Megan Lindholm - Cut

A word of warning: There are scenes in this story that may be disturbing to some.

Patsy sits on a bar-stool at my breakfast counter. She is sipping a glass of soy milk through a straw. I glance at her, then look away at my rainforestcam on the wallscreen behind her. My granddaughter had an incisor removed so that she could drink through the straw with her mouth closed. She claims it is more sanitary and less offensive to other people. I dont know about "other people." It offends the hell out of her grandmother.

"So. SATs next week?" I ask her hopefully.

"Uh-huh," she confirms and I breathe a small sigh of relief. She had contemplated refusing to take them, on the grounds that any college who wanted to rate her on a single test score was not her kind of place anyway. She swings her feet, kicking the rungs of her stool. "Im still debating Northwestern versus Peterson University."

I try to recall something about Peterson, but I dont think Ive ever heard of it. "Northwesterns good," I hedge. As I set a plate of cookies within her reach, I notice a bulge in the skin on her shoulder blade just above the fabric of her tank top. An irritated peace sign seems to be emblazoned on it. "Whats that? New tattoo?"

She glances over her shoulder at it, then shrugs. "No. Raised implant. They put a stainless steel piece under your skin. Works best when theres bone backing it up. Mine didnt come out very good. Grandma, you know I cant eat those things. If the fat doesnt clog up my heart, the sugar will send me into a depression and Ill kill myself."

She nudges the plate of cookies away. I smile and take one myself. "I think thats a bit of an exaggeration. Ive been eating chocolate chip cookies for years."

"Yeah, I know. And Mom, too. Look at her."

"Doesnt it hurt?" I ask, nodding at her implant. I evade the topic of her mom. It is not that I expect my granddaughter to always get along with my daughter. It is that I dont want to be wedged into the middle of it. I tell myself that this is not cowardice. By standing apart from their mother-daughter friction, I keep the lines of communication open between Patsy and myself.

My gambit is successful. "This?" She tosses her head at her implanted peace sign. "No. A little slit in the skin, then they free the skin layer from the tissue underneath it, slide in the emblem, put in a couple of stitches. It healed in two days, and now its permanent. Besides. Women have always been willing to suffer for beauty. Inject collagen into your lips. Get breast implants. Have your ribs removed to have a smaller waist."

I give a mock shudder. "I never went in for those sorts of things. I think God meant us to live in our bodies the way they are."

"Yeah, right." She snorts skeptically, and picks up a cookie crumb, then licks it off her finger. I catch a brief glimpse of her tongue stud. "You made Mom wear braces on her teeth for two years. Shes always telling me what a pain that was. "

"That was different. That was for health as much as for appearances."

"Oh, lets be honest, Gran." Patsy leans forward on her elbow and fixes me with her best piercing glance. "You didnt take her to an orthodontist because you were worried she couldnt chew a steak. She told me the kids at school were calling her Fang."

I wince at the memory of my twelve-year-old in tears. It had taken me an hour to get her to tell me why. Katie was never as forthcoming with me as her own daughter is. Perhaps its a part of the mother-daughter friction heritage. "Well, appearance was part of it. It was affecting her self-esteem. But straight teeth are important to lifelong health and-"

"Yeah, but the point is, it was plastic surgery. For the sake of how she looked. And it hurt her. But you still made her do it. For dental hygiene. So she would look like the other kids."

I feel suddenly defensive. Patsy is going over all this as if it is a well-rehearsed argument. "Well, at least its more constructive than some of the ways you hurt yourself," I challenge her. "Tattoos, body piercing, tooth removal. Its almost like youre punishing yourself for something. It worries me, frankly, that so many people can damage their bodies for the sake of a fad."

"Hardly a fad, Gran. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Its not some weird self-punishment. Its not just that it looks good, it makes a point about yourself. That you have the will to make yourself who you want to be. Even if it means a little pain." She pokes speculatively at the heaped cookies.

"Or a lot of infection."

"Not with that new antibiotic. It kills everything."

"Thats what worries me," I mutter.

I take another cookie. Nothing betrays my amusement as Patsy absent-mindedly takes one and dunks it in her milk. She slurps off a bite, then says with a full mouth, "Im getting cut myself."

"Cut?" The bottom drops out of my stomach. Id seen it on the netnews. "Like a joint off one of your little fingers like those BaseChristian kids did? To seal their promise to never do drugs?" An almost worse thought finds me. "Not that facial scarification they do with the razor blades and ash?"

She laughs aloud and my anxiety eases. "No, Granma!" She hops off her stool and grabs her groin. "Cut! Here, you know."

"No, I dont know." How can I suddenly be so afraid of what I dont know?

"Circumcision. Everyones talking about it. Here." While I am still gaping at her, she takes her net link from her collar and points it at my wallscreen. My rainforestcam scene gives way to one of her favorite links. I cringe at what I see. Some net star in a glam pose has her legs spread. Larger than life, she fills my wall. Head thrown back, hair cascading over her shoulders, she is sharing with us her freshly healed female circumcision. Symmetrical and surgically precise are the cleanly healed cuts. It is a pharaonoic circumcision, and the shaved seamed pudenda remind me obscenely of the stitched seam down an old-fashioned football. I blink and force myself to look again, but all I can see is the absence of the flesh that should be there. I turn away, sickened, but Patsy stares, fascinated. "Doesnt it look cool? In the interview, she says she did it to get a role. She wanted to show the producer her absolute commitment to the project. But now she loves it. She says she feels cleaner, that she has cut a lot of animal urges out of her life. When she has sex now . . .here, I can just play the interview for you-"

"No, thanks," I say faintly. I tap my master control and the screen goes completely blank. After what I have just seen, I could not bear the beauty of the rainforestcam with the wet, dripping leaves and the calling birds everywhere. I take a breath. "Patsy, you cant be serious."

She clips her link back onto her collar and pops back onto her stool. "You know I am, Granma. I came over here to tell you about it. At least you arent having a meltdown like Mom did."

"She knows you want to do this?" I cant grasp any of it, not that some women do this voluntarily, not that Patsy wants to do it, not that Katie knows.

Patsy crunches down the rest of her cookie. "She knows Im going to do it. Me and Ticia and Samantha. Mary Porter, too. Well be like a circumcision group, like some African tribes had. Weve grown up together. The ceremony will be a bond between us the rest of our lives."

"Ceremony." I dont know when I stood up. I sit back down. I press my knees together because they are shaking. Not to protect my own genitals.

"Of course. At the full moon tonight. The midwife who does it has this wonderful setting, its an open field with these big old rocks sticking up out of it, and the river flowing by where you can hear it."

"A midwife does this?"

"Well, she used to be a midwife. Now she says she only does circumcisions, that this is more symbolic and fulfilling to her than delivering babies. But she is medically trained. Everything will be sterilized, and she uses antibiotics and all that stuff. So its safe."