The Procedure

As Clara lined her lips a final time before going into the office, she noticed a faint diagonal scratch across her car mirror. It was small, miniscule to the average eye, but still Clara frowned at the unsatisfying line that crossed her reflection. She made a mental note to get it fixed after paying for her procedure as she walked into the office.

Clara’s job at Parthe & Associates Law was a vastly uninteresting one in which she spent forty hours a week proofreading the legal briefs that were to be sent to companies receiving a lawsuit. She was underpaid and overqualified, but at the very least, her job never stressed her out, and being at the keyboard all day gave her an excuse to shop online every so often.

Beyond the frilly facade of the front desk, the office was equally uninteresting, with rows of cubicles emitting a click-clack-tap noise and printers spewing out pages of Excel spreadsheets. The break room was full of men dropping in for their morning coffee, while most of the women were confined to their desks with the zero-calorie nine-dollar nutrition drinks that they’d picked up on the way to work.

After taking her coffee, Clara went to the bathroom to re-apply her lip gloss. All of the stalls were full, her coworkers’ tiny red heels peeking out from the bottom. The girls in the office–effortlessly beautiful, no doubt a result of their procedures–could afford to take a bathroom break simply to pee; for Clara, bathroom breaks were a designated time to re-apply any makeup that had melted from the office radiator or been licked off of coffee-coated lips throughout the day.

When all of the women walked out of the bathroom together, Clara knew she was only half as beautiful as they were, but she still had the dignity to do her makeup in the bathroom. She couldn’t let others passing by her desk know that she knew she was ugly, because, ugly or beautiful, you are meant to appear oblivious to how you look, taking any compliment or criticism with keen surprise like you hadn’t pondered the exact same thing yourself.

Clara played an audiobook in her headphones as she spent the next few hours mindlessly click-clack-tapping and printing until her supervisor paced past her cubicle to let her know that it was time for her lunch break. Clara opened the fridge and retrieved her sack lunch nestled among the bento boxes of greek yogurt and protein bars, pretending not to notice a group of women already congregating at the table.

“Clara! Sit with us?” Jessica, another legal editor, invited her. The other girls nodded in agreement, beckoning her over with their plaster smiles.

“Oh! I would love to, but I actually have a Zoom meeting scheduled for my lunch break today,” Clara explained.

“No big deal. Next time, for sure, though!” Jessica smiled and went back to crunching on her baby carrots. Why did they always eat healthy, Clara wondered, when they’d already undergone the procedure and could eat whatever they wanted?

Clara logged onto a Zoom meeting with an attorney that she had strategically scheduled for her lunch break. It’s not that the women were unkind; Clara was included in their groupchat, she was invited to sit with them at lunch, and once Jessica even invited her to cocktails with them before the firm’s gala. She knew she was lucky to have such friendly coworkers to begin with, especially since making friends organically was getting more difficult the older she got. The other women just understood each other on a level that Clara couldn’t relate to, like something about the procedure brought them together in a joint beauty ritual of some kind. She accepted their invitation every so often, but usually found herself feeling more alone than when she actually sat alone, so Clara typically scheduled any errands or meetings during her lunch break.

As the paralegal droned on about quarterly goals, Clara selected her webcam and enlarged it, conscious of every overstretched pore and eyebrow hair out of line, reminding herself that she only needed to wait a few hours for the solution. That afternoon, she would attend the consultation for her procedure.

Two hours after closing her laptop and zipping her briefcase, Clara found herself in Dr. Zimmerman’s waiting room, anxiously flipping through the beauty magazines on the table. The magazine highlighted some of the most dramatic procedures that had been performed, transforming ordinary women into supermodels. As they opened the door and called her name, a woman strode out on gazelle legs, long and thin and glowing with a beauty that Clara knew had to be freshly from the procedure.

The nurse took her height and weight, and Clara grimaced at the number on the scale before reminding herself that, in a few short days, it would never be the same again. “Clara? Hello, I’m Doctor Zimmerman.” He entered the room and shook her hand with an almost cryptic grip. “I’m going to be helping you undergo your procedure.”

“Thank you. It’s nice to meet you.” Clara was bashful, as if she was meeting her fairy godmother or prince charming rather than someone who would soon be cutting her body open.

