Jimmy said, No way your mother’s gonna let me sleep in here tonight. The thought that we would be separated, that he would be exiled to another room, had never occurred to me. This was Jimmy. We’d slept together before. I was in a cast, a full body cast, my breasts, stomach, and hips covered in fiberglass.
No, I insisted, she’ll let you, I know. He gave me that skeptical look, eyebrows raised, I’d seen whenever we’d made fun of something, only nothing was funny this time. I wanted to kiss him again, but he pulled away.
You’ll see, he warned.
To escape the yelling we went outside. I was too weak to leave the yard. I wished that one of us was older, had a car, could get away, to Florida like he’d wanted, the Green Comet Diner, anywhere.
My mother called us in for dinner. Jimmy sat next to me, with Tom at one end of the table and my mother at the other. Across from me Chipper wolfed his food, one hand on his milk glass, the other shoveling. Slow down, Tom said. No one’s going to take it away. He grilled Jimmy about his father, the judge. I knew this impressed him, his own father having been a judge, and I thought him stupid and snobbish but I doubt there was anything he could have said or done that I would not have resented. Who was he to me, this man incapable of a kind word or gesture? He paid the bills, that was all. You’re not my father! I’d yell, unable to acknowledge that this was precisely the point, the reason my mother had married him. My father was living in a Manhattan high-rise with an East River view, a parking garage, girlfriends. He neglected to pay child support; he forgot our birthdays. I knew this, yet every day I wished Tom gone from our lives and only felt at ease when he was away.
Jimmy answered Tom’s questions. I tried to make eye contact—Isn’t this stupid, I know they’re stupid—but he wouldn’t take the bait. After dinner we returned to my room. Keep the door open, my mother said. Not all the way, but not closed either. Halfway. This was her compromise. I was shocked. In front of Jimmy she had taken Tom’s side, betraying me and proving Jimmy right.
With the door open we had to keep the music down and could not smoke pot. I was self-conscious about our conversation, not knowing what to say, not wanting to be overheard. I knew Tom capable of eavesdropping; he’d complained to my mother when I’d stayed up all night on the phone with Jimmy. They don’t even talk about anything, they just ramble. For about the millionth time, I wished him dead.
We went back outside and that was not much better since we could be seen from both the kitchen and from my mother’s bedroom. The shade was down, though, and we risked sharing a pipe. We sat on a picnic bench in the dark, not talking, and it wasn’t like our earlier silences when we’d been happy and sated. We both knew this visit was a mistake, one we were stuck with until morning.
At 11:00 I was told to go to bed. I’d never had a bedtime, my arrangement with my mother being that if I stayed on the Honor Roll I could go to bed when I liked. Jimmy was banished to the couch in the den, another betrayal. Always before, my mother had taken my side against Tom; it was something I could count on. Now, suddenly, she was acting as if she could not trust me and because of that, because she had ruled in favor of her husband, I no longer felt I could entirely trust her. Despite my body cast, Jimmy and I were not to be left alone. The implications were insulting; I felt them less, I think, on my own behalf than on his. A boy who had always changed his clothes in the bathroom. Who had done nothing more physical than kiss me, said nothing more insinuating than “honey.” Once during the night I tried to sneak downstairs. My mother heard me, said, Don’t try it again, not if you don’t want to be grounded. As a concept, “grounded” was meaningless—where would I have gone? But I didn’t want a scene. I stayed in my room fiddling with the antenna of the black and white TV that had been returned to me in exchange for the color set, trying to tune in Saturday Night Live. The picture stayed fuzzy and after a while I gave up.
Jimmy left in the morning. I knew that he would not come back. I saw him once more, about a year later, in the fall of my senior year. He’d spent the previous year in boarding school. We’d never said goodbye, never exchanged letters; I hadn’t even known he was gone. When he called me I was so surprised that he had to say his name twice.
Skip school, he said. Skip school tomorrow and come to New York and we’ll go to museums. Museums? This too was a surprise. We’d never discussed art. I was unsophisticated, knew little about paintings, had never been in New York without some supervising adult.
