by Liz Phair
When I get home, my dad examines me and concludes that nothing is broken. He gives me some codeine and sends me to bed. Mom is out of town, or I’m sure she would have intervened. I check the swelling obsessively over the next forty-eight hours, increasingly concerned that it’s crooked. Finally, after three days, Dad looks at me across the breakfast table, bites into a croissant, and without apology or remorse, says, “You may be right. That might be broken.”
I’m making him sound heartless. If anything he’s too sensitive. But not about medical diagnoses. Any doctor’s kid will tell you that, unless your arm is fucking hanging off your shoulder by a thread, they always think their children are fine. They hate bringing their work home with them. Doctors see so many extreme cases at the clinics that your problem looks insignificant by comparison. It’s a heart-numbing job. Day in, day out, everybody’s got something wrong with them. They don’t just think you’re fine; they need you to be fine. Home is the only respite from illness, injury, and the fragility of mankind. Doctors need to come home to a house full of winners and survivors.
He drives me downtown on Tuesday to see a friend of his. For me, going to the doctor means getting a one-off appointment with the head of some department, some friend of a friend, or a colleague of someone in our social network. I haven’t seen a regular doctor since I went to a pediatrician. Doctors will do anything to stay out of the hospital themselves. They know better than anyone the limitations of their profession. Our close friend, a GP, got up the day after open-heart surgery and went home. Think about that the next time you’re obsessively trying to get an appointment with your physician because you have a cold.
I lie on the examination table, staring up at a very nice plastic surgeon as he holds my cheeks in his hands and eyeballs my bone structure.
“Mmmmm, that’s a little off.” He runs his finger over the indentation, calculating the angle of the fracture. “You’re very lucky. A few millimeters to the left and you would have lost that eye.” I know, I think. But I don’t tell him the story. “When did it happen?”
“Friday night.”
“Eh, that’s too bad. This would hurt less if you had come in right away. But I think if I just apply pressure, I can snap that back for you.”
Before I can protest, he leans his weight into his thumbs on either side of the bridge of my nose and pushes down. My barely healed flesh wound shrieks in protest, and my skull is pissed at him, too. He’s jamming my head down against the table, smashing my face into the plastic pad in a very unpleasant manner. My eyes are watering. My teeth are gnashing, and my face is twisted in a grimace. We’re at a stalemate: force and resistance.
“Just about there.” He readjusts his grip, and I hear an earsplitting crack as the barely-fused bone breaks apart again and the whole apparatus locks back into place, more or less. It’s still crooked, but as our GP friend comments at a dinner party several months later, it’s given me a more distinguished profile. Whatever. I’m not going back unless my obstructed breathing really starts to bug me.
I have to wear a very embarrassing splint on my face for a week. Two long pieces of tape, running horizontally from the splint all the way over to my left ear, supply the torque to keep my nose from drifting out of position. It’s not subtle. People stare when I walk by. Worse yet, I have to go to Florida to visit my grandmother. She’s my father’s mother, and she is not doing well. She’s all alone down there, apart from her nurses. My father can’t leave work, and my mother is still out of town.
I board the plane, comforted by the thought that everyone will just assume I got a nose job, which is more on-brand for me—less threatening to my ego. A flying meat-tenderizing mallet just doesn’t have the same ring to it. I have to make a connection in Georgia. As we’re on the final approach, I see that we’re flying very close to a nuclear power station. I react immediately to the iconic spool shape of the cooling towers. Anyone old enough to remember the Three Mile Island nuclear accident remembers that silhouette with dread. It’s emblazoned on my consciousness as a symbol of invisible, relentless, slow-moving death. Wouldn’t it suck, I think, if you happened to be making a connecting flight right when a nuclear reactor was melting down? To have the misfortune to be in the immediate vicinity and get fatally irradiated, for no better reason than that your airline carrier had to make a pit stop?
Right as I have this thought, the plane pulls up shockingly short of the runway—only fifty feet from the ground. The pilot guns the engines, making a steep climb. We bank sharply to the right, away from the towers, and everybody gasps. This is it, I think. I’m psychic, and we’re all going to die of radiation poisoning.
