Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Nyet, Nivilit cheyetah, Irina,” Dr. Joshi said. “Gravo prieta tu pona. Bloody hell, Irina.” Smiling, he covered the receiver and glanced at me. “Canceling appointments is one thing. Canceling a surgery when you need it is quite another.”

  When he finally hung up but didn’t apologize, I still had to be more than civil to him. I knew I had to sort of groom him, the way that runts, from wolves to chimpanzees, have to fawn over the dominant members of the group. So I said pleasantly, “You used Russian.” I leaned over to place my digital tape recorder between us and checked the microphone. Dr. Joshi gazed frankly down the neckline of my sweater. He didn’t think I saw him do it, and so tenuous is the bridge of credibility between a disfigured person and a normal one—particularly a dominant male—that I dared not call him on it. Dr. Joshi was a hotshot, a future gold mine of projects. “You spoke Russian,” I said again.

  “Why, yes.” Dr. Joshi preened. “I speak three languages.” And then he sniffed. If you ever sniff after you say something self-congratulatory, be aware that someone will notice it. It’s an involuntary reflex for conceited people, and I had to be a student of behavior to survive, reading everyone else’s glossary of expressions like a second language, although mine, to them, appeared blank—a pane of lead. Dr. Joshi said, “How is it that you understood?”

  “I took a little in college. I just recognized a few words, that’s all.”

  “You took Russian?” The surgeon couldn’t hide his bafflement.

  If you are a sympathetic, aware, and kindly person who would swear up and down that you don’t judge people by their appearance, you still really do think, deep in the nucleus of your being, that someone with a deformity is dumber than you are (unless he’s Stephen Hawking). You’ll still do weird things unintentionally, like talking louder to someone who is perfectly competent but has cerebral palsy.

  I had to prove all the time that the inside of my head was not as damaged as the outside. I expected it. Expecting it is not the same as accepting it, particularly if you got up that morning in a foul mood and the day went downhill from there.

  I should have nodded politely. Instead, I saw him and raised him one. “I speak five languages. I minored in languages. Italian—my family speaks it a little, but I wanted to be fluent. Latin was required, of course, and I taught myself Spanish when I was in high school. I took Russian because the alphabet was a challenge. Like a game.” I could see from his expression how Dr. Joshi felt about having a young woman with a face as alluring as a catcher’s mitt try to best him, so I quickly added, “You speak it like a native.”

  “I was a boy in Moscow,” said Dr. Joshi. “Then we lived in London, where I read at Oxford.” Another sniff. “My mother is Russian, a farmer’s daughter. My father was a Sikh, a surgeon like myself. Forbidden marriage. Much passion. Much quarreling. But five happy children. My mother has many grandchildren now.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Unusual. Let’s get started.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Joshi said. “But … I would venture that it is you who is unusual in this work. You’re forced to meet people. Is that difficult for you, given …?”

  “Given how I look?” I said. The guy was pure gall on a cracker. “It used to be. I do have to factor in that some people will believe things that aren’t true.”

  “Such as?”

  “That I’m kind of dim-witted and have no sex life,” I said, and then couldn’t believe I actually had.

  My aunt Marie used to tell me that if it was socially acceptable to slug disabled people, I would have both eyes on the side of my head, like a painting on the wall of a tomb in Egypt.

  Dr. Joshi was too dark-skinned to really blush, but he fumbled, dropping his laptop as he turned toward the projection screen. We both held our breath, but the unit was undamaged, and Dr. Joshi quickly—almost too quickly—marched through the succession of photos of the technique he had pioneered. The new procedure would allow surgeons to use a smaller cannula to implant genetically engineered cells into a herniated disc, making the repair a rather neat office procedure. This was only the first interview I would need. Later, I’d use my rough sketches to make finer sketches of the progressive steps I’d created from my own drawings and then with the drawing programs on one of my three Macs. My final sketches—the whole procedure minus the gore—were what a medical illustrator does. They would make plain and to scale, in the paper Dr. Joshi would present, what photographs could not show. I did drawings and even animations in the same way for professors to use in teaching. For lawyers, my drawings made injuries specific in court without causing jurors to throw up. As I sketched, though I was being careful, I also was thinking that when I got home I’d find a message blinking on my office phone, telling me that “Doctor” had decided to proceed another way. When I stood up to leave, however, to my shock and his credit, Dr. Joshi extended his hand. He said, “I’m sorry I offended you.”

