A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Part 3

It was a Sunday night when the truth came to Lisa that attitudes were shifting from sympathy to apathy. She was in the bathroom alone, undertaking the tedious process of removing makeup from her jowl. It had been four months since the accident and she no longer expected to see beauty when she looked in the mirror. She expected to see a sagging cheek pulled grotesquely away from the right eye socket. She expected to see an absence of symmetry reflecting the absence of a working third cervical nerve.

She sagged elsewhere too. With a full schedule of doctor visits and a full complement of stinging stares from the pony-tailed, firm-bodies girls at the gym, exercise had become difficult. Her shoulders slumped. Her hair seemed to clump and drape like willow leaves in rain. Her mirrored ghost appeared as more of a puddle than a person — slack, and lifeless, stretching and distorting its reflection in a polluted medium with little radiating ripples marking the violence.

She had been to church that day. There were the usual hugs and well-wishes from people she had known for decades. But there was a difference in their approach, an ambivalence she barely noticed at the time but seemed impossible to ignore in front of the mirror.

They were distancing.

All the prayers and assurances for healing had gone silent, and now people weren't sure how to treat her, as she wasn't sure how she should be treated. As a pariah? As a project? As a charity case? A survivor? Was she to refuse to let it affect her? Refuse to acknowledge the damage and refuse to let others do so? That was noble but disingenuous. The truth was that it did affect her, all of her.

Was she to "own it" and address it? Come to it with a matter-of-fact acceptance that made it sound like she was talking about the weather? That appealed to her but, given that she was still crying over the ugliness every night, it hardly seemed possible.

She decided, or rather the face in the mirror decided and informed Lisa, that there would be no ignoring or owning. There would only be struggle; a dragging, tear-streaked siege of the ugliness. A prolonged campaign to get herself back in shape.