My mother butters a roll. Her hands could be my own; they are that similar to mine, that familiar. On her right pinky she wears a gold ring with a spiral pattern; her wedding band is unadorned. She has diamonds, special occasion jewelry she rarely wears. Still in her thirties, she is red-haired, Junoesque. Men have always loved her. Before she married Tom she had suitors, one of whom would send a dozen yellow roses to our house every week. In a strictly economic sense she has married well, far above the place she was born into. Because of this she has been able to give me things: the pink telephone and new bedroom furniture and stereo. She has, by her own admission, spoiled me.
I want to tell her that she’s too good for Tom. She can leave him, get someone better. But even I know it’s not that simple. Nothing’s that simple when you come from nothing.
I’ll miss you too, I say. And it’s true, I know, I’ll miss her like crazy. But there’s something else I know which is that I do not want what my mother has—the house in the suburbs and the husband you put up with for the sake of kids who hate him, Sunday drives to aspirational homes, dinner at the same time each night. I know this the way a seventeen-year-old knows things, unequivocally. I’ll miss you, I say, but already I’m thinking: Gone!
The woman on the album cover had her jacket slung over one shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. She wore a white shirt with torn off cuffs, a skinny black tie, unknotted, and a don’t fuck with me expression. The songs she sang were about boy on boy rape, suicide, mythic birds, the birth of her baby sister. I’d never heard anything like it.
I’d discovered college radio and something was happening there. Gangly people with bad haircuts sang about buildings and lobotomies and politics, anything but romantic love. This was difference as indictment, as jerk and stutter and mismatched clothes. No one was bedroom poster ready. No one cared about pleasing anyone and that pleased me just fine.
I changed the way I dressed, adopting a thrift store, androgyne look. My uncle’s dark green bomber jacket with a long black skirt. Men’s T-shirts with pearls. Plastic shoes. Tom’s old suit jackets and vests, ones my mother had picked out, not his usual polyester. Pinstriped wools, windowpane checks, a sky-blue seersucker blazer that I wore over a white cotton sundress, concealing my uneven shoulder blades. Twin City Discount, a Bridgeport warehouse, sold six-dollar stovepipe cords and holy medals that I safety pinned to my jacket lapels. A sartorial stoplight, I was making a statement about my sensibilities, not my body, which I kept malnourished, rattle-light.
My mother did not believe me when I said I wasn’t coming back. She talked about the things we’d do together the following summer, restaurants we could go to now that I was old enough to be a viable dinner companion, plays and movies we might see. Maybe we’d take another trip, bring Chipper this time. I’d go to college, of course, live in a dorm, but I would return to Fairfield every summer, and during my winter breaks, and perhaps even for good once school was over. Those were her expectations.
The day after I turned eighteen I signed a lease on a basement apartment. For two months I’d been living in a dorm, a place I hated for its lack of privacy. The apartment was huge and close to school and my share of the rent, split between me and two friends, came to ninety-nine dollars. Because the radiators were attached to the ceiling pipes, a thing none of us had paid attention to during our brief pre-rental inspection, the apartment had virtually no heat. All that winter chunks of ice rained from the bathroom faucet. Mice raced around the kitchen at night. The windows opened onto the parking lot where a man sometimes slept in the dumpster. You had to peer inside before tossing out the trash. I could hear my upstairs neighbors fighting.
But none of this mattered, not really, because the apartment was more than a place to live; it was a way to assert my fledgling independence. Every time I thought about “home”—the boredom and sameness, Tom with his rages, my brother’s sad cheerfulness, all the people I’d known since before I could remember, people who remembered too much about me, I knew I could not return. I had embarked on a life where no one knew me, a life where, quite literally, I had no back story. I could erase what had been simply by refusing to acknowledge it.
How much of this I grasped I’m not certain. I don’t recall making a conscious decision to avoid speaking about the past. It just seemed irrelevant to my new circumstances. Past would not be prologue, so why bother bringing it up?
The lease signing took place in the manager’s office, which he’d decked out to resemble a ’70s era disco replete with red velvet barstools and mirror ball. His tobacco-stained dentures wobbled when he spoke. I could move in, he said, any time.
That night I called my mother from the dorm’s pay phone to give her the good news.
You did what? she said. Who told you you could do that?
I’m eighteen, I replied. As if by turning the legal age for drinking and signing leases I’d somehow become able to support myself as well.
My mother was silent. I could hear crackling on the line. Behind me other girls waited to use the phone.
What the hell kind of place rents for ninety-nine dollars? she yelled. A whorehouse? A drug den?
I don’t do drugs, I answered, indignant. And I’m not a whore. (That part, at least, was true.)
I won’t send you any money.
Then I’ll have to drop out of school.
It was an empty threat. Even if I meant it, which at the time I’m sure I did, who would hire an eighteen-year-old who lived in a ninety-nine dollar basement with no heat and a man sleeping outside her window in a dumpster? I’d have caved as soon as my savings ran out, a couple of months at best. My mother had to know this. But she also knew I was stubborn enough to at least make a show of living independently and that must have frightened her even more than the prospect of the whorehouse drug den basement. So she wrote me a check and came to Boston and took me shopping for dishes and blankets.
