Free In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler Page B

hand and bald patches in my scalp. I don’t say that this is a kind of eviction from a hairstyle that had become my home, or that my bangs and Louise Brooks bob were me. I don’t say it took me a lifetime to find that haircut and I swore I would never change it, or that when I was ten the boys in my class stripped me and called me “seaweed hair” because my hair was stringy and oily and pointless, and that having lousy hair was more painful than being half naked in front of most of my class.
    And before I can say an absolute yes, Antonio is suddenly standing behind me with loud boy 4 clippers that are moving very close to my head. It never occurred to me that he would begin with my bangs—the fringe, the curtain, the veil. In less than a minute—gone. I watch Paula taking pictures of clumps of my dyed-black hair like little animals on the barber’s floor.
    Some people think I look sexy with a shaved head. Some say I look like a boy and it turns them on. Some get that I’m sick and this is not a hairdo at all. Many think I look like a dyke. I feel exposed. Present. Humble. Clean. Clear. I don’t have to DO ANYTHING … with my hair. It is not who I am. I am suddenly face. All face.

SCAN

GETTING PORT
    There is something about getting anything foreign inserted into the body that is both downright creepy and fabulously supernatural. It didn’t hurt; they were careful at Beth Israel. I was wide awake and I could feel the knife slitting the opening of my skin right under my collarbone, making a kind of pouch for my new port. Port. Port. All week I’d been saying the word. “Friday I will get my port.” “This week they will insert the port.” The port was to make chemo easier. It was a steel piece, like a pendant, that was placed under my skin and lived in my body. It had a tail, which was a tube where the chemo flowed into my blood. Veins filled with poison like Taxol and carboplatin can collapse and burn. My veins were elusive anyway. After weeks of poking and prodding and slapping, who could blame them? The port eliminated the anxiety of yet another search for veins. They put the needles directly into the port.
    When I thought port , I thought water . I thought ocean . I thought summer . I thought harbor . I thought ships and cargo . But mainly I thought of leaving, of departure. Funny, I did not think arriving . From the moment the steel port was inserted into my flesh, I knew I was being taken somewhere. I was a passenger with a port. The port was the fixed spot, where the chemical load could moor itself and enter me. I couldn’t stop touching it. It was lumpy and scary at first. I could literally feel the steel rising under my skin. I started to like it. It became a talisman and a weapon. I showed it off at dinners, flashing it to people who seemed severely privileged and ungrateful. They were so horrified they stopped whining, at least with me. A hard foreign object under the skin separates you from those who remain only flesh. It gives you secret powers and access to a new world, a world where there are no more countries or claimed borders, where life happens and death is near, where the only real harbors are the ones we carry in our chest.

SCAN

THE CHEMO ISN’T FOR YOU
    The day before chemo, Lu surprises me with a wall-size photograph of Muhammad Ali, the moment after he knocks out George Foreman in Kinshasa. It’s one of those almost impossible photographs where time has stopped—Ali is standing, Foreman is on the ground. Ali has clearly won, but it’s not the glory that hits you, it’s the shock and the stagger of the struggle. It’s clearly one second before Ali realizes he is champion, and you can imagine him a moment later prancing around, raising his gloves, bragging and celebrating. But here he is dazed and empty. Toast and I hang the photo on the wall and it becomes a kind of visual mantra board. I will turn to it many times a day over the next months. Ali is me. Foreman is my