Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “Werner,” Miss Cornish says, visibly steamed, her skin getting whiter and her freckles standing out. “Jeremy has important things to express about beauty and metamorphosis in three dimensions.”

  “Huey,” Huey says. “For Hewlett. Jeremy Hewlett the Third.”

  “Cheremy Hewlett!” Mr. Rosen says. “Your mother took the raccoons out from my attic.”

  Huey nods as if this were normal. He doesn’t even seem to be embarrassed about his spectacularly embarrassing mother, Bel Air’s bizarro answer to Saint Francis of Assisi, who is constantly coming to pick up Huey in the carpool line with an animal-rescue goat or a couple of ratty chickens and a three-legged pit bull in the backseat of the Bentley.

  “You take maybe five hundred shots. Maybe six hundred. Then you bring me ten. Only the best.” Then he marches out with his turpentine and Miss Cornish’s blue rag.

  Then he comes back.

  I thought it was to give Miss Cornish back her rag, but it isn’t. It’s to look at my bowl that just came out of the kiln. “Beautiful glaze,” he says.

  Lame as it is, this is my best day of school ever until Billy.

  IX

  ANYWAY, ACCORDING TO VIVIAN, IT ISN’T JUST LISA and Anita who are bugging the hell out of her. Huey is phoning every day too, calling the nursing station and demanding to know how I am. He is leaving messages from Huey, Jeremy, and Mr. Hewlett on the off chance that he’ll come up with a name so appealing that somebody will talk to him.

  But Vivian is having none of it. She is spending her days hanging over the side of my bed trying to jog my unjoggable memory and then running off to go shopping to cheer herself up. She is buying me vats of goopy makeup that she waves in front of me, as if it’s going to make me happy. (Except that when you open up the jars, they smell like toxic waste.) She is much too busy stirring the unappetizing mess into a lumpy paste to spend a whole lot of time chatting with Huey.

  But Wendy takes time out from cajoling me to get up and sit at a table and draw and not fall over to tell me about Huey’s many calls. My head feels roughly like a bowling ball in a vise and sitting up just makes it worse; I do not want to discuss how upset and concerned Huey is.

  Except that Wendy thinks he’s my boyfriend.

  “You’re one lucky girl,” she says, trying to get me to squeeze these stupid, squishy rubber balls as hard as I can with both hands, only I can’t. “You have very persistent friends and they all seem to care about you a lot. Especially your nice young man. And your boyfriend’s mother wants to know if she can bring a visiting therapy dog to see you!”

  Huey’s mother and the gimpy pit bull! Which, combined with the failure of my ac tual boyfriend to call, write, text, or show up, makes me cry for what feels like days on end, except with everything including time and the days of the week blurred together so much, it might have been more like forty-five minutes.

  So where is he?

  Where is Billy?

  “That’s it,” Vivian says to the roomful of medical residents who want to hear me try to count backward from a hundred by sevens some more for a laugh, shooing them all away. “Look at her face! She’s completely unhinged. How can it possibly be good for her to talk with the police looking like that?”

  Even flat on my back, hooked up to a bottle of liquid narcotics, and amusing myself by making the electric bed go up and down, I can tell that talking with the police would not be good.

  Until I forget all about it.

  Although the way I look has not left my consciousness once in, basically, forever.

  “You know what, Wendy?” I say. “I think I want to sculpt my head.”

  Wendy is such a paragon of guilelessness and I am such a shameless liar, I’m pretty sure that this is going to work. There is no way you could make an ashtray with sides that stand up out of this mushy clay, let alone sculpt a face. Not to mention, if you actually want to sculpt a face, it’s helpful if your left hand doesn’t have to lie useless in your lap because the steel pin in your ulna seems to send out shock waves when you so much as try to curve your fingers around a dinner roll you’re trying to butter. But I’m pretty sure Wendy can’t tell.

  “That sounds wonderful!” she says.

  I almost feel guilty.

  Almost.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Only, I don’t think I’m supposed to touch my face. I might have to look at it and extrapolate to 3-D. Do you think?”

