Autobiography Of A Face

Once Lucy has regrown “a full three or four inches of hair” (140), her friend tells her that she no longer needs to wear her sailor’s hat. She goes “bareheaded for the first time in years” (140), attends school without her hat, and is surprised that no one calls her “Baldy” (140). However, she still suffers “relentless daily attacks of teasing in the hallways” (141), especially from groups of boys, and regularly notices girls and even adults staring at her.

Lucy begins receiving reconstructive dental work on her chemotherapy-damaged teeth. She becomes briefly addicted to codeine, enjoying “the pleasant, sleepy feeling” and the sense of being “safe and secure” (142). Her mother stops her taking them when she catches her taking “no less than six times the prescribed number of pills” (142). Lucy also enjoys the caring treatment she gets from nurses after her operations, “relish[ing] the aura of attention” and the feeling that she is “special” (144).

The teasing at school becomes “harder to take” and Lucy can feel herself “changing, becoming more fearful” (145). However, she believes this treatment as inevitable because she is “ugly, so people [are] going to make fun of [her],” and even believes that she is “so ugly” that it is “their right to do so” (145).

During a dental operation, two of Lucy’s lower front teeth are “partially knocked out, leaving two very ugly stumps” (146) and her mother says that she does not have to go to school the next day if she does “not feel very good [because of] the way your teeth look” (146). Lucy takes this “as a barbed verification of […] the indisputable truth” that she is “too ugly to go to school” (147).

After talking to friends about boys, Lucy concludes that she will “never have a boyfriend, that no one [will] ever be interested in [her] in that way” (150). Instead, she decides to develop an “understanding of the real beauty that exist[s] in the world” (150) that has “nothing to do with the ephemeral world of boys” (151). She still occasionally thinks that it would be better to have a “normal” face but then “harshly reprimand[s]” herself for “any stirrings of desire” (151).

When doctors begin talking about reconstructive surgery for Lucy’s face, she is horrified that the process will take ten years of operations and procedures that leave the patients looking “like freaks” (155) for weeks or months at a time. However, another doctor suggests that a new procedure may be far quicker and may lead to “a near-normal jaw line” (156). Lucy begins to cautiously hope that her face is “going to be ‘fixed’” (157) and that if people think she is “beautiful […] they might even love [her]” (157).

When Lucy begins working at the riding stable, horses becomes her “one real source of relief” (152) because they accept her regardless of her appearance. When a girl from the stable moves to another state, she gives Lucy her horse, Sure Swinger. Each day “after school, and all day during the summer,” Lucy spends her time with Sure Swinger, getting to know “his whole being […] at least as well as my own” and “conducting nothing less than a romantic relationship” (158) with him.

Lucy begins ninth grade and starts reading poetry in English class. When she reads Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” she discovers something “beautiful and important” and learns that “mystery was not just a cause but also a natural result of beauty” (160). She also realizes that she has grown apart from her own father and makes a point of greeting him every day when he returns home from work.

After four months, Sure Swinger gets an infection in his hoof and dies suddenly. Lucy is filled with a terrible “feeling of shame” (162) and remains “stricken over Swinger’s death for several months” (163). Eventually, she recovers from her grief and becomes “excited by the prospect of getting another horse, promised by my parents” (163).

However, this is delayed when Lucy’s father is taken into hospital with stomach pains. He remains in hospital as the “weeks [turn] into months” (164). Her family is “not the sort to openly discuss things,” relying instead on “forced optimism” (164), but Lucy is certain that he is going to die in hospital. She looks around her father’s room, trying to find “something that would explain [her] father’s life to [her]” (165), but cannot find it.

Although she hears that he is becoming increasingly paranoid and reliving his time as “a prisoner of war during the Second World War […] as alone as he had been the first time” (166), Lucy only visits her father once. Eventually, the family receive a call saying that he has died. Lucy feels great sorrow but also “a sense of relief” (167) that it is over at last. Unable to process their feelings properly, Lucy and her sister find themselves “laughing hysterically” (167).

Later, Lucy has her first skin graft operation, this time on an adult plastic surgery ward. Afterwards, her face is incredibly swollen with “a large strip of foreign skin, much paler than [her] facial skin, running along the lower half of [her] new jaw line […] [s]urrounded by dozens of minute stitches” (171). She begins to wonder if “the operation had been a horrible mistake” (171). When doctors tell her it looks good, she concludes that what she thinks “would look good must be an impossible dream” and feels “stupid for having had any expectations of hopes at all” (175).