My seatmate turns to me. “What’s happening?” she asks, her face contorted with fear.
“Maybe something’s wrong with the power plant.” I lean back so she can see past me out the window.
Her eyes widen as she takes in the Three Mile Island–style cooling towers. “Oh God.” She looks at me in startled disbelief. “You don’t think?”
I shrug. I’m not committing either way; I’m just angling for credit in the event that I’m right. I need a witness. She’s going to be my ringer when I get my picture in the paper. She will breathlessly tell reporters that she was sitting next to the girl who predicted the incident. She’ll say she doesn’t know how I did it—that I “just knew.” I can see in her eyes that she’s factoring all the horrible ways in which radiation kills you—the same litany of horrors that was just going through my mind. We all know that whatever dose we receive incidentally, the government will lie about it to try to minimize the lawsuits. We’ll live, maybe for decades, knowing there’s a ticking time bomb in our DNA.
The pilot comes on over the passenger address system to make an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry about the detour, but we got word from the airport that there was a flock of birds in the vicinity, so we are going to make a second approach as soon as they clear the area and get you safely on the ground in ten minutes. Unforeseen events can sometimes happen, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Thank you for your patience, and for flying American Airlines.”
My seatmate rolls her eyes, exhaling. “Wow, that’s a relief.”
I smile politely, but I’m irritated. I think we could have survived an indirect hit of radiation from those towers, and I was about to have my psychic powers validated. An unnatural glow under certain lighting conditions seems like a small price to pay for proof of the divine.
* * *
—
Years later, after my second album had just come out, I did a DJ stint at the popular Chicago punk bar Delilah’s. During my set, Peter’s brother showed up with the infamous meat-tenderizing mallet asking me to sign it as a surprise birthday present for Peter. I don’t remember if I signed it. It’s almost a better story if I refused. Either way, I was offended. His brother didn’t understand that not only had that accursed object nearly cost me an eye and permanently marred my features, it had cost Peter and me a seven-year friendship. Peter wouldn’t like to be reminded of that, either, I felt sure.
Some things heal, some things don’t. I don’t feel any bitterness toward Peter. I never did, apart from resenting the odd bad angle in a photograph. But if it weren’t my nose, I’m sure I’d find something else about my looks to fixate on. We were just two billiard balls that got knocked to opposite sides of the table; that’s how I frame it. I got a letter a few years ago from one of our mutual friends, complaining that I had dropped my long-term friends now that I was a rock star. He laid on the guilt pretty thick, but it took no deliberation whatsoever for me to toss the letter in a drawer and forget about it. I still have all my long-term friends. They’re just mostly women. What he should have said was that he wanted to be a famous actor, and that it was hard to watch my success and not get to share in it.
I doubt Peter would have agreed with the letter’s tone. Peter and I helped each other t
hrough an uncertain time between college graduation and the beginning of our careers. It lasted for less than a year, but while we were living it, that time felt interminable: a lifetime of self-scrutiny and alienation, packed into eight or nine idle months under our parents’ roofs. He influenced my sensibility and my humor, and I hope I was helpful to him in some way.
It would have been nice if things had turned out differently and we’d stayed friends, but we didn’t. And this outcome is fine, too. It’s much more memorable than some of my other past relationships. He holds an honored place in my personal history. He’s been enshrined in the folklore of my life. None of it is difficult to understand if you think like a pagan. We were the victims of three bad omens, and they were real enough to scare me. I await the next cosmic turn of events and wouldn’t be surprised if we accidentally wound up in the same retirement community someday. Peter and I would pick right back up where we left off, laughing at all the other old folks wearing their stupid name tags, getting to know one another out by the shuffleboard deck.
“Whatever you do, don’t look at it!” My friends are laughing, but they’re serious, too. They’ve both had babies, so they know what’s going on with my vagina. I just had a Brazilian bikini wax this morning. I expect to go into labor any day now, and I thought it would be nice for the hospital staff to have a clean, prepped canvas to work with. I’m embarrassingly naïve about the amount of by-product that will spew forth from my body during the process of giving birth, but my heart’s in the right place.
