For the nine hours I am on the operating table, I go nowhere, I dream of nothing. Later, I imagine I heard the sound of the osteotome, its beveled edge moving toward and then through me. The delicate crunch of my jawbone; the particular noise of an instrument meeting exactly its intended material – butter knife to butter, bone knife to bone. But that was a fiction. I heard nothing. Anesthesia took me gently to a subterranean blackness and I emerged unremembering, crumpled and new as a freshly eclosed butterfly.
- INCISION: Incision is placed over the region of the ramus to the mid ramus. The tissue is dissected, taking care not to perforate the periosteum.
The worst part of my whole life has been trying to explain myself.
I wanted to shed my skin and become my true girl-self after jaw surgery – I would be mythic, I would be terrible. Lazarus. Jennifer’s Body. I believed the thing that was deeply, essentially wrong with me, the caul that marked me as an outsider in a group of girls before I’d even said a word, was my teeth.
I suffered from a Class III malocclusion: a prognathism that caused my lower jaw to protrude out well beyond my top teeth. A protrusion of less than ten millimeters, to be sure. But noticeably wrong. I lisped. I spat. I was unable to chew anything with my front teeth. In videos, my bottom jaw slammed up and down like a marionette’s, clicking at the joints and completely liberated from my upper jaw. In conjunction with this was the anterior open bite that kept my mouth from closing completely, my tongue visible through the permanently half-shut window of my teeth. And – oh yes – my face was medically classified as “concave.”
I daydreamed of myself with an enormous God hand like in the Create-A-Sim menu of the Sims 4, clutching the top of my skull and reshaping it with one fluid drag of my mouse. I fell asleep imagining how easily, in theory, I might perform the surgery myself. Two cuts, remove the offending growth, place the bone-pieces back together.
Jaw surgery was my point of aperture for years. Everything else was horror, darkness, loneliness. I was so lonely. I was revulsed by myself. The two things conflated themselves – I held the conviction that the day my upper jaw clicked neatly into place with my lower one, the world would finally unfurl itself to me. What I wanted, more than anything else, was to be a real girl. Pinocchia. Pinochette. My gnashing and spittle, the way people reacted to it – a kind of disgusted interest founded in perversion, like how people witness a two-headed animal – deserted me on an island of unintentional androgyny.
(Anyone who has been in my position understands that there are many ways to be a woman, and that most of those ways are punished. Most of those ways place you in the realm of being treated as less than a “complete” woman. The cultural pillars of womanhood are inextricably intertwined with the idea of an essential feminine beauty. When removed from the context of physical beauty – picture an ugly Ophelia, a guileless Helen of Troy – woman is replaced by a secondary female gender; for example, “hag” or “crone.” As in Jane Eyre, femininity can be supplemented through other virtues – piousness, modesty.
I, who had neither beauty nor virtue, lingered unwillingly in the nebulous space where people saw me as a girl, but not quite.)
Because of this, my closest friends were always boys – I was aware of the secret, subtle rituals of masculinity, but was never held to them the way other boys were. Nor did they know anything about the codes of girl-friendship – though of these, I was just as ignorant.
The image I had of girlhood was a dreamy, heady one – I was a visitor walking through an aquarium tunnel, obsessed with the flash and movement inside, separated by several inches of acrylic glass. Impenetrable glass. Trips to the mall and holding hands, the painting of nails and the whispering of secrets, trying on one another’s clothes; pink ribbons and white lace. Like the narrators of The Virgin Suicides, I was fixated on the incognizable idea of what my girlhood should be, picking at my nails and watching through a window. I ached desperately for it, feeling like a voyeur, wondering when the right instincts would follow and girlishness would germinate within me.
For years, I imagined what it would feel like lying on the gurney right before the surgery, knowing I was about to dip my head underwater and come up for air as someone else – whispering to myself, over and over, like a hoarse prayer, “Today is the day we get free.”
- OSTEOTOMY: Osteotomy is initiated by cutting the cortical bone on the medial side. The depth of the cut should be minimal.
