The Thorn Necklace by Francesca Lia Block

Author:Francesca Lia Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

ON THE THIRD day, My Secret and I ventured into my bedroom.

“It won’t be that bad,” I said.

He remained quiet. He didn’t seem so sure. Later he’d tell me, “Closets are the worst.” But he didn’t want to say it in advance, frighten me from the task.

I dragged everything out; stacks of boxes covered the entire floor of my room, clothes submerged the bed. Bowie was blasting “live”: Reality Tour, making me brave, keeping us calm. My Secret doesn’t love clutter.

“As a kid my father made me clean out abandoned houses with him, haul away other people’s trash,” he said.

That can’t have been easy for a twelve-year-old boy. I recognized, even more, the value of this gift.

I sat on the floor with him next to me as I sorted through boxes of photographs. “You’re doing great, lover,” he said.

These photos are of the halcyon baby days when my marriage was intact, my children new and unscarred by the divorce to come. In one photo, I sit on the bed with my three-month-old and two-year-old in my arms. My face is glowing and peaceful, my breasts, in a tight camisole, full with milk; I never felt so beautiful, so fulfilled.

I kept almost all the pictures. But then I found some that a plastic surgeon took after he fixed my nose. It was round like my father’s to begin with and had been broken when I was six—my friend’s brother, who I thought was cute, ran into me head-on with a toy gun.

The doctor never really fixed the problem. He used cartilage from inside my nose to construct a squared-off tip unnatural to my face and Eastern European heritage. Eventually I had to have four more hours of surgery by two different doctors to try to correct the damaged interior and the uneven exterior.

In these pictures my nose still looks good. My face looks pretty, so ridiculously young. But I seem deered-in-the-headlights. The pain when they pulled out the packing in my nostrils seared worse than the natural childbirth I’d later endure.

“You should throw those away,” My Secret Man said. It was the only time he’d said this. I realized it was because he knew the story, he didn’t want me to keep something so clearly associated with pain.

At first I think my insecurities scared him; he wasn’t sure how they might wound us both. But he’d told me, “I understand now. You just need to be reassured. I think you should only spend time with people who reassure you. Doctors, friends.”

You, I think. The one who told me, that day I got so triggered by the comment about my beautiful mother: “I prefer your looks to hers.” It was all I needed.

I hesitated about throwing the pictures away but I did anyway, along with dilapidated shoeboxes and molting angel wings made of real feathers. Those pictures will be the only things I think of going into the trash to retrieve the next day. But I don’t.

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