“Why? What’s wrong with it?” I shift uncomfortably in my seat, worried about the tender flesh still, stinging from its hot-wax treatment. I haven’t tried to look down there since my belly grew so big I can no longer see my toes.
“Just don’t.” Caroline and Viv are in fits, remembering their own unwitting encounters with their nether regions in the third trimester.
After lunch, I go to the club to swim. The locker room is empty, so I spread a towel down on the bench and reach a compact mirror around the great globe of my stomach to try to get a look at myself. I have to contort my limbs to find the right angle, but as soon as I catch a glimpse of my labia in the reflection, I gasp and almost drop the compact. They’re huge, red, and puffy—like a baboon’s ass or something. That is not my vagina. I’m shaken and angry. Not because I can’t handle the sight, but because it’s yet another physical alteration that I have no control over. My body has been changing for nine months now, in ways that are both exciting and alarming, and I’m tired of surprises. I just want to hold my baby in my arms. I’m ready for this construction phase to be over.
They say remodeling a house puts a lot of stress on a relationship. The costs go over budget, and it always takes longer than expected. I relate to this metaphor. My due date has come and gone, and I’m still waddling around the neighborhood like a human lotto ball, almost as wide as I am tall. He’s grown so big that there isn’t enough room in here for the both of us. If he doesn’t leave soon of his own accord, I’m issuing an eviction notice.
I slip gingerly into the pool, relieved to feel buoyant; I’m lugging around an extra forty pounds on land. It was fun to be pregnant, until it wasn’t. I can’t find a comfortable position to sleep in at night, so I’m exhausted. All the Christmas parties we attend are sophisticated cocktail gatherings where everyone stands in high heels, chatting and laughing, while I sit in the corner at the bar. I am my own snack table, resting a plate on my baby bump and munching away while my husband socializes. I was a veritable Wonder Woman in the second trimester, going to yoga, flying to and from Los Angeles, recording my album, hiking in Glacier National Park. Somehow, my energy collapsed in the last month, and I’ve become Dan Aykroyd’s character in Trading Places: a bitter, drunken Santa detangling salmon from his fake beard on the city bus, staring dead-eyed at the passengers around him. Okay, not the drunk part, but I’m over it.
“How is this worth it?” I asked Vivienne one night last week when we were getting into the car after exercising. It was cold outside, the dark time of the year in Chicago. I no longer go to clubs, since I can’t drink. I hate maternity fashion. I’m not into the whole Yummy Mummy scene. I didn’t want a baby shower; I’m still having flashbacks to the nightmare of writing 250 thank-you notes for our wedding presents.
“You’ll see.” She held the door open for me, thinking about the best way to explain it. “When your child looks up at you with pure adoration in her eyes and says, ‘I love you, Mommy,’ it’s the most incredible feeling in the world.”
Never having experienced this joy myself, it sounded like a bullshit answer. I’m not one of those women who fawns indiscriminately over children, raising my voice to a ghastly, girlish squeak. I tend to talk to children like they’re adults and have had some really good conversations with the ones I know. But I’m having trouble keeping things in perspective. I want to dance. I want to run. I don’t want to have any of these symptoms anymore. I have phantom labor pains, my skin itches, my boobs are huge. Silvery stretch marks have started appearing on my abdomen, despite my slavish application of cocoa and shea butters. My baby kicks me nonstop, like an aggressive midfielder, and I have to pee constantly. For something so natural, I’d have thought evolution would have arrived at an easier process.
It’s possible I have an incomplete outlook on life’s greatest mystery. My brother and I were adopted, so they didn’t tell pregnancy stories in my family. As far as I’m concerned, you can go to the store and pick up a perfectly fine baby that’s already fully cooked. No need to toil all year in the kitchen. At the same time, meeting someone who is related to me by blood is of immense interest. I’ve struggled my whole life with issues of identity. For as long as I can remember, I’ve pondered the existential questions of who I am and where I came from. The specter of abandonment has waited in the wings, lurking in the shadows, insisting on acknowledgment.
