I was probably six or seven when I saw the nature of my mother’s relationship with Lindsey, but it was a long time before I understood it, not in fact until Lindsey died in 2002, years after my mother’s death.
We went to Urbana for a couple of weeks every summer, usually my mother and Jeffie and I, but on one trip my father came along. A few streets away, Grandma Richards, who spent her summers in Urbana to be close to whoever remained of her eleven brothers and sisters, lived in an apartment, one big room with a kitchen and a toilet, separated from the kitchen by a curtain—a bed-sitter, she called it, on the third floor of someone’s house on Scioto Street.
We had driven from Washington, the luggage was still in the car, and we were having dinner at Lindsey’s—we called her Nana to her face.
At the end of dinner, Lindsey got up from the table—she was a small woman, not unattractive, with Irish freckled skin and short curly hair and a figure more virginal than mature—and asked my father to bring in my mother’s and Jeffie’s and my bags.
It was the first time in my conscious memory that we had all been in Urbana together. Although I knew that Lindsey didn’t approve of my father, I had never seen evidence of it.
I asked where my father would be staying.
“At Grandma Richards’s,” my mother said.
“I’m going with Daddy,” I said.
“Me too,” Jeffie said.
My father brought in my mother’s luggage and took it up to the room in which she had slept as a young girl. He kissed her goodnight on the large Victorian front porch under the porch light, took Jeffie’s and my hand, and off we went in the old faithful lavender Chevrolet.
The last image I had that night was of my mother standing alone under the porch light, waving to the back of our car.
“Lindsey Greene’s got airs,” Grandma Richards said as my brother and I snuggled into bed with her, my father sleeping on the couch in the same room. “And no one who lives in Urbana, Ohio, should have a right to airs.”
Lindsey was already packed when we arrived at 222 College Street for the drive to Warm Springs.
“I don’t like the heat,” she said, maybe the first thing she said when we arrived, before she even said hello. She smelled of dead gardenias, and if her own mother, whom I called Gammie, were not always baking sugar cookies and pies and cakes when we visited, the house would have smelled of dead gardenias too.
“It won’t be too hot in June,” my mother said.
I’m sure she was bracing for the long trip south with Lindsey, not an easy trade-off for her fear of driving alone.
I slept in the twin bed in my mother’s bedroom at the house in Urbana, and I loved to sleep there because my mother had when she was my age. Before we turned out the lights, my mother reading to me while I half slept on my back, Lindsey looked in the doorway.
“I can’t stand the heat. You know that, Betty.”
“I do know that,” my mother said, repeating, “but it won’t be too hot in June.”
Caroline was still in our old room on Second Medical, but a girl called Annabelle, a silent, sullen girl who stared out the window when I walked into the room, was living there in my place. I was put in the Girls’ Ward instead, in one of the beds lined up against three walls, amid a constant din of voices, which at night ran down slowly like an old car engine until the ward finally quieted.
Lindsey came with my mother while I was readmitted to the hospital. She sat in a chair leafing through a magazine, but when I was called to go upstairs, she told my mother she’d meet her at the hotel. She didn’t like hospitals, she said. She was feeling nauseated.
“It’s quite unsanitary here, isn’t it,” she said as the elevator doors opened to take my mother and me up to the Girls’ Ward on the second floor.
“Is it?” I asked my mother in the elevator.
“Of course not,” my mother said. “It’s a hospital. It has to be kept clean.”
She never disagreed with Lindsey when in her presence, not that I remember.
Miss Riley greeted us when the elevator doors opened. She seemed—at least I thought she seemed—genuinely glad to see me.
She told me that some of the babies in the Children’s Ward had gone home, but Rosie was still there and doing very well, and Violet Blue would certainly remember me, and Sue Sue and maybe some others.
“Magnolia?” I asked.
“Magnolia’s here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her mother has a job at the hotel on the other days.”
I followed Miss Riley to the Girls’ Ward.
“Joey Buckley’s back.”
My heart leapt.
“Just last week he got back for his second round of surgeries. And Father James is home from seeing his family in Ireland.”
