Rosalyn's Face

	osalyn lost her face in the shower.
	It peeled off under the hot water and washed away down the drain.

	(From the shower it flowed into the sewer . . .
. . . and from the sewer into the ocean.

A fish swam by and swallowed it. And so not only was Rosalyn's face now under water, but in that very same water that has passed forever under the bridge.)

Rosalyn neither panicked nor screamed and knew enough not to reach up and dig into whatever was left. She hadn't been particularly attached to her face to start. Now that she was finally fully detached, she rather doubted she was going to miss it.

(The fish didn't care much for it, either. It sucked in Rosalyn's face with a gulp of sewer effluent but immediately spit it out. The face sank to the ocean floor and awoke a sleeping clam.)

Rosalyn stepped out of her afternoon shower and dried herself off, well, except for her face or at least where her face used to be. She turned away from the mirror and was thankful that nothing hurt.

(The clam sensed a touch against its shell and wondered if it was about to be eaten by a moray eel. An undersea current grabbed Rosalyn's face and dragged it away. Relieved, the clam drifted back into its peaceful state of oblivion.)

Rosalyn was not one to fret over what could not be influenced. Besides, her recently-departed face had not been her friend. She'd washed it and coddled it and sometimes even talked to it, but despite all the pampering it had failed her. Each month for many years now, its wrinkles had worsened and made Rosalyn feel ugly. So cry about its loss — why? Her old face was now happy in the heaven for spent faces and not likely to be raised from the dead.

(In fact, Rosalyn's face was not that dead. Many of its cells remained alive, moisturized and refreshed by a return to a more primordial environment, to the world of cold salt-water and micro-nutrients, to a world free of irritating ultraviolet and harsh potions.)

Rosalyn smeared a thick layer of ointment over her missing veneer, slipped on her nightgown, downed two sleeping pills, and went to bed early.

(The one undersea current crossed the path of another and in the turbulence lost its hold. Yet again, Rosalyn's face sank towards the bottom, this time becoming entangled in a tall vine of seaweed. A boat rowed up over the bed of kelp. Suddenly, the seaweed was yanked up towards the sky. Rosalyn's face went along for the ride.)

Despite the pills, Rosalyn slept poorly. She dreamed that she was a young girl of seven instead of a woman pushing sixty. She was back in her childhood home, in the family orchard picking fruit. She bit into a ripe plum (or was it a poisoned apple?) and its juice squirted onto her hand and face.
Everything began to spoil. The plum became a prune, while her hand shriveled into a bag of bones.Terrified by the thought of what must be happening to her face, she had no way to visualize it.

She awoke from her dream with a start but then the drugs sent her right back into it. This time Rosalyn saw her face all too clearly.

(Rosalyn's real face, on the other hand, was being loaded onto a small fishing boat along with several strands of golden seaweed. The young man assigned to thin out the overgrown kelp bed noticed something red and filmy hanging from the vegetation. Since the seaweed was destined only for a chemical recycling plant, he left the slime attached and quickly hauled it in.)

Rosalyn awoke the next morning and for a minute forgot she'd lost her face. When the realization hit, she found herself worrying less about no facial expression and more about what her friends and family were going to think. Her father had once advised her that you could always judge a person by his or her face, that a person's experiences and character could be found right there on the surface just waiting to be read like a opened book.

Of course, modern people no longer read books or faces and for very good reason. With makeup and plastic surgery, most faces said precious little about what lurked below (and most books were just as shallow). Rosalyn's own face had become like that, too, but as the powders and creams needed to mask it had grown thicker, they themselves had become blatant signifiers of precisly what they had been intended to conceal.

(Rosalyn's given face spent the night soaking inside of a ceramic vat full of golden kelp and brine. It missed the ocean. There were no fish or clams or interesting currents or even fisherman. Just lots of smelly seaweed.)

Rosalyn enjoyed her morning coffee as she read the newspaper. Her eyes, nose, and mouth remained relatively intact and functional, but the areas of missing skin had begun to itch. Her husband, who hadn't yet seen his faceless wife, had only himself to thank for her present condition.

Just three weeks ago, he'd called her a "two-faced hag", which had caused her to question just how bad she'd come to look. Her marriage seemed at a crossroads, and there were only three ways to respond to his insult:
She could either sit back and lose face (no good), clench her fists and face off (no good), or do both but in a different way.

(For Rosalyn's bygone face, however, things went from beyond no good to far worse. It felt itself being put through the wringer, torn and grated, shredded and blended, then spooned into an urn, buried inside of a bottle, and FedExed, or so it felt, straight to hell. Being used this way as a pawn in a domestic struggle—the insult seemed worse than the pain.)

Rosalyn had been worried ahead of time but now felt pleasantly surprised. Going faceless felt strangely liberating. A mask was unnecessary; foundation, heavy rouge, hair draped over the forehead, and a pair of oversized sunglasses seemed quite enough. Faceless, she thought, must be a lot like being nameless, like being indistinguishable and almost invisible. Since her face of days past was now perched somewhere in heaven, why not relax, sit back, and enjoy her newfound anonymity?

