In front of the mirror, I touch my forearm and my ribs that jut out like bulbous rock formations. My left arm, shoulder, and chest are smaller than my right. The bones and muscles are misshapen or missing altogether, and an implant fills in for my left breast that never grew. I have no feeling in the skin where I am touching, so there’s the peculiar sensation that I am touching someone else’s body and not my own.
I’m 14, 23, 31. Still, getting out of the shower, I hustle into a robe or T-shirt, turning away from the mirror. It is a trick I developed as a girl: if I disregard my body’s differences, maybe others will too. When I do dare to look, I’m struck by my body’s oddity as if discovering it anew each time: the centipede-like scar on my forearm, the thin skin rippling over my implant like the silken surface of water, the bones in my shoulder that rub together like a sack full of stones. The mirror provides one way to glimpse how others see me, to learn how to see myself. When I look for too long, panic wells in my chest.
I don’t ever talk about my body, not even to my sister or close friends. I can’t. I would lose my balance, my structural integrity. Instead, for years now, I have been trying to write about it. As Richard Rodriquez wrote: “There are things that are so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers” (200). Sitting at my desk, I cross my arms to grasp opposite elbows. I hunch over the keyboard. I long to excise the words. To get them to lie down legibly on the page. To stand in for me when I cannot.
Putting words to the experiences my body holds, the back braces and wrist splints, the stitches and scars, the filling of the absence in my chest—the props that grant me passage to the world—feels impossible. Sometimes it feels like every other second I have to call my attention back to the page. I grow impatient with myself. Can’t you just say it? Instead I look down at my hands. In the yoga I practice and teach, we say the body speaks by way of sensation. My hands tense up. My breath is shallow inside my ribs. My jaw clenches. The tiny muscles around my eyes feel strained. Instead of pushing it away, I am learning to experience my avoidance, to see what it has to teach me. What is this resistance protecting me from feeling? When did I learn that my body is something I have to hide, even from myself? I know I won’t be able to see myself clearly if I keep refusing to look.
When I feel stuck, I make lists in my notebook, arranging the parts of my body in different orders as if there is a code to decipher, a language running underneath the language I am using. Arm, spine, breast, skin, voice. I scar the pages so deeply the swerves of my pen can be felt through the underside of the paper. It feels as if I’m carving these words from bone.
ARM
As a child, shame has no place in my body. I never understand myself as deformed or disfigured. There is no language to demark me as other. I simply know my differences are part of me. When I am born, my left arm is tucked into my ribs like a wing. My brother, my sister, and I—triplets born ten weeks early—are the size of our parents’ palms. One of our uncles, a tall, husky man, passes out when he sees us in the neonatal ICU, purple-skinned and delicate as baby birds. For a few days inside incubators, we can only be touched with gloves. Doctors confer about my condition in particular. They examine the withered left side of my torso but can’t explain or predict the limits of my ability to move or what shape my body will take as I grow. After two months in the hospital, the nurses run out of places to insert IVs. My right wrist, the top of my hand, and ankles are still stippled with scars.
In the hospital, visual examination does not plumb deep enough to explore the puzzle my body presents. X-rays are my first form of portraiture, images of my bones bright against a background of light. I am laid down on the paper runner of the X-ray table. My beloved grandfather cradles my tiny body with his rough, iron-worker hands to hold me still. From birth to school-age, doctors regularly request images of the bones in my hand, wrist, and elbow. The investigations center on the bones in my left hand and arm. My wrist and thumb curl inward, and my elbow mysteriously refuses to straighten. I can’t close my fingers into a fist.
How much will I be able to use my arm? Are my differences pointing to deeper concerns that can’t be seen? Neurological damage? Cerebral palsy? My body withholds answers, slowly unspooling them as I grow.
• •
Trips to hospitals in Manhattan are ritual throughout my childhood. My mother drops my brother and sister off with our grandmother before we head to the city from our home in Staten Island. As we drive, my mother teaches me songs, letters, and numbers. Later, I memorize lyrics, multiplication tables. Our yellow Dodge Caravan careens through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which I have dubbed the “Magic Tunnel” because the lights inside the tunnel cast everything in dusky orange. When we emerge from under the ground under the water and weave into traffic on the FDR Expressway that flanks the East River, I feel as though a little magic has brushed off on me.
