Jimmy, I knew, lived in the larger world and because of this I always knew we would part. Teen romances, of course, are fraught with the notion of parting; it’s the common trope, the theme of countless radio ballads. Breaking up is hard to do. But what teenager ever begins a romance by envisioning its demise? We are, each of us, unique, that special case; we’re going to be the ones to Make It, Find True Love, Beat the Odds. I knew better, and whatever joy I felt was tempered by this knowledge. At the time of my greatest isolation, Jimmy made me feel “normal.” He made me, briefly, a coveted girl, someone cherished for herself. I know adults for whom this is difficult, who are uncomfortable around any kind of infirmity. The two or three times my father visited me at home he could not look me in the eye. How long will you be sick? How many times was I asked this? And here was Jimmy, wanting me to wash away perfume and artifice. I knew our relationship could never be sustained. We had drifted apart before we ever kissed, but these feelings were inchoate, difficult to express. Whatever joy I felt was suffused with the knowledge of our parting, a parting made no less painful by this awareness.
Meltings
Jimmy kept calling for a while after that last bad visit. We never spoke about the change in our relationship, but I knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore. Our conversations, so rambling and goofy, turned stilted. His grades were bad and his parents had begun talking about sending him to boarding school. If that happened he would run away to Florida. Florida? Really? I feigned disinterest. Since I could not say what I felt, I pretended to feel nothing. I met with my tutors, talked in the mornings to MJ or Sandy or Eileen, spent my afternoons with Betsy. The routine was incontrovertible.
Sunlight filled my room. The air turned sweet with flowers. My grandmother brought me lilac clippings that drooped from the weight of their own beauty, the branches trapped in crumpled foil. Their scent was overpowering. I had the shades kept pulled, the lilacs taken away. I could not stand their perfume, the spring breezes, the sounds of children playing. Winter, that great equalizer, had forced everyone indoors. Cocooned in my blankets, I’d merely been hibernating. Now I grew restless, something atavistic in the body needing to assert itself. I ached to move. The people around me began to wear summer clothes. Arms, calves, shoulders, all symmetrical and smooth. I hated the mildness and bounty of spring, which I felt as a rebuke to my condition.
The pain woke me from my nap. A new sensation, nothing to do with my spine. My stomach, I thought, though I’d eaten practically nothing. But . . . not my stomach, lower, a surging within my intestines. I felt nausea, cold sweats. My appendix. They won’t get to me in time; I’ll die right here in this room. Pain seeped from crevices, secret places. It was deep, deeper than bone. My muscles clenched, relaxed, tightened. I wanted to rub my stomach, curl into a ball, crawl under furniture, die. I wanted to die. I wanted to puke. I rang the bell, too late. Betsy cleaned me up, wiped my mouth, gave me sips of water. She sopped up the mess from the floor and spread an old rough towel over my pillow.
Show me where it hurts, she said. I pressed my palms to the cast. I didn’t have words, didn’t know. Down there? Not your stomach? I shook my head. She ripped some squares of toilet paper from the roll on my nightstand, showed me the chocolate smear of blood. Cramps, she said. I knew the term, had heard girls in homeroom: I’ve got killer cramps! Girls in the cafeteria explaining why they couldn’t eat. They stood on two legs, brushed their hair, went to classes. Not like this.
A year earlier, when I was fourteen, I’d finally begun to menstruate. My mother had given me a box of Kotex, a new kind with adhesive strips—the greatest single invention of my youth. There would be no belt, no clanking of metal on fiberglass, no fumbling with clasps. In that regard at least I could assimilate, my body doing what it was supposed to do, not drawing attention to itself.
But after my surgery, my periods had stopped. Shock, I was told. This was normal, nothing to worry about. My system would adjust. Now, resurgent, my pent up period set me wailing. I rocked from side to side. The cramps came in waves. My mother had never mentioned cramps. For her they did not exist. In those days no one invoked PMS, the term was not yet in use. On TV commercials women spoke vaguely of the blues, but my mother had never experienced menstrual pain, mood swings, depression, thought these symptoms exaggerated, something in the head.
