“Hi again, Dr. Wanich.”
Mai’s standing next to him. She has books in her arms and a backpack slung over the arm straps of her one-piece swimsuit. He stands up, so that he can look at her face without seeming like he’s staring at anything else.
“Oh, hello there, Khun Mai. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I come to the pool to study every now and then. That’s your daughter, right?”
He nods. They turn to admire the girl in the pool. She’s chopping the water in front of her. Mai guesses that the girl had taken lessons at a younger age—a girl whose father is a surgeon always takes lessons.
“Do you mind if I give her some tips? Just something with her stroke.”
“Of course not. Do you swim?”
“Yes, since I was your daughter’s age. A swim teacher taught me right here in this pool.”
“I didn’t know they offered swim classes.”
“Not anymore, not these past few years.”
“You should teach them. Maybe I’ll even enroll my daughter.”
“Ha, no. I don’t swim as much as I used to.”
He points a thumb at the books she’s carrying. “Well, it seems like other things are keeping you busy.” He reads a title out loud, “Concepts in Global Studies, your preferred poolside read.” He wears the smile longer than when he’s not trying to joke.
“Father, Father!” Juhn shouts, hanging from the pool’s edge. “I’m halfway through!”
He motions Mai to walk over. She puts down her things on a chair and follows him.
“This is Juhn,” he says to his daughter. “Juhn, give Sister Mai a wai.”
“Sawasdee kah,” says Juhn, waiing.
“Sister Mai here is an experienced swimmer. She says she can help you swim even better.”
Mai sits down near Juhn’s bobbing head and compliments Juhn on her swimming. The girl looks up, her eyes behind foggy goggles.
“Juhn, your arms are strong, which means it’s easy to put a lot of power into your strokes, but, actually, you can save energy and swim longer if you do this.”
Mai bends sideway at the waist and gets into a midstroke position. Her arm lunges out and stops a distance from her head. Then she reaches out even farther.
“See that? A very good swimmer taught me, right here in this pool. You shift your shoulder out, just that one little extra change, and it makes all the difference.”
“Okay!” Juhn shrieks, and swims off.
For a minute, Mai stands with the doctor. She remembers herself, no bigger than Juhn, in the same pool. She swam so much then, even though she had no competitive meets, and her father didn’t come down to watch her swim. She liked the lessons and the satisfaction in answering to Teacher Nee sounding out, stroke, stroke, stroke. She loved the feeling of moving forward, her fingers anticipating the pool’s edge ahead. Even now, she can feel on her skin the ribbons of water rushing around her, cold at first and then warm. Swimming across the pool, her movements sending out one ripple after another, she comes closer to knowing how a spirit could move a body—this watery thing that gives her a shape and a face to meet all the others.
Juhn reaches the other end of the pool and waves to them. They wave back, and Juhn starts another lap.
“Look at her go. Thank you, Khun Mai.”
“It’s a small adjustment. She’s already a wonderful swimmer.”
She says this with a kind of maternal pride, he notices. She has a wonderful smile with upwardly curved ends, even when she’s not smiling.
“Dr. Wanich, I think I’m going to call your clinic,” she says.
“About?”
“Scheduling the procedures, I meant.”
“Yes, do that when you’re ready. Or not.”
“Thank you, Dr. Wanich. I better go study some more.” She clasps her hands to the bridge of her nose and does a slight bow. She picks up her books and finds a seat on the other side. She opens a textbook and doesn’t look up.
When Juhn climbs out of the pool, he wraps her in a towel. She stands, shivering, dripping a little wet shadow on to the tiles. She looks at the young woman reading across the water.
“How do you know Sister Mai?”
“She lives here. She’s a patient.”
“A patient? What’s wrong with her?”
In his daughter’s mind he’s the fixer of broken faces. Juhn knows about his heroic surgeries. He rebuilt a nose for the noodle shop owner whose face melted in burning oil. He gave back a jaw to the sergeant whose patrol Humvee flipped down a border town hillside. Her father’s hands, those that hold hers, restore shape to mangled lives.
He looks over at Mai on the other side of the pool. How many faces like hers have changed under his hands? It’s their choice, their design, he has told himself.
“Don’t be so nosy, Juhn,” he says, pushing her by the shoulders toward the walkway.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
In the early evening, when the mosquitoes intensify their hunt, Mai heads back up the twenty-five floors. Her parents are watching a dubbed Brad Pitt movie on the sofa. It’s one she has seen, though she doesn’t remember how it ends. Usually, she sits down in the side chair and joins them, one eye on the movie, the other on her class notes. Today, she teeters on the arm of the sofa and waits. Her father chuckles at a line she has heard before in the English version; her mother grins. They shouldn’t ever have to leave their earned comforts to pay for her studies.
“Have you eaten?” asks her mother. “There’s grilled chicken and sticky rice on the counter.”
“I had a slice of pizza from the minimart.”
On the end table next to her, framed pictures surround arrangements of knickknacks brought back from their few overseas vacations. A photo of her, age one, at her grandmother’s old teak house. Her grandmother presents her to the camera, cradled, as if showing off a basket of mangoes. She was a beautiful child, her parents like to say. Strangers stopped her parents at the mall, to congratulate them and nudge her cheeks with pinkies.