“I’m determined to make you look and feel your absolute best, but first, we need to see what we’re working with. To begin, we’re going to have you complete a full-body scan with collagen-sensing technology that will allow us to see which areas need to be reconstructed, and how to go about doing it.”

Clara nodded along, lost in the details and the notion of the procedure itself. All that mattered to her was the results. Dr Zimmerman handed her a hospital gown and left the room as she underdressed. She took off the same dress she’d been wearing since work, which was meant to say “corporate hottie” but ended up just looking frumpy on her.

As Clara unhooked her bra and slid her underwear down her leg, she examined her body in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. In the sterile lighting, her skin paled and allowed her freckles, stretch marks, and rolls to show. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. Her cheeks drooped and gathered at her laugh lines. Her skin sagged at the breasts. Every day she’d spent in the sun, every lemon-olive oil pasta she’d ordered at a fancy restaurant, every laugh she’d had with a friend, was evident on her body. It became a museum of her own experience, a badge of honor for all she’d seen and been through. Clara could see the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the parts of herself that the scan would surely identify. Perhaps the mirror was meant to look this way, to prepare you for the hurtful imperfections that would be highlighted in the scan. Clara felt clever, almost outsmarting this logic: no body scan could be more brutal than she already was to herself.

The scan was an ordinary MRI, and though Clara didn’t understand the technology behind it, she was pleased that nothing stung, burned, or shocked her in the process, and in twenty short minutes, she was back in the examination room when Doctor Zimmerman came in with her results.

“Okay! Scan went well?” he asked. Clara nodded, and he clapped his hands before she had an opportunity to say anything. “Great! So here’s what we’re working with: you have some really beautiful eyes. Healthy, even. We’re going to leave those alone. Same with the nose–your medical records indicate that you’ve already had work done on it?”

“Yes.” When Clara had received her first big paycheck after graduating college, she’d flocked to the medical spa for rhinoplasty. Her nose, bulbous and crooked and too-long, would be an insecurity of the past. After two short weeks of recovery, she had the ski-slope button nose of her dreams, the first step in a ten-year transformative facial recreation that would conclude with her procedure.

“Perfect. We’re going to leave those two alone. However…”

Her hair color. Her hair length. Her teeth. Her lips. Her eyebrows. Her weight. Her body proportions. Her calves. Her stomach. Doctor Zimmerman described these as a simple nip-and-tuck procedure that she would undergo this Friday. He explained the various injections–Botox, collagen, hormones, steroids–that she would receive, as well as certain more intensive surgeries, like permanent liposuction and bone re-alignment. When Clara’s eyes widened, Doctor Zimmerman assured her that it would be no big deal. “After all, we’ve seen far worse.”

Worse? Did that mean she was bad to begin with? Worse than what he was used to?

“And the recovery?”

“With the anesthesia we administer, you’ll sleep right through the recovery process. By the time you wake up, you’ll be good as new, ready to go,” he said cheerfully. Doctor Zimmerman led Clara out of the room and into the lobby to schedule her procedure. This would be his 679th procedure since the procedure had been approved by the WHO, and he was very confident in his ability to perform it well, he assured her.

“We have you scheduled for Friday morning at 10AM. Will that work?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Alrighty, then, we just need you to run the card you’ll be using to pay and sign on this line.”

Clara opened her wallet, then looked around the room. The fresh-faced women waiting to be taken in for their procedure follow-ups. Doctor Zimmerman’s eager smile. The years she’d spent hating her face, her body, as a child and teenager. The crack in her car mirror.

It was irreversible, Clara knew, but worth it nonetheless.

She handed the receptionist her card and picked up the pen.

As the week carried on, Clara felt less alone at work knowing that the next time she came into the office, she would share this beauty secret with the other women. She smiled at them in the bathroom mirror as she did her lip gloss. She ate her lunch at their table, chiming in with small-talk comments when it seemed appropriate. She skipped the coffee, allowing the excitement of her big day carry her through the week. By the time Thursday afternoon came, she even texted the work groupchat See you Monday!! followed by a string of emojis. Several of the women hearted her message.