Betsy tore through the medicine cabinet. Midol, Pamprin . . . nothing. She gave me two aspirin and I puked them back up. I rolled and groaned; I wanted to double over, protect myself from the pain. Betsy changed the sheets. Because of the cast, none of my underwear fit. Even if it had, getting a pair on and off would have been a challenge for anyone and for this reason I went without. Somehow Betsy managed to jerry rig a pad to my mother’s sanitary belt, which for some reason she had kept in the back of the linen closet, an emergency precaution. With some difficulty, Betsy was able to slide this contraption over my hips.
A week or so earlier, for Easter, Betsy had given me a basket with dyed eggs, chocolate eggs, jelly beans, a baggie of real grass tucked beneath pink artificial grass. Mild, she said, not to worry. We smoked a little and it eased the pain. When the blood came, all in a rush, I soaked through the pad and Betsy had to change it. I kept my face to the wall, ashamed. It was one more act of treason by a body I could never learn to trust.
Valium helped. Then it didn’t. My prescription was switched to codeine. Then Seconal. Sleep was elusive. Barbiturate-stoned, I stopped dreaming, even that escape closed. There was only my room, the stereo, small television, silent telephone.
My mother came up with an idea. She would rent an ambulance, a private ambulance, to take me for a ride. Together we discussed the route. I had two hours, could go wherever I wanted. School was suggested. The ambulance could park in front and people could come out. I didn’t want to go to school or any place public, didn’t want to be on exhibit. Just drive around, I said. Drive around and I’ll look out the window.
We chose an afternoon, a Saturday. We chose a route. My mother wrote it on a piece of paper that she gave to one of two uniformed attendants. They strapped me to a stretcher, brought me downstairs. The day was warm, the sun too bright. My eyes wet from it. Inside, the ambulance was cool and dark. An attendant covered me with blankets. My mother stayed with me; the attendants went up front. I could see out the window in the ambulance door. I watched the scenery—trees and steeples and telephone poles unspooling. We drove on back country roads and pulled over and an attendant opened the ambulance doors, letting the air rush in. Low stone fences, grassy hills, an abandoned well. Dogwoods and azaleas. The earth damp, reeking of peat. Birds swooped, branches swayed, clouds shifted, people walked, cars sped past, such exhausting motion. We drove to the beach and the salt air made me itch to be in the water. So long since I had felt water, the way it buoyed me, made me bodiless. We went to my friend Carol’s house and her family came to the driveway and I wanted to see her brother Steve who had always been so attentive and gentle with me but he was not there. Later I discovered that she’d forgotten to tell him I was coming and he’d called her stupid and selfish and I was glad.
We drove and drove and I don’t remember what the two hours felt like, whether fast or slow. When it was over and I was back in bed, I fell into a long sleep that did not need drugs to sustain it.
Don’t you remember, though? There were two ambulance rides. The first one did you so much good that we scheduled a second one. We went back to the harbor and parked in a spot where you could see the water with the doors open. I don’t think the second ride was as big a success. You already knew what to expect, and the long, drawn-out time of being in the cast, in bed, was really taking its toll.
I’m surprised when my mother insists that there were two ambulance rides. I have no recollection of this, or have somehow conflated the two trips.
The cast hurt so much you were crying. Probably you were suffering from “pressure sores,” though I don’t know if that’s the correct technical term. Dr. Mangieri f
rom the Bridgeport clinic made a house call, pretty unusual even in those days, but he was a nice guy and wanted, I think, to help when I told him how much pain you were having. He had a small drill and he put some holes in the cast to relieve the pressure, I think around your hip, maybe only one side.
You had this pointy chopstick you used to scratch yourself with. And you showed him, probably thinking he’d say how clever. But he frowned and told you to stop—not that you listened.
People were always coming in and out. Tom’s nieces and nephews came to see you, and Carol and Janine, their boyfriends sometimes, and Betsy and her boyfriend, Frank; the university girls, Jimmy Hunter. I was always feeding someone. My mother gave me a microwave oven and I would defrost hotdogs. I know you won’t eat them now, but back then you liked them.
