At the time my father was living in a barn. Granted, it was a nice barn, squat and rectangular, red with a gambrel roof, and to be perfectly honest he lived in an annex off the barn’s tail end. A cozy room, heated in the winter by an iron stove, it had a couch, a desk, a few makeshift bookshelves, even a small television set that he rarely watched. He slept there alone; I don’t know how he spent his mornings.



I tended to define my father’s relationship to the barn in terms of prohibitions: This was the barn, for example, from which he ran the vineyard that he didn’t own, which produced the subpar grapes that we couldn’t eat, which were turned into a subpar wine we couldn’t drink (and of which, today, there is not a single extant bottle). But more importantly, this was the barn where he’d lived since our parents had separated. (The divorce would come later, after he’d started renting a home on the other side of town.) No big drama, this separation. I would have been eight or so at the time, too young, in a general sense, to understand the vicissitudes of marriage, the mechanism of divorce, and too young again, in our particular case, to have ever witnessed a genuine motion of love between my parents.



My brother, Grady, and I—he would have been eleven or so—spent a lot of our time at the barn. He, responsibly, helped our father with various chores (weeding, lugging, pruning), while I fiddled about errantly, spray-painting rocks or hammering together discarded pieces of wood. I had free rein of the premises, a bountiful prospect, considering that in addition to the vineyard my father also ran a peony field. There was an industrial cooler inside the barn where we kept the freshly severed flowers in five-gallon buckets of water. I’d sometimes ask my father to lock me inside it; I would pummel the inside of the door, half-laughing, half-crying to be let out, and he, playing along, would refuse. I would settle back in faux resignation, allowing the chemically cooled air to envelop me like a wintry cocoon. Alone in the dark, I sensed in my chest a new, dull, nagging sensation, which I couldn’t have known, at the time, was dread.



To satisfy a different taste—it was a business, after all— we also dried the peonies. The entirety of the barn’s attic was devoted to this occupation; a constellation of muted blooms hung from their stems on a haphazard scheme of wires, string, and clothespins. The air up in the attic was dense, dusty, soporific. I can remember inhaling deeply, experimentally, and feeling the concoction settle in my lungs like warm syrup. When I got tired, too strongly steeped in the smell, as I considered it then, of antiquity, I would retreat to the cooler, to the coolness and damp below.



Looking back, I can see that it was around this time—post-separation—that my father started allowing us to flirt more and more openly with danger. He bought my brother a BB gun, whose pellets we loosed at pigeons and the barn’s shingled roof. For me he bought a small sword at a psychic fair. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother about it. Likewise he allowed a senile neighbor to gift me a rusty machete with a whalebone handle that had, by the effusive geezer’s account, seen action in the Mexican-American War. I sanded the handle down to get some of its old glow back, and together my father and I sharpened the blade with a portable Dremel tool. I held one weapon in each hand and massacred the bushes in my father’s backyard.



One Christmas, he bought my brother and I bows and arrows, neat, springy, lacquered things with bungee strings and real—very real—metal-tipped arrows. We became warriors, little Robin Hoods bounding about and crouching and loosing our deadly darts at trees and bushes, fences and the small animals we occasionally glimpsed: rabbits, mostly, nervous puffballs that lanced spectrally away while our arrows struck nearby earth.



After a while, one week or two, we got bored. We started playing a daredevil game in which we fired arrows straight into the sky, so high that they disappeared against the gray, ghostly welkin. Then we ran about in wide circles with our eyes upflung, trying not to get impaled by the rapidly descending shafts. As we played with the bows we could sense their power weakening, the strings thrumming flabbily and failing to send the arrows any interesting distance at any interesting speed—for two weeks we had forgotten to unstring the bows, and now the wood was slack, recoilless, the string little more than a faintly elastic yard of cloth. A ruined gift.



***



One morning, our father drove us—that is, Grady and I—to the Rural King (a farm supply store) on North Saint Joseph Avenue. He’d often take us along with him on these periodic trips, business excursions, as it were, to gather bags of mulch or spare hoes or other farming supplies. While he wandered about, Grady and I would hurry to the store’s rear, where they kept the chicks and ducklings in corrugated steel tubs bestrewn with woodchips.



Somehow, I think by dint of continual begging, we’d convinced our father to buy us ducks. Giddily, our fingers folded over a tub’s rim, we pointed out the ducks we wanted, and our father directed a bored-looking, lank-haired teenage attendant.



Granted, the precise mechanism of extraction lies outside the purview of my memory, as does the series of actions that took us from the back of the Rural King to the cash register and out, in the parking lot, to our father’s truck. Regardless, I know for a fact that we left the store with six snowy-white ducklings contained in a cardboard box.



