Tiny Dancer (24 page)

Dear Santa Clause,

Dear Santa please make my wishes come true, that my Mom gets well soon and my family be well and blessed. Please help me get well soon so I can go back to my country. Please God give Rebecca and Peter four children 2 boys and 2 girls.

Love,

Zubaida

* * *

On February 6th of 2003, Zubaida steeled herself to go back under the knife, marking her return to the operating table after a ten week break for physical and psychological recovery.

The time between had mostly been occupied by what she came to know as the American holiday season, where people seemed eager to make her understand that a whole variety of religious faiths coexisted in American society, and that most of them celebrated one holy day or another during that season, and that there didn’t seem to be any problem about that, in this place.

Zubaida grasped the concept before they finished the explanation, but it all seemed to her like the latest news from the land of the Others and didn’t really matter much to her plans for the future. She knew, without even thinking about it, that life would never be anything like that back at home.

It was still very early in the morning when Dr. Charles Neal took her deep under anesthesia in preparation for a series of major operations to the muscle and skin of her chest and both sides of her torso. During the day’s set of procedures, Peter Grossman and the burn team were going to excise burn scar contractions on the left and right side of her chest, then reconstruct the destroyed flesh of her chest wall by splitting off a section of her back muscle, the
latissimus dorsi,
and pulling it underneath the flesh of her armpit area and then back out onto the chest wall area, giving her a set of working chest muscles.

Hours later, with that long and difficult procedure finished, Dr. Peter turned his attention to her right lower eyelid, where he did some fine tuning to the scar damage, relieving a slight downward pull on the lower eye area. This left her wrapped in bandages around the right side of her face and all around her torso.

When Zubaida came out of anesthesia and felt herself being rolled into the recovery room, she could tell that she was once again completely swathed in the familiar “mummy” wrappings. They had her trapped.

As far as Dr. Peter was concerned, there was no need for Zubaida to know how much of the wrapping was actually required by the surgery itself and how much was just added on in hopes of getting her through the first couple of days without having her pulling out the new stitches by trying to dance.

* * *

The days following that February 6th series of operations made for one of Zubaida’s toughest recoveries. The difficulties began in the physical realm but landed with a thud in her emotional life. At first, her bound-up body felt trapped again, almost the same way it once felt when the ropes of scar tissue bound her. Even after Dr. Peter removed the bandages—it never occurred to her to call him “Dad” at the hospital—the flashes of pain and soreness from the large carved areas of her torso made almost any movement painful.

It was as if one of the superstitious old crones back in her village had laid a curse on her that forced the missing pain back into her awareness and stole away the new joy of living that had begun to form inside of her. In the weeks after that day’s operations, long after the need for drugs was gone and she could go back to walking and feeding herself and even going back to school, the surprise bursts of hot knife pain continued to shoot through her at random moments throughout the day. The cruel, unseen force was trying to train her, through pain, not to move at all. If allowed to go farther, it would eventually force her to hold herself so perfectly still and quiet that she would vanish and become nothing.

The feeling of confinement was abhorrent to her. It didn’t help her to remind herself that the burn pain had been worse. Dr. Peter kept telling her that the pain would go away pretty soon, but when her own body taunted her so unpredictably, it was hard to listen to his words. Even though she now understood most of what was said to her in English, those words added up to nonsense. They felt like sand scrubbed across her raw skin. At such times, it didn’t matter that everybody wanted to help her and that they were kind to her. It didn’t matter that Rebecca and Peter tried to make her feel loved. With the pain nipping at her and her captive spirit silently raging against renewed imprisonment, she couldn’t feel anybody’s love at all.

What she needed was to swat away the invisible scorpions that stung her when she stood, sat, bent, reached, stretched, walked, or stumbled. Instead she was tossed back into that dark dungeon where she had no control over anything, not the people around her, not her own body. They could tell her over and over that her loss of motion was temporary, but words don’t speak with the force of pain. With the eyes of a ten year old, she could no longer see an end to this journey. All she knew for certain was that after this latest set of operations, something as natural as the shortest little dance was an invitation to a stabbing.

More than any other time since the flames consumed her, the sum total of conflicts inside and all around her were enough to drive her completely through the looking glass—just like the “Alice in Wonderland” character in one of the American books at school.

On the other side of the mirror, there was her father, giving her orders that she must learn everything she possibly could, even as he vanished into nothing more than a grin carried over the satellite phone. She felt the need to please him, but she also knew that most of what she was learning in America was forbidden in her country, anyway. The Taliban enforcers were said to have fallen, but what was to stop them from coming back? And either way, what would really change for Zubaida, as far as her future prospects back in the village of Farah?

She understood that the girls in her American school were all being raised to be
good for something
in a land of many choices, but she also knew she faced the prospect of being trained to be
good for something
and then sent back to a country that Zubaida had never known as being anything other than a prison for its women. The same knowledge that was beginning to open her imagination to countless possibilities would sit unused inside of her, merely adding to the torment of her life as a woman who must serve.

She was through the looking glass, located somewhere between the possibilities of America and the expectations of her homeland. In that strange place, they were going to give her back her face so she could return home and spend the rest of her life hiding it.

It was strange read books which she knew women back at home were not allowed to have, stranger still to think of going back home to books she would not be permitted to possess even though she was rapidly learning to read them in English and her native
Dari
.

