Daralyn’s brother had a Flexie Flyer. It was a wooden slatted sled about three feet long with six-inch rubber wheels and black rubber steering handles that controlled the front wheels. The boys, and some girls, would lie on their stomachs, bend their knees, feet in the air, and take off down the sidewalk.
I had to try it. Anything with wheels had its appeal, and unlike pedaling on a bicycle, it looked like something I could do.
Daralyn and I asked her brother if we could play with it one day.
“Okay,” he said, “but you better not break it.”
Daralyn rode on it first, giving me a reminder demo; it was her brother’s, after all.
My turn: I lay down on the sled, eye level about eight inches above the sidewalk, and pushed myself off with my strong leg, rolling away at a pretty fast clip. I could steer with the handles into our flat driveway and stop myself with the handle brakes, sort of, or run up against the edge of the lawn or onto the lawn itself in order to stop.
I went back and forth a few times, up and down the block. Then, like nearly all the other kids had done before me, I lost control, rolled off one of our neighborhood rollaway curbs, and smashed my face on the asphalt street—an unpleasant surprise, since I thought I was doing so well.
I got the forehead goose egg and the swollen, bruised, and scraped upper lip that were the stigmata of enjoying this particular vehicle. Owie. Plus, I looked like an idiot for a week with that big puffed-up lip. But that didn’t deter me: I had to try it again a few times after I healed up. The next time I hit the pavement, and sported the same messed-up face, my mother barred me from ever cruising on a Flexie Flyer again.
“You could knock one of your teeth out on that thing,” she said. “Don’t let me ever catch you on it again.”
I knew better than to defy her.
Though I never rode a stand-alone two-wheeler bike, a friend would let me borrow her little sister’s bike, which had training wheels on it, so I could ride a block or two around the neighborhood with the other kids. But the weakness of my “lazy leg,” as my mother called it, would have made it difficult for me to go any farther than that. I did love the feel of cruising—so much easier and faster than walking! Sometimes I actually dreamed I was riding a bike up the street, with two strong legs and no balance wheels. I would awaken remembering what the shade trees looked like overhead and truly feel as if I’d been riding a bike— exhilarated by that easy, rolling freedom.
Ultimately, my only consistent means of transportation throughout my young life were: a tricycle, which I gave up in third grade; the back bumper of Daralyn’s Schwinn (till she got a skinny-fendered purple ten-speed when I was about twelve); someone’s car; and my feet. If you grew up in a suburb in the United States, especially one as flat as they are in California’s Central Valley, and did not grow up in severe poverty, you probably had a bike, along with every other kid you knew. That’s how kids got to most of the places they went. Since I was unable to ride, I spent a lot of bikeless time at home alone in the afternoons while other kids were off someplace I couldn’t go. This partial isolation set me up with two personality traits: I sought the company of my peers at almost any cost as a young person (in high school, I’d go to the weekly teen dances with strep throat if I could get away with it), and I learned to find things to do on my own—reading, drawing, watching movies, singing by myself in the backyard! All these pastimes became almost thrilling to me. This eventually had me evolve into the solitude-loving but basically friendly recluse I am today. And, of course, it may have been genetic: my dad had a similar nature.
Shoes, of course, were expensive, since we had to buy two pairs each time, and then there was the cost of the orthopedic buildup on the heel and sole. This work, done at the local shoe repair, only partially compensated for the length difference in my legs— but a little bar across the sole of the smaller shoe did help my foot rock forward after I slapped it down on the floor or sidewalk (I have no control over bringing my heel down first and rolling up to the ball of my foot, another aspect of a drop foot).
Since we were a family of lower-middle-class income, I was taught to care for and repeatedly repair my shoes. As I grew older, this allowed me to have a few pairs at once—important to a young girl concerned with her appearance!