A small wonder, that box. Like a dollhouse come to life. There were half-moon holes in its sides through which the sour smell of duck shit wafted and the truncated piccolo of their quacks came to us, fleetingly, along with occasional flashes of pale yellow (a wing), toxic orange (a foot), and blister black (an eye). Phantasmal, these bursts of phenomena. I recall, even then, being under the dreamy impression that the box contained not six live ducklings but an obscure system of wires, tubes, and gears, capable of producing and then relaying these discrete images to my brother and I—like a television, or something more complex still.



Grady held the box on his lap as I plumbed its apertures with fear-hyped fingertips, my pulse stirred to drum-taps by a mixture of anxiety and hope. Beside this minor drama, our father sat driving the truck. His palms were pressed to the pleather of the wheel; he stared ahead at the inrushing pavement; he might have been mildly, comfortably proud of himself. Outside, the sky was grey, the landscape winter-ridden and muted to the point of non-existence—or at least that’s how I remember it: an extended tracking shot of frost-plated cornfields cut with telephone poles, unbearing trees, and uniform homes (low-gabled, white, with aluminum siding). If I tease my memory, the houses sprout chimneys; a cozy smoke chuckles forth, billowing out and bleeding into the sky.



In reality, though, it was springtime—funny the falsehoods that memory supplies. How to describe a Midwestern spring? To be short about it: abundant, terrible, suffocating. A classical scene of renascence, like a pastoral torn from its frame: sweet fields spangled with itinerant beasts, lowing and leaning and loafing, all of them dumbly expectant. The trees become swampy and depressed, over-burdened with foliage and invasive vines thick and corkscrewy as hawsers; smooth wire fences are bent to absurd angles by the crushing weight of waves of honeysuckle; a whole host of hidden insects scores a grand, ear-numbing, dimensionless buzz that radiates along the sinusoidal countryside like an electric knell for the magnificence of the decay to come. High flourishing now, sweet colors, the frilly bunting of rebirth. Only later the fall, decadent, into decay.



We drove to the barn. It had a small backyard enclosed by a black wooden fence. Beyond this fence spread an unworked field full of high grass that swished and fluted drily in the summer winds. It ended in a murky line of trees. In the corner of the fence, we built a chicken wire pale and placed the ducks inside: a temporary structure, slack-sided, held in place by a few slivers of pinewood traced through the wire’s latticework and driven, by a rubber mallet clumsily wielded, into the rich black ground.



That first day was a joy. We named the ducks, chased them about, held them aloft as their spatulate feet flapped wildly. They scuttled here and there, trailing one another about the yard in wide, sinuous arcs, spreading and testing the bright half- moons of their inchoate wings. They quacked without cease—brief, dry, firecracker pops—their beaks seesawing steadily in loosing these bursts, as though crank-turned, wholly mechanical. To me they seemed delicate, clockwork automatons sheathed in fine feather coats.



And while we watched the ducks, our father watched us, the sidelong rays of dying daylight tilting the cast of his ruddy complexion into something more closely resembling bronze. As a consequence of working outdoors nearly all his life, my father had, and still has, very red skin, sun-warped and interlarded with elegant webs of burst vasculature, like the pattern a drop of ink makes as it spreads through the crazed enamel of an ancient vase. Back then he wore coke bottle glasses with faux tortoise-shell frames. He was fifty years old, somewhat thin and tired-looking. He usually smelled, pleasantly, of sweat shed in the open air.



Beyond these details, most of my memories of him revolve around a general impression of senescence, of age overworked. I can’t say exactly where he was as we played with the ducks, how precisely he fit into the scene—in my memories he is mostly a presence: a disembodied voice, for instance—but it seems appropriate, in retrospect, to place him in a folding lawn chair, a beer in his hand (Foster’s) and, as I said before, the dying sun in his eyes. Watching his kids and adjusting his posture. Happy they were happy.



***



A few days after we purchased them, the ducks began to disappear—though ‘disappear’ isn’t really the right word. They left their mementoes: a severed wing, a tuft of bloodied feathers. We saw drops of blood pendent in the grass: rubies spilled by a harried thief.



Some creature, our father told us soberly, was creeping in from the adjacent field, at night, while we, and he, slept. Subtly parting the tall grass, it leapt the wooden fence and took its pick of the frightened ducklings. In the morning, we’d find the remaining ducks scattered about the backyard, huddled and hiding in various nooks and corners, their necks curled and bent fantastically, preposterously, so that their heads rested under their wings. The beast, whatever it was, coyote or fox or wild dog, had disassembled the chicken wire pale, carelessly compressing its walls, uprooting the pinewood stakes. We fixed it, straightened out the skein of wire, and placed the ducks back inside.



I don’t recall any speeches from my father, any half-hearted explications of the circle of life or food chains or any other anodyne ramblings. I do remember that he began to set traps, black wire rectangles with a trip inside, baited with uncooked hotdogs. Hipped on retribution, I recommended that he stay up all night on the barn’s roof with my brother’s BB gun, waiting for the beast to show up. A recommendation he didn’t take.