He could have said “baseball,” which bored me to a near narcoleptic state. Or opera or rodeo. Could have said we’ll ride the subway all day or sit in the station watching the trains go by. None of it would have mattered.
Since I’d last seen him my cast had come off. I’d stopped wearing the brace, even at night. Strangers who saw me had no idea. Jimmy had no idea. I didn’t tell him. It would be a surprise—See, this is me, my real self. A spell would be lifted; we’d have a happy ending after all.
I was of course too smart or dubious or pessimistic to really believe this, but I wanted his approval, his look of shocked delight. At last we would be evenly matched, two inconspicuous kids playing hooky, nothing remarkable about them at all.
I told my mother I had First Period study hall. It may have been true. Seniors were not required to attend study hall and my mother agreed to let me drive her to work then take her VW to school so I wouldn’t have to walk home. I was to pick her up at 5:00, which meant I needed to be back at the train station by 4:30. The trip to New York took seventy minutes. Jimmy rode in from New Haven and I met him, as arranged, in the last car. I knew he would be on the train, but he stepped briefly onto the platform to let me know he’d made it.
Jimmy looked the same. He said nothing about my appearance; his face showed no surprise. I’d expected . . . what? Astonishment, accolades—My God, look at you, so beautiful, who knew, what a dope I’ve been! A word or two of recognition, some look. But it was as though nothing had changed, which meant that everything had.
We made small talk. We knew no one in common, his new school was in another state, there was none of the easy mindless banter that connects people of long acquaintance. For seventy minutes we struggled to fill the trip with words.
Grand Central Station in 1977 was a neglected, shabby place. Turquoise paint flaked from the ceiling of the Great Hall; people slept on benches in the Vanderbilt Lobby, begged for change outside the scarred wooden doors of the ladies’ room stalls. Some of the windows were still blacked out from World War II. A vast illuminated Kodak ad beamed down from the mezzanine: wide-toothed blonde children cavorting in the orange foliage. Still I was struck, as always, by the majesty of the station, its vastness, its balconies and double staircases, the constellations splayed on the vaulted ceiling. I lingered, staring at the mustard-hued stars: horse and hunter and crab.
But Jimmy was in a hurry. There were museums to get to, time was short; he hustled us into the taxi queue and we rode up to the Met, each of us looking out our separate window.
Jimmy paid the fare. He knew exactly where to go, which rooms, which paintings, knew how much admission to pay, not the “suggested price” but not nothing, something in-between.
I had been with my family to the lobby of the Met to see the Christmas tree, along with the grander tree at Rockefeller Center and the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. I’d never been inside the museum proper, though. Jimmy led the way down long corridors with scuffed parquet floors to a room of bright paintings. Ballerinas, lily pads, haystacks, flowering trees and gardens in elaborate gold frames. Impressionism. I did not know the word. Look. Jimmy took my hand and brought me inches from a painting composed entirely of dots. Pointillism. Now stand back. See? The dots massed into solid shapes: a woman, a parasol, a monkey, tiny background sailboats. I scanned the identifying plaque, hoping for clues. Seraht. I said the painter’s name aloud. A “study” by “Ser-aht.” Gently Jimmy corrected me. Ser-ah, not Ser-aht. Georges Seurat. I mimicked the way he said it. I didn’t know what els
e to say. I told him I thought Pointillism was “cool.”
We spoke softly, the rooms quiet, nearly empty. In another room flat beige paintings, figures assembled from squares. Picasso, whose name I recognized, and someone named Braque. Cubism. I’d heard the term, but the paintings confused me. How had they been made—and why? Why are they like this? I could tell he thought it a stupid question.
Up Fifth Avenue, along Central Park, we walked to the Guggenheim. A weekday in October, the park was hushed, sunlight filtered through the arcade of trees. People strolled, we strolled. I thought how lovely to live here and walk in this park and go to these museums whenever one wished, and I told Jimmy I wanted to live here some day and asked did he and he said no, it’s way too crowded.