After the cards and gifts stopped, after I grew used to my caretakers, after the snow melted and the weather turned warm, after Jimmy—especially after Jimmy—there is little specific that I recall. Of Dr. Mangieri’s house call I have no memory whatsoever. I remember the hot dogs (now that my mother mentions them), and Betsy’s boyfriend, Frank, stopping in to pick her up from work. But the steady flow of people in and out I suspect may be exaggerated. Many of them were likely single visits. It seems to me a great deal of my recuperation took place in solitude.
Some details, however, are remarkably clear. Faces close to mine, bodies leaning over me, kissing, tending, touching the exposed parts. A smell of lotion and powder, weed and piss. Betsy’s little girl voice, MJ’s bright blonde hair, the gold crucifix at her throat, Sandy’s dark ponytail, her wine-colored birthmark, Mr. Dillon’s aviator glasses, Mr. Martin’s blushes, Jimmy’s voice, still resonant. The pink walls of my bedroom, the pink phone and bedspread and mobile of abalone shells, all soon to disappear or be painted over white, to be obliterated, like memory. Entire swatches gone.
My father for instance. Where was he? I wrote that he visited me at home “two or three times,” but this is because my mother says so. I have only a single recollection, when he could not look me in the eye, just as he’d been unable to in the hospital. My mother says there were two ambulance rides, not one; she says a doctor made a house call when the cast became too heavy; she says Dr. Syz, her taciturn Swiss boss, came over one Saturday to work on the Smithsonian catalogue for his Meissen porcelain collection. He came upstairs to say hello and when he returned, my mother says, He looked so incredibly sad, this man who was always so formal and reserved, never the least bit demonstrative. I could tell how moved he was, and it was all I could do to keep from crying.
I have no memory of his visit. I lay still, day after day, took barbiturates, watched TV. I read Silas Marner and A Separate Peace for Mr. Martin, memorized and forgot columns of irregular Spanish verbs. I counted weeks, months, then stopped counting. At best I would go directly from a plaster cast to a brace, bypassing the fiberglass body cast. At best I would be able to walk, and that was something huge. But my body would still be cloistered. There was to be no redemption—the princess set free, the duckling transformed into a swan, the frog to a prince, the authentic beautiful self bursting through the façade. Transformation was for fairy tales.
I woke one day, two or three weeks from the end, and could feel my body twitching. Like Mr. Dillon’s rocks, my muscles strained to crack the crust under which they’d been trapped. In my carapace I shook and shook. My left leg thrashed and my arms flailed, hurling blankets to the floor, upsetting the water pitcher. My mother ran in to see what was wrong, but all I could say was Make It Stop. I couldn’t do it any longer, lie still, not one day, not one hour. My body had been buried alive. Make it stop, I cried, just make it stop. She gave me a sedative. I came to, feeling calm. Everything was gray. Nighttime, but even with the light on the world seemed drained of color, as though I were viewing it through dark glasses. For some time—days? a week?—I did nothing at all. I refused to eat, wouldn’t see my tutors, wouldn’t do the work they assigned via my mother. I barely spoke. I lay in bed crying and saw the world as gray.
I had been the Statistic Gone Bad, the exception to every rule.
You’ll exercise so you won’t have to wear a brace, I’d been told.
You’ll wear a brace so you won’t undergo surgery.
You’ll undergo surgery, but don’t worry, eventually you’ll be able to walk.
I wouldn’t be able to walk. I was about to return to the hospital, and I was afraid.
Baby Steps
If everything went well I could leave the hospital within a week, sitting upright in my mother’s Volkswagen.
It was difficult for me to believe that anything would go well. After the cast was removed I knew I would have to be x-rayed to make certain the fusion had stabilized. Although I no longer recall whether it was an actual or imagined possibility, I was terrified of being forced back into my cast and returned to my bed-tomb. There was as well the possibility, very slight, that I could skip the next step, the fiberglass “walking cast,” and begin being weaned from the brace. I hated the brace. It was hot, hard, painful, and ugly. But it came off.