So things went, the ducks plucked in the night, one by one, until they were gone. My father continued to set his traps. I remember thinking they were dumb, dumb, dumb; he’d never catch anything that way. But I don’t think I told him this.



One day, in the midst of the killings, I climbed up to the attic, hoping, maybe, to gauge the potential efficacy of my BB gun plan. The big loading window was open, and its double doors, angled at the top like those of a chapel, were swung wide to accommodate the breeze: a dry, pure zephyr. Periodically, someone—most likely my father—would open these doors, hasp them into place, and allow the attic to ventilate over the course of a day, allow the stale, baked air to escape. The peonies, as I ducked beneath them, rattled drily on their clotheslines, like bones: a vast, morbid set of wind chimes.



I reached the window and gazed out for a long time at the field of high grass, undulant—waves in the crinkled summer light. The field gave out a grand sigh, disconnected in its intensity from the subtlety of the field’s movement. As if there were an ocean, broad and unarticulated, hidden just out of sight. Natural ventriloquy, I think now, but not then. Then all I could feel was a terrible foreboding, a fear of hidden venom. Somewhere in the thicket’s weave, I knew, our oppressor lurked, biding, poised. Where or what it was we couldn’t know, we would never know, and it struck me, forcefully, as an aspect of fate, that we wouldn’t know. So much so that I felt myself becoming resigned to the mystery.



Then my father caught something.



***



It’s strange to think what dimly stays with you, what reveals itself willingly, at the touch of thought, in all its banal detail. I think of my father’s barn, mapped onto my brain by near-constant traversing and exploration. Strange, too, to find what fades—beyond a few scenes of play and a handful of vivid images, I don’t really remember too much about our ducks. And yet it’s strangest to consider what remains most clear, colorful, and precise, what plays back ceaselessly, like a loop of film.



For instance, I have a distinct memory of my brother and I watching our father drown a raccoon.



The raccoon, a sleek, pursy thing, moon-eyed with fear, is locked in a cage that lies in the bottom of a disused concrete trough. A hose hangs over the trough’s lip. Sharply I spy on the hose’s head an inverted cupola of water, a bright droplet, dangling like snot. Slick and lethal. I watch it drip.



For sound, there is the mad snarling and clacking of raccoon-teeth on cage-wire. For motion, the neutered acrobatics of attempted escape. A punch of red tongue adds color; a gurgly, slaverous, small-dog growl undergirds the soundscape. My eyes, transfixed, refuse to leave this desperation. Somewhere, our father turns a faucet. I hear a dry creak. The hose tenses, hisses, and begins to pump the trough full of water.



The raccoon erupts, turning eel-like in the spreading water, its coat dense and opulent. Soon half the cage is submerged. A black snout pokes periscopically through the cage’s upper lattice-work, searching for air, but no such luck. Up, up, up the water goes, until the cage is completely flooded, and the raccoon disappears beneath a braided surface. There are small agitations in the watery glass, bubbles of air and wavelets, the only signs of submerged struggle. Eventually, all settles. My father turns off the faucet, and the memory ends.



I recently asked my brother about this memory. I was curious about certain details, and half-hoping, at the same time, to revel fondly, like a nostalgic lush, in the absurd antics of our childhood. He recalled the ducks, their various demises. He remembered the black wire traps. He even remembered being shown a raccoon in the bottom of the concrete trough. But the actual drowning, he insisted, was done out of sight. My father, with a bit of prodding, confirmed this version of events.



As sharp as the scene and its details are in my head, I have to admit they’re a complete fabrication. I can’t say exactly when this false memory first took root in my mind, or why it did, or what legitimate memories it might have shoved carelessly into oblivion in the process. All I can say is that, until very recently—until a few months ago, in fact—I had borne this confabulation around, cradling it like a relic, relating it to friends, turning it about in my mind. And not once had I questioned its veracity.



Strangely enough, when I felt the dislodged scene begin to fade from my mind, I didn’t experience the dim, dull, toothy ache of extraction you might expect, nor the clean sting of excision. Instead there was a certain ecstatic liberty about the disappearance—as when a weight or pressure applied to the skin is suddenly lifted and the hitherto depressed flesh bounces back, filling its natural bounds, and then, for just one moment, attempts to move beyond the corporeal, into unarticulated space.



***



One more memory, this one real: We’re zooming through the darkling vineyard in my father’s truck. He; me; Grady. It’s a Sunday night, probably. The windows are rolled down. Outside, the foreign smell of grapes dangles over everything like a lazy stitch in the atmosphere.



In the cab of the truck, my face lit only by the dim fluorescence of the dashboard clock, I feel incredibly small.



We’re driving to the fallow field that lies behind our father’s vineyard, hoping to startle and disperse the deer that congregate there in the night, sometimes inspiring one another, by sheer confidence of numbers, I suppose, to dart into the vineyard and nibble at our grapes.