She takes out the printout from her shoulder bag and puts it on the coffee table. Her new face looks up at her parents.
“Koreans and Saudis fly in to get worked on by Dr. Wanich,” says her current face. “I can try to get a slot during the term break.”
Her mother feels her shirt pocket for reading glasses. Her father picks up the printout for a closer look. They look at her new face, up and down, as if it were an electric bill. This is the first they’ve heard of her visit to Dr. Wanich. She wants to tell them that it’s not their fault.
“This is from hanging out with those rich kids, isn’t it?”
“No, listen. Next year, I may have to look for a job. They often ask for a photo from the female applicants.”
Her mother looks over to her father.
“Is it true, Mehta?”
“Yes, Mohd, they do that at companies,” says her father.
“And scholarship applications,” says Mai. “Want me to show you last year’s recipients?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Wednesday evenings, they have a pattern: start at the produce aisle and end at personal hygiene. He pushes the cart, and they fill it. It’s their weekly ritual. He and Pia pick up Juhn at the tutoring center and stop at the supermarket in the same plaza. He doesn’t schedule patients then, and Pia knows not to book piano lessons. She teaches two or three students most afternoons, to keep busy. Most are daughters and sons of residents in the building. Every few months, they host a recital in the living room. Proud parents sip wine and gather around the Schimmel. Every child’s a prodigy, every song worthy of breathlessness. Juhn doesn’t study with Pia. Again, this is the result of his negotiations. He knows their personalities and wants peace in his home.
Juhn drops a pack of yogurt cartons into
the cart. Pia picks it up to make sure they’re not poisonous.
“Whoa, this is full of sugar.”
“It’s fine, Pia. She’s young. She’ll burn it off.”
“Some doctor you are.”
He doesn’t resent her remark; he appreciates her watchfulness as a mother, her intentions. At his clinic he meets many mothers who sit next to their daughters and quibble over the angle of new noses.
Pia braves a circle of shoppers for shrink-wrapped cantaloupes heaped between aisles. The crowd, although better dressed, reminds him of those in the market where, as a boy, he bought fruits with his mother—those yellowing mangoes and eyeball-sized longans and hairy piles of rambutan. She showed him how to divine their ripeness with a thumb poke and a sniff. He doesn’t remember when cantaloupes started appearing in every New Year’s fruit basket in Krungthep.
“How about this one?” he asks, holding up a cantaloupe he has found satisfactory after a squeeze.
Pia looks at it. “That one won’t be ready for a week.”
“Are you sure? It feels like it’s ready.”
“I can tell by the color. And not only that, it’s bruised.”
He turns the fruit around to find a dark dented spot at the bottom. He inspects dozens of faces each week. He shouldn’t have missed this.
“Okay, you’re right. I’ll let you choose.”
He leaves Pia to catch up with Juhn, who has been walking in front of them, her legs outstretched, a slight hop with each step. It’s her walk of leisure. These aisles are their park trails. He imagines her at fifteen, thirty, fifty, still with that girlish stride.
She stops to wait for him in front of a blue mountain of mouthwash bottles and, behind it, an aisle of creams and moisturizers.
“Don’t we need more sunscreen?” he asks, remembering the bottle whistling with each squeeze on Sunday.
“We do,” she says. “But, you know, I may need to swim indoors.”
“Indoors?”
“My friends tell me that it’ll be better for my skin. Less sun.”
“There’s sun everywhere. We’re in Krungthep.”
“Please, please can we look into it? Please?”
She tugs at his sleeves. She has inherited his stubbornness and Pia’s regal charms. She pleads, but commands.
“Okay, I will,” he says.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
To get to the hospital, they cut across the city on the tolled highway. Her father drives, humming a country song, while her mother switches radio stations for traffic reports. Mai’s in the backseat, her hair still damp from the shower. They are silent for most of the ride, no different than when going to visit cousins in the provinces or attend a hotel wedding. They try their best to make this afternoon feel like a past afternoon.
“May the sacred look over you,” her mother says in the hospital atrium. That morning, at the shrine in their building’s courtyard, they had made offerings to spirits and angels, for good luck.
“See you guys soon,” she tells her parents, as attendants seat her in a wheelchair. She’s pushed through double doors that swing out to receive her. In a dimly lit room, she undresses and puts on a beige-colored gown. From a wall mirror, a face looks at her, bewildered, its body submerged in shadow.
“Bye-bye,” she says with a smile.
Outside, she is asked to lie on a bed. She’s pushed down a corridor, stopping once next to an older woman with ash-colored skin, nearly see-through, and then into a prep room.
“Hello, Khun Mai.”
“Hello, Dr. Wanich.”
She clasps her hands at her chin, although she can’t see him. Her eyes want to shut under the bright lamps.
“How are you?” his voice sounds out.
“I’m all right, I guess.”
“Good. All right’s very good.”
“How’s Juhn’s swimming?”
