I don’t remember much about what we did on the weekends, except that then I got to see Daddy, with whom I was always quite close, and whom I missed dearly during my “work week.” Mother told me later in life that after I was born, he paid more attention to me than he did to her, which I’m sure was very hard for her and must have added to the difficulties in our relationship. She said I’d follow him around in my diaper, during that short twenty-three months when I could walk, and he’d be in his BVDs or Fruit of the Looms, and our body types were so similar that I looked “like a little Bob” from the back. When he was attempting to fit our screen door in Los Angeles, he swore, “Ye gods!” and I swore back, “Ye gods, Daddy, the door doesn’t fit!” My mother told him he’d better watch his language. (They’d have a fit if they heard me these days.)
I remember being in my crib at the apartment and him coming in to the tiny bedroom, leaning over the rail and talking to me, sometimes unable to resist teasing me. My mother said I would stick out my lower teeth at him like a little bulldog when he made me irritated, and he’d make the same face back at me, which would further incense me, and she’d chastise him for it.
I hated to go back to the hospital on Sunday nights.
It took decades for me to fully appreciate the value of what those dedicated, innovative rehab people did with me in therapy, or the time and emotional commitment doing the therapy must have been for my mother. I was a three-year-old simply doing what I was told to do, and in my future childhood years, I just got up, put on the brace, grabbed my sticks, and was out the door, trying my best to be a normal kid. I didn’t know then that I had initially been slated to spend my life sitting down, dependent on others to care for me, so gratitude for this gift of mobility didn’t occur to me at the time. Appreciation of my “good fortune,” that of being able to stand and walk, did not come until young adulthood.
But I also don’t remember feeling particularly sorry for myself in my disability at age three, or even comparing myself to normal children. I felt very sad at being confined in the hospital for so long, not being able to play anymore (except in the bathtub or with my mama and the birds on the beach), and not seeing my parents, my old playmates, or anyone else I knew. I reached a somewhat depressed resignation, relieved by those interspersed moments of freedom. I may have cried out of loneliness, but I don’t remember that. I just remember accepting the days of monotony and wishing every hour of every day that I could get out of there. After a few months, it seemed that there would never be any other life for me. I felt it was endless, and as if the fun part of life was over.
I do recall being a little angry about the entire situation, which is something you can see in a couple of post-hospital photos of me. I look resigned but not cheerful about it—a combination that may be somewhat ingrained in my personality. I know I haven’t been horrible, and am certainly not irritated all the time, but anyone close to me has eventually seen me break down in tears over not being able to do things involving standing or walking, even some small, basic task, or has seen me angry and/or frustrated with my physical state. Though polio did not strike me as unfair when I was a child, the idea sure has crossed my mind more than a few times as an adult.
I’ve come to see that nearly everyone has many life experiences that are unfair. Mine were only more excessive than the average, and occurred earlier in life. I sometimes tell myself, sarcastically, that polio is the gift that keeps on giving.
When rehabilitation was deemed successful, I was finally released, with bows on my Kenny sticks, bows in my hair, and a brace on my leg. Yes, I was a strong-willed girl, and perhaps I would have been in a wheelchair all my life had I not had that determination and the assistance of some sympathetic people who saw my true nature.
A friend and I, July, 1951, the week I was released from the hospital, age 3 1/2.
In front of the lot my dad bought for our new home in Yuba City, late summer, 1951. Mother always turned me out impeccably, partly so that even though I was handicapped, I would look as pretty as other little girls.
5
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back to childhood
While we lived in Santa Monica, my dad went traveling throughout California looking for a small town that had a milk delivery service for sale—someplace without disease epidemics and the other stresses of a large city, someplace safe where his little family could start a new life.