  I answered, God help me, “Dasvidaniya.”

  Standing at the window before I climbed into bed, I studied the traffic out on Lake Shore Drive, the taillights and headlights strung in a curve like a necklace of bright amber beads. Next year, I thought, I won’t have to put myself through this. My life was going to change. Next year on this date, I would be a different person, putting someone else’s needs before my own. I would be truly grown up.

  My phone brrrred and spun again. By the time I got to it, it had stopped.

  The missed call was from Joey, my fiancé.

  Yep, my fiancé.

  I’d become engaged the previous fall to Joey LaVoy, the first kid I saw that day when I struggled to my knees in the snow still clutching my melted vinyl purse to my face. Joey and I would be married in August. Most people with a congenital deformity or a disability who thrive at all do end up with someone, but the someone is usually either another “special” person they met in rehab or is the kind of person who gets off a little on it. It was down to the way Marie had raised me that I was engaged to a bona fide hunk, who also was a firefighter like my dad, and in Chicago too, where only the best of the best worked.

  My aunt was no psychologist. But she knew human types. She was a TV news chick. She could suss out the core of people like a hunting dog. A sassy, hyperactive flyweight, she reminded everyone of Audrey Hepburn, with her Peter Pan haircut and her short black dresses with tights and ballet flats. Marie’s appearance was as deceiving as mine.

  Even now, well into her fifties (how well, she never revealed), my aunt was the kind of woman people thought of as “kittenish,” long after the age when a cat was a cat. In fact, not only was she no kitten, if she’d been a feline, she’d have been the kind with half of one ear torn, the kind that could bristle to twice its size in battle. You could ask anyone who’d been in Marie’s sights, ever so trustingly unaware before she pulled the trigger in an interview. Or you could ask me. I think no one knows Marie better than I do, not even her sisters or her parents or her (kind of many) lovers. When my aunt Marie said that she would never leave me, that night at the hospital, she meant it. And in return she demanded absolutely just about fifty percent more in everything. Giving me a pass would have been the worst thing she could have done, but there’s no instruction manual to tell you that. My aunt flew on instruments: You can’t be as good as; you have to be better than, Marie said. Over and over. Day and night. It was her litany.

  The first thing she did was get me to survivor-type groups—not to learn coping techniques but to see what I could become if I didn’t choose to live life like it was a giant slalom. She was right. What I saw shocked me into fight mode. Mine might well have been that pitiable—but so much simpler—life, the twilight existence some girls endured, living on disability, sewing veils to wear to the mall, never driving, dancing, dating, or drinking. In burn groups and loss groups and body-image groups (I was good for any group), most people ran a continuum from depressed to suicidal. True, many of them adjusted, with time. Those who adjusted came to talk to those of us
just starting down the road. Most were in the helping professions, counselors or nurses or teachers. Some were teachers because they embraced the common fallacy that children are gentler. In fact, normal children are ruthless little brutes, programmed to survive. Kids might be more honest, forgiving, and way, way cuter. But they’re also hand mirrors of the selves those people would have been. Most of the people who visited to inspire us were living what was still a middle life, not quite this or that.

  Marie wouldn’t hear of that for me.

  I was going to be the world-champion faceless person.

  I had to do everything I could that normal girls did. I wanted to quit ballet after the fire, although I’d studied it since I was four. Nix. A year later, I was back at the barre. In junior year of high school, I was in a master dance class. Just before recital, several mothers of the other girls sent a discreet but firm note to the dance teacher, who made the big mistake of passing it on to Marie. While they entirely understood my situation, their daughters were unsettled by my appearance when they performed—ballet was intended to be an act of essential beauty. Marie’s response was to buy every seat in the recital hall, so no one but our family could attend.

