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On Reflections and Flowers

By Rev. Brian Worley

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1.         The Girl Without a Face

“You know,” said Rivkah, “in the grand scheme of things, all you can say about a person is that they woke up, ran a few errands, and then took a nap.” A few glasses of wine were encouraging her to wax existential.

The Girl Without a Face was looking into her glass thoughtfully and picking at the hem of her skirt. She made a noncommittal sound.

“I mean, whether you’re a little old lady in a small town or Alexander the Great, it all boils down to the same thing, doesn’t it?” Rivkah gestured grandly with her glass, though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that she was still slumped back in the chaise lounge.

“Hm,” said the Girl Without a Face. She was thinking about her mother, who had died just less than a year previous. She may have looked up, toward Rivkah. “What about that saying, ‘In a hundred years, it won’t matter what kind of car you drove or how much money you had, but it will matter how you’ve raised your children.’ How’s that fit in?”

“Well, there is that,” said Rivkah. “Though, technically, I’d say raising children counts as ‘errands’.”

“Hm,” said the Girl Without a Face.

Her name was probably a misnomer, though it had been how she was known to the world. Perhaps her name had been Nancy, or Crystal, or Edith, or Jennifer, or any of a thousand other names. Whenever anyone mentioned her, the respondent would say, “Oh, the Girl Without a Face?”

 She could see, and hear, and smell, and speak, but no one ever seemed to know what she looked like. When she was born, the doctor thought there was some profound birth defect and was preparing to send her for emergency surgery when she cried from her tiny invisible mouth. Since then, people could talk about her body, or her hairstyle, or her clothing, but never her face. To say that she had no face did not mean she had pink skin and misshapen slits through which viewed crooked eyes. It was as though, to everyone who looked at her, there was a blind spot that occupied the place between her hairline and her chin. X-rays showed normal skeletal structure, and from behind, no one would know that she didn’t have a face.

Cameras were no help.

There were three people that the Girl Without a Face considered friends. The first was Rivkah Maccoby, with whom she drank wine (if it was evening) or cappuccinos (if it was earlier), and who she’d known since her second year of grad school. The second, Chairman Meow, was a cat whom she’d taken care of since her mother died. Narcissus, the third, had become a flower and had probably never existed at all.

The Girl’s social life, until she graduated high school, could be summed up with people whispering about her while she was still in earshot. When she was still very young, she realized that no one could tell if she was crying as long as she was very, very quiet.

By college, however, she had endured the worst of the taunts, excused as they were because “children will be children”. She had come out relatively unscarred, even if she had become something of a stoic. In college, she met people who, after an initial period of shock or confusion, were willing to accept her as she was.

Her life was still unusual, and though not all was bad, people tended to treat her like she was fragile or infirm. Even while the Girl was in graduate school, her mother would still call her, “just to make sure everything was all right,” as though still unconvinced that she wouldn’t fall victim to SIDS.

One day, after assuring her mother that she was feeling well and taking the multi-vitamin her mother had sent (although she wasn’t), she told her mother that she had met a boy.

“What’s he like?” her mother asked. Her mother hoped that the Taoists were right, and that the world was in balance, and that her daughter would meet some Boy without a Body to complement her daughter and show that the world was still a fair place. Though the Girl’s mother couldn’t quite place why, she always felt a little bit guilty after having these thoughts.

“Well, he’s smart, and funny, and nice. He plays the violin, and he’s studying pre-Med,” the Girl told her, sipping tea and looking out her kitchen window, as she’d seen her mother do so many times when she was a child. She was looking at the yellow flowers in her neighbor’s window. Even flowers have faces, she thought. “He’s taking me to an expensive Italian restaurant on Saturday.”

For the rest of the brief conversation, her mother tried to think of a polite way to ask, “Yes, but what does he look like?”

After her mother died, the Girl Without a Face inherited her mother’s house. Before she moved in, she walked through the house with the ghosts of her parents and the memories of her childhood, throwing out and donating to charity and selling in a yard sale that Rivkah helped watch.

