The young man didn’t move. He sipped his tea.
“I’m sitting here?” said the man. He was a big man too. He took up most of the table. There were plenty of other free tables in the café. The young man trembled inside, but he kept his hand steady. He steadied his symmetrical face.
“You a homo or something?” asked the man.
The son didn’t respond. But he could see the man digesting the face, the perfect face, and the man lifted the table gently, and the scone slid down into the boy’s lap, and the tea wobbled, and the boy just put the scone back on the now slanted table and kept his eyes on the scrawny facial hair of the man.
The man, Marty, was tired. He did not want to fight. He had done that so many times before. He was tired of it, and he was taking classes now, and they told him to acknowledge how he was really hurt inside, not angry at all. He read his paper high over his head and stopped looking at the young man. So it was a homo. So he was picked up today at the café by a homo. This was new for him. He decided to do what that lady said, and try to find the humor in it, and when he did he really did find it funny, and behind his paper, he started to laugh.
Well, the young man was stuck. He’d wanted a hit, a real hit, a hit that would complicate his face. Finally he put a hand on the man’s newspaper, folding it down. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I just want to get hit.” Marty laughed and laughed some more. His arm tattoo read Skull Keeper, and had an illustration of bones wrapped in ribbons. “You want to get hit?” he said. “Too bad. I’m done with that shit.”
“Please?” said the young man, and Marty said no, but the tight businessman eavesdropping at the next table with an iced mocha blend said he’d do it, sure, a hit?
“Right on the cheek,” said the young man, and he asked Marty to oversee, because now he trusted Marty far more than the tight businessman, whose smile was far too pleased at the idea. “Let’s all go out back? Please?” he asked Marty, who folded up his paper and agreed, because it was the modern world, and he was old but open-minded, and being the protector was a better role for him anyway, maybe a role to consider, in fact, for the future. And the tight businessman looked so tightly delighted, and the boy said, “Cheek, please,” but he did not know the tight businessman had poor centering perception, and had never, in fact, hit another man, although he’d wanted to, his whole life, ever since he had been teased every day on the walk to school by that bastard boy Adam Vermouth, who had told him in a squawking voice that he was useless, useless, useless. The tight businessman played with his hands as fists all the time at the office, but when put in the actual situation, aiming for the cheek, what he got instead was the nose, and he slammed the boy straight on and broke the bone, blood pouring out of his nostrils. “Okay?” said Marty, holding his arms out flat like a referee. “Are we done?” “That’s good,” gasped the boy, reeling with pain, and the tight businessman was just warming up, was dancing on his toes, ready to pummel this handsome young man into the brick of the café’s back wall, but Marty clamped one soft big paw on the businessman’s shoulder and said, “You’re done now, son.” The tight businessman relaxed under Marty’s hand, and the young man, too, relaxed under Marty’s voice, and later, Marty did decide that it had been a far better day for him, being the fight mediator, the protective bulldog, and when he told the lady he had figured something out, tears broke into his eyes, like eggs cracking, bright and fresh. She was proud of him. He was such a good man inside, underneath all the butt kicking and bravado.
The young man, bleeding all over the wall, waved off offers to go to the hospital or the doctor. “No, thank you, thank you,” he said, stumbling inside, using up a pile of brown recycled napkins, then holding the café’s one pint of coffee ice cream to his nose, and the businessman kept saying, “It will heal poorly,” and the young man said that was the point. And he shook the hand of the tight businessman, who was feeling cheated, as if he’d had a taste of nectar he could hardly even feel in his mouth. The young man waved at Marty, who was at the pay phone telling about his revelation, and he headed home. There, he tended to his nose for days, hoping and hoping, and he went over to his mother’s on the day he was ready to really look at it straight on, ready to remove the Band-Aids making a little pattern all over his face. She was in the kitchen, eating jelly beans off the counter—eating them even when they turned into tiny tractors and then back again—and she helped him peel each Band-Aid off, one at a time, and then they both went to the bathroom mirror. She put a hand on his shoulder. They stared at his face for a long, long time.
What had happened of course is that it had healed symmetrically. The nose was severely broken and bumpy, but the bump was a band over the middle of his nose. It had complicated the vertical planes of his face, but horizontally he still matched himself exactly. The young man’s eyes filled, and he felt the despair rushing into his throat, but his mother, wiping his cheeks clear of the leftover crusted blood, breath smelling of jelly beans, listened to the story and laughed, and said, “Son, my sweet, sweet son, it’s just that you are a butterfly. That’s just what you are. I don’t think you can do anything about it.”
Finally, he was eating a hamburger one afternoon and, licking the ketchup off the knife, he cut open the side of his lip. It was a small mark, but it needed stitches, and when they took out the stitches he had a small raised area above the left side of his lip which provided the desperately needed window. He met a woman—Sherrie-Marla—in a week. True, about a month or two later, she, while kissing him passionately, bit the other side, creating an identical mark. She dabbed ice on his lip, apologizing, and he dreaded it, dreaded her change, his eyes filling with tears in advance of her leaving, but the fact was, Sherrie-Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn’t flinch. His face was him to her now; it was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he’d needed to alter.
His mother came over for brunch with her Sunday suitor, and when she saw Sherrie-Marla take her son’s hand and kiss it on the thumb, a circle completed inside her.
In bed, after the brunch, Sherrie-Marla turned to him with clear eyes, touching his lip wound with her fingertips, her head propped on her open hand.
“You have movie star lips now,” Sherrie-Marla told him, smiling, as he leaned in to kiss her, tenderly, her kisses very, very gentle on the sore area, just pillows in the air between them.
Her own face was wildly asymmetrical. One eye much higher than the other. A nostril tilted. The smile lopsided. The front right tooth chipped. The dented chin. The larger right breast. The slightly gnarled foot. It had caused her her own share of problems. We are all, generally, symmetricaclass="underline" ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all. It opens its arms, in its unevenness, and he, the butterfly, flew inside.
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When we came home from the movie that night, my sister went into the bathroom and then called out to our mother, asking if she’d bought another toothpaste as a hint.
I know I have major cavities, she said. But do we really need two?
Two what? asked my mother.
Two toothpastes, said Hannah.
My mother took off her jacket for the first time in hours, and peered in the bathroom, where, next to the grungy blue cup that holds the toothbrushes, there were now two full toothpastes.