On the day our professor was handing back our graded papers, he skipped mine. “Giuliana DePandi, can I see you in my office, please,” he said at the end of class. I showed up all smiles, extending my hand and introducing myself—a necessity given the degree of my participation all semester. “Hi! How are you?” I said brightly. He cut right to the chase.
“You’re in trouble for plagiarism.”
“Huh?” I responded. “Plagiarism?”
He then informed me that I would have to appear before some sort of university tribunal the following Monday morning. They were sending me to the college gallows!
“What makes you think I plagiarized anything?” I cried. I was in a state of disbelief: I would never stoop to plagiarism! And I was mad as hell that the geek I had bought the paper from had done so. With reckless abandon, it turned out. The professor pulled out first one book and then another, opening them to giant swaths of text he had marked. There was maybe half a page worth of original material in my ten-page treatise. For three hundred bucks, I had expected originality. That was a good chunk of the grocery-and-extras allowance my parents gave me for the semester, which I had managed to sock away thanks to Richard’s generosity when it came to picking up checks. I wondered if there was a way to report dial-a-cheater for consumer fraud. Lucky for me, it turned out that the professor wanted to avoid the bureaucratic time-suck of an ethics trial, and he offered me a plea bargain, instead: I could accept a D for the full semester’s grade. I gladly snatched it up and rode off into the metaphoric sunset.
I was never one to be scared straight, and the only lesson I learned about cheating was that if you wanted to do it right, you had to do it yourself. Or, in my case, with a trusted accomplice. I recruited Richard to help me with an elaborate scheme to ace a botany final I was dreading. The reason I was dreading it was because—minor detail—I had never actually gone to botany class. What did succulents have to do with journalism?
The idea was to wire me up so I could relay the final exam questions to Richard via a hidden mike, and he would consult my notes and radio back the correct answer. If I had spent half the time I spent researching recording devices just studying the damn textbook, I would have been fine. Luckily, Washington, D.C., provides excellent shopping opportunities for both amateur and professional spies, so I was able to pick up what I determined to be a reasonably good two-way radio set. Come the big day, I squashed a baseball cap down over my long hair to conceal the earpiece in my ear. The cord was taped down my back, leading to a battery pack clipped to the back of my bra. Then another wire ran down my arm to my wrist and the tiny mike I would read the exam questions into for Richard. Growing up in greater D.C., I had seen the Secret Service in action plenty of times, and I was confident I had this. Richard was hiding in the stairwell closest to the lecture hall, standing ready with his spy gear and the botany notes I’d bought. (Remember, this was pre-Internet!) I sauntered into the classroom and settled in for the big test. I wasn’t just going to pass this course; I was going to get an A-plus! I pretended to cough while covering my mouth and dictating the first question to Richard:
“What is cytokinesis?”
My ear was filled with loud crackling, then Richard all but shouting.
“Wait, repeat that!”
I put my wrist up to my mouth and softly read the question out loud again. Everyone within a three-row radius seemed to respond with an annoyed “Ssh!” which only piqued the interest of the TAs who were posted as test monitors throughout the lecture hall. The nearest one shot a suspicious glance my way.
“They could hear you in my ear!” I hissed at Richard. Secret Service my eye. We were the friggin’ Penguins of Madagascar.
“What did you say?” Richard crackled back. Now the TA was staring hard. I flipped over my exam, scanning the questions. There were eighty of them.
“I still can’t hear you!” Richard squawked.
Now the TA was striding toward me. I was busted. There was no way this was going to work. I gathered my things, left the blank exam behind, and walked out. I found Richard in the staircase barking into his microphone: “Giuliana? Are you there? What was the question again?”
“It’s over,” I said, unplugging us both. “This was a horrible plan. Let’s go get a burger.”
I got a C.
Okay, maybe it was a D.
Bumbling spy episode aside, Richard had the kind of style that made it easy for me to forget that I was just another struggling student, anyway. His sophistication always rankled the frat-party college boys in my apartment building, and they made a sport out of coming outside to heckle me whenever Richard showed up in whatever fabulous fresh-off-Daddy’s-lot car he felt like flashing that day. I’d hear shouts of “gold digger!” as we drove off laughing, killer sound system blasting. I didn’t care what anyone called me; I was Richard D.’s girlfriend—the Richard D.—and I wanted everyone to know it. When Richard arranged a sweetheart deal on a leased Lexus for me, commuting to campus made a lot more sense than paying rent and sleeping on a twin bed in a room shared with a girl I barely knew, so I moved back home.
My parents adored Richard, his adored me, and it was all very lovey-dovey except for the part where Richard and I tried to kill each other on a regular basis. Our honeymoon period lasted about as long as one of Ben Cartwright’s marriages. Both of us tended to jump to conclusions, and both of us were insanely jealous. If I wanted to go out with my girlfriends, Richard would race over to my house and be sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, waiting up for me at two in the morning.