“Stay still now,” the X-ray technician coos, her voice melodic, not realizing how practiced I am at this. I take pride in being obedient and calm. My mother dresses me in what we call X-ray clothes—clothes that have no metal accoutrements—so that I won’t have to change into a hospital gown before the X-ray. The X-ray technician asks: “When I go behind the glass wall, can you breathe in for me? And hold it for just a second until I ask you to let it out?”
There is safety in remaining still, even comfort. The radiology wing of the Hospital for Special Surgery overlooks the river, and I spend many hours waiting there with my mother, father, and grandfather as the films are developed. I am enthralled by how the water holds the boats and barges, its incessant movement below the glinting, sharp-edged buildings. It’s as if the water moves for me.
Countless X-rays account for the monitoring of my growth. Routinely my body is studied, measured. The interpretation of the images is an attempt to predict the future, to chart a more expansive course for me than my body on its own would grant. My parents present me for examination again and again. Can we make her life as wide and buoyant as possible? They do everything in their power to make it so.
Mostly I remember no single hospital visit or even instance, rather the memories remain blurred across years, tethering my early years together. This forms a kind of core knowledge in my body. Even when I press on the memories or stories that have been told to me, even when I try to drag them in dark ink across the page, I uncover only light. It’s as if my parents expunged fear from the record my body kept, held it inside their own bodies instead. My understanding of this time is as smooth and bright as the surface of the river. I am carried, cared for, not yet touched by our culture’s casting of my body as other, as divergent. It is less like memory and more like myth.
No conclusive medical explanations are uncovered. Any conjectured diagnosis is not provable and does not provide a pathway of treatment for the constellation of my differences. Instead, each of my body’s differences is treated separately, with its own orbit of medical interventions across time.
SKIN
I’m five when the cast comes off. I count the stitches. There are fourteen of them, tiny wires poking out of my arm. Fourteen is double my favorite number, seven. The incision makes a sloping backward S along my forearm. I’ve worn various types of wrist splints since I was just days old, but this is my first cast, the first time my arm is held still for weeks. Tendon transfer surgery—the rerouting of a tendon from one side of my wrist to the other—enables me to lift my wrist enough to grasp for things, to hold a small ball in my hand.
When I return to school after surgery, my kindergarten teacher brings me up to the front of the room to explain to the class why my arm is in a cast and sling. “Laura is a triplet,” she says. “When she was growing inside her mommy’s belly, it got too cramped in there. She had to have surgery to help her use her arm better.” This plain explanation helps. I don’t remember ever being teased or ridiculed. My asymmetry becomes passable. My classmates gather around me with markers to sign my cast.
At the doctor’s office, the cast lay on the examining table beside me. My mother has protected it from water, wrapped it in Saran wrap when she gave me baths. Now, severed, the cast lies there, a stinking empty husk. My arm emerges pale and rubbery as a lifeless fish. I can wiggle it. I can raise my wrist. I touch the field of fine hair above my elbow. The skin on my upper arm feels rough as the plaster it’s been released from. This does not bother me. Lacking nerve endings, most of the skin on my arm is numb anyway.
Weeks pass. Stitches removed, the incision becomes a raised scar. My mother splits open tiny golden capsules and rubs vitamin E over it. “This will make your scar disappear,” she assures me. Although I don’t tell her so, I don’t want the scar to disappear. It fascinates me—the scar as evidence that my body experienced something when I was not awake. It makes me wonder what else my skin holds. Each day I examine my arm, carefully keeping count of the stitch marks. I want the experiences of my skin to remain visible. I want to be marked, special. Over time I watch the scar fade, but still, to my satisfaction, faint markings of the fourteen stitches remain. The scar becomes part of me.
VOICE
Even inside the structures of casts and splints, I find ways to move. I learn to crawl by scuttling across the living room floor on my butt. In physical therapy I plunge my fingers into bright-blue putty to remove a bead or tiny plastic monkey. And from the time I can speak, I sing. There is a home video of me at two, sitting in a plastic laundry basket, singing and rocking back and forth. As I grow older, I stand in the middle of our kitchen and sing for hours. Feet planted, I twist side to side from my waist, my arms swinging. My great-grandmother encourages me by teaching me songs and singing with me.
In preschool, I am chosen to sing “The First Noel” at the school Christmas concert. Another fuzzy, home video shows me standing with proud presence at the front of my class. My voice garners me praise. The resonance in my chest and throat calms me. I sing the night before surgery. I sing after I get my tonsils out even when I am told to rest my voice.
