But I have to honor that there’s an intimacy being created there, too, one unique to any parent who manages a child’s chronic illness. My mother, the diplomat. My mother, the (un) registered nurse. My mother, the translator of cries and bubbles.
If my child did have allergies, I’d know where I’d look for guidance. My mother, the teacher. If kids like Jennifer and I had blazed a trail, it’s only because parents like her cleared the path.
• • •
“When milk was twenty-six cents a quart, my parents paid seventy-five cents for goat’s milk, and then had to boil it,” a woman writes to me. The Washington Post had recently published a column I’d written about my dinner-party mango reaction, and she sent a letter describing her own experience with food allergies. Decades earlier, a prick test for sixty substances had caused numerous wheals to break out across her back. The doctor decreed that she could have no beef, pork, wheat, or cow’s milk—and most vegetables were rationed to only once a week, to prevent overexposure.
“If I had tomato juice on Monday, I couldn’t have stewed tomatoes until the next Monday,” she remembers.
In an era when regular bread cost sixteen cents per loaf, they had struggled to pay almost a dollar each for loaves of 100 percent rye bread. Instead of hamburgers and hot dogs, they tracked down lamb and Spanish mackerel. Doctors told her parents that her allergies were probably related to living in Southern Florida, below sea level. So after seven years of no improvement, the family moved to Baltimore. In her teenage years, they decided to retest her, this time with 116 hypodermic injections.
“Every day for a week or so, I had to go downtown after school and get sixteen to eighteen shots,” she says. “I was so skinny that one of the needles actually went through my arm and dripped on the floor. The nurse was horrified. I just laughed.”
Incredibly, the tests showed no reactions to the foods that had once plagued her.
“I had either outgrown or moved away from my allergies,” she writes. “I’m sorry that you were not as lucky.”
Lucky. Luck is a funny thing. Most strokes of good fortune are premised on being rescued from a stroke of bad fortune. The cat has to fall out the window before he can be caught by the woman standing on a balcony below. Nobody cares when a rich man wins the lottery; it’s the winner who had been on the brink of foreclosure that inspires us. My family has always spoken of my good luck in surviving reactions, and never the bad luck of having those reactions in the first place. Should I be bitter? Did I draw the genetic short straw?
When I was growing up, making those weekly trips to the allergist, the rhythm of Dr. Latkin’s office never changed. We stayed with him no matter our health care plan, even when that meant periods of paying out of pocket; the continuity was comforting. We would arrive, sign in, and take our seats in the waiting room. On the floor would be the play set for the littler kids who enjoyed sliding primary-color beads along a series of loopy wire curves. The latest issues of Highlights, Cobblestone, and Cricket would be waiting on the low-set beech table. The walls were hung with posters displaying a collage of moments from Richard Scarry’s series of Busytown picture books. Even when I last visited, less than a year ago, though the office had been renovated and repainted, the Busytown posters were still there.
As a kid, I knew Busytown from the Golden Books that my grandparents kept at their house. Richard Scarry populated his stories with anthropomorphized animals, often outfitted in traditional Swiss clothing: Blacksmith Fox, Stitches the Tailor, Hilda Hippo, and the Cat family of Daddy, Mommy, Huckle, and Sally. I use the term story loosely. Most of the books focused on indexing the business of daily life using the simplest of plot arcs (The Pig family is going on a train! Sally sends Grandma Cat a letter!), paced and labeled to show each step, crop, coin, switch, and gear that makes things happen.
Scarry’s eye was as quirky as it was meticulous. When Jason the Mason, a pig, built a house for Stitches the Tailor, a rabbit, the illustration correctly engineered the supply of plumbing and airflow to every floor. Scarry accounted for telephone lines and labeled the sewage pipes. Depicting “moving day,” Scarry detailed Stitches’s quadruple-decker vehicle with scads of baby bunnies, a carrot hood ornament, a tricycle for every child strapped on top, and a paper airplane sailing out one of the car’s high windows.
There is no cartoon universe better suited for an allergist’s office. You could say that Richard Scarry is Bruegel the Elder for the preschool set. I’m not just basing this claim on Scarry’s tendency to embed a character clothed in a blousy burlap shirt amid the populace clothed in suspenders and three-piece suits. (Though this was the kind of shirt Pieter Bruegel himself would use when attending local weddings, the better to observe his subjects. This ruse was what earned him the nickname of “Peasant Bruegel.”) Coincidences of clothing aside, what I like about both are their refusal to assume an artificial focal point for the audience. These are two artists who both revel in landscapes composed of many bodies in motion.
Scarry shared Bruegel’s preoccupation with—as the title of one of Scarry’s books asks—What Do People Do All Day? In the same way that Bruegel seeded his paintings with recurring beggar figures, Scarry worked Lowly Worm into every scene, complete with his feathered Tyrolean hat, his tubular pseudo-pants, and his singular tail-shoe. Lowly is our conscience and our mischief maker. If a curtain is drawn, he’ll peer over it. If a trumpet is playing, he’ll hide inside of it to sing along.
