(no subject)

[levertovfan]

A bit cliched, and semi-autobiographical (about my family), but I rather like it....

Once upon a time, in a big Eastern city at the end of a great war, a young businessman met a young German émigré in an ice cream parlor. He liked the way her skirt moved around her legs, the lisping sound of her German accent as it punctuated her flawless English, and the sad look she sometimes got in her eyes when she turned away from him. Six months later, they were married. His business grew, and they moved to a spacious house in a leafy suburb of the big Eastern city. He wanted a son, but his wife bore him seven daughters in close succession and retired the darkened room where all the books in German and Russian and Yiddish were sequestered. Meanwhile, he grew more prosperous, and paid for nannies to raise his seven daughters.

He watched his daughters grow up, as they played at the club and accrued honors at the school, tutored them to mouth Hebrew, and sat through seven bat mitzvahs at the reform temple that all but his wife attended. He wanted badly to belong the beautiful club that was closer to home, where most of the girls’ schoolmates’ families belonged, but they didn’t accept Jews. He saw his daughters casting envious glances that way too, when they passed by. He decided to give them each a gift.

His first daughter arrived at the surgeon’s upset. She had gotten into Radcliffe but her boyfriend had found out just that day that he had been denied by Harvard. He cursed Jewish quotas and pleaded with her to follow him to the state university. When the surgery was proposed, she was hesitant—but on closer examination she realized the advantages of shedding the arch in her nose, and consented. The surgeon punched her nose in with his fist. “More efficient,” he explained. Then he sat her down, quieted her crying with anesthesia, and went to work. She started at Radcliffe in the fall after discarding her high school boyfriend along with her old nose. She married a Yale graduate, an ostensible Jew, has two children, and when her husband went into politics, she followed and became a prominent socialite in Washington.

After her eldest sister’s experience, the second daughter knew what her father’s gift would entail. She acquiesced readily to the surgery. Although she had heard of her sister’s experience, she nevertheless began screaming when the surgeon’s fist struck her face. The surgeon sedated her and the screams ceased. When she woke up, gazed wonderingly at her reflection. The entire summer before starting Vassar, her sisters teased her for staring at each passing mirror. She married a son of wealth, a Unitarian. The couple moved to a house in a wealthy, leafy suburb outside Boston similar to the one in which she grew up, where the local country club, which only excluded most Jews, embraced the couple and their three children.

If she had had a snub nose, the third daughter would have gratefully followed her elder sisters to the surgeon’s, but she did not need it. She already had a snub nose that the other girls from her confirmation class eyed enviously. She attended Smith, and became involved with a Christian group there. She married an Evangelical student from Amherst, moved to his hometown in Georgia, and raised four children. On one of the family’s rare visits to the third daughter’s relatives, her mother was disgusted although not surprised to learn that her grandchildren do not know that they are Jewish.

The fourth daughter knew that her hooked nose guaranteed her a place under the surgeon’s knife and she was determined, out of a stubbornness that surprised her, to resist. When her day at the surgeon’s office came, she refused. Her father asked her how she could possibly refuse the gift that he was so generous to bestow upon her. She didn’t want it, she screamed back. He threatened not to pay her tuition at Barnard. He ultimately signed a check for fall semester, but she had only been in New York for a few months when she decided to transfer to Stern College, the women’s branch of Yeshiva University. She arranged for scholarships that would cover the whole price of tuition before telling her parents. As she had predicted, her father disinherited her. She didn’t come home summers after that. She converted to Orthodox Judaism, married a rabbi, and had seven children. When her parents come to visit their grandchildren, even her mother feels alienated from their customs.

Seeing the ruckus her sister caused, the fifth daughter submitted gracefully to her father and the surgeon. As soon as the surgeon’s fist impacted her nose, she fainted straight away. But the surgeon’s knife was infected. She died two nights later. Her father was irate—at the surgeon, at the referral service, at God. Her sisters rose as a body and screamed at their father for forcing the surgery upon their dead sister. The mother wept and recited the schma. The fifth sister’s acceptance letter from Mount Holyoke sat unopened on the counter.

After the fifth daughter’s experience, the father would not force his sixth daughter, the brightest and his favorite, to get the surgery. But he was irked when she loudly insisted how beautiful all the sisters were before their transformation. The father agreed that all his daughters are beautiful, even that they were beautiful to him before their transformations under the surgeon’s knife. But he did not understand why his sixth daughter must be so very loud in her instance and every summer when she came home from school he needled her about her decision. She went to Bryn Mawr and qualified for higher academic honors than any of her sisters, but she dropped out during her senior year to live on a kibbutz in Israel. She had several relationships, but she always felt that her primary obligation was to the kibbutz family.

The youngest daughter was indifferent to the wishes of her family, but she saw no reason not to accept her family inheritance and attend Wellesley. Her father did not have the heart to insist, and so she did not undergo the surgery that her father offered. She graduated with a science major, unlike the rest of her sisters, and unlike the rest of her sisters, went on to grad school. She moved to Seattle. She liked speed, and travel, and the feel of water droplets whipping against her face. She remained childless, and had affairs with men she met bicycling along cliffs on remote parts of the coast. One day she was on her bicycle, and a car door opened directly in her path before she could swerve away, lacerating her face and hands and crushing her small, arched nose. The hospital estimated that their patient would regain consciousness in six months, but if any plastic surgery was to be successful, it had to be done now. The seventh daughter’s insurance plan could not cover the price of complete reconstruction. Since she lacked an obvious next of kin, the hospital called her five remaining sisters. They flew in from the East Coast and from Israel and gathered at her bedside.

The first daughter said that repairing the face to its original form made sense, but while the surgeons were in there, wouldn’t it make sense to stage some—improvements?

The second daughter agreed, and said that most of the money should be devoted to these improvements.

The third daughter disapproved of their improvements, and said that repairing the face to its original form should be the first priority.

The fourth daughter suggested that they should pay for their sister to be stitched up as much as possible, and that they should leave the decision up to their sister when she finally woke up.

The sixth daughter argued that their sister most prized her hands, so that she could continue to go bicycling, and that they should use the money to give her the most thorough reconstruction of her hands possible.

And so by a majority, it was decided that the money would be used to repair their sister’s nose and face. For a model, they selected a picture of a nose that resembled her old nose, except that it shaved off the arch. The sisters departed for their planes home. But when the surgeons went to operate on the seventh daughter, swarms of doves burst out of her lacerated face, leaving behind only a deflated skin. One swarm of doves chased after the first daughter’s plane and flew into the ignition. The plane crashed, killing everyone aboard. Three more swarms of doves did the same to the second, third, and fourth daughter. And when the sixth daughter looked out the window of her planes, she saw a swarm of doves swooping and cawing in celebration.
The End