turn into polemics or badly disguised fables with the moral shouting at the reader from the final paragraph.
I hope and pray that I do not do that.
Rather, I like to think (and please don’t disabuse me of this notion!) that I write stories because I have a question. Not the answer, mind you, but just the question. The question at the core of this story is, Who owns the body? Is my body my own, to modify with tattoos and piercings? May I color my hair or shave it off, enlarge my breasts, or starve myself into bony submission?
And if the answers to all those questions is, Yes, you may, then at what point is society allowed to interfere with what I do? At what point do those decisions belong solely to me? When I am twenty-one or when I am twelve? May I make those sorts of decisions for my child, for religious or aesthetic reasons? Now we are on shakier ground, are we not? Do you immunize your child, straighten his teeth, correct a club foot, radiate his cancer, and circumcise him?
Or not?
Patsy sits on a bar stool at my breakfast counter. She is sipping a glass of soy milk through a straw. I glance at her, then look away at my rainforest cam on the wall screen behind her. My granddaughter had an incisor removed so that she could drink through the straw with her mouth closed. She claims it is more sanitary and less offensive to other people. I don’t know. It offends the hell out of her grandmother.
“So. SATs next week?” I ask her hopefully.
“Uh-huh,” she confirms, and I breathe a small sigh of relief. She had contemplated refusing to take them, on the grounds that any college who wanted to rate her on a single test score was not her kind of place anyway. She swings her feet, kicking the rungs of her stool. “I’m still debating Northwestern versus Peterson University.”
I try to recall something about Peterson, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. “Northwestern’s good,” I hedge. As I set a plate of cookies within her reach, I notice a bulge in the skin on her shoulder blade just above the fabric of her tank top. An irritated peace sign seems to be emblazoned on it. “What’s that? New tattoo?”
She glances over her shoulder at it, then shrugs. “No. Raised implant. They put a stainless steel piece under your skin. Works best when there’s bone backing it up. Mine didn’t come out very good. Grandma, you know I can’t eat those things. If the fat doesn’t clog up my heart, sugar will send me into a depression and I’ll kill myself.”
She nudges the plate away. I smile and take one myself. “I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’ve been eating chocolate chip cookies for years.”
“Yeah, I know. And Mom, too. Look at her.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?” I ask, nodding at her implant. I evade the topic of her mom. It is not that I expect my granddaughter to always get on with my daughter. It is that I don’t want to be wedged into the middle of it.
My gambit is successful. “This? No. A little slit in the skin, then they free the skin layer from the tissue underneath it, slide in the emblem, put in a couple of stitches. It healed in two days, and now it’s permanent. Besides, women have always been willing to suffer for beauty. Inject collagen into your lips. Get breast implants. Have your ribs removed to have a smaller waist.”
I give a mock shudder. “I never went in for those sorts of things. I think God meant us to live in our bodies the way they are.”
“Yeah, right.” She snorts skeptically and picks up a cookie crumb, then licks it off her finger. I catch a brief glimpse of her tongue stud. “You made Mom wear braces on her teeth for two years. She’s always telling me what a pain that was.”
“That was different. That was for health as much as for appearances.”
“Oh, let’s be honest, Gran.” Patsy leans forward on her elbow and fixes me with her best piercing glance. “You didn’t take her to an orthodontist because you were worried she couldn’t chew a steak. She told me the kids at school were calling her ‘Fang’.”
I wince at the memory of my twelve-year-old in tears. It had taken me an hour to get her to tell me why. Katie was never as forthcoming as her own daughter is. “Well, appearance was part of it. It was affecting her self- esteem. But straight teeth are important to lifelong health and—”
“Yeah, but the point it, it was plastic surgery. For the sake of how she looked. And it hurt her.”
I feel suddenly defensive. Patsy is going over all this as if it is a well-rehearsed argument. “Well, at least it’s more constructive than some of the ways you hurt yourself. Tattoos, body piercing, tooth removal. It worries me, frankly, that so many people can damage their bodies for the sake of a fad.”
“Hardly a fad, Gran. People have been doing it for thousands of years. It’s not just that it looks good, it makes a point about yourself. That you have the will to make yourself who you want to be. Even if it means a little pain.”
“Or a lot of infection.”
“Not with that new antibiotic. It kills everything.”
“That’s what worries me,” I mutter.
I take another cookie. Nothing betrays my amusement as Patsy absentmindedly takes one and dunks it in her milk. She slurps off a bite, then says with a full mouth, “I’ve been thinking about getting cut myself.”
“Cut?” The bottom drops out of my stomach. I’d seen it on the netnews. “Like a joint off your little fingers like that one group of kids did? To express solidarity with one another.” An almost worse thought finds me. “Not that facial scarification they do with the razor blades and ash?”
She laughs aloud and my anxiety eases. “No, Granma!” She hops off her stool and grabs her groin. “Cut! Here, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Circumcision. Everyone’s talking about it. Here.” While I am still gaping at her, she takes her net link from her collar and points it at my wall screen. My rainforest cam scene gives way to one of her favorite links. I cringe at what I see. Some net star in a glam pose has her legs spread. Larger than life, she fills my wall. Head thrown back, hair cascading over her shoulders, she is sharing with us her freshly healed female circumcision. Symmetrical and surgically precise are the cleanly healed cuts, but all I can see is the absence of the flesh that should be there. I turn away, sickened by the slick pink scars, but Patsy stares, fascinated. “Doesn’t it look cool? In the interview, she says she did it to get a role. She wanted to show the producer her absolute commitment to the project. But now she loves it. She says she feels cleaner, that she has cut a lot of animal urges out of her life. When she has sex now . . . here, I can just play the interview for you—”
“No, thanks,” I say faintly. I tap my master control, and the screen goes completely blank. After what I have just seen, I could not bear the beauty of the rainforest cam with the wet dripping leaves and the calling birds everywhere. I take a breath. “Patsy, you can’t be serious.”
She clips her link back onto her collar and pops back onto her stool. “You know I am, Granma. At least you aren’t going all meltdown like Mom did.”
“She knows you want to do this?” I can’t grasp any of it, not that some women do this voluntarily, not that Patsy wants to do it, not that Katie knows.
Patsy crunches down the rest of her cookie. “She knows I’m going to do it. Me and Ticia and Samantha. Mary Porter, too. We’ll be like a circumcision group, like some African tribes had. We’ve grown up together. The ceremony will be a bond between us the rest of our lives.”
“Ceremony.” I don’t know when I stood up. I sit back down. I press my knees together because they are shaking. Not to protect my own genitals.
“Of course. At the full moon. The midwife who does it has this wonderful setting; it’s an open field with these big old rocks sticking up out of it, and the river flowing by where you can hear it.”
“A midwife does this?”
“Well, she used to be a midwife. Now she says she only does circumcisions, that this is more symbolic and fulfilling to her than delivering babies. But she is medically trained. Everything will be sterilized, and she uses antibiotics and all that stuff. So it’s safe.”
I suppose I should be relieved they are not using broken glass or old razor blades. “I don’t get it,” I say at last. I peer at my granddaughter. “Is this some sort of religious thing?”
She bursts out laughing. “No!” she sputters at last. “Granma! You know I don’t go for that cult stuff. This is just about me taking control of my own life. Saying that sex doesn’t run me, that I won’t choose a man just because I’m horny for him, that I’m more than that.”
“You’re giving up sexual fulfillment for the rest of your life.” I state it flatly, wanting her to hear how