We don’t do this all the time. It’s a treat. We’ve usually got to beg him, and he’ll say no, no, there’s really no point tonight as we’re driving along, and we’ll crumple into ourselves, portraits of disappointment, until he turns sharply at the last moment, a surprise, and we revive.



We reach the fallow field. My father turns his headlights on high to catch the deer’s eyes, which bloom madly in the outer dark like a constellation of diseased stars. He chooses one with our help, and we buck off in pursuit. We come closer and closer to the singled-out deer, following its balletic dives and jukes with a bloodhound’s determination, closing in so tightly that I can imagine the dashboard and windshield disappearing before the galloping hind-quarters, the intervening material dropping away like so much illusion.



It’s then, at the climactic moment, that my father presses his foot to the brake pedal, the truck’s cabin dips forward abruptly, tipping my unseatbuckled self forward, and the deer makes its getaway, prancing through the waist-high bunches of Johnson grass until it’s reached the edge of the headlights’ range, at which point it disappears, without even a backward glance.



I gasp and turn to my father, who is dimly feigning distress, turning and twisting his hands in the dark, as if to signal something like, I guess it got away.



 

 In celebration of Seamus Heaney, we include here a tribute read at a service in Harvard Yard’s Memorial Church honoring the life and work of the poet. Professor Robert Kiely, who served as Master of Adams House from 1972 until 1999, read “Seamus at Adams House” as an introduction to “Anniversary Verse”. Heaney himself had composed and read “Anniversary Verse” for the 50th Anniversary of Adams House, where he often stayed during his years at Harvard. Adams House was known as the Left Bank of undergraduate life back when students were allowed to choose their Houses: the vibrant center of the arts on campus. We include Professor Kiely’s portrait of the poet during his Harvard years in remembrance of Heaney the teacher, and Heaney the friend: the Heaney who guides us still.



 



-The Harvard Advocate



 



 



    Harvard can be a strange and difficult place for a newcomer, freshman, professor, or poet. I remember a new colleague telling me that although everyone was friendly and polite, he could not find the center of the place. He always felt lost. That was not Seamus. Seamus had his own center. He also had his own home at Harvard. When he first came to the university in 1979, the English Department welcomed him warmly as Visiting Poet, but it was in 1981 when he moved into I-entry of Adams House that he became one of us, a neighbor, a friend, a member of the family.



    The guest suite in I-entry was not a five star accommodation. These rooms were only a step up from the days of the founding Puritan Fathers. There was indoor plumbing, electricity, a bed, a desk, a table, and a few chairs. A visiting professor who had arrived near midnight some years earlier phoned me to say that the place had no door and she was afraid to go to bed. Buildings and Grounds had been working on the room and had not quite finished the job. I told her to pile furniture at the threshold and try to get some sleep. We did install a door before Seamus arrived. In any case, he never complained. In fact, I think he liked the spare simplicity, the convenience, the company when he wanted it, and the solitude when he needed it. When Marie came for visits, she put flowers on the table and said it made them feel like newlyweds.



    Seamus came back every year for one semester. It soon seemed as though he had always been there with us, taking meals in the Dining Hall, chatting with someone in Randolph Court, reading poetry and listening attentively and with evident pleasure to students reading their own poetry in the Common Rooms. Like any true survivor at Harvard, Seamus learned how to disappear and do his work, but he also loved celebrations and a good party. One of his favorite Adams occasions was the Saint Patrick’s Day Tea at Apthorp House. He often brought Irish friends who could sing or play the penny whistle. Students tried to dance something resembling an Irish jig. He would stand on a chair and recite poems, beaming all the while, not for the attention he was getting but because of the attention poetry was getting. When he was informed of the Nobel Prize, he was travelling in Greece. He phoned to say he couldn’t keep the astonishing news to himself. It was during a Tea, so I announced it to the assembled crowd of students who cheered so lustily he could hear them in Athens.



    Seamus was a great story-teller as well as a great poet. Among the many he told, there are two stories about Ireland, poets, and poetry that keep coming back to me. One night when he was driving alone through the Irish countryside after an event—a wedding or banquet—he was stopped by a patrolman for speeding. The patrolman seemed tired, wet, and angry: “Show me your driver’s license,” he shouted as if to a deaf man. Seamus began fumbling around his pockets, realizing that he may have forgotten to carry it with him. The patrolman shone a flashlight into the car as if looking for contraband. “Can you identify yourself?” Seamus noticed an envelope with his name and address on the empty seat next to him. “Will this do?” The patrolman shone his light on the name, looked up and said, “The poet?” Seamus nodded modestly. “Drive on,” said the patrolman.



