy to spot potential offenders: they walked with a certain swagger, a certain sway.

  My relief—tinged with regret—at leaving the familiar and well-ordered world of the hospital didn't last very long. The radiation had been very hard on my teeth, the lower ones especially, and saving them would require a lot of specialized work. Only a few short months after I naively thought I'd said good-bye to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital forever, we had to again start the routine of driving in once or twice a week for what turned out to be two years of dental work. The dental clinic was in a completely different part of the hospital, though we still walked through the courtyard that Dr. Woolf's office looked out onto. The hospital laundry was somewhere nearby, and the smell of it, which I associated with the walk to Dr. Woolf's, never failed to make me a little bit queasy.

  There was, however, the benefit of getting out of school. By now I hated school with a vengeance and continually told lies about my health in order to stay away. Anything just to not have to face those boys each day. Luckily, my mother was fairly compliant; looking back, I wonder that I was allowed to pass into the eighth grade at all with my attendance record.

  The various procedures, including at least a dozen root canals, kept me in pain most of the time. Codeine was prescribed. We kept the refillable prescription bottle in a kitchen cabinet, and within a short while I was taking pills almost constantly, even when I wasn't in pain. I looked forward to the pleasant, sleepy feeling they offered. No matter how bad I felt about the world, about my position in it, I felt safe and secure and even rather happy thirty or forty minutes after I'd downed a couple of pills. As the months wore on and that pleasant effect became harder to achieve, as each pill seemed to touch the pain less, I started taking more and more pills. I was aware that I was taking more than I should, up to four times the regular dose, and I would alternately ask my mother and then my father to refill the prescription in order to keep my high consumption less conspicuous. They both noticed that the pills seemed to be disappearing quickly, but they assumed my brothers were pilfering them. All of this came to an abrupt end one day when my mother caught me shaking out no less than six times the prescribed number of pills into my palm. From then on I had to make do with aspirin.

  My inability to open my mouth very wide caused a lot of problems whenever anyone wanted to work on my back teeth, and it was decided that I should be admitted to the hospital and have a whole slew of work done all at once under general anesthesia. This idea was fine by me. Not only did it offer even more days off from school, but the thought of surgery seemed far more appealing than sitting wide awake in that dreadful dentist's chair.

  This was my fifth operation, a number that seemed high at the time. On the morning of the operation, an aide woke me early and tossed a surgical gown and a small bottle of Betadine onto my bed. I was to wash my whole body and my hair with this iodine solution, put on the gown, and then wait in bed until the nurses came with the pre-op injection needles. This was the worst part of all. The waiting felt endless, crowded with an unspoken dialogue inside my head concerning the nature of pain.

  It gave me pleasure to think that the boys who teased me openly at school and the adults who stared at me covertly elsewhere would never be able to stand this pain, that they would crumple. My whole body was tense and my stomach upside down, but I was convinced that because I did not admit these things, did not display them for others to see, it meant I had a chance at really being brave, not just pretending. Every time I heard footfalls coming down the hall, fear's physical rush swelled inside me, and as the footfalls passed my room, a physical sense of relief came over me. These false alarms, however, only heightened my fear, knowing that sooner or later the approaching steps would really be for me.

  When the moment came, a student nurse gripped my hand tightly, almost too tightly, squeezing the blood from my fingers, as a regular nurse injected my thighs with the premed. Paradoxically, the moment after the injection, which made my thighs ache and sting, came as a relief; every tension fell and floated prettily away like leaves from an autumn tree. As the minutes passed, the sweet and strange comfort of the medication lifted me up and floated me around the room, and when the orderly finally arrived and asked me to slide over onto the stretcher, I felt as if I were watching someone else shyly try to hold the short gown down over her legs as she awkwardly wiggled along the rough sheets.

  When the operation was over I remember throwing up some swallowed blood and feeling terribly weak, though joyously relieved it was all over. In post-op the specially trained nurses checked on me every ten minutes. I was too groggy to sense what was going on, but I relished the aura of attention, the cool hands on my warm arms, the way my name distantly sounded in their soft, I-won't-let-anything-bad-happen-to-you voices, the notion that I was somehow special, that I mattered. But afterward, back in my room, I dozed and waked for hours, each time more panicked than before at being all alone. I'd make up some excuse to ring for a nurse, just to have someone enter the room. I be
gan to wish that the operation weren't over, that I was still asleep on the stretcher with a crowd of people hovering near me.

