by Lucy Grealy
"It's just a bony growth; it's nothing to worry about, Mrs. Grealy."
"But surely it's not normal, a young girl to have a lump like that on her face?"
"It's just a bony growth, Mrs. Grealy, nothing unusual after such surgery."
The doctor, who wasn't a doctor but a specialized dentist, smiled condescendingly after each inquiry. Nothing infuriated my mother more than this condescension, which even I recognized as endemic in the medical profession. Unfortunately for my mother, I was still a typical nine-year-old, and I seized upon every opportunity to be embarrassed by her. Why did she have to make such a fuss? Couldn't she just accept what they said? Not brave enough to actually speak up, I mentally rolled my eyes at each encounter between my mother and the doctor.
If I had suspected how classic and common my tendency toward parental shame was I'd surely have abandoned it and sided with my mother. I was vain and proud when it came to wanting to be different from everyone else. I wanted nothing more than to be special, and so far the role of patient had delivered. My teachers had given me a noticeable amount of special treatment, and I'd gained a new level of respect from my friends since going under the knife.
When my mother marched me back to Dr. Cantor's office, it was with a sense almost of righteousness. It was obvious I had a bad infection that they could no longer ignore, and my heart thrilled when I heard the words "emergency surgery" used in conjunction with my name. They had to drain and clean out the lump, which was growing almost visibly and looking angrier by the minute. I asked if I'd get to go to the hospital in an ambulance and was abjectly disappointed when told no.
As far as I was concerned, I was still on a great adventure, the star of my own television special. Up until that point my great trials in life had been the emotional upheavals of our painful family situation. This physical drama seemed a bit of light relief to me. Besides, there was yet another unfinished book report looming. Just when I thought it was hopeless, I'd again been handed this brilliant stroke of luck. Something as impressive-sounding as Emergency Surgery had to be worth as long an extension as I could ask for, as well as another round of presents. It seems odd to me now that a deed as relatively easy as not crying over a needle was rewarded so lavishly, while my Herculean efforts to simply not fall apart during one of the many family crises went completely unnoticed.
After the surgery my parents were instructed to take me to the Strang Clinic, which translated to me as a trip to the City. I was thrilled: I loved any chance to drive through the filthy, bewildering streets of New York, see so many different types of people, marvel that so many noises could exist all at once—horns, sirens, human yells. At the Strang we met the eccentric Dr. John Conley, a leader in the field of head and neck surgery. After a thorough examination, he arranged to have me admitted to the children's wing of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, known as Babies Hospital.
When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.
As I sat there on the playground's sticky asphalt I experienced time in a new way, but perhaps that memory has significance because of the way my life has unfolded. It seems almost uncanny to me that I didn't know; how could I not have? A year before, my class had gone on a field trip to a museum where I became fascinated with a medieval chart showing how women contained minute individuals, all perfectly formed and lined up like so many sardines in a can, just below their navels. What's more, these individuals contained more minute versions of themselves, who in turn held even more. Our fates were already perfectly mapped out within us, just as we once waited perfectly inside of our mothers, who themselves were held within the depths of their mothers, our great-grandmothers.
It's impossible for me not to revisit this twenty-year-old playground scene and wonder why I didn't go right when I should have gone left, or, alternatively, see my movements as inexorable. If the cancer was already there, it would have been discovered eventually, though probably too late. Or perhaps that knock set in motion a chain of physical events that created an opportunity for the cancer to grow which it might not otherwise have found. Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.
TWO
Petting Zoo
AT FIRST THERE WAS ONLY THE PRESENCE OF THE boy beneath the bed to horrify me, but before I knew it his father was under there, and then, most shocking of all, even the doctor squatted down and tried his own ineffectual cajoling. This last bit of vaudeville was too much; not only were the doctor's assurances on par with some villain's comforting homilies, but it was all so ... so ... undignified. I was mortified. The boy, a year or two younger than me, wore red pajamas with feet; his father was almost completely bald and wore thick glasses. He reminded me of a father-actor on a black and white TV show I watched in reruns every afternoon after school. Partly I felt embarrassed for the father and the doctor, though I also maintained a degree of scorn toward them for indulging the boy's behavior. But mostly I found myself deeply embarrassed for the boy. How could anyone sink so low as to hide beneath a bed? This went against every belief I held dear. One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry. I was nothing if not harsh. Had I not found myself in this role of sick child, I would have made an equally good fascist or religious martyr. The subtleties of my first visit to the emergency room, where I'd been praised as good for being brave, were already arranging themselves into a personal treatise in much the same way that a seemingly inconsequential architectural miscalculation on the ground floor can result in a sweeping chasm in the penthouse. At a time when everything in my family was unpredictable and dysfunctional, with my mother recently discharged from a brief stay in a hospital herself, here I had been supplied with a formula of behavior for gaining acceptance and, I believed, love. All I had to do was perform heroically and I could personally save my entire family.