“Where have you been?” he would demand. Mama and Babbo would wait expectantly for my answer. Veteran snoops who had spent years brazenly listening on the other line (without even trying to be quiet) whenever I was on the phone, they were thrilled now to be included in practically every episode of my relationship drama, courtesy of Richard, who doled out guest passes just to sway the popular vote in his favor. Sometimes I just wanted to kill him. Sometimes I attempted to.
Richard lived in a fancy apartment above the garage of his parents’ mansion. One night, after another one of our epic fights, Richard, utterly exhausted, yelled at me to go home just before slamming his bedroom door in my face. No one slams a door in my face. Oh, I would go home all right. Right after I wedged this chair up under the doorknob so Richard couldn’t escape and then turned the heat up as high as it would go with the fan on full blast. He was probably already asleep, and could just roast away like a baked potato for all I cared right then. I sped off.
Once home, I knew who was calling when the phone rang at one a.m., waking my parents.
“Ma, I got it! Hang up!” I hollered upstairs. Mama was already on the line when I cut in.
“No, no, Anna, don’t hang up!” Richard was imploring.
“I don’t understand,” Mama was saying sleepily. “Here’s Eduardo.”
“Richard, what’s-a the matter?” my father asked.
“Eduardo,” Richard began, “your fucking daughter…”
“Dad, hang up!”
“…tried to kill me!”
“Giuliana, she do-a what?”
“SHE TRIED TO BOIL ME TO DEATH!”
“What-a you boiling, Richard?” Babbo was perplexed. Was Richard making pasta?
“Me! She was boiling me, Eduardo!”
“Giuliana, she put-a you in water, Richard? How she do that?”
“Dad! Don’t listen! He’s drunk! Hang up the phone!”
“Why-a you get in the boiling water, Richard? I no understand.”
“Your daughter is fucking crazy!”
“Ha-ha! April fools, Dad! We are playing a joke. We can all hang up now!”
“Oh. You so funny, Giuliana. I go back to sleep now. Good night, Richard!”
A week after the heat incident, I don’t know who grabbed whose neck first, or why, but Richard and I had a choking standoff.
“I’m going to kill you!” I gurgled, veins bulging, eyes popping.
“I’m going to kill you!” Richard rasped back.
“You let go first!”
“No, you let go first!”
We agreed to both let go on the count of three, and continued to consider ourselves the perfect couple.
We were still together in my senior year at the University of Maryland when I was studying for final exams one November night. I’d been reading in bed for hours, then finally got up to brush my teeth around one o’clock. When I went to stand, though, my body refused to straighten. I fell back onto the bed on my side and tried to deep-breathe my way through the searing pain in my spine. The next day, I made an emergency appointment with Dr. John Kostuik, my orthopedist at Johns Hopkins. He ordered X-rays and an MRI and delivered the news I had been dreading since junior high.
“You’re going to have to have the big surgery.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked hopefully. I thought of all the physical therapy exercises I’d been told to do over the years but had blown off. Maybe I could do a crash course now. I was terrified. After so many years of dread, denial, and tentative hope, it was as if the monster had finally won. I was cornered.
“The alternative is to live in pain and have it get even worse and eventually have to do the surgery anyway,” Dr. Kostuik said.
I was still desperate to negotiate.
“I’m graduating in the spring and then really want to go to graduate school. Can it wait three years?” I asked.
The doctor shook his head. “You’ll curve another one to three degrees a month,” he said.
“I can’t even wait and go to my graduation in a few months?”
“No.” My spine was collapsing in on itself. I couldn’t wait three years, or three months. Even one month was gambling.
Surgery was scheduled for January 6, 1996. The operation would last around eight hours. My entire back would be splayed open. A couple of times a week for several weeks leading up to D-day, I had to give blood to the bank for the surgery. There was no way to pretend anymore that this wasn’t happening. I had no delusions about the pain that was awaiting me, and I was terrified.
Snow was forecast the morning of the surgery, so my parents drove me to Baltimore the night before, and we stayed in a hotel a few miles from the hospital. We woke up to a record-breaking blizzard that ended up causing $3 billion in damage and 154 fatalities across the Northeast. The roads were almost impassable even with our four-wheel drive, and we were late for pre-op. The hospital felt eerily deserted, with only essential staff called in. Dr. Kostuik stopped in before I was rolled to the operating room.
“What degree will I be?” I asked. My curve was at forty-five degrees. How uncrooked could he make me? Fifteen degrees or less would be fantastic.
“I think I will be able to take you to ten degrees,” Dr. Kostuik reassured me.
As the anesthesia pulled me under, I found the nerve to urge him to do better.
“Can you make me zero degrees?” I groggily asked.
“Zero?”
“I know you can do it. Please make me zero and take my awful curve away for good.”
“I will try,” he promised.
I remember waking up during the surgery, seeing faces and lights hovering over me, and hearing an urgent voice say “She’s awake!” before I plunged back down again, feeling scared. When I came to again, my bed was being pushed to the recovery room. I saw Dr. Kostuik smiling at me.