“She’s a little fish, thanks to you. She’ll be taking lessons at an indoor pool, starting next month.”
“She’s very beautiful, your daughter.”
“Thank you. She is, isn’t she?”
He steps away when the anesthesiologist interrupts them to check Mai’s blood pressure. Dr. Wanich looks at her charts again. He is almost twice her weight, although she is taller, as most well-nourished kids are these days. She’s no longer a child, but she hasn’t lost her youthfulness. She has bone structure that would have kept her looking young all her life. He pictures her as a teenager, as a young girl, then as she was at a few months old. The medical textbooks say that babies look the same that early, and then they grow into their fated faces. She’s already beautiful. She’s perfect.
His colleague gives him a thumbs-up. He nods.
“Ready?” he asks her.
“I am.”
When she got together with her friends earlier in the week, Pig was set to depart for a term-break vacation in Australia. They ordered in pizza, and Mai provided tertiary opinions while Pig tapped back and forth on the screen with Bubble and Caterpillar to plan which outfits to pack for scenic jaunts through the Outback. At the end of the night, Pig turned to her, bottom lip bitten. It’s a face that Pig likes to deploy in posted photos to exaggerate her grievances. Mai isn’t used to seeing it outside of a screen.
“I’m so happy for you. You’ll have everything now.”
“Silly Pig, how’s that even possible?”
“No, I’m not. It’s almost unfair.”
“Stop being ridiculous. Nothing’s different. Nothing’s going to change.”
So here she is. He puts the mask over her mouth and nose. She turns her eyes back to the operating lamp, the off-white ceiling, the cloudless sky. He watches her eyelids flutter, an instinctual fight, and then she’s gone. With a green felt-tip pen he draws an incision path a few millimeters below her lash line. He makes trails along the side of her face and behind the flare of her nose.
He does hundreds of these procedures every year, he reminds himself. He has chosen this specialty, in part, because it lets him avoid matters of life and death. Or does it?
“Scalpel,” he says to a nurse.
Her skin and tissue will peel easily into flaps to be held open with tape. She will bleed small streams down her cheek before an assistant wipes her face dry.
She will wake up, unsure if the procedures had been successful. She’ll be told by a nurse to keep taking pain medication until she’s comfortable. Within a week, the swelling will go away. She will remove the bandage patches and inspect herself in front of a mirror. Her new face will seem like a stranger’s mimicking her own head turns.
He will see her, too, the first time at the post-op checkup, where he will shine a penlight on her face and see that her reddened seams have faded. She will likely have done something different, maybe cut her hair to her shoulders, but to him, unlike everyone else, she will not look like another woman.
He will hope these things will always be true: that his daughter loves him, that she never suffers for his fault. Tomorrow, as today, he’ll go on giving shape to his patients’ wishes. He will believe that all he touches is surface, the least important part of all.
He lines the blade where she wants it. He carves into her with the same force he’d use to cut into a fruit.
SONS
It’s ten in the morning, and Sammy sees Betty’s pickup truck roll into the lot from the direction of town. Wayne’s driving. Betty opens the passenger door and hops down, and Wayne waves palm-up with his gimpy arm, fingers straight and frozen, like he’s feeling for rain. Sammy is glad to be standing about a hundred yards out in the field and not near enough to require the usual niceties—excitable commentary about last night’s Red Sox game that he didn’t watch or a general inquiry of what he was doing with the camera—until Wayne feels that sufficient banter had been exchanged. After Wayne drives
off, Sammy sees that Betty has arrived empty-handed. Yesterday, she promised to make a run to Kreissler’s. They’re running low on everything—paper towels, detergent, floor soap. This summer season has been far busier than the last. Since Memorial Day guests have booked every bungalow and nearly all the rooms in the lodge.
Betty waves with one hand to catch his attention. After he smiles and does a half wave back, she begins to flag him toward her with both arms. She won’t yell for fear of waking the guests. He supposes that she wants him to come back up.
It is clear to him that Betty doesn’t fully apprehend her intrusion into his zoological investigations. He has been up since five o’clock to capture, through his zoom lenses, the foxes living underneath the shed. He tried enticing them with leftover bits from last night’s roast, but his cooking has so far failed to draw them out to daylight. Some townspeople have warned him about feeding the foxes—cunning nighttime raiders of garbage bins and antagonizers of small pets, they say—but what can anyone do to stop him? This is America, and this is his land. He owns that decrepit shed and all that lives under it, the field where he’s crouched, the main lodge and the ten bungalows, the driveway Betty and Wayne had just driven up, the wooded trail that hugs gently sloping hills all the way down to the boathouse, and the crescent-shaped beach along the lake where Vermont gentry and assorted New Englanders have vacationed for generations. Some walk up to the reception desk to ask for Mr. Portsmith, not realizing that Sammy is now the owner. The brass plaque on the wall bears his meandering Thai name. They struggle to pronounce it. He tells them to call him by his Anglicized moniker.
“Sammy!” Betty shouts finally.
“What?” he mouths, making it clear that he won’t resort to her kind of ruckus. She turns and disappears into the kitchen’s side door.
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