Mouth blood. The urge to spit. These were the most familiar of the sensations when I woke up – everything else was garishly frightening and alien. Blue light, weird, artificial, glowed dim and neon from somewhere. My mouth was banded shut at my braces – I swallowed in a panic. The end of a tube that snaked through my nostril and down my trachea bobbed and scraped at the cusp of my throat with the motion. Nothing made sense in any direction.
Dizzy, my head like an enormous lead balloon, I struggled to reorient myself. It was night time – I had gone in for surgery at six in the morning. The nurse had asked me if I wanted any music before the anesthesia began, da dum I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be… Da dum I wanna be what my body wants me to be… And then the overwhelming urge to close my eyes, like a great black wave…
I would learn the clinical details later: a bilateral sagittal split osteotomy was performed, which meant that my gums and the soft tissue of my mouth-flesh were cut away to expose my lower jawbone, from which bone was excised. My upper jaw was also cut in the same fashion, only my front four teeth were tilted down when reassembled, so as to close my open bite. The result was at once mechanical and shockingly organic – large metal staples held the bones back together under my skin; tense, pulley-like.
The first night in the hospital was the ring of fire: my throat swelled from the constant rubbing of the intubation, I discovered the joys of a catheter. My wrists were a dark palette of bruises where, from the context clues of the several needle holes in my arm, I gathered that someone had missed a vein a few times while I had been anesthetized. About six times. Close to 4 A.M., wanting to know where my phone was, I mimed writing on a notepad.
A nurse cooed, “Aw, is she deaf?”
“No,” I said. “My jaw is freaking wired shut.” But it sounded more like “Mmpfgh. Mpprrgfphh.”
But all of it paled at the first, heartstopping moment – joy so fierce it burned like the white-blue center of a flame – when I ran my fingertip over the new seam of my upper and lower teeth and found them touching for the first time in perhaps my whole life.
In the dim, beeping hospital room, where the strangely frantic murmur of the TV people was the only other sound, I fought to stave off my excitement. It would be morning when I could be unhooked from the various tubes I was attached to and see myself.
Hours of darkness followed. Drug-induced insomnia and pain goaded me awake. More darkness, interrupted by injections into my IV. Darkness.
When morning light dappled the walls, spring green on plaster white – it was late March, exactly a week before my seventeenth birthday – I was finally led to a mirror.
Everything was bruised, corpse-like; the cheeks were grotesquely swollen, with an unhealthy green and purple pallor. Spit pooled on the bottom lip, twice its size, and crusted over dried blood, blackening the corners of my mouth. A dark ruby droplet of fresh blood sparkled under my nose. My heart started pounding – a dog being chased through the gaping black mouth of a forest, the thud of quickening feet. A smile began to form, but my internal stitches prevented the motion. The future was not coming, it was here. I was Carrie – the blood-heralded, the finally-beautiful.
Images flickered and vanished behind my eyes like the whirl of a ribbon: I would blend in, subtle and chameleon-like, with the beautiful girlfriends I would have. I would be invited to parties, and after-parties, and after-after-parties, I would be laughing. Love and loneliness had burned a hole in the pincurl of my heart, an unspent coin that lingered in my pocket year after year, begging to be spent. Yes, I would be the one laughing.
- WOUND CLOSURE: Bleeding is controlled by routine methods.
Being girlish and foamy and feminine felt like playing a caricature, so I gave into the performance.
Every day, as the swelling in my face went down over the course of nearly a year, I wore baby-pink cropped cardigans with matching pink faux-fur lining. Dried blood was siphoned out of my sinuses via vacuum hose; hot pink glittery halter dresses. Short-seamed pink miniskirts and bloody stitches that fell out of my gums like black worms, satiny pink tanks with sweetheart necklines. Pearl necklaces, glossy lipstick. Blue-dark blood again. If at any point I wasn’t girl, at least I was Girl – I relished the excess, the flamboyancy. It was an irreproachable take on femininity – no one would question whether I was failing at the rituals of girlhood when I was performing the Cirque du Soleil of Girlhood.