“I made you straight,” he said. “I made you a zero.”
That first night, I was certain I was dying. There was only one nurse working on the orthopedic floor because of the blizzard, and it felt like forever before she gave me my painkillers. Within an hour of swallowing the two horse pills, I was gagging. I spent the next three hours dry-heaving. It felt as if every single stitch was ripping open and every already traumatized muscle along my spine was being wrenched. The blood vessels in my eyes burst. I was a weeping, hysterical mess. The pain overwhelmed me. It was far worse than I had ever dreaded or imagined—a blinding pain, white-hot and relentless, like being mauled from within by some wild animal. No morphine in the world could carry me away. Thumb frantically pumping, I would dispense the maximum dosage as soon as it was time, then beg the nurses to do something, give me something, anything, because the morphine wasn’t cutting it. Monica took the train down from New York and slept in a chair in the corner of my room. I could hear her crying for me. She was the only one who understood what hell I was going through, and how desperate my helplessness made me feel. I would sit up all night, my eyes fixed on the wall clock, waiting for the doctors to make their morning rounds, not wanting to risk being asleep when they came for their five-minute exam. I was convinced they would find some way to conquer the pain.
“Giuliana, go to bed,” my mother would chide. “Nothing will be different tomorrow.”
“No, Mama, we’re going to have an answer,” I would insist. The pain was something tangible and solid to me, a puzzle to solve. They just needed to work on it harder, and then I would be fine again.
“Good morning! Hi, hi, hi!” I would greet the doctors. “Listen, I wanted to ask you if there’s something you can give me instead of the morphine,” I pleaded. “It’s not working.”
“We’ll look into it” was the answer they always gave. I would then fire off questions at them that I had etched in my brain the entire night before. “When will I start feeling better? How bad are my scars? When can I leave the hospital? Will I need more surgery? And most importantly, is there anything more you can do for the pain? I’m dying here!”
I’d harass the nurses for the rest of the day, buzzing them to check and see if my doctor had sent over a new medicine for me.
“Nope,” came the response, always.
I spent two miserable weeks in the hospital. The streets were still snowy and frozen from the blizzard when my parents packed me up in the back of their Jeep Cherokee for the hour-long ride home to Bethesda. We pulled up to the house and the Jeep stopped. My parents had been keeping vigil at my bedside, so no one had been home to shovel since the blizzard, and now the driveway was a treacherous bobsled run of solid ice. There was no way I could hobble my way to the front door, and it would likewise be too dangerous for my father to carry me.
Of course, my parents had planned a surprise homecoming party for me—because that’s exactly what everyone who is delirious with pain and hasn’t showered in two weeks hopes for after major surgery—so the house was full of relatives, friends, and neighbors. The uncles all poured outside to contemplate the ice situation, which, being Italian, meant yelling over each other and waving their hands around a lot.
“Take me back to the hospital,” I demanded from the backseat. “You cannot get me into the house.” I was starting to fear that Plan B would turn out to be abandoning me on the driveway glacier like one of those orphaned baby seals with pleading eyes in National Geographic specials.
After more yelling and gesticulating, the geniuses came up with a solution: they would get a chaise lounge from the pool and carry me up the driveway like Cleopatra. As if. I knew it would never work like that. My objections were overruled, and I soon found myself being dragged, bumped, and slid along the uneven ice while screaming bloody murder. Everyone came out of the house to watch and shout advice while my lounge-chair pallbearers continued to argue and curse in Italian as they slipped, fell, and dropped me along the way. I was still yelping in agony and fury by the time they got me up the stairs and deposited into my bed. Then they all went back downstairs to celebrate my homecoming. Our cleaning lady, Bianca, had come over to help with the festivities, and she and her three-year-old daughter were the only ones still upstairs.
I was happy to be left alone. All I wanted to do was try to sleep and enjoy a little peace and quiet. But first, I needed a drink of water.
“Mama,” I called out. “Mama, I need some water, please!”
No one heard me over the party. I tried calling more loudly, but I was still weak, not to me
ntion dehydrated. I’d stop, gather strength, then mewl again. Dammit, I should’ve gotten a bell, I thought. Finally, a small head poked inside the doorway. Bianca’s little daughter.
“Hi, sweetie,” I said in my most syrupy voice, trying to coax her inside. “Can you go get Mama?”
The toddler stared at me blankly.
“Mamacita? Donde esta tu mamacita?” I tried.
She giggled and stepped inside the room.
Good, good, we’re getting there, my hopeful brain assured my thirsty body.
She plopped down on the floor, watching me, and giggled some more. A grown-up in bed in the middle of the day! Who couldn’t get up from bed! Funny grown-up!
“Mi mama,” I said with growing urgency. “Emergencia!” Lassie would’ve been halfway to the farmhouse by now, what was with this heartless kid?
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