CW: self harm.
To save face, turn away from the sun. Turn away from the spatter of cold rain against the cheek, away from the hard light of the moon at its roundest, away from the snow-flecked wind, away from the barky scratch at the fork of an oak.
Away with all surprise. The surprise of a sunrise come too soon, the aroma of auntie’s home cooked stew when you tumble through her front door, the brush of rose petals at your cousin’s modest wedding.
To save face, run the razor along your hairline, oh so carefully, do not mar the skin. Put the face inside a velvet box with a small gold coin, a coin with its own saved face, embossed and soft and gold, only solid gold.
Put the face inside a safe, and then another safe to be sure. Scrawl down the combinations and eat the paper that holds them: insert the scrap through your lipless mouth, your gated teeth, and swallow it down fast.
Stack your boxed face on top of your mother’s velvet boxed face, your father’s, their mothers’ and fathers’—fifteen boxes deep. Green, red, black. Shade the boxes from the harsh overhead light so the velvet never fades and you cannot make out the colors.
Walk into your living room. Your family awaits. The red muscles and tendons of your faceless mother pull and strain with approval, revealing her teeth. Your father’s do the same, and their mothers’ and fathers’.
A relief to finally look like your parents, to be identifiable as theirs. Your fleshy-faced husband stares, but ultimately says nothing. He will remove the bottom half of his own face soon enough, but will insist on keeping the skin over his eyes.
• • • •
Walk into your daughter’s room, the walls a perfect gray, every toy on the shelves the perfect gray, the shaggy carpet the same perfect gray, the kick-boards and doorframe stained gray.
It is made imperfect by neon green stuffed frogs and bears tipped onto the floor. By your daughter’s tiny teeth marks in the rail of her crib, her attempt at perforating the wood into perfect semicircles. Her perfect cheeks have new scratch marks every morning, no matter how short you cut her nails, no matter how tight the mitten elastics pinch the rolls of her wrists.
The light from the window shines right into your eyes, your lidless eyes, and you cannot blink it out. Move to the right, your head at a strange angle, try to look natural. Pull your tendons into a smile, as you’ve seen your mother do. Peel your daughter’s fingernails from her cheeks, her jaw from the soft pine of the crib rail.
She flinches. She doesn’t recognize you. She screams and starts to cry, bites the crib as hard as she can.
You say, cooing, Don’t cry. And then when she keeps crying, Don’t cry, don’t you dare cry!
She hides her own face from you, trembles under a blanket, crying, Mama Mama Mama.
• • • •
Your boss is afraid of your new faceless face. He mounts a campaign to get you fired. You pit his boss against his boss’ boss. They schedule competing meetings and salt your calendar in passive-aggressive invites, escalate reply-all chains, and then your boss is fired.
His boss, now your boss, is amenable to your naked muscular affect, your darting dry stare, and the eyedrops you drop every hour on the hour. He is overly cordial, the only sign he is unnerved.
Good. You want them all to remain unnerved. Your career depends on it.
You rise through the ranks and fire your new boss when you become his boss. You work and work and work, taking calls with Asia at eleven p.m. and Europe at five a.m.. The skin below your neck erupts in oozing pink rashes, all across your body. You spread oily cream on them, steroids next. You wear turtleneck sweaters and expensive golden rings to distract from the pustules. The doctors prescribe new creams and tell you to go home.
Your face is already skinless. No one cares what story your body is telling.
Your closet shelves fill with Armani, Gucci, Chanel. You buy numerous shoes and store them in their shiny black boxes, a single thumb or index fingerprint always marring their perfect surfaces.
Your girl grows taller. She grows a bad temper. When she misbehaves and whines loudly at a mall, you slap her cheek, just hard enough it grows pink, not hard enough to bruise.
In a year, she grows six inches and slaps you in return, suddenly, out of nowhere, when you are sorting the mail by the front door. Her mistake. There is no skin to grow pink.
You tell her so and she stomps your foot instead, hard, with all her weight, breaking one of your metatarsals.
You take away her computer, her phone. She threatens to throw your silk dresses and scarves out the window, your handbags and kitten heels, her father’s crisp suits and delicately patterned pocket squares. You imagine them blowing down the street, expensive and awkward tumbleweeds, cavorting as if animated until a wise neighbor captures them in nets, has them dry cleaned, hangs them in their own private closet.
You touch your corded cheeks, strum your long fingernails nervously over your naked teeth like a washboard. You install three more doors to your closet to put more gates between your safes and your angry daughter, between your vulnerable face and hers.
• • • •
When she is fifteen, you argue. She insists on wearing pajama pants to school like an urchin and doesn’t wear concealer. Her classmates’ mothers and fathers surely whisper about your inability to control her, to keep her clean and presentable.
You tell her they’re whispering about her. You tell her she makes you look bad. Try harder.
Right there at the dinner table, while your husband looks on, she shoves her clammy girlish hand down your throat. She nearly chokes you, stretches the cartilaged tube of your esophagus, spiders her fingers through the labyrinth of your stomach, finds a balled up wet scrap of paper in an off-cast chamber, the note still marked with old ink. While you kneel and cough, she runs to your bedroom, locks the four closet doors behind her.
You stare up at the ceiling, following the sound of her thumping footsteps. Rarely used dials click to life. A clinical alignment of tumblers follows, and then a confident latch as steel doors are flung open.
You run upstairs. You try to unlock the closet doors with chicken bones and branches, with the expensive clasps of Prada bags and the threads of Hermès scarves. You pound the last door with your fists, hammer it with Jimmy Choo stiletto heels, throw pearls hard enough to shatter against the dark hard wood.