When are you coming home? she would periodically ask, to which I’d reply I’m already there. Not until years later did I consider how this must have pained her, how she must have felt she’d failed to make a home where her daughter felt at home.
Our lives had been so entwined, I’d been so dependent on her, that now, perhaps more than most people my age, I felt the need to break free. For my mother, however, this time in my life was a reward for all the hard work of caretaking. We’d live under the same roof. I’d be the companion who compensated for her bad marriage even as I was part of the reason for it. That much I did grasp and it made me want to flee.
Unchosen
Most Fridays he’d hock his guitar and we’d go to the movies or to Cafe’ Algiers. During the week he’d pick up an extra shift waiting tables so he could get the guitar back in time to hock it again. Because my apartment was cold we spent weekends at his place, an attic in a house he shared with several other people, one of whom built robots in the basement. His bed was a futon on the floor; there was just enough space for that, his guitars, and a chest of drawers.
One afternoon we were eating lunch in a restaurant in Central Square, figuring out our plans for the night—what movie to see, who was playing at the Rat—when out of nowhere he asked about my personal relationship with Jesus. That was how he put it: What’s your personal relationship with Jesus?
The way he phrased the question it sounded like an ad slogan. At first I thought he was joking. During the three months or so we’d been together the subject of religion had never come up. Nor did he look the part of a “Jesus freak,” at least not as I imagined it, which had something to do with buzz cuts and high-water pants. Certainly not this vaguely hippie-looking man with his guitar and long blonde hair. Although having seen both Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, I probably should’ve known better.
We’ve never met, I said.
He scowled at me.
I’m serious, it’s important.
Says who? I wanted to ask. With my fork I moved things around on my salad plate. Wherever this hairpin turn of a conversa
tion was headed could not be good. My personal relationship with Jesus was something I’d spent zero time contemplating. I’d read the Beatitudes and liked their emphasis on social justice, but that was about all I knew. By dint of baptism I was Episcopalian. When my parents divorced, my mother found a friendlier congregation at my aunt’s church, where we sang anti-war songs in the parish school’s all purpose room. Friendly, that is, until my mother tried to enroll Chipper and me in Sunday School and was told that because we weren’t Catholic we couldn’t attend class, but she was welcome to buy the textbooks and teach us at home. And that was it for us and religion.
I don’t have a relationship with Jesus, I said. Personal or otherwise. Why are we even talking about this?
He looked down at his sandwich remains for so long that I started to wonder if he was praying. When he looked up, his eyes were shiny and sad.
That’s too bad, he said. Because Jesus is my personal savior.
What this meant, as far as I could tell, as far as he explained it to me in that Central Square restaurant with its steak sandwiches and iceberg lettuce salads, its fluorescent lighting and waitresses in white orthopedic shoes, the kind of place I felt out of place in, was that he wasn’t really supposed to be having sex outside of marriage or, if he did, it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. He needed to let me know that he could never love me, heathen that I was. We could still have fun together, don’t get him wrong, but as far as anything more serious was concerned I shouldn’t get my hopes up. Of course if I were to willing to change . . . And then he had to stop talking because I’d begun to choke on a piece of tomato from laughing so hard.
I don’t love you either, I managed to sputter.
He looked stricken. What kind of woman was I, sleeping with a man I didn’t love, laughing when he asked me about Jesus, choosing to reject him as her savior? Who knows what ideas about me he’d formed? Clearly they had little to do with the person sitting across from him. He could love me, maybe, if only I would become someone else. That afternoon I couldn’t finish my lunch. I was too overcome, laughing.
He was the first man to ask me about the scar which, by the time I was twenty-four, was barely visible except at the base of my spine, where it widened slightly.
It’s from an operation, I told him. Ten years ago. I had scoliosis.
Had. I remember marveling at this later, the cavalier way I consigned my scoliosis to the past. At the time, however, my answer seemed sufficient. Certainly it satisfied my questioner’s curiosity, as he dropped the subject.
I spent the next decade with this man, my opposite in so many ways. A black man from Alabama, thirteen years my senior with two children from a previous marriage, he was a former semi-pro football player turned photographer, a dyslexic who disliked to read, a man confident to the point of entitlement, and so handsome that at first I found it difficult to look at him directly. In his presence I felt charmed, able to laugh off his joke about my funny walk, my “trick foot.”
Early in our relationship he decided I could ride a bike, it was simple, anyone could do it. My inability had to be psychosomatic. He would teach me how.
I tried to explain that the issue was one of balance, not aptitude, but he refused to believe me. I just needed to try. And perhaps because I wanted to please him I convinced myself that maybe he was right. What fun it would be, after all, to ride along the Charles River, the breeze fanning my hair. I’d take my bike to work instead of the lumbering Mass. Ave. bus. We’d strap our bikes to the roof of his car and go on weekend trips. All I had to do was be a good pupil, something that came easily to me.
We walked his twelve-year-old daughter’s bike to a scruffy neighborhood park, a patch of lawn littered with soda bottles, beer cans, dog shit. The day was cold for early fall, the park nearly empty. A couple of kids tossed a football around; an old man in a soiled overcoat sat on a bench drinking from a paper bag. The bike was pink with streamers on the handlebars. It did not look scary. But the moment I mounted it I knew I’d made a mistake.