    The other story is about a poet looking for a poet who was not an Irishman. Seamus loved the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He knew that Hopkins had been sick, lonely, and unhappy in Dublin; that he died there; and, though an Englishman, he was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery where Irish patriots had also been laid to rest. One day, Seamus decided that he wanted to visit Hopkins’ grave. In an almost Shakespearian scene, the young Irish poet got lost among the tombstones, unable to find his way to Hopkins until he came upon two gravediggers. “I’m looking for Gerard Manley Hopkins,” he said. “Who?” “The poet. Hopkins.” The first gravedigger shrugged and looked at his mate, “Have you heard of a Hopkins?” The second gravedigger scratched his chin, looked at Seamus, and said, “Oh, you mean the convert!” And then glanced over his shoulder and said with a nod, “He’s over there.”



    I hardly need to say that Seamus loved Ireland. But like those ancient Irish monks who sailed off in their currachs and made themselves at home all over the world, Seamus was a hardy traveler and, through his poetry and generous disposition, his was a welcome presence and voice in many parts.



    I have saved till last my most treasured memory and a copy of a message from Seamus to Harvard—to all of us—that most of you will not have read or heard. In the spring of 1982 Adams House celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding. Throughout the semester there were festivities—an original opera, an art show, poetry readings, concerts, and finally a banquet. Seamus, of course, was there. As a surprise, he composed a poem and dedicated it to Adams House. I now hear it as a toast to Harvard, a thank you note to all of us, and a light-hearted, but serious reminder of what we can be at our best, why he liked being here and, though he doesn’t put it that way, why we loved having him with us. 



 



-Robert Kiely



 



Anniversary Verse



SEAMUS HEANEY 



 



“For Bob and Jana with much gratitude”



                                         --19 May 1982



 



Master Kiely, guests and friends,

Tutors, tutees, alumni, students,

               You stair-case dwellers

Whose amplified hard rock and reggae

Resound from every dormitory,

You fiftieth anniversary

Revellers, 



Ye maids and swains of Adams House,

Ye actors, athletes, sexy muses,

                Ye gilded youth-

I rise to rise to the occasion

And not disgrace my art or nation

With verse that sings the old equation

                Of beauty and truth.



I rise as one who comes and goes

Beneath your storied walls and windows

               A visitor,

Part tourist and part faculty,

An ethnic curiosity

Dubbed by grace of poetry

               Guest lecturer.



Inspire me then, occasional muse,

With verse to cure the exam blues

                And banish care,

To greet old academic ghosts

Who once caroused on the gold coast

Whose love of learning vied with lusts

                For flesh and beer.



That I may briefly celebrate

Community, half-collegiate

               And half domestic,

And say a word about the way



A scholar’s personality

Can keep its health emotionally

               Yet stay scholastic.



The diapers we first were dressed in,

Our graduation gowns of ermine,

               Which, would you say,

Will mean more to us in the end?

Those powdered folds pinned tight around

Our little backsides, or that grand

               Scholar’s regalia.



All of us are amphibious

Between our universities

               And where we come from.

No one gets born in a campus bed.

Even the trendiest school of Ed.

Has never weaned or bathed or breast-fed

               Or wiped a bum.



No co-ed dorm supplies the joys

Of an attic full of dusty toys

               And old dolls’ houses.

No faculty of engineering

Repeats the thrill of tinkering

With model planes, that hankering

               To fly with aces.



It seem illiterate solitude

Is the first place that the true and good

               Awaken in us.

The later freedom we call leisure

Cannot supply that buried treasure

Which is the basis and the measure

               Of personalities



 And which we name imagination,

A word I cite with much elation

               And some unease

Because it can sound slight and airy,

An entry in the dictionary,

A bubble word. Yet while I’m wary

               I realize



All need its salutary power.

All men and women must beware

               Who would deny it

And go against their childhood’s grain

And dry up like earth parched for rain.

They’ll grow mechanical and then

               No drug or diet,



No health farm, clinic, yoga course,

No mantra, om, no Star Wars force

               Will compensate

For what is lost when the mind divides.

Even science now concedes

The brain has two conjugal sides,

               The left and right,



That have to marry intuition

To the analytic reason

               For psychic balance.

Head sleeps with heart, begets a creature

Free yet cornered in its nature.

To be your whole self you must mate your

               Brains and glands.



Which is why I bless the atmosphere

Of Adams House; and toast our master

               And his wife.

I toast good nature in the staff,

The way that nothing’s done by half-

Those who work hard and still can laugh

               Are the spice of life.



I like your hospitality,

Your literate vitality,

               Your casual styles.

The way that love of liberal arts

And loves inspired by Cupid’s darts

Have educated all your hearts

               Is in your smiles.



So all together, gaudeamus,

Because as sure as my name is Seamus

               To-day’s the day

For intellectuals to play.

On your fiftieth anniversary

Rejoice, and as the jazzmen say,

               Take it away.