  “You’re the artist!” she says, just beaming away. “If you think you can do it, then I’m sure you can.”

  “Only, I don’t have a mirror . . . Do you have a mirror?”

  She does.

  This is how I look: like a scary thirty-second community service ad for seat belts that can only run on late-night between infomercials and porn because it is unsuitable for children and adults with weak stomachs. Oh, and the color-blind. Because it’s hard to justify exposing anyone to all that gore and medical handiwork—the stitches, staples, bandages, and butterfly Band-Aids arrayed across my face—without giving them the psychedelic thrill of the color palette. Purple and black and violet around the eyes, the left eye sinking into greens, banana-yellow down the cheekbone, interrupted by a splash of white bandage with a crusty brown trim of blood and unidentified gray ooze. Bluish eyelids rimmed with perfectly dyed eyelashes, my eyelashes, the only recognizable, remaining portion of what used to be my face.

  And I think: How is it that I’m going to go from this to normal?

  And I think: How did you do this to yourself?

  And I think: Even if Billy is sitting around watching porn after a quick run to the Westwood Cannabis Club on Le Conte with Ian Brodie’s dog-eared med club card, even full of Master Kush-laced, semi-legal, double-chocolate pot muffins, it is not an entirely bad thing that he isn’t here to see this.

  Which you would think would make me feel somewhat better about his being somewhere else, the silver lining of the disappearing boyfriend.

  You would think.

  My eyes close and I don’t feel anything.

  This is what happens when you are lying on your back in a hospital gown made of coarse retro-print cotton, when your current life ranges from swirling fog to basically unbearable: Your eyes close and you are still you, only somewhere else.

  My eyes close and there’s Billy, driving too fast around the curves on Mulholland with open bottles of old scotch on the front seat and a couple of girls from Holy Name riding in his open trunk. Then Agnes shows up, fuming, to drag him home from the police station. Not that there is the slightest possibility that anything bad will ever happen to him, or he’ll get kicked out of Winston. It isn’t as if he stuck actual Winston girls into his trunk.

  But as it turns out, when Billy says, “Let’s violate some probation,” every time he lights up, he actually means it.

  There we are sitting on Billy’s bed, throwing darts at his conditions of probation. Billy keeps the thirty-two conditions of his probation—Maintain a 3.0 average; Do not exit domicile between the hours of six p.m. and six a.m. without permission of parent or guardian; Do not consume controlled substances or alcoholic beverages of any kind; Do not cavort with known underage users of said substances—on the bulletin board over his desk. We are sitting on the bed trying to hit his favorite ones.

  We are sitting on the bed and he is nuzzling the back of my neck.

  “Follow the light with your eyes,” Ponytail Doctor says, glancing down at her clipboard, reviewing my daily mental state as ascertained by one of her eager little intern helpers, dropping Wendy’s mirror into her giant pocket and leaning in toward me in the mistaken belief that we have anything, including human-looking heads, in common.

  She tilts her head to consider my face.

  “The swelling will come down,” she says, staring down at the bandages some white-coated flunky plucked off, depositing them, soaked in bodily fluids and livid orange antiseptic, on a stainless steel tray so I could admire them.

  “I saw it,” I say. “You know I�
��m screwed.”

  “This is why I didn’t want you to see it when it’s still like this,” she says. “This is only temporary. Look—”

  “I did.”

  Wendy is bringing up the rear and I’m pretty damn sure she won’t be getting her mirror back any time soon. “You’re going to be just as smart and beautiful as before!” she says with a cheerleading fervor that leaves Ponytail’s usual baseless enthusiasm in the dust.

  Ponytail looks as if she wants to stuff the entire playology supply of mushy modeling clay down Wendy’s throat.

  “It’s hard to see yourself like this,” she says. “Of course it is. But it’s going to be all right. It might not seem that way right now but—”

  But what? You have to wonder what Ponytail could even come up with that would make this even vaguely all right, now or ever.

