February 2008 Winners and Judge

You read in Mechanics of Popular Psychology Today that when people employ the second person point of view it is often to create the psychic distance necessary to explore difficult terrain, traumatic experiences. The article also said that dark humor played a similar role, when appropriately used. You agree, in theory.

Although you’ve considered going to therapy (due to the enduring psychological effects of the complete hysterectomy), the mere thought of baring your soul to a stranger, even a licensed one, immobilizes you. Not to mention having to admit that the surgery you underwent three years ago still defines your present tense.

You cannot complain: your husband Frank is benign and you survived the uterine cancer. In your recovery, you expected to find some hobby or activity that would occupy your time. You had always enjoyed reading, at least until you saw the title of the most recent addition to the New York Bestseller’s list: Fallopian Utopian.

Instead of reading and in lieu of therapy, you consume a significant amount of white wine. Roaming from room to room in the still of your house, you sip Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough New Zealand—a more distant land you cannot imagine.

On the day of your diagnosis (what you most commonly refer to as D-day), Frank is the one who weeps openly in the doctor’s office; as if it’s his ovaries, uterus et al that have to come out, his reproductive organs that are rife with disease and running amok.

It takes two weeks after the cancerous verdict for you to summon the courage to review the information packet on your upcoming surgery. The term Hysterectomy strikes you as odd. Ectomy you understand as the removal part but its Hyster prefix is more elusive. You come to decide that it must be short for Hysterical—the doctors will remove your hysterical organs. But are they hysterical in the frantic sense, or in a side-splittingly funny way? You cannot remember the last time you felt either. There’s a riot in progress down below, this much you know.

After the surgery, Frank takes a month off from work to nurse you back to health. His office regularly sends exquisite floral arrangements and gourmet fruit baskets to your house. Frank bears these gifts into your sick room with a certain amount of pomp, and some circumstance too. You know you should laugh, but can’t.

Instead, you lie on the bed, only comforted when the bright and lively flowers droop, dry up and fall to the floor; a smile flits across your lips as the glossy fruit turns brown, sprouting mold before your very eyes. You refuse to allow Frank to remove the gift baskets from the room you share. The sweet smell of death clings to the cloth wallpaper and you wrap yourself up in its musk.

At first, your family and friends come to call. They gingerly sit on the edge of your rutted bed and tell stories about women who make complete recoveries, women who move on after these kinds of things. It is during one of these mercilessly buoyant accounts that you recklessly pull down the comforter and expose your wound to your well-wishing friend: scary black threads crisscross a red-raw slice hedging your pubic stubble. You assume the train track effect is convincing from all sides.

You become less prone to displays of this sort as the weeks pass, as you inevitably settle into the situation. You nod absently while your visitors tell their heartfelt, yet prepared stories. They return to their cars enthusiastically and head for the highway, as far away from you as they can get. You cannot. So stay.

Your stomach, no longer propped up by what you thought were permanent residents of the lower level (turns out they were terrible tenants, befouling the entire building), falls slack and useless. Frank turns his attention to your other senses: he entices you into hot baths, adding healing oils and scented bubbles to the water. He massages your back, neck and temples, attempting to bring feeling back into your flesh. Your husband’s fervent attentions appear a tad hysterical to you. But then again, you are sick (in every imaginable respect).

Staring down there as you soak in the tub, at the site of such drastic absence, you ponder the reorganization of your internal organs.

“Will there be a hostile takeover,” you ask Frank.

“At the office?” He returns absently, pausing on his way to retrieve the large box of Epsom salts from the medicine cabinet.

You say: “Not at yours, in mine.” Pointing to the area just above your flaming red scar, you hope to emphasize your meaning.

“You just need time,” he replies, solemnly shaking the box and regarding the cascade of flakes.

“But does Time need me?”

Your unsettling queries have been offered up to the Great God Time before, as matters that only He can tell. Staring night after night at the blinking blue light of your digital alarm clock, you find Him exceedingly tight-lipped, if not an absolute prude.

Your udder hysterectomy (you consider this play on the word “utter” the best thing to come out of all this), forces you into a strict hormone replacement regime: each morning you begin with coffee and a pill, for lunch you take another two with food, and every night in bed you slip a capsule under your tongue.

When Frank starts talking adoption and other options, you begin to forget. It is around this same time that he nervously reaches across the fluffy duvet and lays his warm hand on your breast. You do not move at first, cannot for the life of you recall the proper response. Had you done it before? This seemingly unfamiliar act. Foreign bodies. Yours far more than his.

Only when your husband’s hand withdraws does its faint echo remind you of all you’re trying to forget: the absolute delight you once took in the playland of the flesh, feverish afternoon embraces that left you weak-kneed and panting, nay, begging for more bent over the pedestal sink, the impromptu evening picnics on the scratchy living room rug, some camembert, candied pecans and oaky chardonnay on hand, the effortless banter and profound debates that enchanted you until dawn crept unwittingly up, a shiver sweeping along your spine when you’d wake to find he’d left some delightful little gift for you on the nightstand.

