Autobiography of a Face

by Lucy Grealy

  My body, wanting to turn itself inside out, made wave after wave of attempts to rid itself of this unseeable intruder, this overwhelming and noxious poison. I shook with heaves so strong they felt more like convulsions. Someone lifted a metal basin to my face, and I quickly deposited in it everything my digestive system owned, and when that wasn't enough I came up with the digestive juices themselves, pitiful spoonfuls of green bile, and then I just threw up air, breathing it down in deep gasps between bucking it back up in spasms that ached with fruitlessness. It was the emptiness that hurt the most. When my stomach had something to offer back it was happy to do so, but when it was empty, the convulsions still came, my stomach pressing inward with even greater self-spite, punishing its own lack by squeezing ever harder.

  Gradually the waves of vomiting subsided, leaving behind an unacted-upon nausea that seemed to involve not just my stomach but all of me, even my feet, my scalp. As a result of the vomiting my sinuses swelled and ached, but knowing nothing about sinuses, I could only report that my nose hurt. Dr. Woolf looked puzzled but didn't follow up with any further questions. Someone helped me put my clothes back on; I don't remember the walk back to the car.

  The sky was so blue it was almost transparent, and it moved seamlessly outside the window as I lay in the back seat. The trip home was straightforward, from the bridge onto the parkway, then off the parkway down a few streets, and up the driveway. Once we were off the bridge, it was a half-hour trip, and I calculated there were only nine turns from start to finish. From this unfamiliar vantage point, without the normal visual landmarks, I stared at the sky and attempted to guess where we were. Each time the car turned I tried to visualize what it was turning toward: Exit 14, the supermarket, the stone house on the corner, our house. Somewhere along the way I messed up. I thought we were at least two more turns away, but suddenly I felt the rise of the driveway and knew I was wrong, but it would be the last time. Over the years I perfected the mental drive, could do it even when I was half asleep, even when the rhythm was interrupted by a sudden need to vomit into the kitchen mixing bowl my mother placed on the floor.

  That first time I arrived home I remember feeling not quite so bad. I'd begun to feel less nauseous, or at least better able to control it. My father suggested I eat something, some ice cream perhaps. My head swimming, I sat at the kitchen table and ate several spoonfuls, my parents looking at me expectantly.

  "It wasn't so bad, was it now, Lucinda Mag?" my father asked.

  I shook my head no, purposefully bringing another spoonful of the vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry mixture up to my mouth. Speaking seemed like something one could grow tired of.

  My stomach rebelled. I stood quickly and made my way over to the sink, where I threw up the now liquid ice cream, still cool and even soothing as it came up. For some reason I started to cry. My mother put her hand on my head and tried to soothe me, and when I was done began to explain that there was no need to cry, that everything would be all right, that I mustn't cry.

  How could she know I would take her so seriously? She went on to explain how disappointed she was that I'd cried even before Dr. Woolf had put the needle into me, that crying was only because of fear, that I shouldn't be afraid, it would be all right. It was one thing to cry afterward, because she knew that it hurt, but why did I cry beforehand? Hadn't I always been so brave before?

  I looked out the kitchen window over the sink I had just thrown up into. Straggles of spider-plant cuttings had taken over most of it, the brown, tangled roots filling an assortment of drinking glasses placed on the ledges. There was also a collection of small ceramic houses, presents and mementos accumulated over the years. Immediately outside, the overgrown, sloppy fir trees prevented any clear view of the front lawn or street.

  Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them. What did my mother mean? Part of me knew then, and still knows, that she was afraid for me. If somehow she could convince me not to be afraid, we could rally around the truism she had grown up with: there was nothing to fear but fear itself. My mother didn't know how to conquer what I was afraid of, nor could she even begin to tell me how to do it for myself. Instead, out of her own fear, she offered her own philosophy, which meant in this instance that I should conquer the fear by not crying. It was a single brief sentence, a fleeting thought she probably did not mean and doesn't even remember saying but I, who would have done anything to find a way out of this pain, would never forget it. As I made my way downstairs to my room, I resolved to never cry again.

  I kept my bedroom dark and watched the light from my television change color on the wall beside me. Every hour or so I felt a great urge to lean over and retch into the mixing bowl on the floor. I drank water constantly so as to have something to throw up. As soon as the vomiting was over I'd feel whole continents better, and the intense nausea that had been unendurable only moments before was suddenly bearable, exposed as a fake, something I'd only mistakenly thought I could not bear a second longer. I'd lie back on the pillow feeling both energized and exhausted. Gradually, over the next hour, the feeling of unbearableness would return, subtly, insidiously, until I again had to lift myself up and hang over the side of the bed, my intimate bowl beneath me. This went on all night.

  The second day was better. The cycle between nausea and relief would gradually extend so that I was throwing up only every four hours, every six hours, only three times during the night. The third day was the breaking point. I could actually eat something innocuous like tapioca. I quickly learned to judge food not by what it tasted like in eating but how it tasted when I threw it back up. Vanilla pudding was best, though it turned an unfortunate color, making me opt for chocolate for purely aesthetic reasons. I'd try to leave it down long enough so that I could digest most, possibly even all, of it before my stomach rebelled yet again.