In the Guggenheim more paintings of cubes and dots, and other paintings that were a single color—red or black or white. I didn’t understand these at all, didn’t know what to think. Minimalism, he called it, and I was afraid to ask. Gradually we spiraled up the ramp, making detours into side rooms, so that I was surprised to see how far we’d gone when we reached the top. Far below us was the lobby floor, polished and white, the base of Mount Everest. Look, I wanted to shout, Look what I just did! but it was only an everyday occurrence.
For lunch we ate hamburgers at a diner, splitting the tab. Nearly two years earlier I’d fantasized about dimly lit restaurants, candles and wine, images culled from old movies. Jimmy devoured his burger, I picked at my fries. The lights were harsh, the silverware spotted, we had to rush to catch our train.
When we got to the Fairfield station, just ahead of the evening commuters, he gave me a perfunctory kiss, stepping from the car for a moment before the train doors shut.
What had he wanted, what had prompted him to call? Idle curiosity? Did he want to see what I had become? Or was it more complicated than that? Beneath the teenage swagger was a reticence. This was someone after all who’d chosen, albeit briefly, to be with a girl whose body he could not see. A girl for whom physical intimacy had been impossible. Something had held him back. Now that I was “normal,” he didn’t try to touch me, nor did he comment on the change. Other boys did, asking me out, pressuring me to sleep with them. The boy in Social Studies who stared at my legs and told me I should wear short skirts. The boy who, while dating a friend of mine, had barely spoken to me but now wanted to know if I would come over when his father was away. The ones who asked to copy my homework, saying Patti, you’re so smart, as though they had just noticed and were turned on by my brains. The men in parking lots who whistled. I didn’t want any of them. Their urgency frightened me, their desire to touch. For so long I’d been invisible. Now I wanted to be noticed, but became flustered when I was. I felt unequipped to flirt, didn’t know the language, the rules involved, watched the other girls twirl their hair, swap notes, raise and lower their eyelids, one more exam I was studying for, harder than my other exams.
Jimmy didn’t see me through a sexual lens, which puzzled me because it seemed as if suddenly everyone else did. Even my mother had not let me be alone with him once I could walk. It was as though in shedding the apparatus of brace and cast I’d shed the person I had been. I had thought I wanted this, wanted to be seen for myself, but now I realized I didn’t know what that meant. Hadn’t I been “myself” all along? If people hadn’t noticed me, if what they’d seen was instead the brace, could I honestly say they were seeing me now? I’d been metal, plaster, and fiberglass; now I was breasts and hips, just another girl, just what I had wanted and could not bear. I hadn’t traded one self for another, a nun for a vamp, and this abrupt shift in the perspective of others was something that I struggled to understand.
Pacifying the Beast
X-rays show an excellent position. Patient should change over to her brace now and go out of it one hour a week until about October, at which time she can wear it only to sleep in all probability. She is to come back in October for new x-rays.
—Dr. Wayne Southwick, Chief Orthopedic Surgeon
Yale New Haven Hospital
Breasts, hips, stomach, ribs. I could not stop staring. My body had been given back to me. In the afternoons, when my mother and Tom were at work, I’d take off my clothes and look at myself in the full-length mirror on their bedroom door. My bones were nearly visible beneath the netting of skin, my waist small from confinement. I counted ribs, traced hipbones, clavicles, Twiggy at last.
The members of my family were big-boned, robust people who seemed to take their bodies for granted. Rather then seeing myself as thin, I saw their bulkiness, the encumbrance of flesh. That was my bias, viewed through a distorted lens, just as it had been difficult for the able-bodied to clearly see me. I was “poor thing.” I was Robot and Monkey and Turtle; eventually I became Baby, another generic girl whose substitute name was shouted from passing cars.
By fall I was only wearing the brace to sleep. During the day nothing marked me as different; no one knew. Weeknights my mother strapped me in before midnight; weekends I had to be home by that hour so she could corset me. This curfew applied to her as well; she had to leave parties early to help me into the brace. Don’t worry, I’d say. No big deal, just tonight, stay out late, have fun. A waste of breath. If my mother resented this imposition on her freedom she didn’t let it show. A small matter after all we’d been through, but I was impatient, sick of waking during the night with the weight of metal on my back, angry at this transformation into a visibly disabled person—even if no one could see.