Generally, oxfords were my mother’s shoe of choice for me, but I did have loafers eventually (beloved Cordovan red with tassels in the fourth grade). I have always owned one or another pair of Mary Janes, which will stay on my foot—not the case with many other shoes, since I have no toe-grabbing ability. At one point I also had one pair of black patent flats a friend had handed down to me which I insisted on wearing; both shoes were the same size, so I used a wide rubber band to keep the right one on my small foot. (Once I dreamed I went to church naked, wearing only these shoes with the obvious rubber band. Waking, I thought, Well, I don’t know which is worse, being at church naked or wearing a shoe with a rubber band.)
The older I got, the more I wanted flats and dressier shoes, which often were not particularly comfortable and did not offer much support to my paralyzed foot and ankle. But vanity drove me, and I tried to wear shoes as much like those that other girls were wearing as was possible, though I could never wear a heel that was more than an inch and a half high, including the lift, or I’d turn my ankle.
In high school, I learned about an organization called the National Odd Shoe Exchange, or NOSE, which for a small fee set a person up with a membership and one or two partners with exactly opposite-sized feet and similar tastes. For a few years I had a happy exchange of shoes with a girl up in North Dakota, but in college we lost track of each other, and then NOSE gradually seemed to have a breakdown in its administration. I tried several times during my life to find another exchange partner, but they never did provide one. They still exist, and I send them the extra shoes I buy—the ones I can’t wear for the opposite feet—and I imagine they sit in a warehouse until someone requests something in those sizes.
But shoes were among the more superficial and solvable problems in my childhood.
Me and Daralyn, Easter, 1956.
8
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the crippled kid meets sticks and stones
Children I knew in the neighborhood accepted my limitations and we played together almost normally. I couldn’t run, so it was quite unrealistic to engage me in games like baseball, which at that time girls only played in PE class, but there were lots of games of Red Light/Green Light, Mother May I, and Swing the Statue on our front lawn, as well as Hide and Go Seek around the neighborhood. If kids were riding bikes that day, I went home and read Nancy Drew or Judy Bolton books or watched TV, unless Daralyn was there to pump me. She biked me farther than my mother would have wanted us to go, and I loved it. I was cheeriest when I wasn’t home, for the most part.
I loved to play with dolls, knowing this was practice for the family I expected to have someday. I see now that I also used these helpless pretend children to release my frustrations. I remember biting one of my dolls on her hard plastic arm until my teeth hurt. I created make-believe doll-sized apartment buildings out of my child-scaled table and chairs, complete with taped-on pieces of paper sporting drawn elevator buttons. Living in an apartment seemed like the most glamorous life imaginable. I played Monopoly, Finance, and Clue with my friends, and watched tons of television.
TV was fast becoming a babysitter for working moms, or even moms who wanted a break. For me, it was also a rest stop: I was required to take an hour’s nap midday up until I was six or seven, since I fatigued so easily, so a half-hour on the couch after school was not laziness but necessity. If I pushed too hard, my little leg would buckle under me like a marathon runner at race’s end. And on Saturday mornings, of course, every pajamaed kid in town was in front of the TV. Early childhood favorites were Ding Dong School with Miss Frances, Winky Dink and You (vinyl sheet on the TV screen so we could draw parts of the cartoon with crayon), My Friend Flicka, and Fury, the last two being
horse-with-kid-owner shows. I also loved Howdy Doody the puppet; having met Clarabelle the clown in the hospital confirmed my devotion, plus I loved the emcee, Buffalo Bob, especially since Bob was my daddy’s name.
Red Ryder with Little Beaver, his Indian boy sidekick and sneaky informer, were another personal favorite. At one point I started making-believe that Little Beaver lived over my bedroom with his thirteen friends (expressing my longing for siblings), and I required anyone entering my room to walk around the imaginary staircase. People snickered or smiled. I knew they were patronizing me and didn’t like it, but understood: pretend was pretend, even if for me it was pretend-real.