At that point heroism was still fairly easy: I'd been on Ward to in Babies Hospital for only about an hour. I wasn't happy about being associated with babies, but I was thrilled by the notion of being in the city, in a hospital that had twelve floors and an elevator. To this day I find riding in an elevator a basically pleasing act, the progression of lights marking a sense of excited anticipation. Ward 10 was an old ward. Babies Hospital was nothing like the shining, clean techno-miracles I was used to on television and had experienced at the considerably newer Pascack Valley Hospital. The walls were pale green, and the floor was dark green tiles speckled with gray, worn to an even darker shade where people had paced over the years. All the doors were wood, and the partitions, strategically placed for viewing purposes, were made of thick sea-green glass reinforced with mesh wire. There were bars on all of the outside windows. Though the hospital was undeniably clean, a dingy air prevailed throughout. I was always a fan of the gleaming new, but in time I came to find this dinginess comforting, more humane than the fascinating but alien landscapes of newer wards I would later visit.
I heard my name called. Again they called me Lucinda. Previously that name had belonged only to the first day of school, but from that moment on I recognized it as the property of all people in uniforms standing in the unflattering fluorescent light of hospitals. The doctor asked my parents a number of questions
about my mother's pregnancy and my infancy, and sometimes my mother and father had to confer with each other in order to answer I wasn't used to seeing my parents defer to people in positions of authority; I wasn't used to seeing them act together, pair up like this; and I wasn't used to seeing them act so normal, like the parents of the friends in my neighborhood, like parents I had seen on TV. It was generally assumed that we were not a normal family, a feeling we proudly carried and tried to hide at the same time.
We—my parents, two older brothers, older sister, twin sister, and I—had immigrated to America five years earlier, when Sarah and I were four. My father, a well-known television journalist in Ireland, had been offered a job he couldn't refuse with a major network in the States. He packed us all up and, in what was probably meant to be some sort of tongue-in-cheek joke about immigrants, had us travel to America by boat. Unlike our earlier countrymen, who came in steerage, we sailed on the Queen Mary on what was her penultimate voyage. Surely this grand act was to be the harbinger of the riches already awaiting us. As with most of my father's gestures, that voyage was well meant, but later, when things were not going quite as well, it was referred to with scorn, and even later, after his early death, it seemed an act filled with literary bathos, and pointedly sad.
Of course, at the time it was an adventure extraordinaire, especially for a four-year-old gathering first memories. My brothers used to play Ping-Pong on a back deck and sometimes lost the ball over the side. I loved nothing better than to run and stare at its lostness in the churning water far below. The chaos held me tightly, endlessly. One day Sarah drank a glass of cream instead of milk and was sick all over the place; another time we were invited to a children's party in the gigantic ballroom, and I won a prize at Duck Duck Goose. In the ship's gym there was an electric horse and a peculiar machine with a large strap that vigorously jiggled the fat atoms in your bottom to smithereens. The most predictable memory of all, the Statue of Liberty, draws a complete blank, but I remember looking up and simultaneously hoping and fearing that the ship's stack would hit the Verrazano Bridge as we passed beneath it. New York, when we disembarked, was rainy and filled with broken windows.
"Where are we now?" Sarah and I asked our mother several days later in our new kitchen. She stood near the sink, her hair short and ash blond, her shirt white silk. I was convinced my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.
"We're in Spring Valley now." She was patient with us.
"But when are we going to America?"
This struck her as funny. Her face lit up and I knew we'd pleased her, but exactly how escaped me. Spring Valley was just a name, a place, but America, now that was something big, a whole way of life, an idea, a piece of magic. Judging by the way everyone spoke of it all the time, I was eager to know when we were going to be there.
My oldest brother, Sean, was seventeen when we left Dublin, Nicholas a few years younger than he, and Suellen a few years younger than that. For Sarah and me, Dublin was just a collection of vague shadows, but for the rest of our siblings, Ireland was home. This new place to which they'd been unwillingly transported, America, could never match up. The virtues of Ireland and England were constantly extolled. Many years later, when I moved away from the country I'd grown up in, I came to understand how small things from that previous life such as a brand of candy or a particular television show took on great symbolic meaning.
But these transformations of loss and symbol came much later. When we first arrived, I could not even eat an American candy bar without being reminded by one of my brothers that it stood for the entire political and social inferiority of America. Sometimes a Crunchie, a British/Irish candy bar, would appear in the house—perhaps someone had mailed it—and the feel of that orange wrapper in my hand seemed to conjure everything that I was missing. Television, I was reminded, was vastly superior back in Ireland. I watched American shows and felt guilty for liking them, wondered why their counterparts across the ocean were so much more refined. I never doubted Ireland's superiority, I only assumed it was some failing of mine that prevented me from seeing it in precise terms.
My poor brothers, missing their home more than they could admit, felt nothing but contempt for this new country thrust upon them. Their worst insults became That's so American; don't be so American; how American. If we were selfish or acted spoiled, we were becoming American. When we used up all the hot water in the bath, that was an American thing to do. Gradually my earliest memories of Ireland transformed into pure myth. Where I was now was not only no good, it was getting worse all the time. The flawless times of the family were past; I had missed them simply by being born too late. I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.