Don’t let go, I said. Promise you won’t let go.
I promise. Just sit there, get used to it.
I felt dizzy. The ground looked far away. I didn’t think this was a feeling I’d ever get used to.
Okay, he said. Ready?
He grabbed the handlebars. I kicked the kickstand free. The bike wobbled beneath me. He walked backward, leading. Then he let go with one hand. Instinctively I put my foot down.
What’s wrong? You were doing great.
I was going to fall.
No you weren’t. I had you.
You said you wouldn’t let go. You promised.
I didn’t let go.
I tried again and again. Each time he let go I toppled. Sometimes I righted myself, sometimes I landed in the grass, which felt surprisingly crunchy, not at all soft. The kids stopped playing and began to watch. At first they laughed, then they started shouting encouragement.
You gotta get your speed up, lady, one of them yelled. You gotta pedal faster.
Even the old man got involved, pointing and muttering between swigs.
Like to see you try it, I thought. We’ll trade—I’ll take the bottle and you get up on the bike.
I fell on my knees; I fell on my side. I fell with the bike on top of me. I chipped a fingernail, got dirt on my jeans, wiped out on a discarded Big Mac wrapper. Whenever I tried to get up a little speed I fell.
Everyone had advice. Pedal faster. Don’t look down. Just stay balanced. But that—as I’d tried to explain—was the problem to begin with. I couldn’t “just stay balanced.”
Long after I was ready to quit I kept at it. I wanted to ride a bike. I really did. But I also knew that my stumbling was no more within my control than my boyfriend’s stumbling over words whenever he tried to read. And did I bring home the paper every night insisting he attempt to read it? Did I quiz him on the contents?
His denial was a form of magical thinking. As if my failure, being a matter of choice, could with discipline be unchosen. The larger implication, of course, was that I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with the way I was.
Yet to a certain extent that was true. While I had scant interest in the reclamation of my soul, and had broken up with the evangelical guitarist the day he tried to convert me, my body was a different matter. Given the option, a menu card at birth, I’d have checked the box for a straight spine. Perhaps then I’d have played sports, joined clubs, attended dances. Perhaps like Chipper and my parents I’d have been more social and self-assured. I might not have been so silent and aloof, might not have read quite so much, might not have begun turning myself into a writer right from the start. Who can say?
When I landed hands down in a pile of crusted dog shit I knew it was time to stop. Who was I trying to kid? I hadn’t learned to ride a bike. I hadn’t really thought I would. But I’d tried and in trying I’d shown my doubting companion what my words had failed to convey. I’d gone into the park the student and come out the teacher.
Backward Glances
And so. What was I then? What am I now? Formerly disabled? Healed? Reformed? (Literally, yes, I suppose this is so; I have been re-formed, pieced together with bone from my hips.) No one points, stares, yet I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m “passing” for able-bodied.
At a conference not long ago I spoke as part of a panel on writing about disabilities. During the question and answer session a woman asked me about scarring. How has the notion of scarring influenced my work? Because I’d not given the issue much thought, her question intrigued me. Unlike some of the other disabilities represented on this panel—blindness, polio, Parkinson’s disease—my scoliosis is not immediately apparent. Yet my scar, though concealed, brands me as “other,” a member of some special non-elect. I struggled through an answer to her question, speaking about the reductive nature of disability, the dissonance inherent in hearing oneself described as a scar, a spine, how jarring this can be, especially for an adolescent, whose sense
of identity has yet to jell. Only much later did I consider the question in terms of writing.
A book, Kafka said, should be an ice axe to break the frozen sea within us. Writing chips away at inauthenticity because for the work to matter it needs to get at what’s essential. It’s the thing that won’t let go that counts. My own urge to write stems from a sense of vexation and inquiry: something is bothering me and I need to grasp why. Time, we know, does not heal all wounds. That’s a fairy tale adage, something to see us through. Still, a certain amount of time needed to elapse before I felt able to write about any of this. The scar had to form, heal, fade. Until then I did not want to dwell. There are myths for this, too, cautionary tales for those tempted by the over-the-shoulder glance. Lot’s wife. Orpheus. Leave it alone. Don’t look back.
A few days after I turned forty, my father called to wish me a happy birthday. Decades earlier, during weekend visits, my father and brother had played games together. They wrestled on the carpeted floor. For Chipper there were love pinches, piggyback rides, Hungarian-sounding nonsense names. Ignatz. Butchie Shondoke. I was Sweetheart. I read and read. Sweetheart we’re going to toss the ball around, we’ll be back, make yourself at home. Sweetheart, you like skiing? Jean-Claude Killy—watch this! Later, when we were adults, Chipper—and only Chipper—was invited to my father’s house on the New Jersey shore, a house I have never seen. I was my mother’s daughter, my grandmother’s pet: female, fragile, foreign. No place for me in this world of men. Fathers naturally favored their sons, their progeny, the person to carry on their names. This, at least, is how I had rationalized my father’s preference.
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