The main reason Scarry’s vision attracted me in childhood, just as Bruegel would fascinate me in college and ever since, is his casual and persistent depiction of life’s small catastrophes. All does not go smoothly in Busytown. Lowly Worm tumbles down the air intake of a cruise ship; Mr. Frumble loses the beloved fedora that fits over his floppy porcine ears; Rudolf von Flugel, the fox pilot, downs his red German monoplane with some frequency. Houses catch fire, tractors crash, and construction workers slip and go bobbing down the river. These crises are met with the equanimity of the crowd, just as the farmer with his plow calmly ignores the flailing legs of a boy drowning at sea in Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
This has always struck me as being the way things are, particularly if you live with illness. I don’t mean to suggest that the towns we live in are callous. But as Scarry and Bruegel remind us, our towns are busy and their inhabitants preoccupied.
Once, a UVA English professor promised to introduce me to a famous poet who was reading at the university bookstore that evening. A half hour before the reading was to begin, I had an allergic reaction in the dining hall. I made it to the bookstore’s bathroom, where I vomited, and then, worried I would pass out alone, lurched to the main entrance of the bookstore, where I curled up on the floor and called for help.
As one cashier hovered over me, and another dialed the hospital, my professor arrived at the bookstore with the famous poet at his side. Out of the corner of my blurry eyes, I recognized my professor—his salt-and-pepper hair, his spectacles, his sweater vest. I caught his brief pause, the murmur Is she okay? He did not address me by name. He acted like nothing more than a mildly compassionate stranger, one who had somewhere to be by 7 p.m. He took the poet by the elbow, and they stepped inside.
I am grateful that he kept going. Not every page is meant to tell your story. You are not the focal point of every canvas. This town is busy. And when I joined the poet’s workshop a semester later, sitting in the front row of his classroom, he did not remember me from that night. So I had the chance to introduce myself as someone other than the girl with the allergies.
That’s the balancing act. My job is to center on staying safe in this world, but my job is also never to assume the world should revolve around keeping me safe. We have more important things to worry about. Don’t kill the birthday girl. The gifts are wrapped and the piñata waiting. We have a party to get to.
Acknowledgments
For those looking for more information on managing food allergies, I recommend consulting t
he Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), the Food Allergy Initiative (FAI), and other groups mentioned in these pages.
For technical explanations and studies cited, I drew upon articles or abstracts published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Pediatrics (issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics), Mayo Clinic Proceedings, New England Journal of Medicine, Psychiatric News, and Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, as well as information provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI), and numerous mainstream news and medical resources.
In assembling the elements of science history, I am particularly indebted to Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady, by Mark Jackson, and Peter Duncan Burchard’s research on George Washington Carver for the National Park Service.
I am grateful for the assistance and access provided by those at the National Peanut Board (Dee Dee Darden, Ryan Lepicier, Lindsay Spencer), the Culinary Institute of America (Jeff Levine), and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (Marianne Canter, Megan Brown). I would also like to recognize the tireless and innovative research pursued by Dr. Hugh A. Sampson, Dr. Robert A. Wood, Dr. A. Wesley Burks, Dr. Gideon Lack, and their colleagues.
Thanks to the amazing team at Crown, especially my editor, Sydny Miner. Sydny, I admire your keen eye. You made this book smarter, braver, and better. Thanks as well to my acquiring editor, Heather Jackson.
Thanks to Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives. They took a chance on a poet and have proven tireless and savvy advocates.
None of this would have happened without the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, which opened the door, and the space to write afforded by fellowships to the Jentel Artist Residency Program and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A 2010 Individual Artist Fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities came at a critical time, and kept the roof over my head.
I had a Greek chorus of good counsel from the worlds of allergic living and creative writing, whose insights affirmed my faith in this project over and over: Maria Acebal, Natalie E. Illum, Holly H. Jones, Jenny Kales, Jennifer Kronovet, Dylan Landis, Richard McCann, Nancy McKnight, Erika Meitner, Tom Shroder, and Kate Stein. I will forever be in the debt of Meaghan Mountford, who is a reader like no other.
Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of your loved ones like the news “I’m writing a memoir!” Thanks to my friends who make cameo appearances, and in particular to Adam Pecsek for his great humor and even greater patience. Thanks to my family—Mom, Dad, Christina, Uncle Jim, my grandparents, Sara and the Jonkers clan, the Texan Beasleys, who will probably never offer me brisket again—you are all such good sports. You make this a full and lucky life.
Finally, thanks to my longtime allergist, Dr. Peter C. Latkin, and his staff. We come into your office scared. We leave smiling. You have done so much for so many.
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