My body’s ability to transform something as ordinary as air into song is a powerful amulet. It wards off the time when I will look in the mirror and understand my body differently. It is a form of protection my body offers me. I’m sure there are moments when I realize my differences from other kids, but these are not the moments that stay with me.
SPINE
In the hot yoga room, I stand in front of the mirror. My wrist bows toward my hip, my hand dangling awkwardly. Reflexively I tug at my sports bra, evening out the pads to make sure my breasts appear as symmetrical as possible. I lean a bit more weight onto my right foot to straighten my spine.
This hot practice includes bright lights, no music, a mirror you are made to face. It is always the same twenty-six poses, some of which are held for a full minute. Keep your eyes on your eyes, the teacher instructs. As the practice builds, I assume every pose with as much precision as I can but notice my tendency to check out, to let my consciousness drift away from the pressure of the heat, the burn in my muscles. In a 110-degree room, somehow I don’t feel hot. As a girl, I did this during uncomfortable or painful medical procedures: when trapped inside the hot mold of plaster used to make my back braces, enduring the pain of my skin having been torn from my ribs. I went elsewhere, and memories could not take root. But my body remembers.
I started practicing yoga a few years ago without clearly knowing why except an unconscious draw to it. Vinyasa flow-style gave me a foundation first, and more recently, I’ve started this intense, regimented, hot practice, which has been paradoxically freeing. Both practices are containers for exploration: opportunities to notice the sensations underneath my skin and my body’s way of occupying and moving through space. In the hot room with soft, compassionate focus I return to my image again and again, even when the unevenness of my chest or ribs causes me to grimace. Inside, the words form: Inhale, I am. Exhale, right here. The instinct to hide my body, even from myself, is ingrained, feral. It is sometimes hard to remember that this behavior is learned. That the world taught me my body was something to hide. And that this hiding is a structure I can practice leaving.
• •
As I approach school-age, the growth of my spine is increasingly monitored. Now I stand alone for X-rays, my hips and shoulders draped with heavy, protective shields. When I am five, in addition to the X-rays, my doctor sends me for an MRI to get a deeper picture of my spine. In preparation, my mother sits me in front of the microwave, sets the timer for ten minutes, and has me practice staying still once more. My reflection is warped in the glossy-black door of the microwave as I watch the blue-green numbers slowly countdown to when I am to be released from my pose. After the MRI, I will be diagnosed with scoliosis and have to wear a back brace twenty-three hours a day to keep my spine from a slow-motion collapse. The day of the procedure, I am made to swallow thick, purple liquid, a magic potion that makes me drowsy. My limbs grow loose, and my father carries me into the MRI machine.
For years I’ve had a printout of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column pinned above my desk. In the painting, Frida is wearing a back brace, as I did when I was younger. Three straps cross her stomach, and one arcs across her breastbone. Her breasts are bare. Her torso is sliced open from chin down, a crumbling ivory roman column replacing her spine. Her gaze is exacting, daring the viewer to look back at her. In portrait painting, a mirror can be a tool for the artist to see the painting anew after working on it for long hours. The mirror confers fresh eyes. Self-portraits are also a way to re-envision, to examine, to portray yourself. Frida famously said she didn’t paint surrealism; she painted her own reality. Two-thirds of her work are self-portraits.
When I look at this painting, I can’t help but think of my own back braces, although the most violence I endured was confinement and skin rubbed raw. I have always been fascinated by Frida’s life and work, her fierceness in the face of opposition, of trauma. By the fact that even she, an outspoken artist and activist, cloaked her right leg, shrunken by polio, underneath long, bright skirts.
An Internet search instantly reveals what are purported to be Frida’s X-rays. The speed at which I am able to retrieve them feels like a violation of privacy, as if even her bones, long after her death, are not her own. I also find an article written by two radiologists about Frida’s work: “Like radiographs, paintings require a form of interpretation, and Frida Kahlo’s paintings challenge and develop our interpretive powers” (303). Perhaps my desire to portray myself in words is less about making my body legible and more about grasping the power of interpretation.