When I wasn’t obsessing about being entombed in plaster, I permitted myself small moments in which I imagined my body set free. I pictured myself walking, running, tying my shoes. I wore a bathing suit, a midriff; I went swimming. Then I stopped. This was dangerous thinking. I told myself that the decision about what came next for me was not mine. I faked an attitude of calm. Que sera, sera; I knew that expression. Easy enough to sing on the A.M. radio, harder to adopt in a hospital. If everything was out of my hands (which it was) then there was nothing I could do (there wasn’t), in which case it was pointless to worry (which I couldn’t help doing). I merely needed to trust in my body, a thing I could not do.
One day after being admitted to the hospital, I was cut loose from my cast. Of the procedure itself, I remember only scattered details: the round saw slicing lines along my sides, spewing plaster dust; a gradual loosening of the plaster’s grip along my torso, neck and thigh; a sense that I could breathe. The cast was removed in pieces, the top of the torso lifting like a giant lid, the bottom sliding from beneath me as I was maneuvered onto my side. I felt suddenly naked and cold. Layer after layer of dirty gauze and body stocking was peeled away. Goose bumps rose on my skin. I was a mummy being unwound. What would they find? The final layer of gauze was pulled off. My skin had turned it gummy and gray. For the first time in months I could see my stomach. It was ashen, mottled with pimples. My right thigh had purpled and shrunk to child size, smaller than my calves. I was turned onto my stomach. The scar was proclaimed beautifully healed. I had forgotten about the scar. I was desperate to scratch at my dirty flaky skin. A nurse washed me with an antibiotic soap, dried me with a rough towel. My skin thirsted for air. I was taken to be x-rayed, naked on the table. These x-rays would determine what would happen next. A mold was taken of my torso to fit a new brace. Then, just as I’d been after surgery, I was put into a kind of “holding cast,” a plaster shell that covered my torso and prevented me from moving.
[Patient’s] radiographs taken after removal of her cast demonstrated evidence of early bony fusion but motion was evident on bending films and thoracolumbar spine. The bony mass was likewise noted to be somewhat scant and it was decided to apply a light cast, body jacket with the neck left free and leg left free as well. A mold was taken for Milwaukee brace which she will wear after her light cast is removed.
—Dr. Wayne Southwick, Chief Orthopedic Surgeon
Yale New Haven Hospital
Early mornings the hospital smelled of sausage, defrosted microwaved breakfast sausage mingled with the sulfurous odor of boiled egg. I could never eat it, and this particular morning I could eat nothing at all. My mother and I waited for Dr. Southwick to make his rounds. She sat embroidering in the chair beside my bed while I looked at the ceiling-mounted television. Sometime in the late morning we heard Dr. Southwick’s voice in the corridor. I turned off the TV. My mother put down her embroid
ery. She took hold of my hand. All of my resignation, my false sense of acceptance, evaporated. I could not go back into the plaster cast. I’d beg, scream; I’d hoard barbiturates and overdose. I fully expected the news to be bad so when I saw the expression on Dr. Southwick’s face—his broad smile, the way he extended his hand—I was more shocked than relieved. The news was not bad. The news, he said, was fine. My spine was fusing nicely. I was not yet ready to go back into my brace, but I could be switched into a fiberglass “walking” cast.
This new cast would extend from shoulder to hip; my neck and legs would be uncovered. Since fiberglass “breathed,” I could take showers but not too often—two or three times a week. As soon as the cast was on, I could begin physical therapy and would be discharged once I could walk.
I heard the words “walk” and “cast” and they said to me two different, contradictory things. I was better, I could walk. I wasn’t better, I’d have to remain in a cast for at least another three months. June, July, August . . . I’d be wrapped in fiberglass all summer. From the outset I had known that this was likely, but I’d done the forbidden thing—I’d allowed myself to imagine myself free. I was sick of casts, sick of being unable to see my body, rub my stomach when I had cramps, scratch my skin when it itched, sick of wearing ill-fitting clothes. I listened to Dr. Southwick, but my anguish prevented me from fully heeding his words. My mother rose to thank him. After he left, I vented: I wouldn’t wear another cast, I was done with casts, tell them to come up with another plan, I was through! I’d roller-coasted from relieved—I could get out of bed—to resentful—this was never going to end! Each time I thought so, a new plan arose, exercise yielding to brace yielding to surgery. No, I said, I would not.
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