Read Me By Hannah Clague
W
hen I was young, I made myself a retainer out of spearmint-flavored Orbit gum. The inside of me couldn’t yet be read on the outside, so I pressed the wet, sticky glob to my bottom teeth, using the underside of my tongue to mold it into the shape of my crooked, under-bitten smile. I let it sit there, imagining the sugar-free substance hardening into the glittery plastic I’d seen in other kids’ mouths. I was never able to tell they had bad teeth until they showed up to school with sparkling underbites. No one knew something was wrong until we could see it; nothing seemed imperfect until classmates were crowded around them, eagerly watching them pop the hard plastic free with their tongues then click it back down again, over and over. The other kids also gathered around me, sometimes. When I came back to school after my daily smorgasbord of doctor’s appointments, my classmates peered at me curiously from their squeaky plastic desk chairs until—upon encouragement from the ever-empathetic Mrs. Bradley—they rushed toward me with arms open, smushing me into a Hannah Sandwich. I squirmed, and they let go easily. They never knew quite where I’d been or why they were hugging me—other than Mrs. Bradley’s warmly nonnegotiable urging—and their squeezes were a little halfhearted. As I wiggled free, I longed to be able to open my mouth and show them some glistening new orthodontia as if to say, “Here it is! Here’s the problem.” I wanted to come back baring a toothy surprise instead of nothing. I wanted them to look at me and know me; I wanted whatever secret sickness was hiding inside my body to be written on the outside of it. One evening when my mom was working late, I crept across her squeaky bedroom floorboards and stole her nighttime bite guard case off the bedside table. (“No, Mom, I dunno— maybe the puppy got it and chewed it all up or—something?”) I placed my precious gummy creation gingerly inside and smuggled it into my school desk, wedging it safely between the pencil case and the book of Everyday Math HomeLinks I never completed. After lunch, I carefully pried it from the case, stuck it securely against my teeth, and paraded around Mrs. Bradley’s third grade, proudly convincing my friends that, this time, I’d been to visit the orthodontist. My best friend Helen peered inside my mouth. “Cool,” she said. “Does it hurt?” Emboldened, I snuck into the little closet of a bathroom that was attached to our classroom and leaned over the childsized toilet to peer at my reflection, a xanthous image that was barely visible in the one bulb’s musty yellow light. My face was pasty, pale, and all one color; it was not like Helen’s: dark, defined, and alive. I looked like nothing. The thing the doctors were trying to find looked like nothing. I opened my mouth wide, watching my tongue pace back and forth along the gum stuck there. I had a story to show my classmates when I got back from Mott Children’s Hospital. It wasn’t real, but I could touch it—I could hold it in my hands. They could see it; it was a reason for them to make a Hannah Sandwich out of me.
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I wanted my disease to be visible on my body—to be readable. When it wasn’t, I settled for the fake correction of my overbite. I was slightly shocked that Helen had fallen for it, and not completely convinced that she had. *** “Hey, what’s that there?” Cassie reached out, her fingers almost skimming the freshly healed, raised red line on my leg as I jerked hastily away. I scrunched up on the far side of the couch, blood rushing to color my ears, and turned only my mouth back toward her. I took a deep breath and spit it out: “Uh. No—nothing.” Of course, my babysitter already knew exactly where I’d been that past weekend. She already knew my mom and I had taken a little diagnostic road trip to the Cleveland Clinic. She already knew that I’d returned without the little sliver of quadricep the doctors had taken. Cassie had personally handed me my absence note that morning, reminding me to take it straight to my fourth-grade teacher when I got to school. But in that moment, I didn’t want her to see my scar. I understood that if anyone saw it, they’d know something was wrong with me. They’d know the doctors had cut into me in an attempt to find it. Now that my covert illness had been found, it had changed—I wanted it to stay hidden. It made me imperfect and I was ashamed of it; I did not want it to be seen. I did not want to be a Hannah Sandwich. I did not want anyone to be able to read the sickness on my skin. I stood up, pulled my terrycloth shorts back down securely over my thighs, and hurried off to find my sister and her toy chemistry set, leaving Cassie alone on the couch and cartoons blaring blandly from the TV. *** On my back on the musty, mottled carpet, I gaze up at the pipes crisscrossing the ceiling of my mom’s basement as I count repetitions. One, two; shoulder blades lift higher. Nine, ten, forehead to knees. With each crunch, I will my stretch marks to sink into me, begging my stomach to absorb its faults as though it had never torn in the first place. I’m only twenty; I shouldn’t already be marred. Twenty, twenty-one, keep breathing. I know that biology doesn’t work like that: even if you shrink, scars don’t go away. They will belie your healthiness always. But I imagine that if my stomach were flatter, more concave, maybe the shadow of my rib cage would hide its ignominious imperfections from the light. Thirty-nine, forty, keep going. I want people to be able to read my body and know me. I am afraid what they’ll find written there. I work hard to erase the ugly part of my story from my skin. Fifty. Other side. One. *** I’m on a first date, curled up cross-legged on the narrow booth of Ashley’s Bar. My freshly-minted, horizontal driver’s license smiles at his I.D. lying next to it in the middle of the table. We’ve just compared them, pressing the two cards close together to see whether Maryland’s crab or Michigan’s
