best to hide my temporarily disfigured and frighteningly ugly face. Mama gasped as if she’d been shown an alien or was a character in one of those sci-fi movies where the mother opens forth and delivers something lizardous.
“Sh-sh-she won’t look like th-this forever,” the doctor stammered. “It’s just a matter of, well…Your p-pelvic bones wouldn’t…you know, and we had to use the forceps and when that didn’t work we resorted to our su-suction method, but unfortunately that failed so we had to call maintenance and b-borrow their Industrial Strength Hoover Mega Vac, but don’t worry, we sterilized all the major attachments and brushes.”
Mama’s mouth opened as if she was going to scream, but being so young, she couldn’t find the words and after wiggling her tongue around and bulging her eyeballs at the doctor in what she hoped was a threatening gesture, told him to get his no-good butt out of there and that if her baby didn’t present any better the next day, she would be Hoovering his own head.
“This isn’t our baby,” she told my dad. “There’s been a big mistake.”
She never told me this story until I was fifteen when she had decided that there was a chance I may not end up tragically unattractive after all.
“Your nose was all the way on the other side of your face, lopped over like it was trying to scoot off your cheek and climb into your ear,” she said, showing me the pictures. “Your head had all these humps and rings around it. Kind of like Saturn but shaped awfully funny, plus you had all this black hair covering your body, and I just wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole. I’d never seen such an ugly and hairy baby, oh, but we loved you and just prayed you’d get prettier. With your ears being what they were.”
I didn’t say a word as she reached for my hand with her own and squeezed it. “You realize they were the exact size at birth they are right now? A full-grown set of sticky-out Farmer in the Dell ears on an infant. Lord have mercy you were a sight. I thought I’d given birth to a part chimp, and you had one ear that tried to migrate toward the nose and was sort of curling inward, you know, like how a sunflower will tilt its head and lean in toward the sun.”
I instinctively reached up to feel my features, hoping they had settled into their proper place after forty-four years of living.
“Thank the dear Lord they handed you over in that pretty blanket and showing the good side of your face, the side that had a nose on it. Plus, of course, they had the cap on you and must have worked on that ear to get it up under there so we wouldn’t have to see it curling toward your bent nose. Thank goodness the doctor said we could mold your face, so every night your sweet daddy would go to the crib and work on your nose and ears, kneading them like Play-Doh.”
This is exactly how the world began for me.
As for my sister, born two years later, she started out in life being hailed the most beautiful baby to EVER come into the world at Spartanburg General. She had the perfect head, not a mark on her.
When Mama went into labor with Sandy, she wore a beautiful aqua gown and robe set—like something Eva Gabor from Green Acres would wear—and gave birth to the most breathtaking baby girl anyone had ever seen. The doctors and nurses couldn’t take their eyes off this perfect specimen of brand-new human life.
“She is so angelic,” the nurse told Mama as she held her daughter in a pink teddy bear blanket. “Nothing like your first, is she?”
Mama didn’t know what to say. “You remember her?”
The nurse sort of blushed and stared at the floor. “Hard to forget her, but I hear she’s much better or I wouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Oh, yes, she’s gotten so much cuter since you saw her in here. Lots of the fur has rubbed off and her nose is starting to inch over more toward the center of her face, thanks to my husband’s handiwork. He’s a true sculptor, that man.”
The nurse had no manners. “What about those ears she had? Biggest things we’ve ever seen in this hospital. I am not supposed to tell you this. Shhh, our little secret, but we had some plaster and made molds of them because we were absolutely certain no one would believe it when Dr. Milner wrote it up for the American Journal of Abnormalities . We didn’t do photos, knowing you could have sued us. One of her ears was much larger, you know.”
Mama was getting mad and her pain meds were wearing off. “We figure her head will grow and everything will eventually balance out,” she snapped. “I measure them once a week to make sure they’re stabilized and not enlarging, and when we go out, until she gets more hair to cover them, I have handmade bonnets with flaps that do the job. She’s really a cutie-pie nowadays, so go on and give an enema or two and let me be unless you have more pain meds on you. My bottom is throbbing like it’s grown its own heart.”
“I’m sure your firstborn is now pretty as a picture,” the nurse said with a quivering voice. “Oh, but look at this little piece of heaven’s finest you have now. The good Lord sprinkled beauty dust all over her precious features. Those ears are flawless and so cute and tiny.”
Yes, it was true, my newborn sister’s ears lay flat against that lovely round head that needed neither forceps nor the hospital janitor’s Ultra Hoover to pull her 8-pound body from Mama, since I had seasoned her passageway with my brutal birth and donkey ears.
Sister Sandy stayed pretty for the whole week until Mama checked out of the hospital, the entire staff still marveling and cooing. The very next morning, during an afternoon feeding in our little bungalow near the duck-filled lake, Mama walked into the nursery and screamed. Baby Sandy’s genetically perfect ears had sprung from their resting position plastered against her head and shot out like two slices of bologna, huge and perpendicular to her skull. They also grew four inches apiece over the next three weeks, scaring everyone who saw them as they glowed red and were hot to the touch.
To this day we aren’t sure what caused our ear malfunctions, but, needless to say, Sandy had a plastic surgeon correct and beautify her pair. I left mine alone, targets for years of bullying and teasing.
We had no hope for turning out to be anything but crazy. Birth sets the stage, parts the curtains and gives a new human life its first audience. If I tried to pinpoint the exact age that any chance of turning out a regular kid was nipped in the bud, I’d have to say around four years old, when Mama and Daddy signed me up for Kiddie Ranch private kindergarten in Thomson, Georgia, a little Peyton Place town just outside of Augusta where the Masters Tournament is held each year and it meant something if you could get tickets so my daddy got on the list and always had them.
Here’s one big mystery: If your daddy can get tickets to the Masters, why isn’t his daughter asked to join the Junior League? Not that I care. Not that I’m still sore, mind you. Twenty years of therapy and I’m fine, you hear?
Throughout my entire life I’ve both loved and feared and tried daily to please my daddy. I think he was mystified by being the father of a nervous, jittery little child with tics and annoying behaviors that linger to this day.
David Sedaris, one of my author heroes, also suffers from OCD—Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—and tics. I read it in his book Naked that he licked things: lightbulbs, fixtures, furnishings, and he jerked his head around and rolled his eyeballs up into his skull.
My disorders were checking things a million times and peeing every three to five minutes. This is when the Kiddie Ranch teacher tattled on me and told Mama I tee-teed more than I breathed.
“We went in there with her forty-two times in a single day and, sure enough, I hear it trickling out plain as day,” the teacher said. “Where she’s getting this water I have no idea because all we give them is a Dixie Cup of Kool-Aid. She must be like a camel and store it all in her humps.”
The teacher smiled at her witty remarks, but Mama was all in a tizzy as any mother would be whose kid was a human PVC toilet pipe.
She carted me to a kidney doctor in Augusta, who saw my bare possum (vagina) and I died a thousand humiliated 4-year-old-girl deaths. He prescribed the teensy Valium I took every morning