I never know how much importance to give it. Is it a minor detail in my biography, or does it define me? When I look at old family photographs, do they really pertain to me? Are those my ancestors, or am I playing at nostalgia? However much I wish to belong to any one person or group, that urge is almost always counteracted by an awareness of being different, as though there’s a barrier around me, thin as a layer of ice on an eyelash, that prevents full integration. I keep people at arm’s length and in their separate categories—even those with whom I have long-term, committed relationships.
I remember when my father sent me the original copy of my birth certificate—for the purpose of gathering passport paperwork, or because I’d lost my driver’s license. It arrived in a manila envelope. When I held the yellowed document in my hands and looked at the time and date, punched out on an old-school typewriter, I burst into tears. It was overwhelming to touch the last artifact that connected me to a mother I never knew—a young woman who, for whatever reason, couldn’t raise me. I saw a vulnerable infant changing hands, and I wept for the agonizing decisions of everyone involved, for chances lost and new roads opened at a heavy price. It was also a snapshot of a fleeting moment of wholeness, before I carried in my heart this broken piece of glass, which I’ve been careful not to disturb lest it cut me. I cried because I recognized a feeling I must have had once but could no longer summon, no matter how quietly I sat or how happy I was. It makes for great art, though; I’ll say that.
I mean, who cares, right? It isn’t a big deal. There are much bigger deals in life. But it’s my deal, and I’ve done my best to adapt. Now, on the cusp of becoming a mother myself, all these emotions that are tied to being secure with or separated from a child swirl around in my subconscious. I vacillate between being blasé and being ecstatic about what’s soon to happen. Will my child have a different kind of bond with me than I had with my own parents? Will I see traces of my biological mother and father in his features? I’m keen to meet this energetic somebody who looks like a smiling wombat in the ultrasound pictures.
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But I’m not impatient to see the inside of a delivery room. Giving birth is something I have a lot of fears about. The thought of having an episiotomy, for one thing, terrifies me. Having my delicate perineum sliced open the way one scores a loaf of bread haunts my waking dreams, and I know it will be necessary. When I entered puberty, a male pediatrician examined me and offered this opinion: “You’re very tight. It may be difficult for you to have intercourse.” His assessment turned out to be untrue, but I was thereafter convinced I was deformed somehow and even tried to break my own hymen in high school, shoving three fingers up my pussy while I sat on the toilet, violently thrusting until I hurt myself badly. I ended up contracting an acute infection that made urination excruciating. My mother and I had to cancel a weekend trip and instead go to the hospital, where I received antibiotics, a catheter, and some excellent morphine.
I was too humiliated to explain what happened to the attending physicians. I’m sure my mother assumed I’d had sex, but I was still a virgin when I went to college. My high school boyfriend and I discovered all the ways to have fun without full penetration, and I never told him the reason we didn’t “go all the way.” At that time in America, there was still a lot of shame and negative perception surrounding vaginas. They weren’t something you celebrated having, or spent a lot of time musing over. Girls referred to their genitalia as “gross,” an orifice better left uninvestigated. I spent years perusing porn sites before I came to appreciate my own lovely seashell. If anything, now I wish it were less ordinary looking and more anatomically bold or quirky. I guess I could Bedazzle it.
Nonetheless, even at nine months pregnant I feel very self-conscious fitting my heels into the stirrups on the examination table so that my ob-gyn can check my cervix. Something about seeing her face in rapt concentration above the paper dressing gown spread across my lap, focused directly and solely on my vagina, makes my skin crawl. It’s all I can do not to clamp my knees together, sit up, and shove her backward on her little rolling stool. I adore my ob-gyn, but in this context I feel like a farm animal whose organs are the functional property of the state. What I can’t articulate is the way my soul resides in my pussy; in my clitoris, to be exact. It’s not just biological tissue to me. It’s a whole different way of knowing.