  Marie was right. But there were times when I just couldn’t do it: I balked at the threshold of the world. College interviews? Volunteer work? The harder she pushed, the harder I pushed back. There were times I was sure that the nonagenarian lady next door would stroke out from the sound of Marie and me screaming at each other. (Mrs. Rainflow finally did die—not because of us. But at the funeral, Marie made the heirs an offer for Mrs. Rainflow’s place, in order to knock out the wall and combine both apartments into two big studios linked by a massive kitchen and dining room.) Despite all her insistence that I make my own way in the world, without compromise, I know Marie really believed I would live at home but not quite at home, all my life. After all, I’d been given plenty of chances to attend conferences, juicy junkets, as part of my job. I’d even received two awards. But they were sent to me in the mail, because there was no way I would ever get on an airplane or even the el—planes sometimes burst into flames; the train gave off sparks when it braked. There was no way I would ever go up to a podium, in front of people, and let anyone snap a picture of me being handed some little bronzed statuette of a pen and a paintbrush.

  And yet, probably surprised because I behaved as though I deserved my propers, people responded. I made friends beyond my tight high school circle (at Holy Angels, I got a kind of deferment as a fire survivor and a martyr’s daughter). When Joey and I met up again in college, after he got out of the military, he asked me out—asked me out, me alone, on a date, not as part of a congenial group. While we had always been friends, I figured Joe was a pervert or had suffered some odd genital injury in the military. Marie thought that was nonsense. Still, we started slowly, with Kit and me joining a group of friends we had in common with Joe, for a movie, then a cookout; I always found a spot to sit far from the barbecue grill. He was sensitive to me: He never did things like ask me out to a bar where people would be dancing. Our first real date was a late afternoon of Christmas shopping downtown, which I thought was awfully romantic. Our second was a winter picnic at the harbor. When we went out to dinner, it was to small places on the West Side, where people had known my family, not to swanky spots, where even haughty waiters had permission to stare. Joey became the leading wedge that opened a way for me into the world of summer tavern volleyball and vodka frost parties and … eventually everything. Still, the more comfortable I got, the more frightened I felt. When I confided, Marie urged me on.

  “What if it doesn’t work out?” she said. “It’s not going to hurt less if you pretend you don’t care.”

  Although I finally did let myself fall, ours would have been a very proper courtship even by eighteenth-century standards. Joe was awkward and I, nearly twenty-two by then, was still an exasperated virgin, although determined to correct that oversight. The lovemaking didn’t happen for two years. And when it happened, it was never our best thing, although our bodies were built for sex—me a dancer, him a gym rat. Our intimacy never approached the total abandon of self you were supposed to feel. But it was good enough. It was one C in a garden of A-pluses. We were pals. We had history and hopes. Joey sheltered me. Joey set me free. When I was with him, I forgot that I was supposed to be an untouchable. With Joey at my side, I was at least as good as.

  So if Marie was the sun and Kit the ground on which I stood, Joey became my north star.

  I knew tonight he’d want to take me out, to distract me with bad jokes and good wine. I knew I should go. Tomorrow at 7:00 a.m., Joey would start his forty-eight-hour shift. But it would be even harder on me to be sociable than it would to eat pasta politely. Despite my inability to smell, I’d trained my brain to let my tongue do what little tasting I could do. But I couldn’t train my mouth to act like a lady. And so I ate sparingly, and only when I needed to, a fact that drove my aunt Marie crazy, as she drank thimblesful of wine and worked out like a prizefighter to stay TV-lady skinny. Joey took an almost erotic pleasure in food, hence my working more hours and taking on new clients to help pay for the house with the fancy gourmet kitchen that we would buy one day. For Joey, I would even learn to cook. When I described the kneading and the thumbprint required for my grandma’s homemade gnocchi, Joey said, “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  But even for sweet Joey, I wouldn’t go out tonight.

