Family of Liars(5)

Now that I am grown, I think don’t take no for an answer is a lesson we teach boys who would be better off learning that no means no. I also see that my father wanted me to look like him even more than he wanted me to be pretty. But back then, some part of me felt relieved. Harris was in charge, and I had always been told that he knew best.

I left school in February for what was supposed to be two weeks. The doctors cut open my jawbone and put a wedge inside it. They built the bone up and moved it forward and reattached that part of my skeleton. Then they wired my teeth shut so everything could heal in position.

They gave me codeine, a narcotic pain medicine. Instructions were to take it every four hours at first, then as needed. The pills gave me a strange sensation—not numb, but aware of the pain as if it were happening to someone else.

My jaw. The loss of Rosemary.

Neither one could hurt me, if I took that medicine every four hours.

The liquid diet was not so bad. Tipper brought me frozen yogurt. We no longer had a nanny, but our housekeeper, Luda, was exceptionally kind. She was from Belarus, thin as a pole, with bleached hair and eye makeup my mother found vulgar. Luda made me soft, almost-liquid custards, chocolate and butterscotch. “To get your protein in,” she’d say. “So nourishing.”

The family dogs took to sleeping in my room during the day. McCartney and Albert, both golden retrievers, and Wharton, an Irish setter. Wharton was noble-looking and stupid. I loved her best.

The infection came on suddenly one night. I could feel it arrive, underneath the haze of my medicated sleep. An insistent throbbing, a thrumming red ball of pain in my right jaw.

I woke up and took another codeine.

I made myself a bag of ice. Pressed it to my face.

It was five days before I asked my parents to bring me to the doctor. Harris believed that complaining isn’t the behavior of a strong-minded person. “It adds nothing to the company you keep,” he often said. “?‘Never complain, never explain.’ Benjamin Disraeli said that. Prime minister of England.”

When I mentioned the pain, to Luda and Tipper, I was lighthearted. “Oh, this one side is just giving me a little trouble,” I said. “Maybe we should have it checked out.” I didn’t tell Harris at all.

By the time the doctor saw me, the infection was severe.

Harris told me I was a fool to have ignored an obvious problem. “Take care of things when they need taking care of,” he reminded me. “Don’t wait. Those are words to live by.”

The infection rampaged through my system for eight more weeks. Antibiotics, different antibiotics, a second doctor, a third, a second surgery, painkillers and more painkillers. Ice. Towels. Butterscotch pudding.

Then it was over. My jaw was healed. The wires removed. Regular braces installed. The swelling was down.

My face in the mirror was foreign to me. I was paler than I’d ever been. Thinner than was natural. But mostly, it was my chin. It was now set forward, giving me a strong line along the jaw to my ears. My teeth hit one another at unfamiliar spots, too sensitive for nuts or cucumber, too weak to chew a pork chop, but lined up.

I would turn my profile to the mirror and touch my face, wondering what future this bit of artificial bone had bought me. Would some beautiful boy want to touch me? Would he listen to me? Want to understand me? I hungered to be seen as unique and worthy. I wanted it in that desperate way that someone who has never been kissed wants it— vague but passionate,

muddled with fantasies of kisses I’ve seen in movies, mixed up with stories from my mother about dances and corsages and my father’s multiple proposals.

I longed for love,

and I had a pretty urgent interest in sex, but I also wanted to be seen

and heard

and recognized,

truly, by another person.

That’s where I stood, when I first met Pfeff. I think he saw that in me.



* * *



—

I WAS BACK at school in May and finished out the semester as best I could. I returned to softball, where I had always been a strong hitter and a credit to the family. We won our league championship that season. I stepped back into my group of friends. I worked hard in pre-calc and chemistry, doing extra hours in the library to get up to speed.

But I was not well. I found myself thinking obsessively about stories I read in the newspapers—stories of men dying from AIDS, this new health crisis. And flooding in Brownsville, Texas; families whose homes were drowned. Photographs in the paper: a man in a bed, his weight down to nothing. Protestors on the cobblestone streets of New York City. A family in a rubber raft, with two dogs. A woman waist-deep in water, standing in her kitchen.

I’d think of these images—

people dying, a city drowning— instead of thinking about Rosemary, dying, drowning.

They let me hurt without looking at my own life. If I didn’t think about them, I’d have never stopped thinking about her.

Codeine helped dull these obsessive thoughts. I’d been prescribed it by several different doctors, so there was a seemingly endless supply of little brown bottles in my drawer. The school nurse gave me more, with permission of my parents, when I said my teeth were aching.

At night, I took the pills to sleep. And sometimes, night came early.

Like, before supper.

Like, before lunch.





PART THREE