Here’s how my parents met: In 1946, Bob was just home from the war and intent on marrying and settling down. Frances was recently divorced and living with her two teenage children in a bungalow apartment across the street from the bakery where she worked in L.A. So, she was often up very early to scoot across the street and start baking. (She was really good at it and passed a smidgeon of this talent on to me, though my work is more haphazard. The greatest compliment she ever paid me was that she really liked my pie crust and that it was “so tender and flaky,” though I used butter and she used Crisco.)
Bob delivered milk to her home. Mother thought he was cute. (He was.) She was nice looking, more patrician than cute, even though she was very short. She told her baker boss that she’d really like to meet her milkman and didn’t know what to do about it.
“Bake a couple of pies and put ’em out on the windowsill to cool just before he comes by in the morning,” he said.
Always deferential to men, she asked, “What kind of pies should I bake?”
His quick answer: “Cherry!”
So she followed his advice. She must have gotten up a lot earlier than usual to pit all those cherries (I inherited her cherry pitter, so I know she at least sometimes used fresh fruit), make the crusts, and get two pies into the oven an hour before Bob Allen came by her window at 8:00 a.m. By the time he delivered the milk, there they were, aroma wafting through the open window as prescribed.
Bob walked up and said, “Boy, Mrs. Smith”—that was her married name—“those pies sure smell good!”
“Oh, would you like to come in and have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee?” she coyly answered.
A very few months later—on January 1, 1947—they were married, and I was born on December 8 of that year.
Daddy was raised in Texas, and long after he died, on one of my many drives north through the Sacramento Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area, I suddenly had an “aha!” moment regarding my dad’s choice of Yuba City. The climate was hot. The land was flat. In the distance, to the west, you could see “the world’s smallest mountain range,” or so it was nicknamed—the Sutter Buttes. The lazy Feather River ran through the “twin cities” of Marysville and Yuba City.
Holy smokes: it looked just like Texas. And in 1951, there was a milk route for sale there.
Growing up in Yuba City, none of us local kids could see why the two towns were referred to as twins; our town wanted to sprawl west out to its orchards, while Marysville was referred to as a cup, nearly surrounded by the river and its levee, and, being the older town, also had far more graceful houses—two-story gingerbreads—and tall trees. Yuba City had wealthy ranchers and the professionals who served them, and more high schoolers headed for Harvard and Stanford, while Yuba City mothers grew wary at the prospect of their daughter dating a Marysville boy. (They certainly were the first to take up the popularity of black clothing and Beatle boots, though our high school had the best rock and roll band, Drew Sallee and the Dead.)
To an outsider, though, the two towns did seem as one large one separated by only a river. Way off to the east of Marysville, you could make out the purple mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
Upon my release from the hospital in 1951, my six months of polio captivity completed, we moved into a little Yuba City rental house on Percy Avenue, a bit too close to the undesirable part of town. This was only until the two-bedroom house my dad was helping build for us was finished.
Daddy studied mechanical engineering in high school, and it’s possible he also took some college-level courses. His dad wrote to him in a letter I read that h
e was quite perturbed that Daddy didn’t continue in school and that he kept the milk route instead, which he felt was a fool’s errand and no career for an intelligent man. (The Allen clan, including myself, has a proclivity for engineering and accounting.) Daddy was also an ace mechanic who would comment, as a car drove by outside, on which cylinders weren’t firing correctly. He served on a ship in the navy in WWII, then had a girlfriend or two before Mother. He loved being outdoors and cheerfully greeting a myriad of early-rising customers, whistling most of the time. He often stopped to help them plant fruit trees or share a cup of coffee. He had a coppery “farmer’s tan”—arms, neck, and face—and the rest of him was Irish-Anglo colored, as I discovered when he used the bathroom. He was not a modest or prudish man.
While we were still on Percy, the next phase of therapy began: my mom worked my legs twice a day while I lay on my back. By this time, I was getting old enough (three-and-a-half and counting) to protest the routine, but she never let up. The doctors had prescribed a once-a-day program, but she insisted on doubling that, thinking if some was good, more was better. (Now we know that too much therapy can be detrimental, since it can wear out neurons that can never be regenerated.) I had several months to go before I hit the maximum benefit mark, so while Daddy delivered milk and built our house, we had our own work to do.