  Later, as I underwent more and more operations, even when I was home in my own bed, upset about how much I hated my face, I could put myself to sleep by imagining myself lying on a stretcher. I could almost hear the movements of strangers in comfortingly familiar uniforms all around me, the distant beeps that were really heartbeats, the mechanical shushes of respirators, which meant someone, somewhere near, was breathing.

  It wasn't without a certain amount of shame that I took this kind of emotional comfort from surgery: after all, it was a bad thing to have an operation, wasn't it? Was there something wrong with me that I should find such comfort in being taken care of so? Did it mean I liked having operations and thus that I deserved them?

  At school the taunts were becoming only harder to take. Somehow I had reasoned that if a bad thing happened often enough it would get easier. It worked with pain, so why wasn't it working with teasing? Every time I was teased, which usually happened several times a day, it seemed incrementally more painful. I was good at not listening, at pretending I hadn't heard, but I could sense myself changing, becoming more fearful. Before I'd been an outgoing person, and in the right circumstances I still was, but now meeting new people was laced with dread. Except for the one time I went to my guidance counselor to complain, I discussed this with no one. Besides, I reasoned, what could I do about it? I was ugly, so people were going to make fun of me: I thought it was their right to do so simply because I was so ugly, so I'd just better get used to it. But I couldn't. No matter how much I braced myself, the words stung every time they were thrown at me. It didn't seem to matter that I was doing everything I could to know the truth, to own the fact that I was ugly, to make sure I was prepared for it, to be told nothing I didn't already know.

  One afternoon I went to the hospital for some outpatient surgery. A tooth in the back of my mouth had to be pulled, and I was knocked out for about ten minutes. Afterward I waited in recovery for my mother to take me home. When she came in, she pulled the blood-soaked gauze out of my mouth and gasped. In the course of the surgery two of my lower front teeth had been partially knocked out, leaving two very ugly stumps. Apparently no one had been planning to tell us about this complication, and it was only by chance that my mother discovered it while we were still there. Justifiably, she exploded in anger. The surgeon's response was predictably patronizing, and a full-fledged battle ensued as I sat there feeling a bit woozy and slightly bewildered, still pleasantly lost in the fading buzz of the anesthetic.

  Once home, my mother, still fuming, turned to me and said, "You don't have to go to school tomorrow if you don't want. I understand that you might not feel very good about the way your teeth look." We looked straight at each other. Something had just happened, but I wasn't sure what. All I'd ever wanted was to be left alone and allowed to stay at home. I had spent a great deal of energy trying to convince her that I had to stay at home because of some counterfeit physical ailment, and suddenly it wasn't what I wanted at all.

  She stood over me in the living room, the cats howling for their dinner because we'd returned home so late from the hospital, and offered me, what, compassion? As I think of it now, I'm certain her offer to let me stay home was an attempt to understand what she must have known instinctively. But it was too late. I'd already given up that fight. I understood my mother's offer only as barbed verification of what I believed to be the indisputable truth: I was too ugly to go to school. I pretty much stopped going to the seventh grade, but I was moved along with everybody else to the eighth. My grades were mediocre, and my passing surely had to do more with ineptitude on the school's part than with academic accomplishment on mine.

  I relished that summer as no other. My friend Jan and I took our infatuation with horses to ridiculous proportions. We spent all of our play time pretending we were horses, galloping around her yard, jumping over whatever obstacle we could set up. Whoever got around better was given a homemade blue ribbon, and afterward we would kneel on her lawn and dare each other to graze, the curiously familiar and sour flavor of grass filling our mouths and turning our front teeth green.

  Jan's parents were paying for her to take riding lessons that summer, and I was filled with envy. We couldn't afford them. Sometimes she'd invite me to go with her and I would, though I hated the superior tone she took with me then. I went because the very presence of horses overwhelmed me, filled my whole body with a sensation so physical and complete that I'd be transported during those hours. I did nothing but fear the passing of each moment as I sat by the fence watching Jan ride, because I knew that eventually we'd have to go home and all I would have left was the wonderful, peaty smell on my palms to remind me of the horses. Jan started boasting that her parents were going to buy her a horse, that they'd build a stable for it in the empty field by the lake, and that, maybe, just maybe, she'd let me help her take care of it. We spent long afternoons thinking up names for the horse, though according to my taste, her ideas were sentimental, unoriginal choices such as Beauty and Black.