  For one thing, my beloved seemed to have a genetic inability to be comfortable in public without his lifelong friends. When we were alone, we didn’t lack for things to say. In public, Joe liked people around, and I assumed it was to cover his own shyness. So Neal Polachek, Joey’s best friend, would most likely tag along or meet up with us at some point. If it wasn’t Neal, it would be Andy English or Adam Sawicki or Joey’s brother, Paul. I tried to like Paulie, who’d dated Kit for a few months, prompting my best friend, who always took new romance far, far too seriously, to rapturous speculation about our being sisters-in-law. Now Paul was dating Jane, a high school teacher and tennis coach who was exuberant and fun to be with. But since the engagement, Paulie and Jane seemed almost to avoid us—I never knew why—while Neal, a loner, for whom three weeks with a woman was an enduring relationship, was always available.

  So when I called Joey back and his phone went over directly to voice mail, I did a quick little fouetté en tournant of victory.

  Honey, I’m pooped, I thought, but what I said, since it was even harder to understand me on the telephone, was, “Honey, I’m worn out tonight. I’m going to sleep. I’ll come to the station tomorrow.” It wasn’t that I took Joe for granted: Having him was like being given a birthday present every day. I worried that I would let him down—that I was too self-centered for the patience and daily-ness of a married life. But there was nothing I wouldn’t master for Joe, for the life we would have, the house we would buy, the children—rowdy little girls, tender little boys.

  I would bring something nice to the station tomorrow. Cannolis, maybe. I liked Joey’s fellow firefighters and felt almost more comfortable in a firehouse than anywhere else, since the days Kit and I used to ride bikes to my father’s station after school and eat Schmitty’s chili and corn bread. Joey’s crew knew who I was and who my father had been, and they treated me like an ordinary woman. They were cocky, yes. But the Rogers Park territory they worked was among the toughest and busiest in the whole city. Joey had his own right to a little swagger. But that wouldn’t have been Joey. He was always humble. Even when we were kids, he didn’t seem to know how cute he was, nearly girlish in his good looks. He had been my first crush, something I never told him.

  I left the ringer on in case he called back. At least we could talk.

  Instantly, the phone rang. A special ringtone: “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I would always answer the phone for my aunt.

  “Sweetheart,” Aunt Marie said. “Are you alone? Can I come over?”

  “I’m having a
n orgy,” I said, stifling a yawn.

  “Oh, good, then I won’t have to change.”

  Marie knocked. She always knocked. Doors locked primly on either side of the big kitchen. But when I let her in, she threw aside any pretense of respecting my space and climbed up onto my bed like a girl ready for gossip. Tomorrow, Marie would leave for London with a camera crew, to await the birth of King William’s first child with the newly crowned Queen Katherine. The prince or princess would be the first baby in six generations born to a sitting English king. Instead of a deathwatch, she was going to a birthwatch.

  “I never sleep before I go anywhere. Do you?” she said.

  “I sleep beautifully. I never go anywhere,” I said. All those blasts and sparks. Not me. I hadn’t had candles on my birthday cake until I asked for them, when I turned twenty-one.

  “Do you want to go to England with me? I can still make it happen.”

  “I’m not a TV news chick, Auntie. I work for a living. I’ve put up with a whole university of long-winded lawyers and doctors this week.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  To tease my aunt, I made my eyes wide in a pantomime of fear.

  “Sicily. Really! Come on!”

  “I am. Really. Just. Tired,” I said. The anniversary swung softly, like a dark cloth, between us. “I had the weirdest phone call.” I told my aunt about Eliza Cappadora. Marie remembered interviewing Beth, Eliza’s mother-in-law, after Ben’s kidnapping—the mother’s strange presence of mind, despite the fact that she was literally dirty, her clothing smeared and wrinkled, her hair in oily strings, her manner robotic.

  “She didn’t want to plead with the kidnapper,” Marie said. “In fact, she said whoever did this was a heartless bastard and that anyone who saw her son should grab him, even if it meant killing the person he was with,” Marie said.