Then there was—be still, my beating heart—The Cisco Kid. Cisco and Pancho, Cisco handsome and Hispanic, Pancho paunchy and meant to be the stereotype of a friendly Mexican. “Oh, Cisco!”; “Oh, Pancho!” they’d say at the end, and ride off into the chaparral. I wanted to be some kind of kid with a capital K, but really, I knew I was known as The Crippled Girl or The Crippled Kid.
In the evenings, there was Your Hit Parade, with Gisele MacKenzie, Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins, and Tommy Lionetti, and eventually there was The Ed Sullivan Show. There was so much life out there, so much to being an entertainer! I knew all the songs and sang them, sometimes while dancing about the living room. Yes, I could dance, albeit in the lame way you’d imagine a little girl with a paralyzed leg and foot would dance. (Often I’ve said, “I can’t do that,” to invitations to do something requiring strength in my foot or legs. And then some well-meaning person has implored, “Oh, just try!” and then said quietly, “Oh—I see,” after I’ve made the effort.)
In early school days, my off-balance skip was my substitute for running, and it sufficed for getting up and down the block quickly when the sidewalk was hot and we were all going barefoot. At school, the children were not always as understanding as in my own neighborhood, and by first or second grade I had been tagged with the moniker “Hopalong Cassidy” by one boy in particular, Steven, though occasionally others would toss it in my face as well.
He started picking on me as early as kindergarten. One sunny day I was leaning against the ivory stucco wall in the playground during recess, probably resting. He approached until he was standing right in front of me. He stepped closer, until he was pinning me up against the wall with his big stomach, giving me an intimate view of his green plaid flannel shirt.
Frightened, I squirmed as he stared down into my eyes, savoring his power over me.
“Stop it!” I said. “Move! I’ll tell Mrs. Overstreet!”
He wasn’t cowed by this threat. He just continued to stare into my eyes. I had no idea what he intended to do, other than keep me pinned to the wall. My heart was racing in terror, but my thought was that he couldn’t hurt me very much right there in front of everyone in the kindergarten play yard . . . could he? And recess did have an end.
After an eternity of a few minutes, the bell rang and he had to let me go—but the vulnerable feeling stayed with me. It was clear to me I had been lucky this time, and thus learned at the tender age of five-and-a-half that I needed to stay clear of bullies, since I was small and could not run.
A year later, I was still enduring Steven’s taunts, but he hadn’t had an opportunity to physically bully me again. Then one afternoon after school, my friend Karen and I were waiting near the brick steps outside the kindergarten/first grade door for our mothers to pick us up, and Steven happened to come out just after we did.
He began his taunts: “You’re Hopalong Cassidy! Hopalong Cassidy!”
“Leave me alone!” I said crossly. I was never afraid to talk back—which is, unfortunately, just the type of behavior that eggs a bully on.
Once again, he was standing close in front of me, taking an intimidating posture. But this time, suddenly, he punched me hard in the solar plexus.
It knocked the wind out of me and I could not get a breath in or out, let alone speak. The three of us were stunned, shocked, mouths agape; I am certain that Steven never thought he could cause such a dramatic result.
Karen ran into the school, and seconds later Mrs. Malloy, our plump and gentle first grade teacher, came out and found me gasping for breath, Steven standing there glued to the same spot, eyes wide, paralyzed by the effect of his violence, too young to know to flee the scene of the crime.
Mrs. Malloy grabbed him by the arm and gave him a look that could kill, then turned to me. “Are you all right, Francine?”
I was still in shock but nodded yes. I managed to whisper in disbelief, “He punched me in the stomach!”
Mrs. Malloy hauled him up the steps by the arm, and now he was the one who was clearly afraid. Karen and I knew they were off down the long, dark hall to Principal Nason’s office—bad luck for Steven, because Mr. Nason happened to live just around the corner from us and knew our family and my condition.
In those days, corporal punishment was still legal in grammar school, and we assumed that Steven had gotten the licking of his life with a wooden paddle—the licking my mother was always threatening to give me. Mr. Nason never said a word to me about it, but Steven gave me a wide berth for the rest of grammar school. My mother’s advice on hearing the story was to stay clear of him . . . as if I had not already tried.