She stayed the night there alone, and found that the bathroom sink in the master bedroom was stopped up, so that after she brushed her teeth, it took three hours before the drain emptied. It made her wonder why her mother hadn’t fixed it, and she realized that her mother’s life had largely become a mystery since she’d left for college. She knew her mother played bridge and gardened and worked for a few hours every week at a greenhouse, just to “get out”. They chatted on Fridays, and visited several times a year. They went to the big family Christmas dinner together where all her cousins already had children of their own, and she and her mother felt a little uncomfortable. The Girl Without a Face felt her greatest connection to her mother, in fact, when they were feeling uncomfortable together at family reunions. But after she’d left for school, she could no longer know or imagine what her mother did to fill up all the lonely hours of the day.

Still thinking about her mother, the Girl went to the grocery store, purchased a bottle of drain-opener, and came back to the house. She poured the drain-opener in the standing water, then stood and watched as it slithered to the bottom of the sink and down the drain like some kind of invisible, faceless beast.

2.         Rivkah Maccoby

Most people thought that Rivkah Maccoby was vain, because she looked at herself in the mirror at every opportunity that presented itself. She had long, straight black hair, olive skin, and a full face. She was tidy and well-groomed, and paid great attention to detail.

She wanted to get plastic surgery, but couldn’t decide which part of her body needed it most, and couldn’t justify changing one part of her body when it would just serve to make the rest of her body look even worse.

Despite assertions from her female friends, and being lusted for by numerous men, she wouldn’t be convinced that she didn’t have a nose that was too long, hips that were too wide, hair that was too limp, breasts that were too small, and fingers that were crooked. She made love half-dressed and always with the lights off, and she could never quite enjoy it. Her relationships were usually short, and the Girl Without a Face accused her of sabotaging them.

The Girl once told her “Some men like women with smaller breasts.”

To which Rivkah replied, “I saw a study that said men who like women with small breasts tend to be pedophiles.”

Rivkah spend hundreds of dollars on skin softeners and body enhancers, cosmetics and brushes, files and scrapers and all manner of portable torture devices that she used every morning before allowing anyone to see her.

When the Girl Without a Face saw Rivkah looking in the mirror, she indulged in a bit of black humor by imagining that Rivkah was checking to see if her own face was still there, to make sure facelessness wasn’t catching. The Girl Without a Face thought that if Rivkah’s aura of boundless, consummate insecurity expanded to the room she was in, the light bulbs would unscrew themselves.

3. Chairman Meow

“Look,” Rivkah said to the Girl. “Here comes your cat. He wants pizza, too.”

The Girl looked where Rivkah had pointed to see Chairman Meow creeping slowly toward them. “Give me a piece of crust,” she said. Rivkah tore off a piece and handed to the Girl, who held it out to Chairman Meow.

Chairman Meow was not a Communist. If the Girl Without a Face had a cat named Chairman Meow when she was still in high school, and any of the students had understood the pun of his namesake, the students would have used it as further ammunition against her. Chairman Meow was named “Tiger” when he belonged to the Girl’s mother. The Girl Without a Face thought that was a terrible name for a cat, and she inherited the cat the same year she was taking a course in the History of Modern Asia; thus was Tiger rechristened.

Chairman Meow walked to the Girl and, while staying as safe a distance as he could manage, gingerly smelled at the pizza crust in her hand. Then he backed up and began surveying the room. “We shouldn’t look at him,” Rivkah said. “Maybe he’ll eat the crust if you put it down and we turn the other way.” The Girl Without a Face looked into her glass of water, trying to see the cat out of the corner of her eye.

After her mother died, but before she could move into her mother’s house, the Girl Without a Face had to take Chairman Meow, née Tiger, to her apartment. For three weeks, Chairman Meow hid in the laundry room, behind the washer and dryer. The Girl put the litterbox next to the dryer, and food and water in the doorway. Every day, she would find the food gone and the litterbox soiled. She would clean the litterbox, refill the food and water dishes, and peek behind the washer, where she’d see a ball of gray and white fluff with glowing eyes staring at her in abject terror.

After a moment, Rivkah and the Girl heard a shuffling and turned to find the cat dragging away most of an entire pizza. They jumped in surprise, Chairman Meow dropped the pizza and ran away, and they laughed and laughed. The next day, the Girl found Chairman Meow sunning himself in the middle of the living room floor.

Chairman Meow was not a Communist. He wanted, so to speak, a bigger piece of the pie.

The Girl Without a Face had always been partial to the cat because sometimes, as the cat was cleaning his paws, she got the impression that he was looking her in the eye.

4.         Narcissus

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