I know now that even though my mother and I had our strong differences and many emotional gaps during our long relationship, her diligence in my therapy immediately after my hospital release is largely responsible for my ability to walk for much of my life. She was determined that her child was not going to be severely handicapped—partly for my good, and partly for her own. I put up with the daily exercises, got to know my mommy and daddy again (it was particularly great to be with my dad every night after six months of weekends only, and be held on his lap once again while he read the paper), made friends with the Schwedhelm children next door, and enjoyed my return to a new normal. I remember playing with little cars, not just dolls—early girls’ lib. I also likely wanted the cars and trucks because my dad had real cars and trucks.
We soon moved to our new five-room-plus-bath home on Brown Avenue, in a friendly, quiet, modest middle-class neighborhood with lots of kids. Our house was on a large, flat lot, grass in front and back (no stairs, although there were a few steps for me to struggle with). It had a fruitless mulberry tree that my dad had planted in the backyard, which decades later grew to sport a forty-foot-wide canopy. Soon after we established ourselves, my father installed an ornate iron gate through a chicken wire fence as an entrance into the fruit and vegetable garden. He planted a lawn around the mulberry and an elm surrounded by tall white Shasta daisies (which stink, in case you don’t know that, but they looked good and were fun to color by adding food coloring to a vase of water and letting their stems carry it up to the flower), and an orange tree. In the family orchard at the back were two cherry trees (I often sat in one at the top of a ladder, with a child-sized bucket, picking the fruit: eat one, save one), as well as a peach, an apricot, an almond, a plum, and two pear trees. We grew full-sized watermelons and cantaloupes and so many tomatoes that my mother canned enough to last through the winter. Corn, string beans, cucumbers, eggplant, and even okra, a nod to my dad’s southern roots, and plenty of other vegetables were also among my parents’ crops.
When we moved to the new house, an older girl from up the block was sent by her mother to meet me. Her name was Daralyn (because they had anticipated a boy and meant to name him Darrel Lynn), and she has been my friend for nearly seven decades now. My mother did not want me to learn to ride a bicycle. (In high school I discovered that a girl with the exact same polio residuals I had rode a bike, a stunning revelation to me.) So Daralyn put me on the back bumper of her green big-tired Schwinn two-wheeler and pumped me all over the neighborhood. It has often been through the kindness of friends that I have been able to experience activities of life that I would have otherwise been destined to miss.
I had a series of beloved pets: Pluto the golden cocker spaniel, not brilliant but a good dog, named for the Disney character; Gracie, a little tabby kitten named after George Burns’s wife; and Pity Sing, a gorgeous, long-haired calico cat so named by Daralyn’s mom because she was “such a pretty thing.”
I made a determined attempt to have a normal childhood. I learned to skip in a step-step-LIFT, step-step-LIFT approximation of skipping that I later realized was very awkward looking, so I stopped trying to run, barring an emergency, by the time I reached thirteen. But in the early days, from ages three to six, I wore elastic support gizmos on my leg and foot and that heavy metal brace, and gimped along on those little crutches, trying to keep up with the other kids.
I took naps every day until I was about six. I thought all children did. Around age seven, I realized other kids had stopped that before they entered kindergarten for the most part, other than falling asleep watching TV after a tiring day at school.
While waiting to nod off on my bed in the early afternoon, I would lie on my back with my legs in the air and let them gently sway around. I don’t know what made me do that; it just felt good. Possibly it was related to the heaviness of my brace and the relief of having it off. It really pulled on my little leg, which was already so weak. Later, as an adult, a friend told me this “feet in the air” position is taught in bioenergetics: it’s a way to get energy flowing. Makes sense to me that directing blood the other way in your legs would be advantageous for circulation. The blood flow in my smaller leg was so bad it was nearly non-existent.