  Sometime during the late afternoon, relief would come. A flicker at first, only a moment, but for that brief moment I understood I was going to get better, that this was going to end. I sat up in bed, felt the strength of my body support me. Another moment would go by and I'd feel ill again, my head beginning to throb, but an hour, maybe two hours later, the feeling would return, stay for just a few breaths longer before abandoning me. The next period of illness would be a few shades briefer, and so it would go on through the evening. When I woke up on the fourth day I felt only a little weak, a little washed out, but glorious and high, that sanguine, comfortable feeling one gets after performing some great physical feat. I had swum the Channel. I had climbed Mount Eiger.

  I sat up, listening for the sounds of my mother's footsteps, the clicking of the dog's nails on the tiled floor. A tree obscured my window, shattering the light into patches on the ditty glass. I didn't understand how I could have overlooked the sheer joy of these things for so long, how the intricate message of their simplicity had escaped me until just this moment. This weightless now-ness, this ecstasy could sometimes last me all day, at least until that afternoon, when it was time to go back to the hospital for the radiation treatment, which, as I've said, didn't seem so bad, not really, anyway.

  The fifth day was Tuesday, my favorite day of all. All but completely recovered, yet excused from the burden of school, I was free to wander about the still house, form intimate relationships with the cats and dogs, who regarded me nonjudgmentally as I tracked their movements over the living room floor, sleepily following the inexorable arc of the sun. Tuesday, still far away from Friday, was futureless, thoughtless, anxiety-free.

  The house itself mothered me. With everyone else away at school or at work, I somehow thought my eavesdropping created a new meaning for the clock, the hot water heater, the cats growling over their food. I felt that my listening made for them, and for myself, a real home. The house empty was a different place from the house occupied.

  With so many brothers and sisters, I'd never had many opportunities for privacy. I liked to go into my
mother's closet and sit there in the dark for the sheer pleasure of smelling her, at the same time knowing how annoyed she'd be if she knew I'd invaded her privacy. I became a snoop, going through everyone's drawers, looking for clues to how other people lived their lives. I liked to lie on my sister's bed, look out her window, think to myself, So this is what she sees when she wakes up in the morning. What was it like to be somebody else? I went into my father's bedroom, dark and cluttered, and saw all the bits of paper, the stray ties, the dirty cups, as marks of how little he was touched by his personal surroundings, how little they, in return, touched him. It all seemed so random, so accidental. In my brother's room I found magazines with pictures of naked women, fascinating me for reasons I couldn't determine. His room seemed the most alien of all. Even when I lay down on his bed and what he I knew I wasn't even close.

  The long, elliptical mornings of invading other people's privacy while alone in the house seemed endless, but eventually I'd hear the car drive up to the house and know it was time to leave for the city. Except for Fridays, I looked forward to the drive, counting groundhogs serenely eating grass along the highway, seemingly unaware of the danger a few feet away from them. I pretended I was riding alongside the road with great, graceful swiftness on a large black, gleaming horse, its sensual mane tangling in my face, the rhythm of its hooves a hypnotic lecture on how to arrive someplace entirely different.

  Inexorably, Friday, or D-day, as we began calling it, would approach. Wednesday held anxiety at arm's length, but it was there on the edges, and I knew it. Thursday was almost unbearable. Friday morning I woke up early, as always, but I did not want to get out of bed, even to go lie on the floor with my best friends, the dogs, who I imagined understood my suffering and whose wet tongues licking my face weren't random or casual but pointed, intended, full of sympathy.

  The second week of chemo was worse in that I knew what to expect. This presented a curious reversal of fear for me, because I already understood that with other types of pain the fear of not knowing about it usually brought about more suffering than the thing itself. This was different. This was dread. It wasn't some unknown black thing hovering and threatening in the shadows; it had already revealed itself to me and, knowing that I knew I couldn't escape, took its time stalking me. This was everything I ever needed to know about Fate.

  We went through the whole routine again, the endless waiting, Dr. Woolf's eternal phone call, his strong hands on my body. I tried not to look at the syringes beside me, but when I looked out the window Dr. Woolf invariably passed in front of my line of vision, casually holding a syringe in the air. When I looked down at the floor, I somehow chanced to look at the exact time and the exact spot where Dr. Woolf would send a brief spurt of fluid out of the syringe to clear the needle of air. A graceful, thin arc of liquid would fall directly onto the tile I was concentrating on. I took it as a sign to cry, which I did, ashamed of myself, unable to meet my mother's eyes as she began telling me not to, to hold it back.

  The tourniquet went on, and it began all over again, just like the week before, except that this time when I got home I went straight to bed. I didn't even try to sit up or to eat anything as grotesque as ice cream. I felt that my mother was disappointed with me. I hadn't gone straight to bed last time—why was I doing it this time? She came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. She looked tired but beautiful, always beautiful to me, her makeup exact and perfect, the redness of her lips, the faint hue of her powder, the distinct, musky smell of her perfume.