The day after his tentative stab at intimacy, you throw the hormone pills into the trash compactor and move yourself into the spare bedroom. Spare. Exactly, you think. When you tell him what you’ve come to, he stands there. Frankly, he stares.

“Only Time can tell,” you say, by the way, being as cheeky as you can, leaning into an awkward pose with a hand on your hip.

“Why are you doing this?”

“It’s called Hysterecovery; deal with it.” Walking away, you know this is probably the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said and deserves the kind of laugh that causes a stitch, but you can’t, not yet.

It isn’t long before a coarse white hair sprouts from your chin. You do not cut it off—it tells the story of depleted female hormones bereft of the organs that once produced them. The hysterical organs that made you a woman provided monthly reminders of your sex; dripping bloody clots of liverous tissue, paradoxical messages written in red.

You cannot recall why you didn’t have children while you could, but now that you can’t, their impossible lives loom over you. Their insubstantial hands urge you into the wine cellar, compel you to drink until your head spins in oxymoronic imagery: Barren motherhood, diseased affection, teeming emptiness.

Sometimes you are shocked at how you arrived at this place, more often not. The complications are ultimately uncomplicated. You are pleased that you never give voice the truly cutting words or shout the foul language that still rises from the pit of your gut. You finally stop blaming Frank for what you cannot do. You in your room. Him in his.

Until.

You are sitting calmly in the corner booth of the Mandarin House, awaiting the pineapple pieces and fortune cookie that complete your weekly shopping routine. The spiciness of the General Tsao’s chicken is soothed by the sweetness of the marinated fruit. Your waiter, upon arriving with a small dessert plate, informs you that in gratitude for your steadfast patronage they have included a Chinese delicacy, the litchi, as a small token of their esteem.

Your eyes rest some moments on the novel arrangement. In the center of the plate, a delicate mound of familiar yellow cubes. At either side of this nucleus, sit the flesh-like protuberances that must be the litchi, which you have to assume because you’ve never seen them before. These two oblong sacks are ringed in pink where their insides appear to have been removed. A fortune cookie nestles at the base of this assembly, its ends pointing down. It looks like a frown when not considered in relation to the other tenants of the plate, those sitting just above. When seen as part of the whole, the fortune cookie looks like the spread-eagle legs leading to the female reproductive system by way of a crotch with a cookie crunch, pineapple uterus and squishy litchi ovaries on top, exposed.

You lurch from the booth and out the glass doors, gasping for air. Your unmoored stomach heaves twice and propels its lunch onto the pitch of the parking lot. A mushroom cloud of sour steam billows into the cold atmosphere as you tentatively raise your head. There stands a mother, clutching her inquisitive five-year-old son to her side, regarding you with fear, possibly loathing.

You run. Down the single-lane road, past berry-bearing shrubs, through barbed thickets flanking the golf course; its rolling knolls and manicured hills beckon you in. Barren yet fertile grounds persist in the bitter November wind, the heaving landscape masked by the dwindling sun. A flood of kinship rises up from the austere space below your belt and forces you down onto your knees. You lean forward, ever closer, in communion with the hardened earth. Hot tears pour over the meniscus of your lids and stream down your cheeks. You turn your face and press a burning ear against the icy ground to hear some sound, to feel a pulse other than your own thrashing rhythms. You listen.

Until you cannot remain out in the cold any more.

While removing your coat in the hallway and shoving it into the over-crowded closet, you hear a small snapping sound. You fumble in the nearest pocket and draw out a broken fortune cookie, its paper message peeking out. It must be from some previous lunch—there is no way you took the one you were served today. Images of eviscerated fruit threaten to unhinge your still reedy composure.

You pour yourself a glass of wine and find it helps. A second is quick to follow, warms you up. It isn’t long before you discover yourself faltering outside Frank’s bedroom door, cookie crumbs falling from in between your clenched fingers. Tiptoeing inside, you make your way to his un-made bed, the one you used to share. The blue glow of the digital clock illuminates a trembling hand. Time is telling You.

Opening your fist over the wicker nightstand, you release the crumpled sliver of paper from the fragments of its cookie house. It could be an important message, possibly a life-altering communiqué. The Chinese are very wise, they say. You lean in, un-wrinkle it and read: If a smile is an umbrella, then laughter saves the drowning soul.

The giggle rises slowly from the pit of your gut, gaining speed and gathering meaning on its way up; you fall onto the bed in a fit of salvation laughter. When you catch your breath, you step out of your clothing and slip under Frank’s covers. You bury your face in the pillows, inhaling a scent once so familiar to you.

Settling deeper into the generous bedding and tucking the feather comforter around your tingling flesh, you listen to the sounds of your house: The rhythmic tick-tick of the grandfather clock, the subterranean purr of an ancient boiler coming through the wood floor, a hushed trickle from the leaky bathroom faucet. In the midst of all this, you hear something else, something more. You are quite pleased when you are able to distinguish it from all the others: the unmistakable beating of your very own hysterical heart.