 



My dad was the first in the family to get plastic surgery. He lost the tips of his fingers sixteen years ago in an accident at the paper factory where he worked when we first moved to America. My dad arrived on time and never made trouble with the other employees. Every morning saw him stepping out of our apartment in the same outfit: a tucked-in collared shirt with a small hole or two hidden in the armpits, faded dress pants, and a belt to hold up his pants on his skinny body. The clothes were all from Goodwill, just like his lunchbox, which was blue and white and had frayed plastic on the edges. Eventually, they promoted him to a management position, in which he had to watch over the cutting machine. It had a huge blade that cut giant cylinders of paper into smaller, more usable rolls. 



One day, the machine broke, and my dad was responsible for fixing it. While he was poking his hands in and out of the machine, something released, and the blade dropped down, slamming its edge onto his hands. It sliced off the tips of his four left fingers, cutting cleanly through the bones of the first metacarpals. What was left behind were bloody stumps with shriveled, blue skin at the tip and glistening hints of bone somewhere in that mess.



The doctors took chunks of meat from his thighs and sewed them on as fingers.



My middle sister came next when she decided to get a nose job and eyelid surgery. Then followed my eldest sister with her tummy tuck. Now, my mom is about to fall under the blade. 



 



* * *



We sit in the waiting room as the nurses shuffle around us. They wear heels and tight pink shirts emblazoned with jewels that spell out “BOTOX” across their over-sized breasts. The receptionist flashes us her abnormally white teeth and greets us with a face that is evenly powdered with thick, matte make up. All the nurses wear similarly sculpted faces. They maintain eternal smiles and speak with a tone too soft and sweet, like preserved cherries. I help my mom fill out the paperwork and translate some of the brochures into Vietnamese for her. We pass the time flipping through albums of Befores and Afters, page after page of magically shrunken bellies and tightened skin.



A nurse comes and escorts us to the screening office. A large mahogany desk takes up the far left corner of the room. On top of it sits a computer monitor set to a solid blue screen. A single bookshelf stands against the opposite wall, and a full-length mirror leaned casually adjacent to it. A few green plants dot the tops of the furniture, and certificates and paintings of flowers decorate the cream-colored walls. If it wasn’t for the breast implants lining the shelves of the bookcase and the examination chair sitting ominously at the center, the room could have passed for any middle-class family doctor’s office.



I remember such offices. I had gone with my middle sister to a consultation before she had her surgery. 



I think my middle sister chose the knife because my mom called her ugly all the time. Every time they met, my mom would criticize her nose or compare her to our ugly aunt, saying that they had the exact same face. Or sometimes she would joke, “Your nostrils are so big, you’ll never be able to be rich. Any money that you find will just slip right out of them.” 



Usually my sister doesn’t believe in superstition, but the jokes had some truth in them—of the three sisters, my middle sister was always the one who spent her money most lavishly on clothes and perfumes. Towers of shoes and once-worn gowns filled her closet. It didn’t matter that her boyfriend thought her nose was cute. It didn’t matter that she won a beauty pageant. It didn’t matter that my mom said she was just joking the whole time. These words entered my sister and tore her apart from the inside.



Of course I didn’t know how hurt she was until she told me late one night that she wanted a nose job, and I stayed up until morning trying to hold her back. I thought I could save her, but then I looked at her. Something in her eyes had already glazed over. I imagined her body being cut up into pieces by my mom’s words and reassembled into a different person by a stranger. I saw that my sister had already chosen to go down this path, and I cried.



 



* * *



That was four years ago. Now, I try my best not to let my emotions seep through as my mom and I go on with the consultation. We sit down in leather chairs, and the same pretty nurse with the BOTOX shirt sits down in front of us. My mom conjures up her best English and explains that she would like a facelift, tummy tuck, and perhaps eyelid surgery. The nurse smiles. She selects a few videos for us to watch on the computer and then excuses herself from the room. My mom and I go through them. The videos take us through a step-by-step methodology of each type of surgery. To perform a facelift, the surgeons make a long U-shaped incision that starts from the temples, reaches the base of the ear, and curves backwards to the hairline. This makes a pocket in the face. The surgeons pull up the skin, disconnecting it from underlying tissue, and scrape away any excess fat within the pocket. The skin is then pulled back to the ears. Any excess is removed, and the wound is closed. In cases when there is too much fat beneath the chin, they will also make a small incision at the base of the chin to suck it out.



To perform a tummy tuck, surgeons make three incisions in the body: a smile along the pubic line extending towards the hips, a frown below the rib cage, and a circle around the belly button. They cut the frowns and the smiles so that the ends meet each other, making an eye-shape on the stomach. This eye covers the areas of skin that will later be removed. The belly button is set free by the incisions surrounding it, so that it will not be ripped off from the body when the skin comes off. After these first three cuts are made, the doctors take a pair of clamps and peel off the skin starting from one corner of the eye. 