ARM
In middle school, a friend and I are playing volleyball in my family’s backyard pool when she says, “I feel bad for you.” I’d just dramatically missed her volley, flailing sideways into the water with a splash. “It must be difficult for you not to be able to use your arm.” This is the first time I can remember a friend commenting on my body’s differences, reflecting my own image back at me. Confusion washes over me, a kind of vertigo. There is genuine empathy in her voice, and this is what puzzles me most. I don’t feel limited. I can do nearly everything my friends can do save blow dry my own hair. Haven’t I been playing volleyball with her hit for hit? It is just the awkward dangling of my left arm that she recognizes?
In the coming years my mother will help me doctor bras and bathing suits to disguise the absence in my chest. Another friend, who becomes my best friend, will tell me that when we first started hanging out, her father told her he was proud of her for being my friend.
In the shallow end of the pool the water laps at our stomachs. I volley the ball back to my friend after muttering an awkward, “It’s fine.” This is the beginning of my habit of deflecting, of pretending to myself that I am not affected by how others perceive me. I don’t consciously understand that these comments imply I am somehow lesser, worthy of pity. But as we keep playing, a new queasy feeling sifts in my stomach, a feeling that lingers.
SPINE
Again, I am held in plaster. Hot, wet strips are coiled around my torso. The strips begin to harden. The heat trapped inside builds, searing my skin. I take staccato breaths. The office cat, black and sleek, leaps onto the table to console me when I cry. The heat is nearly unbearable. My face reddens as I try to draw air into my compressed lungs. Finally, the orthotist uses a small handsaw to sever the mold armpit to hip, releasing me.
Out of the molds my back brace is made. From ages five to twelve I wear back braces to hold my spine as straight as possible. If bracing doesn’t work, I will need a metal rod installed surgically next to my spine. To prevent surgery, my parents are fastidious about keeping me in the brace for the prescribed number of hours. Every night after my hour of release, my mother or father spreads open the plastic for me to slip inside and cinches the back closed with three Velcro straps. I wiggle and move and run to my room to test it out, sometimes returning to my parents to adjust the straps if they are pulled too tight. Some braces are adorned with red, blue, or pink straps, some speckled with stickers: Tweety Bird, music notes, glittery red hearts. The smaller ones encompass more surface area of my body, from under my armpits down to my hipbones, a space cut out in front for my chest, an arc of plastic shielding my breastbone. The larger ones don’t cover my chest, a pressure point above my hip thrusting my ribcage to the right. The brace sways my ribs, edging under my armpits, special seamless undershirts pulled taut and wrinkleless between my skin and the waxy cushioning inside the plastic.
It takes time to get used to wearing a new brace once I outgrow one, skin rubbed raw, a new alignment pushing against the curve and twist of my bones, the helix of my ribs that if left on its own could eventually compromise my lungs, my heart. When a new mold is made, my body becomes the armature for the sculpture I become next. Each discarded brace is lodged in the unfinished ceiling of our basement laundry room with the old fishing poles, wrapping paper, extra light bulbs—a place I can’t reach and rarely enter. The space my body took up remains preserved, air where my body once fit.
VOICE
When I am nine, in the middle years of wearing the brace, I am cast as the dream fairy from Pinocchio in a school play. Standing at the piano for rehearsals, I open my mouth and belt out notes. My voice teacher takes my hand and makes me feel her throat, the way it resonates like the chamber of an instrument. She shows me how to round my vowels, how to let my tongue hit the back of my teeth. I breathe in as much air as my lungs will allow and let notes rise to the auditorium ceiling. Singing continues to give me a kind of pleasure that I have never known from anything else. Singing lessens the pressure in my chest.
The night of the performance I stand on stage in the spotlight wearing a pale blue princess gown with puffy silver cap sleeves and layers of tulle and ruffles. A burgundy curtain ripples behind me. My great-grandmother’s diamond costume jewelry is draped around my thin neck, glittering in the light. For the performance I am allowed to keep my back brace off, which I still have had to wear for most hours of the day. The silky bodice of the dress hugs my slender ribs.
I don’t have an ounce of nervousness; at nine I am all bravado, still too naive to be embarrassed, to understand how I stand out. In the spotlight it doesn’t matter to me if my arm turns inward against my hip, if my ribs stick out against the silk fabric. A few days after the performance, I find blood smeared on my cotton underwear. “You are a woman now,” my mother tells me after she assures me that I am OK and explains what is happening to my body. It is less of a pronouncement than an off-hand comment, her way of explanation. But I am a serious child who takes her every word to heart. I walk around for days afterward bereft. Even after I stop bleeding, I keep a thick pad adhered to my underwear, thinking that this is how I have to live as a woman from now on. I resign to this the same way I’ve approached inconvenient or uncomfortable medical procedures. It is a week before my mother discovers my misunderstanding and releases me with a gentle laugh.