  Jan never got her horse, but that June, shortly after my fourteenth birthday, I got my job as stable hand at Diamond D. It was the perfect environment for me. Most of the other hands were girls who were a couple of years older than me, and there were two boys, Sean and Stephen. The girls were nice enough to me and eventually became my friends, though I never felt completely at ease with them. We came from different worlds. They were raucous and wild, and I loved them for this. Epithets the likes of which I'd never heard even from my own wild brothers flew from everyone's lips, and there was a glorious delight in getting as muddy and dirty as possible. When I came home at the end of the day my mother always made me undress in the garage. I was proud of the mud all over me and the tired ache from trying to hoist bales of hay, however ineffectually. As the summer wore on I got tanned and gained weight and grew physically stronger every day.

  I loved how basic were the needs of the animals, how they had to be fed and watered even if you were tired or hot or late. There was a primacy to it, a simplicity I recognized from coping with the pain of my treatments, a shedding of all extraneous grievances to reveal a purely physical core, a meaning that did not extend beyond the confines of one's body. When feeding time was near, pandemonium broke out among the horses, filling the barn with neighing and kicking and squealing. And as soon as our work of dragging buckets and hauling hay was over, peace descended. It was a quiet filled with chewing sounds and soft snorts and a sense of rest that felt ancient and good. Sometimes late at night, when I couldn't sleep, I would call the barn, knowing no one was there, and imagine the sound of the phone echoing in the horse-filled barn.

  I kept my new world, with its physical pleasures and new social experiences, completely hidden from my family, who did not seem particularly interested anyway, though they were glad I'd found something "healthy" to do with my time. School was coming around again, and I actually looked forward to returning: horse fever is common among junior high school girls, and I thought my new job at the stable might improve my status at school. Everyone at the barn was preparing to return to school as well, including Jeanne, who was boy crazy and had a crush on Sean.

  The day before school began, some six of us girls were sitting on top of the hay pile. Jeanne stood on top, pointing to each person and asking, "If Sean asked you out, would you go with him?" The girls were mixed in ages and in physical development, Jeanne being the oldest at sixteen. Alison and I, at fourteen, were the youngest. Alison looked fourteen, but I, my body still reeling from the effects of all the chemotherapy, looked about ten. Puberty was still a year away. Jeanne seemed to be asking everyone systematically, but she wasn't actually thinking of asking me, was she? Sean would never ask me out; it was a completely ridiculous question, and the thought that we all might have to acknowledge this fact together seemed worse than anything else in the world.

  Finally, Jeanne turned to
me and, only because she didn't know how to politely leave me out, asked the question. I hesitated, not sure how to respond, but then Chris came to my aid and answered for me. "Why would Sean want to go out with her?" "Well, I'm just asking," Jeanne replied. I shifted uncomfortably on the hay, glad Chris had spoken for me. This was the moment when I knew definitively that I would never have a boyfriend, that no one would ever be interested in me in that way. I suppose I had learned this already from the boys at school, but never had I actually formed the inner sentence, expressed it in real terms to myself.

  Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love. Instead of proving my worth on the chemotherapy table, I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world. I decided that it was my very ugliness that allowed me access to this other beauty. My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn't my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to? At the end of each day, as I lay in the bathtub, I looked at my undeveloped child's body. I considered the desire to have it develop into a woman's body a weakness, a straying from my chosen path of truth. And as I lay in bed at night, I considered my powers, my heightened sense of self-awareness, feeling not as if I had chosen this path, but that it had been chosen for me.

  Beauty had nothing to do with the ephemeral world of boys, of this I felt sure. This was driven home to me when junior high school started again and I watched my sister and her friends begin their own puberty. They put on blue eye shadow, blow-dried their hair, and spent interminable hours at the local mall. My own notions of what made a woman beautiful were more classically oriented: if I could look like anyone in the world it would be either Marlene Dietrich or Botticelli's Venus. I definitely did not aspire to look like Farrah Fawcett, of this much I was sure. I looked at girls in my class, with their perfect faces, and wondered why on earth they ruined them with so much makeup, such stupid hair. If I had a face like that, I told myself—then harshly reprimanded myself for any stirrings of desire. My face was my face, and it was stupid to wish it any other way.