  But she doesn’t have to.

  “You go to Winston School!” Wendy says. “You’re on Student Council! The world is your oyster.” She avoids Ponytail’s eyes. “Remember that.”

  Winston School is hard to forget, and even if you could forget it, no one else will let you. But the Student Council part is a memory I was just as happy living without. And oysters, which I have only ever eaten with Billy at restaurants he finds and drives me to and orders for me and I slurp down with a smile on my face, are pure slime.

  I close my eyes and wait until their voices recede into the whirring and annoying background.

  I close my eyes and keep them shut until they go away.

  And then, even before I look up, even with the hospital banging and the disembodied voices in the corridor, the humming and clicking of the equipment I’m tethered to, I can hear John breathing. He is standing there staring at me, braced against the green wall, with tears running down his face and disappearing into the tiny dark houndstooth of his shirt.

  Vivian hisses, “John-o, get a grip. Shhhhhh! You’re scaring her.”

  But he is completely silent, stoned and still, and you can tell that Vivian is who he’s scaring the shit out of. Because a catatonic drunk staring straight up from a reclining leather chair is a lot easier to deal with than a sloppy, barely standing one with watering cans for eyes.

  Not to mention, a mother who is pissed off that you did what you did but is determined to remain unnaturally normal is a lot easier to deal with than a father who acts like your screwed-up life is his own personal Greek tragedy.

  I close my eyes and I go back to watching Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s. Back to watching the scene with Billy and me throwing darts from his bed to the wall. Feeling his phantom fingers touch my cheek back when it didn’t hurt to touch my face, back when my face didn’t have scabs and ridges where the stitches used to be.

  But not for long.

  X

  BECAUSE: THE MINUTE THE BUTTERFLY BANDAGES are off and my face is semi-unveiled, Vivian is even more obsessed with making me look semi-normal.

  She pulls out the bags of camouflage supplies and we gaze at all that product.

  “My poor little prizefighter,” she says, sitting on the side of my bed with a crate of tiny little sea sponges, a species I am probably personally responsible for pushing over the brink of extinction by my inordinate use of its posthumous services. She pulls out a jar of sewer-scented Brazilian cover-up with the consistency of mud. Not the makeup version of pouffy masque-mud either—actual mud.

  “Look at this,” she says, swirling a sponge in the monochromatic glop. “This is such a nice color.”

  “For that semi-alive look,” I say.

  Vivian frowns with the lower half of her face, careful not to crease the skin around the eyes. Apparently I was unconscious long enough for her to develop a meaningful relationship with the makeup genius at the Lancôme counter at Neiman Marcus. His idea of how to reduce the appearance of swelling involves brushing three shades of blush onto my cheeks, and then, given the inevitable failure of this clever technique to turn a battered pumpkin into Heidi Klum, distracting people with more eye makeup than they’ve ever seen on one person.

  Vivian tries to get me to let her apply eye liner, but it feels as if she is slicing off my eyelid with a meat cleaver.

  “It kills me to see you like this,” she says, mostly to herself. “It kills me to be doing this. You were so beautiful. You were. But you have to stay positive. I’m really making inroads here.”

  “Can Lisa and Anita maybe come over?” I say. “Now that this is getting covered up?” In a burst of baseless positivity, I am vaguely optimistic about how I’m going to look smeared with beige mud and all that multicolored blush.

  But Vivian is so busy trying to figure out the finer points of making purple, green, and yellow skin look normal that she’s not exactly taking in what I’m saying.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, surveying the wreckage with a sour look. “They can try all they want, but they have to get past me. You don’t have to see anyone looking like this.”

  Which, of course, is the story of my life: Vivian making decisions about how to organize my life based on how I look.

  Setting in motion my After.

  This is how my After starts: It is June. It is the summer before junior year. It is last summer, not even one whole year ago, which in the warp of hospital time seems like it happened in some other century, and Vivian decides it would be a good idea if I could look like someone else.