I don’t know then that getting my period at an early age will prove to be fortuitous, as I need to reach physical maturity before plastic surgery can be considered. I don’t know then that growing up will mean learning that I have to guard my differences, refuse to look at them, pretend they do not exist. At the time I feel only a sense of heaviness, of loss.
After the play, everyone flocks over to congratulate me. Where did this little girl get such a big voice? They all want to know.
• •
As my body changes, I lose my vibrato. I am no longer the girl who spends days at the hospital under attentive care. I am no longer the dream fairy singing on stage at the school play. The new shape my body takes emphasizes and exaggerates my differences. Although the differences in my hand and arm have made me feel special and worthy of attention, the absence of my breast makes me feel freakish. This dawns on me slowly, and the realization suspends me out of my body, gives me a new vantage from which to look at myself. My thoughts boil with other accusations about my appearance. My wild, curly hair, which I also inherited from my great-grandmother, along with my singing voice, becomes a source of shame. So does the acne that bubbles on my chin and forehead. I hear my friend complain about her thighs, so I do too. In class my friends start passing notes about crushes on boys, concealing the neon, gel-inked words inside loose-leaf, folded into geometric shapes. My daydreams about my own crushes are a launching place into a future that I can scarcely imagine. I participate but don’t dare to believe that a boy will like me. There is a new density in my chest, a clutching inward. I never had qualms talking to boys before, but now embarrassment shoots through me, flushing my cheeks.
BREAST
As the photographer snaps the images, I stand still, the same way I have countless times for X-rays. But here my torso is unprotected—no hospital gown or leaden shields draped over my chest. At twelve, I am small and pale in front of the camera. The left side of my chest is sunken, ribs askew under thin skin. I’m so used to disrobing in doctor’s offices that it doesn’t occur to me to be scared or nervous or embarrassed, not then, and not over the course of the two constructive surgeries I will have later that year.
The medical photography studio is musty and windowless, filled with only artificial light. My T-shirt and bra lay behind the changing curtain, discarded along with the breast form with which I’ve been padding my misshapen ribcage. Without its polyester shell, it looks like a tentacle-less jelly fish. Also in my bag of tricks is padding my mother collects for me out of old bathing suits, a bottle of roll-on glue that adheres fabric to skin called It Stays. I’ve become skilled at shape-shifting, at conjuring what I desperately hope passes for a girl body. Sometimes, though, it feels as if I have a black hole in my chest, an absence that cancels everything else out.
Inside this room, I become the girl I conceal even from myself. Light touches me in places customarily kept in shadow. Concave chest, shrunken hand, winged shoulder, twisted spine. Since birth I’ve been propped up like a sapling, supported with braces and splints, made to grow upright. This time, though, after years of imagining it there, the prop will be slipped underneath my skin, the breast implant a small pocket of saltwater against my warped ribs. The flash captures the evidence of my body’s egregiousness, which the insurance company needs before it will approve payment for plastic surgery. Despite any company’s determination, this is not an elective surgery; in order for me to grow up it is required.
Silence fortifies me during this time. People in my life know I am having surgeries, but the details are vague, withheld. I promise myself that I will share with my best friend what is happening to me if I need to, but I never do. In this way I can pretend it isn’t happening, that it is no big deal. I learn to keep this to myself, and in doing so, I relinquish my ability to see and honor and name my own body, my own experiences. I cower from the mirror because I learn that my body is not worthy of being seen.
I remember startlingly little about the day the medical photographs are taken; only that my mother and I walk out of the studio into the rush of people on Lexington Avenue into a burst of June heat. I don’t remember if I had goosebumps or if the waistband of my jean shorts left a red lash across my hips. I don’t remember ever seeing the photographs.
Works Cited
Gunderman, Richard B. and C. Matthew Hawkins. “The Self-Portraits of Frida
Kahlo.” Radiology 247.2, (2008): 303-06; doi:10.1148/radiol.2472061459
Rodriquez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriquez. Bantam, 1982.