(Well, well, thought Rosalyn's missing face, if this is what its former owner considered an appropriate final reward for an organ that had given its very all to blunt the brunt of the sun, wind, and time's assault, well . . . maybe this spoiled lady needed to rethink her priorities.)

Later that afternoon, Rosalyn dressed up and drove her Mercedes downtown. The streets were congested because of new construction converting rundown rowhouses to pricey lofts. Thoughts of 'slum clearance' and 'urban renewal' shot through her mind and made her (temporarily) sentimental over her dearly departed face. She parked outside a door marked 'Private', opened it, and walked into what was off-limits except to those few with sufficient disposable income.

Two other ladies were sitting quietly and reading fashion magazines. Neither lady had a face, and so Rosalyn felt right at home. She picked up an issue of Vogue and envisioned herself on a future cover.

(Rosalyn's ex-face felt like a sardine packed in mustard. For decades, it had moved easily and at will. Whether Rosalyn had smiled or talked or squinted or kissed, her face had been the instrument. But this . . . this is what you got after retirement? 'Stir-crazy' didn't begin to describe the agony.)

Both of the other women were now gone and so Rosalyn would be next. She thought back to Manhattan Beach and of her home along The Strand. She'd purchased it five years ago at an embarrassingly obscene price. It was fifty-eight years old and falling apart, but refurbishing and upgrading had not been her intent.

The house's façade had been beyond damage control or even salvage. She'd bought it as a tear-down, paid dearly for the privilege to raze it and then rebuilt from the ashes. And while she now lived in a mansion with an ocean-view to die for, the place where she really lived, she'd realized only three weeks before, was inside her body, the body of a "hag" with a face needing much more than routine maintenance.

(Rosalyn's vanished face detected the slightest of movements and grew hopeful that it might be exhumed. Suddenly it felt itself being thrown around like crazy.)

A young lady with a face escorted Rosalyn into a small room, asked her to take a seat, but seemed reluctant to look her in the eyes. On one wall hung a framed poster of a sliced slab of skin with its different layers labeled in medical techno-speak. On the other wall was rack of brochures, each decorated by a face designed to sell a dream.

Which of those faces pertained to her she didn't know or care to know. It was too late. She'd chosen to go 'deep' almost a week ago, and now her God-given face hung in some imaginary dreary gallery of dear departed flesh. Rosalyn felt her stomach turn and glanced away.

(The jostling went on and on and on like it was never going to stop. Why, thought Rosalyn's onetime happy face, hadn't it been content to lie immobile and enjoy its very hard-earned rest? What if this shaking went on forever, like a coffin in a never-ending earthquake?)

A man in white walked in, slipped on a rubber glove before he touched her, and then cautioned Rosalyn against picking at the gray "scabs" and pinkish "goop." She felt herself growing faint, but then he toned down his overly-descriptive language and assured her she was making progress.

As she departed, he handed her a small (but expensive) jar on which his name had been imprinted in ornate gold letters. He told her that there was nothing fresher in the world, that his proprietary mixture was compounded daily from only the finest and purest of ingredients. "Once the brand new fresh skin appears," he said, "rub this on three times a day."

But Rosalyn was almost sure that she'd detected the sound of concern in the man's voice, and wondered if by 'once' he had, in fact, meant only 'if'. For a moment, she yearned to hunt down what had once been an important part of her, resuscitate and reattach, then tell her big-mouthed husband to go to hell.

(Although as much as Rosalyn fantasized, her abandoned face was not about to stage a second coming, at least not as her one-piece custom sheathe with its perfectly-sized holes for eyes, nose, and mouth. It couldn't, or at least it couldn't in the way she might imagine. But while it had been beaten and cooked and was being held captive inside a cramped cell of sludge, its spirit was still very much intact. The physical damage was all its owner's doing, and her unappreciated ex-face made a solemn vow: if ever it found a way to get back onto her — oh, my, my, was it ever going to get back at her!)

Rosalyn was no stranger to 'cosmeceuticals'. 'Hope in a jar' — her bathroom cabinets were chocked full of them, and now she had another. They claimed to rejuvenate, but they always promised so much more than they delivered. Still, Rosalyn dipped two fingers into the gel and applied it gingerly to the site of her onetime face. The only thing she realistically hoped for was that the chemicals in it wouldn't burn.

(The light felt almost blinding, but minus eyes, there was no way to blink. Of course, the avoidance reaction was purely instinctual, a knee jerk conditioned many years ago.)

To Rosalyn's surprise, the gel felt unbelievably soothing, as if it jived perfectly with her personal chemistry, as if it had been formulated for her and her alone, as if Tinkerbell had just flown over, waived her glittering wand, and coated her face in magic fairy dust.

She held up the jar and squinted to read the tiny print without her glasses. 'Active ingredient: extract of California golden kelp' and nothing more. How absolutely amazing!

[

lthough, as only you and I know, it indeed contained a little something more . . .

]

Rosalyn shut her eyes and for the first time felt a warm glow radiating outward from her cheeks. Face-II was finally emerging. With help from her jar of liquid wonder, she just knew she was going to look glorious.