While lying there in bed, I would also try to wiggle the toes on my polio foot. I had the ability to move the littlest one in particular, up and down, while I stretched it a little out to the side, maybe as much as a quarter inch. If I did it too much it would start spasming and twitching on its own. I could bend my big toe just slightly, too. The others all mostly moved together if I tried to move any of them, and the movement was almost imperceptible. But I continued to check from time to time, to see if they still moved. (They have become less mobile over the years; these days, I can barely move any of them.)
Besides having almost no control over my toes, I also had— still have—what doctors call a “drop foot.” Many polio, stroke, and neurologically damaged patients have a drop foot: it just hangs there, with no strength or ability to move up and down. I generally illustrate this by showing a limp wrist and flicking it up and down with my other hand and letting it fall. Between my toes and my drop foot, I’ve never been able to wear backless sandals or flip-flops. When I go to a spa they always want to give me a pair to wear, and can’t understand why I want to wear my own. If they press, I just tell them: polio, can’t wear those, they fall off my little right foot. This is inconceivable to young women, most of whom have never encountered a survivor of polio, if they’ve even heard of the disease. If they insist, I say, “It’s as if my foot had a stroke.” That is something they can at least imagine, even if they have never known a stroke patient.
We really take walking for granted. I do, and I can barely do it. Babies are up and at it sometime between just under a year old and a year-and-a-half, which is considered late. I was talking in truncated sentences at eight months (“Baby go bye-bye!”), but I didn’t get up and walk until I was about fourteen months. Then, only twenty-three months later, my normal walking life was over.
So, at about age four, my chief concern became walking without tripping, falling, or stubbing a toe. There was a Kaiser Permanente ad that played a lot on the radio a couple of years ago promoting a great program called Marché. As the spiel went on, you learned that marché is French for “walking,” and Allison Janney’s voice went on to say, “You probably already know how to do that!” (Walk, she meant.) “Just get on out there and put one foot in front of the other.” Easier said than done, in my case.
One winter afternoon after school, at age five or six, having newly abandoned my Kenny sticks, I tripped on nothing in particular in the garage, on my
way from our new two-tone green 1953 DeSoto to the back door of the house, and landed chin-first on my ancient black metal rectangular lunchbox. Mama had to take me to the hospital for stitches. Three or four years later, I had a fall that produced an even worse cut, this time on my polio leg (my scar is one and a quarter inches long and nearly a quarter-inch wide). More Novocain, more stitches. A week or two of summer fun down the drain, no playing in the sprinklers or wading pools in the 100-degree days, and the later nastiness of stitches removal.
Lots of kids have stuff like this happen, so I’m not saying that it’s because of polio that I went through all of this, but it certainly increased my chances of falling and injuring myself by some gargantuan percentage. I also began to see that if I did not want to totally tear myself up, I’d better start being more careful. Thus began a lifetime of being physically cautious—timid, even—burdened with the knowledge that if I slipped, I was going all the way down, every time.
My mother took me to someone’s house when I was barely school age and told me to play with the little boy whose house it was while she talked to his mother. The boy was in his pajamas, even though it was well into the day. I am fairly sure I was there to get exposed to the chicken pox, which I contracted not long after that, as that’s what parents thought was smart in those days. Our parents exposed us to diseases that were potentially dangerous or even lethal—chicken pox, measles, mumps—to “get it over with.” Everyone got them and they were considered inevitable. My mother never socialized with other women unless invited or at church, so it was rare that she made a visit like this.
I felt this wave of attraction for my new friend—he didn’t seem to mind that I was a girl, and was happy to explain to me the toy, puzzle, or game he played with while we stood at a big dining room table. I put my head on his shoulder while I listened to him. He looked at me with a slightly stunned expression, but went on with the explanation. It was my little secret romance. I just loved boys, probably because of my love and admiration for my daddy, and because my mother adored my dad more than any other person on the planet.
Not a Poster Child Page 4