—to an outsider. However, they became emblems of emotional reminders, and of subjective truths of how life really was, or is. To Isabel, they were often lies of what her family wanted other people to see. Her family seems happy and even-tempered on the beach, or Isabel appears content with her mother in Opa’s garden. However, the pictures do not equate reality, and become painful. For instance, when her father snaps a Polaroid of her at their dinner meeting, he takes it home as a souvenir of her beauty and maturity. It becomes obscured and almost pornographic—an image of her out of context of who she really is—as she becomes his prey. It is a record of physical growth against emotional growth. All forced. Like Opa’s zucchini (those which grew larger through manipulation of a string and chemicals), Isabel has been given a toxin to enhance her womanhood, while still a child in years. In pictures, a “sick-chini” only a few weeks old can look larger than the oldest and the ripest, but it is not fit for consuming. Once again, forced into maturity and remaining artificial.Although Isabel constantly struggles with her manufactured life, she learns she has the ability to control herself, her own rites of passage. She realizes, while watching television with her sick mother, that she “didn’t make choices” (220). The knowledge that she is forced to watch her mother’s medical drama transcends into every aspect of her life, including her womanhood. She was never allowed to decide when she would become a woman and how. Even in her dreams, others decide whether or not she will keep her scars of her broken face, have the surgery, and alter her appearance. But, that way of living her life is no more. She learns that she is able to find reciprocating love with a man whom is most like the only stable figure in her life, Opa. She no longer has to lie, but can be honest, kn...