  This is not as far into the realm of the truly bizarre as it sounds, given that my actual appearance, not to mention my actual life, is so not in Vivian and John’s satisfactory column. And she can pretty much tell that no matter how much she tells me to stand up straight, brush my hair, and slather on zit cream, it’s not going to make a dent in my sub-regularity.

  “A makeover?” Lisa says. “Like, you get a new hairdo and a personal shopper? How can you spend a whole summer doing that?”

  “You should at least do something you can put down on a college application. You can’t have a blank space the summer before junior year,” Anita says, not because she’s a complete pain, but because if she doesn’t get into someplace a lot better than UCLA, her parents are going to make her go to UCLA and live at home and let them check her outfits every morning.

  “It’s not like you have to cure cancer or anything,” Lisa says. “Not that you couldn’t.”

  Anita is more realistic. “How many mani-pedis can you get in one summer before you want to jump off a bridge?” she says. And then she says, “Oh no! You’re not getting implants, are you? Do you want me to find you some articles about how unhealthy that is at our age? You can’t even tell how big your boobs are going to get for years.”

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with them now,” Lisa says.

  “Of course not,” Anita says. “That’s not the point. The point is that having plastic surgery before junior year is insane.”

  “Not that you’re insane,” Lisa says.

  “At least give yourself two years to think about it,” Anita says. “At least if you do it between high school and college, everyone won’t know.”

  Vivian probably would have had me redone surgically if she hadn’t blown all those bucks on my vast collection of bazillion dollar T-shirts I didn’t exactly fill out. Seriously. For a couple of months, I was the only kid in the Three B’s who wasn’t anorexic whose mother wanted her to pack on the carbs on the off chance that all those extra calories would somehow migrate to my chest—until it became obvious it wasn’t going to work and she wanted me to go back to subsisting on carrot sticks and cartons of Trader Joe’s soy milk.

  Look:

  Wave while other people fly off to camp or their family’s cute little cottage or castle or villa or whatever on Majorca for summer vacation.

  Watch while I go off to Yuko System of Beverly Hills and get seven hundred dollars’ worth of chemically straightened hair. With extensions. And shimmering blond highlights with color-coordinated low lights. It takes all day.

 
Then someone named Rolf, who is nevertheless Japanese and wearing extremely tight leather pants, teaches me how girls who have forty-five minutes to blow-dry their bangs, blow-dry their bangs.

  And while we’re at it, why not drag me someplace to get my eyelashes dyed in a process that creates so much by way of stinging fumes that I am seriously worried I’m going to be a gorgeous blind girl?

  Soon a color consultant with an actual office and a receptionist and everything, as if picking out colors were an actual profession, gets all excited about the perfect color of my now slightly fried eyelashes.

  My entire wardrobe, on the other hand, has to go. All this time, I have been recklessly dressing without regard to my season. All those spring T-shirts and summer sweats when I was really an autumn. No wonder I looked like crap. Only now I have to wear a bunch of new stuff that is slightly orange.

  “Copper!” the color consultant says.

  Oh.

  And I can’t get just any old new slightly orange stuff that I happen to like. No, I have to get a personal style. And I have to get one quick before they do my makeup so my face won’t get done in some clashing style that is stylistically hostile to the personally stylish, autumnal skirts I am about to buy to show off my improved stylish legs.

  The style consultant, after foisting off a style on me that she keeps describing to Vivian as “kicky,” is all agog over the mother-daughter aspect of turning me into a person my mom can stand to look at. This gives her the overwhelming urge to find Vivian her own kicky yet sophisticated style so we can match. But Vivian is not about to chuck all of her clothes, even if it would enhance my personal stylishness to have a matching mother.

  “No,” Vivian says in this pseudo-motherly, pseudo-wisewoman, totally fake voice. “I’ve had my turn and now it’s Gabby’s turn.”

  “Your maman is magnifique!” the color lady says in an accent I imagine her practicing for hours on end while standing in front of the mirror in her color-coordinated high-rise condo on Wilshire Boulevard. “What a rite de passage for you, little one.”