  "You can't let this get you down, you know. I know it's hard, but you can't get depressed by it. Don't give in to it. You were not so bad last time, so make sure that what you're feeling isn't just in your head."

  She sat there a moment longer, staring at me sadly, before asking if there was anything else. When I said no, she stood up and left me alone with the television. My father had rigged up a buzzer to the kitchen, which I could press if I needed anything. For the first few weeks I pressed it every time I threw up, but as time passed and I failed, as I saw it, to not vomit too much, I began leaving the vomit in the bowl, even when it smelled awful, and only buzzed when the large vessel was full. I lay there in my room as if alone in the forest at night, dimly sensing something large breathing close by and feeling the eyes of something unfathomably lurid turning upon me.

  My father bought me toys, not because he believed for a second that they would sufficiently compensate me but because it was as close a gesture as he could manage. He didn't really have the stomach for the treatments, and only on the rare days when my mother was ill or busy would he take me in for chemotherapy. His rhythm was entirely different from my mother's. We arrived late, so there was not as much waiting time, though he seemed happy to sit for as long as he could reading the paper. Once my name was called he'd accompany me into the office and exchange greetings with Dr. Woolf, but as soon as I was asked to take off my clothes he'd turn to me and say, "Right then, I'll go get the car." Perhaps in part he was embarrassed to see his daughter half naked, but I knew that he did not want to see me suffer.

  He'd jangle the keys at me, just as he did with the dogs, for whom the level of excitement at that familiar sound approached heart attacks. He'd smile and announce, "I'll be right back," adding, "This way you won't have to walk so far when it's over. I'll double-park right outside and come get you."

  I watched his back as he left and felt relief, because his embarrassment and awkwardness caused me as much pain as they did him. There was no blame in those moments, no regrets, no accusations, not even despair. Those things came later, when I learned to scrutinize and judge the past, but at the time his leaving was enabling. Knowing that my father had his own burdens, his own failings, allowed me to continue on through what would otherwise have been unbearable. As an adult, I wonder how he could have left me alone in there, but as a child I knew the answer to this clearly, and knew that as soon as he was out of the room I was, if nothing else, free to respond as I chose. My father's nervous whistling of Bobby Sherman's Julie, Julie, do you love me faded down the hall as Dr. Woolf turned to me with his tourniquet and I turned to him with my unfettered grief.

  My moment of truth with my father was brief, followed mercifully by privacy and a sense of relief. It was harder to maintain a sense of transcendence during the appointments with my mother. She stayed in the room and still, despite my repeated failures, insisted that I not cry. But one summer day—it must have been summer because we were all hot and red-faced—I remember my mother bending beside me. The needle was in my arm, and I was feeling the first hot flushes in my stomach. I could smell her perfume, stronger than usual because of the heat. "Don't cry," she was whispering to me, as if it were a secret we were sharing. Dr. Woolf's voice was resonating over our heads, talking to neither one of us. Perhaps it was something in her voice that day, maybe it was the way everything shone and vibrated with the heat, but for the first time in a long time I lifted my eyes from the still empty basin and looked at her. Her own eyes were filling with water, tears that would never fall but hovered there, only inches from my own.

  Suddenly my perception of the world shifted. I wasn't the only person in the world who suffered. I had always heard other children wailing from behind closed doors all along the corridor outside Dr. Woolf's door, so it would be false to say that I found myself hearing them for the first time or more clearly. What happened was more hallucinatory. My sense of space and self lengthened and transformed, extended itself out the door and down the corridor, while at the same time staying present with me, with my mother, who, to my profound discovery, was suffering not just because of, but also for, me.

  Moments never repeat themselves exactly. Simply because I understood something important and urgent and graceful there on the examination table, looking at my mother's red-rimmed blue eyes, didn't mean that only seconds later I wasn't back in another moment in which I hated myself for crying, for not being strong enough. The beautifully simple revelation I had with my father
in Dr. Woolf's office was followed by his parting, his footfalls dimming down the hall, leaving me alone to contemplate what I had just learned. My mother's very presence forced me to be present, disallowing me to dwell, and the comfort I gained from understanding her pain was both fleeting and insidious. Fleeting because that is the nature of all moments, and insidious because once I had tasted the freedom and transcendence of my epiphany, I wanted only to return to it. I confused that graceful state of mind with the attached solace it brought, so when the next injection came, the next bout of crying, and I wasn't Mt to not suffer I felt I had only myself to blame, felt that I had failed in some unknowable, spiritual way. In my mind I didn't have what it took: I didn't deserve to be comforted.

  At night I dreamed that the children I was baby-sitting for had slipped down to the bottom of the pool we were standing by and had drowned. Try as I might, I could never fill my lungs with enough air to reach the bottom, where they lay struggling, the eerie light lapping over them. Afterward their useless corpses rose to the surface. I had to go to their parents, my empty arms outstretched toward them, my clothes soaking wet, and explain what had happened, how I had tried my best, really I had, but still, it wasn't enough.