My belief is that many things like this happen to children that they are not able to fully articulate. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say, “Kids at school are bullying me and scaring me”—plus, by the time I got home and was playing with other children and having a good time, an incident like this would not have been at the front of my mind. I might have told Mama, “Kids at school are calling me names,” but she would have responded with, “Don’t pay any attention to them”—which, I feel, is a form of discounting a child’s experience. I know that occasionally I was asked what I did at school, but never, “Are the children nice to you? Do you have fun playing with them?” I don’t think my mother understood that I was being bullied, or perhaps she did and didn’t want to dwell on it.
Mrs. Malloy, though, knew the truth of the situation.
I realize now that poor Steven was probably bullied at home by his older brother or parents. It was a case of kicking the dog, finding someone who was below you on the totem pole who could not fight back or run from the “fat kid.” I would guess that kids called Steven “Fatty.” But in my early school days, I could not know or understand any of that, and was just glad my hero the principal had laid down the law for my nemesis (though I did feel sorry that Steven got the awful paddling). After that I was relatively safe at school—for a while.
My mom said I always enjoyed the fifteen-minute opera shows because I loved the costumes (I have only a vague recollection of this). I suspect that actually I loved the drama and the music. I always loved to sing, and I took a couple of years of piano lessons, practicing on two different neighbors’ pianos, since ours had been sold in Los Angeles—my dad hadn’t wanted to pay the fifty dollars to move it north. My mother the singer regretted that forever after.
In grammar school, I encouraged the neighbor kids to join me in organizing and practicing for shows that we never actually presented. We’d make up songs and sing them on our big front porch, put on makeup, create ridiculous skits that no one ever saw. It was great fun, and I could not imagine anything better than being an actress or a singer. I saw this as my eventual future, and if you’d told me then that it would never happen, I would not have believed you. It didn’t cross my mind that having a gimpy leg was a detriment to becoming a glamorous movie star or a professional singer.
A girl I didn’t know approached me in the first grade schoolyard one sunny California day. She stood in front of me and looked into my face, then looked down at my little leg and stared at it. I had no idea where this encounter was going.
She made eye contact again and stated, simply, “You’re crippled.”
“I know,” I said. I mean, what else was there to say? I already knew I was defective and thought it was pretty odd tha
t she thought she needed to tell me. Did she think I was crippled and also stupid? I stared back at her; she looked down at my leg again, then, bored with the discussion, walked away.
This scenario, or one similar to it, has taken place many times over the course of my life. When I was younger, sometimes the child would say nothing and just inspect me. Sometimes these encounters made me angry, and sometimes just stunned, embarrassed, and sad. At first, I said, “So what?” But I learned not to ask that, because it sometimes unleashed a list of other observations, such as, “You can’t walk right. This is how you walk,” followed by a demo I always felt was exaggerated (though I realize now that it wasn’t); or, “You can’t run. You can’t catch me,” followed by the taunter grabbing one of my belongings and running with it.
Sometimes, though, if I said, “So what?” they’d just answer, “Nothing,” shrug, and walk away, much like the first little girl. I always saw that as a small victory: one more person had learned that he or she didn’t scare me, that they couldn’t upset me, that I was mentally fit, so there was something right about me. But there were also times when I waited to cry until I was home alone.
It falls to those of us who are different to find a way to suggest appropriate behavior to innocent blurters, especially kids. I was not always good at it. In fact, I see that in a lot of instances I was pissed off inside and wrote the person off as a jerk, when in fact he or she was simply ignorant. I know I have been sarcastic to a lot of people in my lifetime, and I guard against it now, but it took me decades to be calm about other people’s bad manners in this respect. By the time I was in my thirties, although I still had significant anger about a lot of things, I did begin to see that people often said or did things without thinking first, and realized that it wasn’t worth it to be upset over a lack of knowledge or awareness.
Not a Poster Child Page 6