The videos present us with clean, spotless skin without any fat residues; seamless, bloodless cuts; and smooth, pink muscles in every diagram. When surgeons actually perform surgery, they have to tug hard because the skin is still alive and clings to the muscle throbbing underneath.



Human fat is yellow and clings to the skin in tumorous clumps, like gelatinous stalactites. All of the fat is removed, sucked out with tubes, cut away with knives. A considerable amount simply rips away along with the skin. Muscle is red, and its sinews run parallel to each other, forming tiny grooves in between the fibers of the meat. Blood sometimes gets stuck inside these grooves and clots, forming brown puddles during surgery. It looks as if someone threw embers onto the body, turning the flesh to ash in areas where the skin was burnt the most. 



Once the eye on the belly is removed completely, the surgeons lift it off the body. It looks like a sagging hide of road kill, though everyone knows that it belonged to something human. To finish the procedure, they pull the flap of skin above the gaping hole down, over the belly button, until it meets with the bottom lid of the recently removed eye. The skin is held in place as they suture the flaps back together. Finally, they locate the belly button hiding beneath the skin and cut a hole around it so that it can reemerge. To finish the operation, they secure the bellybutton with a few last stitches.



 



* * *



My eldest sister recently went through this procedure. I found out about it when I was roaming around Argentina. Sitting at an internet café, I opened an email from my middle sister explaining how she would be taking my eldest sister home after the operation. It would have been so easy if I could have just been mad. I wanted to place my sister into the paradigm of an insecure, needy middle-aged woman who complains too much. I wanted to be mad at her husband for agreeing, at my sister for being an ally. I wanted to have screamed in protest and written a long email in response. Then it would have been simple. But I couldn’t. Instead of words of rage, I found only sympathy.



I couldn’t blame her—not after having seen her real stomach. 



I had come to her house and found her lying down breastfeeding her youngest son. It looked as though she had taken a nap with the baby because the sheets were rumpled, her hair was tousled, and her shirt was pulled back from turning in her sleep. It revealed a small triangle of skin at her stomach. We started talking, and at some point during our conversation she saw me looking and lifted her shirt up to reveal the entirety of her scarred stomach.



It looked like a balloon that had been fully inflated and left to slowly deflate on its own, with wrinkles and dents and strange craters all over its sides. Stretch marks covered everything below the ribcage, and a smiling scar ran across her pubic line, the result of multiple caesarian sections. The skin sagged. It sank down the base of her pubic line. This was all the extra skin that her body had no use for after giving birth to three children. There was so much skin that when she clenched it with her hands, blobs rolled out from between her fingers, as if she were squeezing Play-doh. After her pregnancy, the skin realized its unnecessary role for the body and, on its own, willed itself to die—and turned brown, the color of rotting bananas. 



 



* * *



When my mom and I finish the videos, the nurse comes back and asks if we had any questions. We don’t. She smiles again, sweetly mutters some cordial phrases, and then leaves.



The doctor comes in, introduces himself, and asks us if we had any questions. My mom asks him about neurological dysfunction, which happens when the nerve endings are destroyed after surgery. In such cases, she would lose the ability to smile. He comforts her by saying that these cases almost never happened. 



My mom then asks if he could also do a brow lift and eyelid surgery. These were simple: a small cut above the temples along the hairline, a little tug to pull the skin up and lift the eyebrows. I watch him scan my mom’s face for a few seconds. His eyes give two quick glances over her eyebrows. “Yeah, it’s pretty simple—and to be honest it’s not that necessary in your case.”



In the prescreening, he asks my mom to sit on the examination chair. She is short—only five feet tall, so it is a bit difficult for her to get on. She wiggles onto the chair, sits, and then looks at him in anticipation. None of us spoke much. The doctor kneels down a bit to match my mom’s height, and then directs his professional attention to her face. With his left hand he guides my mom’s face up or down, left or right, depending on what he needs to examine. With his right hand, he places his thumb on her chin for support and uses two of his fingers to push skin back and forth in certain areas. After a few minutes he delivers his verdict:



“So in your case we would have to cut behind the ears and at the base of the chin.” He saw the puzzled look on my mom and directed his attention to me, “Your mom doesn’t need that much on the face. Just a bit of work on the chin should do it, and she doesn’t have that much in the first place. Here is a really extreme case on an elder lady who could not have surgery on her face.” He shows both of us a Before and After of an extremely old lady who got a chin tuck. The woman originally had so much fat beneath her chin that she had no neckline, only a large, sagging flap that formed a triangle where her neck should have been. The surgeons made only one incision on her chin, but they managed to suck out enough fat to give her a neck. My mom is impressed. 



The surgeon is now ready to examine her for the tummy tuck. “I’ll come back in a few minutes. For now, you can undress.” He hands her a white smock that opened up in the front. “Wear this, and you can keep your underwear on.”