When Clara woke up the morning of her procedure, her juvenile love for the world had returned to her. Her cereal seemed sweeter. The trees seemed greener on the drive to the doctor. The models in the waiting room magazines seemed to look more and more like her, and she was eager to get her new face. Once she could rest easily knowing she looked how she wanted to, she could work how she wanted to, too. The procedure was one step closer to her dream life.

Clara lay on a scratchy hospital bed as Doctor Zimmerman wheeled her to the operating room. The anesthesia would kick in any minute now, he told her as he wheeled her into what looked like a photobooth. This machine was the first step of the procedure, he explained. It would scan her body and make a blueprint of what needed to be operated on.

He explained. Clara listened. She let her head sink deeper and deeper into the pillow, which suddenly felt like an expensive silk pillowcase and beckoned her to sleep. The machine began buzzing, and a bright light that reminded her of a camera flashed. Clara shut her eyes, the image of doctors hovering above her burned into her retinas for the next several seconds. Another flash. A hot fizz on her skin. Another flash.

The machine felt like it was taking photos of the deepest parts of her as she drifted into a surgical sleep. One flash and Clara was on the playground in second grade. The girls in her class were drawing with sidewalk chalk, and Samantha Higgins had drawn Clara’s body as a circle while the rest of the girls were drawn with thin triangle-shaped bodies.

Another flash, Clara was playing baseball on her elementary school team. Carson Blake pushed his ears forward and held them in place with his hat, said, “look, I’m Clara!” Everybody laughed.

Another flash. Clara was in high school, and her mother had dropped off fast food for her for lunch as a reward for getting an A+ on her history paper. Ava McGill laughed, said that only Clara would choose food as a reward for a perfect grade.

Another flash. Clara was in college, flirting with a guy at a party. He was a business major, he told her. “I’m an English major,” she replied. “What are you going to do with that?” he said, and Clara shrugged. “Man, your nose is bigger than your brain is,” he remarked, and playfully punched her on the shoulder and walked off.

Another flash. Clara was at work, sitting at a table with her coworkers as they gabbed over their simple little lives, with husbands that took care of them and paid for their procedures and told them they were beautiful. All that Clara had to add was that she liked sleeping on the left side of the bed, too.

Another flash and Clara was awake, surrounded by purple on all sides. Curtains, she realized, turning to the IV in her arm and steady beep coming from the machine beside her. Of course! Her procedure. It all came back to her–the scan, the flashes, Doctor Zimmerman.

“Hello?” she called.

Immediately, Doctor Zimmerman emerged from behind the curtains. “Clara? You–Clara!” He exclaimed, interrupting himself. His face lit up like it was reflecting the light of an angel. “Martha, come look at this,” he summoned his nurse, and for a moment, Clara was afraid her surgery had been botched, like she grew a third nostril or something. But when she saw the nurse’s face, when she saw a woman’s reaction to the beauty before her, she beamed and rushed to stand, eager to see her new face.

“Your IV!” Doctor Zimmerman reminded her and he rushed to put a hand on her impaled forearm. “Careful,” he looked into her eyes in an almost hopeful way, like being this close to something so ethereal might transmit some of her beauty back to him.

Martha handed her a mirror, and it suddenly occurred to Clara that this was the longest she’d gone without seeing herself in her entire life.

She nearly gasped at the sight of her own face. Her cheekbones were sharp enough to cut diamonds, high enough to reach the heavens. Her hairline had been shifted forward to create the perfect forehead ratio. Her hair, a soft teddy-color instead of its previous mousy brown, rolled to her shoulders in soft waves of the finest silk. Her complexion, though, was what made Clara gasp; it was as if they had injected gold beneath her skin, the way she glowed an aura of beauty that no natural force could ever create; this was beauty at the hand of man, at the expense of money, and Clara had captured it.

As Clara opened her car mirror to examine her reflection a final time before going into work the following Monday, she was reminded of the faint diagonal scratch across her mirror. It was small, miniscule to the average eye, and her new face, its striking radiance and symmetry, easily outshined the scratched mirror. Now that she had completed her procedure, she could spend her next paycheck on getting it repaired. But as she looked at the bridge of her nose, the scratch re-emerged, deeper this time. She leaned closer, examining her nose further. Had that bump always been there?