Rebecca and Peter had made sure to fill her with all sorts of unbelievable experiences that opened her eyes to untold amazements—which she was probably never going to see again and which people back home weren’t likely to believe or to even comprehend if she tried to tell them, anyway. She was left to wonder what she could bring back home to her father and her family about any of that?

Everything was good/bad, up/down, black/white. Here in America, the difference between right and wrong seemed to simply mean “don’t hurt anybody else.” In the Afghanistan that she had always known, the same issues of right and wrong could get you killed in a hundred different ways.

And there was her father, calling to her on the satellite phone and telling her that everyone in the family was counting on her to come back and teach them all a bunch of skills that Zubaida knew could get all of them thrown in prison. And that was presented to her as a
good thing
.

She needed to regain some sense of control over her life, or at least over her immediate situation, and some escape from the terrible pressure constricting her from all directions. But since Zubaida’s lifetime of experience outweighed the relatively small measure of free days that she had spent in America, her coping mechanisms mostly consisted of those her mother and her aunts had modeled for her over the years. They were the ways of the women who must serve, and their message for Zubaida was that her only source of power was to raise the veil on her emotions and give no one a handhold on her inner life.

That much, at least, she could do.

* * *

Mahnaz, the nanny hired by the Grossmans, sat alone with Rebecca speaking in urgent tones while Zubaida played by herself off in another room. Mahnaz told her story to Rebecca in halting terms, as if she feared that Rebecca would refuse to accept what she had to tell her. But she had to let it out anyway. There was too much to hold back.

According to Mahnaz, even though Zubaida’s teacher Kerrie Benson was reporting that Zubaida continued to make a real effort to fit in and to get along at school, she appeared to be saving up her most hostile urges to inflict upon Mahnaz after classes each day. A pattern of difficult behavior had developed that Mahnaz was having to endure nearly every time she picked Zubaida up from school. On this day, things had taken a grim step backward.

She told of how they were riding home on the highway that afternoon, when Zubaida began to tease her by joking that she was going to jump out of the car and kill herself. She faked opening the door several times, ignoring Mahnaz when she insisted that she stop.

Mahnaz had grown up in Iran before immigrating to the United States, so she knew the tendency of many Middle Eastern women to employ melodrama for the benefit of others. At first, she didn’t react to the threats other than to question why Zubaida would even mention such a thing as suicide, when so many people were working to restore her life to her. Zubaida ignored the appeal to her reason and again pretended to open the car door as if she was about to jump. She laughed when Mahnaz shouted in fear.

“They will blame you, Mahnaz!” Zubaida laughed. “They will say it’s your fault!”

Mahnaz tried to describe the way that Zubaida’s face looked to her at that moment, her voice, her attitude—it was hard to get across. She said that the momentary change in Zubaida was so dramatic that it seemed as if she was looking at a girl who was possessed.

Rebecca thanked her and confided that she was also seeing more episodes of troubling behavior, although this was a distressing new low point. She shivered at the thought of a child toying with her fears by threatening to commit suicide in such a way that it would frame her for the act.

She and Peter had already discussed their options in reacting to Zubaida’s behavioral changes; now this news would force them into action. She thanked Mahnaz for telling her. But the problem went deeper. Mahnaz no longer felt safe with Zubaida. She wasn’t afraid of being directly hurt, but she feared that that even a child’s game about suicide could have unpredictable results. Mahnaz knew that no one would blame her if Zubaida actually went through with an act of self-destruction, but she also knew that she wouldn’t be able to forgive herself for not stopping it. Something in what she was seeing in Zubaida’s demeanor made it impossible to dismiss such threats as overstatements. Even the smallest chance that there would be some merit to them was too much for her to bear.

She gave her notice and drove home for the last time.

Rebecca and Peter sat up late that night looking for answers. The situation with Mahnaz came as no surprise to them. In recent days Zubaida had been subject to such manic fits of behavior that she would repeatedly run up behind one of them and shout in their ears, then run off laughing. At the slightest angry tone of voice in response to her actions, she could fall into a deep funk that might last the rest of the day. With Peter, she alternated between hot and cold, calling him “Dad” and wanting to sit on his lap at one moment, while refusing to acknowledge him when he walked in the door after work, in another.

Sometimes there was an apparent cause to her outbursts, usually an ordinary passing nuisance. Other times, there was no sign of any external reason for a radical shift in her behavior. She could be equally fierce whether the cause was obvious or not.

Peter felt sure that some of the manic behavior and the rapid mood swings that they were seeing in Zubaida could be the result of a form of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. He spoke to Matt Young, the burn unit’s pediatrician, and together they decided to try her on a long-acting form of Ritalin called Concerta. If he could get her brain chemistry balanced out it would be a lot easier to evaluate what they were actually dealing with, as far as her long-term state of mind and her overall mental health.

Individuals who have taken Ritalin report that their subjective experience of the drug was very subtle. They were not particularly conscious of feeling different under its effects; rather, the vast improvements in their behavior, both for themselves and for those around them, came as a result of feeling that the ongoing din of distraction which ordinarily blasts inside of them all day long has suddenly been quieted.

The downward pull of despair that has kept them so manic in their attempts to resist its power simply dissipates. The new powers of concentration and focus experienced by the patient seem to come as a result of finally being provided with a mental background quiet enough to let them concentrate.