When the door closes, my mom slowly takes off her clothes. She is slightly plump, with a bit of fat resting on her thighs, around her arms, and surrounding her waist. Her stomach swells out a bit, and it carries a few stretch marks and scars in it, the aftermath of carrying four children. After she finishes undressing, she wraps the smock around her body and climbs onto the examination chair again. I realize that this was the first time I have seen her this naked. She looks so soft. Her skin is pale and almost translucent, and I can almost map out the veins running up from her feet. She is sitting silently on the chair, dangling her feet, and staring expectantly at the door, and I have a sudden urge to cradle her in my arms. 



The door opens and the doctor returns. My mom opens her smock, exposing her little white belly, and he begins his second examination. After a few minutes of silence, he gets up and explains that my mom only needs a medium-size tummy tuck. “Again, it’s not that bad. After the surgery, we could reduce it to about half. You’ll definitely still be able to tell the difference though. The results will still be good. As for the rest, we can’t get to it because it’s located behind the muscle frame. But you can easily fix that by losing … maybe five pounds. It’s not that big, and that should do it.” With that, he shakes my mom’s hand and then leaves. My mom scurries to the door and put her clothes on. She avoids looking at the mirror as she passes it.



 



* * *



Perhaps my mom will someday be able to look at herself. My middle sister, after her surgery, claims that she, for once, feels beautiful in front of the mirror. She knows that the changes were very subtle, and that people can’t really tell the difference in most cases. She knows that being slightly prettier doesn’t affect her performance at work, but it doesn’t matter. She can smile at herself now. 



When my middle sister got her tummy tuck, she went to a family wedding dressed in a strapless, cream-colored gown that flowed to the ground. Small ripples of fabric ran across her torso and emphasized her curves. Her waist was tiny, and from the side, her stomach was completely flat. She hadn’t worn that dress in five years—not since she married and had kids. I told her how fantastic she looked. She smiled sheepishly and said, “Oh come on. It wasn’t like I exercised or anything.” That night we took many family photos, and my eldest sister gladly volunteered herself to take full-body shots. 



I thought of my dad, who never shows his hands. 



After his surgery, gravity pulled the meat to the sides as his fingers healed, and the tips look like they are about to slip off. The fingernail grew back on only one finger—the others have dents where the nails should be. They never regained their flexibility. They bend only slightly back and forth from the first joint, and when left unflexed, stick out like sock puppets craning their heads in jumbled directions. It’s almost as if the accident never happened because he hides his hands in every photograph. 



After his surgery he unwillingly joined my mom in the business and became a nail technician because there wasn’t anything else he could do. Work is more manageable now that he runs his own nail store. At first he started out working as a regular employee, performing basic manicures for customers. One time, he sat down to do a manicure for a young lady, but she recoiled and screamed when she saw his hand. Then she got up and left without a word.



Both he and my mom agreed that plastic surgery might be necessary if my mom was to continue working in the nail business. Her customers, when they come to the store, don’t know   that she works thirteen hours a day and comes home at eleven after thirteen hours of work, only to start cooking for tomorrow and do her accounting. They don’t know that she climbs into bed at two in the morning and wakes up at seven, and has been repeating this routine six days a week, all weeks of the year, for the past twelve years. They don’t see that she barely has time to put on her lipstick in the morning, never mind doing cardio exercise for half an hour three times a week. They only know that she has wrinkles, over-sized pores, white-hair, and pockets of fat forming at the base of her cheeks. Seeing this, how can they trust her to make them beautiful when she doesn’t seem to value her own beauty?



 



* * *



The last person to see us in the office was the manager of the clinic. Perhaps she thought I was stunned by her beauty, and perhaps she has received the same reaction many times. Her body had been cut, sewn up, altered, covered, pulled, twisted, and inflated in almost every possible place: a nose job, breast implants, facelift, hair-dye, heavy make-up, Botox, and a tummy tuck. She was around sixty years old, but packaged to be twenty. She looked neither old nor young. Her beauty wasn’t the sort of ageless beauty that some women gather as they age, when they manage to carry their gravity with grace. Her taut, flawless skin looked as if it could suddenly snap and spew out her contents. She turned out to be a sweet lady though, and an excellent businesswoman. She had been a patient at the clinic for sixteen years before she became its manager. Her surgeon was our surgeon.



She handed us the papers. The tummy tuck would be $6,000, and the facelift would be either $8,000 or $11,000, depending on whether my mother chose general or local anesthesia. The conversation drew to an end, and the lady asked us if we had any final questions. My mom wanted to see her scars. The manager stood up and showed us her belly, and we could see a very faint scar at the pubic line where they had performed the surgery years ago. Then she bent down and showed us the scars on her chin and face. My mom’s eyes lit up when she saw how faint they were.



In the car, my mom asked me, “Wasn’t that lady pretty?” I looked at my mom. She was looking at me. I turned my head back to the lines on the road, unable to say anything because of what felt like a knife in my throat. Instead, I kept on driving.