Slowly, imperceptibly, I morphed into something recognizable. A chrysalis, if cut open, does not reveal a fascinating chimera of caterpillar and butterfly but instead a wet mass of digestive enzymes – the old body has to be eaten. It has to die. I wanted irreproachable beauty. I wanted to never again be vulnerable to the easy, low-hanging insult. I taught myself to modulate my tone; I watched videos of people making each other laugh and absorbed in eidetic detail their cadences, their sentence structures.
Three years after jaw surgery, I believed my face to be a lacuna. A square block of clay. My teeth clasped each other like the lip of an oyster and gleamed like pearls; my face had settled into itself like the foundation of a house.
Still, I was identified in the opaque way that dogs can smell tumors, to weed out the sickness – the something-off I could never fix about myself. It is a devastating, desperate feeling: to believe for all of the years of your life that there is a block of ice between your mouth and the mouth of the world, waiting for the day it melts and everything opens up to you, soft and inviting. And to realize that was naivete.
It was the first time I had ever been called a “pick-me” – written in an Expo marker speech bubble by a group of other twenty-year-old girls above a cartoon of me. A cold-water shiver, a trickle of pain.
Even after jaw surgery, the categorization of women into “girl’s girls” and “pick-mes” were as arbitrary as the other ones I’d experienced on the other side of the fence – good versus bad, ugly versus not-ugly. The kind of category that, once applied, gives tacit permission to shun or hurt – “Well, it’s okay if it’s her.” I would never, ever be able to get it right. It simply didn’t work that way.
(The pick-me/girl’s girl dichotomy engenders a kind of social policing among women, making sure they and the girls they know are in the category of “good” women, who follow the correct rules, and excising the ones who slip into the realm of “bad” women. But I don’t know who makes these rules. I find myself asking – are men held, among themselves, to these same standards?)
Instead, girlhood came to me, light and lilting, like this:
MADHU: I’m trying to achieve the, like, je ne sais quoi of smoking cigarettes without smoking
cigarettes. Do you think I smell mysterious?
ME: Yes. You smell like Victoria’s Secret Bombshell and the concept of the word ingenue, but in, like, a sexy way. You could try riding the bus more.
MADHU, petulant: I’m scared of the bus. You get on and it just takes you wherever.
ME: This is true.
MADHU: I just feel like I’m losing my mystique a little.
ME: Do you think… I have mystique-ness?
MADHU deliberates: You have, like, a beautifully uncultivated authenticity. You feel things deeply like, I don’t know, a nymph of earnestness.
ME: No mystique.
It was Madhu who saved me. We developed our own dialect with self-aware verve. It was her that inducted me into her own heady world of girlhood for the very first time. Like me, she had spent her adolescence awkward and bespectacled, but had grown up to be as sleek and as slinky as a sable cat. When we met, I believed she was the exception to the rule – the only girl who liked me.
After that night I cried to her, “Am I a social freak? Do all women hate me?”
“Noooo,” she said. “I love you.”
And then, I realized she was the rule. I had harbored a nudging fear that she wouldn’t have befriended me before jaw surgery, but she only laughed when I told her that. Said she had always wanted to be my friend. (Meanwhile I had never approached her, thinking her far too untouchably beautiful and interesting to befriend me.) We forged our own sorority – late-night phone calls and the clink of teacups on china, giggling fits in grocery stores. Not as gauzy as I’d pictured, but twice as wonderful.
One afternoon, the six o’clock sunlight glassy on her bedroom’s terracotta floor, I showed her a photo of myself prior to jaw surgery – my jaw jutting out proudly towards the camera.
“Oh my God, it’s terrible, right?” I said.
In the photo, I was smiling that crooked bullet-toothed smile. Same jewelry. Different eyebrows. I looked young – all my friends were five years away.
She stuck out her tongue. “I think you looked cute.”
.Design is by Primrose Tanachaiwiwat and uses Anna Haifisch’s “Dog Thoughts”
UF PRISM 