When you open the last door, your daughter hangs half out the single square window, a leg and arm already out. Your heart jumps in anticipation of seeing her dangling like that.
Put the face back on, she says, inching farther out, a threat.
The face! What a vendetta! She’s been harboring it for years.
Get inside or else, you say.
She examines what’s behind you. A wreckage of torn hand-tooled leather, shattered black pearls, ripped cord and broken buckles.
You prepare to see her go limp, to give up, to slump out the square frame. You prepare to buy her a glossy coffin and cry, to touch her baby pictures until they are worn and lost to time, to fold the cheap clothes she insists on buying into mothballed boxes and turn the room into an altar.
You have no face to read, yet she knows what you are thinking. Instead of flinging herself away, she grabs the velvet boxes by the armful and throws them into a Gucci bag. She escapes out the window with all fifteen faces.
• • • •
You leave the safe open, empty, a hungry black mouth in your closet. There’s nothing to protect anymore.
In the weeks that follow, you peruse Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys, slum it at Nordstrom to pass the time. The flyers appear. Photocopies of your mother’s face flattened against glass, your father’s, your husband’s mother’s, his father’s. Written below each face is a short epitaph, an accusation, in black Sharpie that’s still fresh enough to smell:
He beat all six children with a military belt.
She stole her daughter’s social security number to commit credit fraud.
He locked his son in the basement for two days when he flunked his tests.
She drank away the family fortune.
He embezzled from the state.
You tear down the flyers and look at the striated lines of Xerox ink in your clenched fist. None of them are about you. So she isn’t yet serious.
Your family complains at every visit, hurtling into your kitchen with their own accusations. You should have taken a knife to her cheek early, locked her in the basement, not let her out on weekends, warned her off boys. None of them deny what she writes. How can they?
You tell them, Go away. They don’t even have your name on them. No one will care about the graffitied manifestos of a teenage girl.
• • • •
Six years later, the chest pains grip you at your desk, your mouth full of chicken salad. Your right arm goes numb, and you spit out your lunch. Your assistant calls an ambulance and you are taken to the emergency room.
A minor heart attack, too much stress and not enough exercise.
But I’m skinny, you say.
The doctors don’t comment on your faceless face, but they sigh and type quickly into their computer, hiding the monitor from you so you cannot read their notes. They tell you they’ll return shortly, and then change shifts. You wait endlessly, and have to tell each new doctor why you don’t need to be there.
Your husband calls you back finally, and tells you he has called the daughter. She is taking a train in to see you. He says he told her not to, that the visit would strain your nerves, and what was the point, it’s not like you are dying.
The daughter arrives and you barely recognize her. She has become fat, a size six or eight. Her visitor’s badge displays a childish nickname you didn’t give her, so you call her by the name you did.
She tenses and grits her teeth, no pine crib bar to bite.
A three-inch scar runs along her ear, a halted seam. She might be beautiful without it now that she doesn’t have pimples, but only if she lost the weight.
This is who you raised. A hungry coward who can’t finish the job.
Pick beauty or pick honor, this in-between state is spineless, you say.
She doesn’t say anything, just pulls a green velvet box from her dirty messenger bag. The hinges creak as she opens it. Your face, the eyebrow hairs still pinioning the skin, the lips still moist and wrinkled with your ideal shade of red.
Didn’t want to make ugly posters, like you did for all the rest? you ask.
You won’t live forever, she says. Is this how you want to spend your life? Don’t you miss the sting of a sunburn, the cold of the rain? Don’t you miss the surprise of a sunrise come too soon, the aroma of auntie’s home-cooked stew?
Do you think you are poetic? you ask.
She shuts the box and tosses it at the foot of your bed. She takes a photo and turns the phone to face you. You are alone in the frame, your expression a permanent grin, ghastly over the white of your bleached hospital gown.
• • • •
The flyers about you appear the day after you are discharged.
You walk to the train, intent on going straight back to the office, and see the pink copy paper stapled crookedly to telephone poles, stark on the tiny roofed bulletin boards your quaint little town is partial to.
Instead of scanned images of your off-cast face, they are old photos when you still wore it. Smiling in front of a food stall, or gathered at a restaurant surrounded by your faceless family. Getting married to your husband in a cheap polyester dress on a winter evening, on the shortest day of the year. Perched in profile, intent on some schoolwork, a pencil hovering over the notebook you agonize over.
Below each picture, in small cursive letters, only: I wish I knew how to love her. I wish she knew how to love me.
You walk back to your car and get in. You turn off the radio, cutting off the steam of classical music mid-cello.
You pull the velvet box out of your Birkin bag and open it.
The face is flat and lifeless inside, the skin still warm.
You hold the face up like a sheet mask. It feels like thin rubber, restrictive and unfamiliar. How did you ever breathe in this, eat, or focus on anything else?
You think of the wrinkles that come with it, the tired eyes, the sagging cheeks you’ve worked so diligently to avoid, the wagging wattle.
You touch the skin to your right cheek experimentally. It instantly begins to adhere to your dried out tendons, pulling out of your hands like it’s being zipped up.
It burns worse than anything you’ve ever known.
The morning sun rises just so, enough to shoot hot through your windshield. You move your head to the right on instinct, to keep the light out of your eyes, but you also blink. The relief, the flitting dark, the involuntary tears that finally hydrate your waterless eyes.
You close them completely, to keep the light out.