For Christmas the previous year I’d been given a copy of Thomas Bulfinch’s Mythology. The book was heavy, bound in deep blue faux-leather, thickly illustrated, too heavy for me to hold above my head all those months I was supine. By summer—Jimmy gone, the university girls returned home, Betsy working another job—I was spending most of my time alone. The fiberglass cast was hot in the sun. I turned my air-conditioner to ten, wrapped myself in blankets, and read Bulfinch, revisiting the Greek myths I loved, skimming through the Norse section (all that ice, those horned helmets and animal skins), lingering at the Arthurian tales. In particular I liked the story of Dame Ragnell, who tricks King Arthur into getting her way.
According to Bulfinch, Dame Ragnell was “a lady of hideous aspect” whom King Arthur happens upon in the forest. The lady confronts him, asking by what right he refuses to look at her when she, in fact, possesses what he has been seeking—the answer to the question: “What thing is it that women most desire?” If the king cannot answer this riddle within a year, he must forfeit his life and lands to the evil baron who has posed the question. The year is nearly up. Dame Ragnell promises to answer the riddle—in exchange for marriage to Sir Gawain, the king’s nephew.
King Arthur is reluctant to condemn his nephew to such a fate, marriage to a hag. Her skin is coarse, her hair bristling, her teeth yellow and sharp. What would she be like to touch? But Gawain insists on saving his sovereign’s life. They accept Dame Ragnell’s terms. “Women,” she tells the king, “would have their will.”
King Arthur repeats this answer to the evil baron, the curse is lifted, and Sir Gawain marries the “loathly lady” in a ceremony devoid of festivities while his companions “scoffed and jeered.” Yet that night, alone with her husband in the bridal chamber, Dame Ragnell, to Gawain’s amazement and delight, sheds her “unseemly aspect” to reveal her true form: a beautiful young maiden. She explains to the astonished Gawain that she’d been under a spell, condemned to appear hideous until two things occurred. The first was that some gallant knight consent to marry her. This being accomplished, half the curse has been lifted and she is free to wear her true form for half of the time. Gawain is to choose: should she be fair by day or night?
Sir Gawain would fain have had her look her best by night, when he alone would see her, and show her repulsive visage, if at all, to others. But she reminded him how much more pleasant it would be to her to wear her best looks in the throng of knights and ladies by day. Sir Gawain yielded, and gave up his will to hers. This
alone was wanting to dissolve the charm. The lovely lady now with joy assured him that she should change no more, but as she now was, so she would remain by night as well as by day.
Having broken the spell, Dame Ragnell, beloved of Gawain, is accepted at court. The jeers and taunting cease. Gawain is a happy man, Ragnell a happy woman.
Now that I, too, was free to reveal my “true form” during the day, I couldn’t stop wondering at the change in those around me. The jeers and taunting stopped. Popular girls deigned to speak to me. Boys asked about parties, weekend plans. My mother became more watchful, my brother less solicitous. We fought, yelled, insulted each other like ordinary siblings. He hung out in my room again listening to music and threatening to tell my mother that I smoked pot, a threat we both recognized as empty.
Disabled people freak people out, he’d said, explaining why my condition had made him uneasy. But it goes deeper than that. Visible difference freaks people out. Nonconformity, in any guise, is a potential threat.
In the early 1990s, in Boston, a spate of gay bashing occurred near my place of work. My boss, a deeply religious black woman, expressed her dismay, claiming it was wrong to “pick on” gay people. They just can’t help the way they are. It’s like picking on the crippled. When I suggested that gay people might not consider themselves “crippled,” that they may, in fact, have no more wish to be straight than she did to be white, she recoiled. Surely no one would choose to flout, so visibly, the mores of the crowd. Homosexuality was a “disease,” like polio, something to be pitied, something that allowed her to make a show of her tolerance. I’d spent my adolescence deflecting this adult tolerance—strangers who clucked their tongues, called me “dear,” and felt free to interrogate me. Pointing children, apologetic mothers, their smiles watery and sad. People who spoke of faith healers or invoked the will of God, infuriating my mother, who’d heard the same phrase years ago, when her first child had died.
All the Difference Page 13