Apart from its vulgar culture, the worst aspect of America was its politics, according to my brothers. They had leaned toward the left back in Ireland, and in reaction to our conventional Republican neighborhood in a country different in almost every way from the one they knew, they became radical. Added to the list of insults along with American were Bourgeois and Capitalist; American-Bourgeois-Capitalistwas the most searing of all. I had no true idea of what these things meant, but I developed a healthy disdain for them too. I remember my teacher in the third grade talking about some great and famous capitalist. It was during the first snow of the winter, and she had a hard time keeping everyone from looking out the window except for me. I sat there tensely, wondering why she was describing this man with such admiration in her voice. I was waiting to hear the awful truth of what this capitalist had done, but instead the teacher gave up and placated the class by having us make snowflakes from colored paper.
If I intuited that our family was different and in some ways superior, there were also obvious oddities about us not as easily defensible. Neighbors and schoolmates made fun of our different accents. Though I didn't understand this at the time, Sean was in the early stages of what would be diagnosed as schizophrenia. Apart from that, he had long hair and lived a "hippie" life, much different from the lives of our neighbors' sons. My mother herself suffered from depression, an illness I could not understand at the time. There were always money problems, even before my father lost his job, and if nothing else, our home's drastic state of disrepair served as a reminder that there were things I had to keep from other people.
Seeing my parents act so much like, well, parents, other people's parents, there on Babies 10, surprised me, and momentarily fooled me. They spent the entire afternoon with me, talking to doctors, talking to me, to each other. I met some of the other children and their parents. I watched the drama of the boy in the red-footed pajamas unfold as he was eventually extricated from beneath the bed, saw how his mother held him in her lap the entire time the doctor did whatever he was doing to him. At one point I was sent down to Hematology for a blood test. I'd had several blood samples taken from my arm, but this was a finger stick. I watched the entire procedure, fascinated. When I stood up I couldn't understand why I heard a faint buzz and felt so lightheaded. Afterward I reported my dizziness to my mother, who simply remarked that I had been silly to watch. I was perplexed because I'd actually enjoyed watching the blood test and only now felt embarrassed by my "weakling" response. Since then I've always turned my head whenever someone approaches me with a needle.
I visited Radiology for a chest x-ray. This department was newly renovated and, unlike the rest of the hospital, was painted in bright colors. It was the only floor that actually fit my picture of a children's hospital. Murals of cartoonish animals and clowns stared merrily at me as I walked down the halls. In the waiting room I found an absurd number of half-broken toys and giant stuffed animals sitting dejectedly in the corners, too big and unwieldy to really play with. Being all of nine years old, I disassociated myself from all this baby stuff anyway, and made a point of looking disdainful and bored. I'd consciously packed no stuffed animals to bring to the hospital. It was of paramount importance that I appear adult, strong, unafraid.
As the day wore on, I began to believe that maybe my parents really were like the other parents after all, people I normally would have castigated for their indulgence, for letting their worries and fears hang like pictures on a wall for everyone to see. Finally, as dinnertime approached, the intern who'd examined me earlier explained to my parents (I listened in as he talked about me in the third person) that he was going to do a bone marrow test on me. We were all standing in the hall together. I don't remember whether I was afraid of this test I'd never heard of, but when my parents said, "Well then, we'll be off," I looked at them panic-stricken and asked, "Aren't you going to stay with me?" They looked at each other, then back at me, and said something about the traffic, and besides, I wasn't scared, was I?
I felt my face flush. Things seemed to rush at me as if I were the focal point of some unseeable camera's close-up. Immediately I regretted all my assumptions. The embarrassment I felt then stays with me still, though of course it wasn't embarrassment. That feeling was about as different from embarrassment as a patch of soil is from a tree, an egg case from a spider, a lump of stone from a sculpted hand lying heavily on an even stonier lap. It was the moment when I understood unequivocally: I was in this alone.
As it turned out, there really wasn't much to fear, at least not just then. The treatment room was small and overheated, even cozy, being too old for fluorescent lighting. The two interns who did the bone marrow test had only arrived on the ward that day, the first of their rotation. I lay on my stomach on the stiff, clean-smelling white sheets covering the table. Outside, night was settling, but the sky was still velvety blue from the city lights. The interns seemed to know each other from working together in the past, seemed bent on entertaining each other more than me, but I liked them instantly. I had no idea who this Mutt and Jeff team was, but they had a little routine down, switching into alternately squeaky and rough voices. They even thought it was funny when they pressed down on my numbed lower spine and my legs reflexively kicked the contents of the tray all over the floor. As it clattered on the green tile I tensed, waiting for the flare of anger I normally associated with even the most innocent of accidents. Instead they laughed at themselves, made jokes silly enough that we all groaned, awarded me ludicrously high points for being such a good sport, allowed me to feel at ease, at home even.