I had never told my parents about catechism classes. I don’t know what they would have thought about my conversion to Catholicism. Probably very little. They didn’t have opinions to put in our way when we were growing up.
I didn’t want them to know about Father James, although my mother had met him in passing. But the unspoken story between us had a quality of secrecy and shame. I wouldn’t talk about it.
The muscle transplant surgery was scheduled for the end of the first week. My leg and ankle were nothing but bone. I was told to be careful not to twist my ankle, because I could break the stabilization. I needed muscles to be able to walk; otherwise there was nothing in that leg to support the skeleton. It’s my understanding that in the first muscle transplant, the shin muscle, which controlled my ability to lift my foot, was moved to serve as a calf muscle and held in place for the several months I was in a cast by wires strung through the muscle and a “rubber button,” with holes for the wires located externally on my heel. This surgery was more painful than the stabilization and the re-forming of my foot, and more aggravating. The muscle, urgent to return home, is always straining to get there.
I was to get new muscles in my calf and a small transplant in my big toe, so the toe wouldn’t drop and trip me when I was barefoot. This time I would be in Warm Springs for almost a year, with only a month or two at home before another muscle transplant and more weeks of physical therapy.
I liked that I’d be living in the Girls’ Ward, liked the thought of a room full of girls, especially at night and after my mother had left. Early on, I had learned to make a place for myself in a crowd, but that afternoon before my surgery, sitting up in bed, bored and nervous and not permitted to eat, I wasn’t quite in the mood for making friends with the fifteen girls on the ward, most of whom I’d never seen before.
My bed was the last one next to the door, a placement determined by the order of surgery. Since I was next to be operated on, I’d occupy that bed until another surgical patient took it over, and gradually I’d move around the room as others came up for their operations. We were all engaged in this slow movement of our beds around the rectangular ward. The changing sightlines gave an illusion of adventure to our daily lives. I had either a window opposite my bed or the wall, either Elaine was across from me or Amy or Francy was, a fluid social geography. Tomorrow could always be a social improvement on today.
On one side of me was the door to the corridor and on the other was Sandy Newcombe. I could tell we were going to be friends because she wanted desperately for that to happen.
“So, Susan—is that what you call yourself? Or Sue?” Sandy was in a body cast, leaning over her side table as close to my bed as she could possibly get. “Maybe Sue. I’ve got a friend named Sue in Waco, Texas, where my folks live, only they call her Sue Bunny. A crazy name, Sue Bunny, but that’s Waco for you.”
“Susan,” I said.
She told me her name and her school and her surgery, the same as Caroline’s had been, and this and that, on and on through afternoon snacks and dinner, until my mother came upstairs to be with me. She spoke to Sandy awhile and then closed the curtains between our beds.
My mother sat down in the chair beside me, running her fingers over my arm,
and in her soft, musical voice went over the details of the operation as Dr. Iler had described them. She liked the precision of medical conversation, and it was comforting for me to listen to her talk about the muscles, to repeat the scientific names. The gastrocnemius—the name of one of the calf muscles that had atrophied with the rest of the calf muscles and showed no sign of traces—would be replaced with the tibialis anterior, my shin muscle, which had shown some trace of response. The hope was that the shin muscle transplanted to my calf would develop through physical therapy and I would be able to walk normally. The shin muscle, Dr. Iler had explained, wasn’t critical for walking. As it turns out, I don’t notice its absence, except that I can’t move my ankle at all or lift my foot up or push it down.
That night, a feeling of dread, as if it were actual and liquid, filled my chest. I hadn’t been nervous before the first surgery: my defenses were no doubt securely in place because they had to be—the ready charm, the easy dismissal of expressions of concern. I’m fine, perfectly fine.
I knew this time that the surgery would be painful, and I was braced for it. The dread was about fear, not pain, a lingering fear, and what it brought to mind was the nights of pleading with my parents for promises of safety when I was small. A systemic fear I couldn’t articulate.
My mother described the aftermath of surgery—the anxious little tibialis longing to be back where it belonged, the swelling, the inflammation, worse with muscles than with bone. Or so Dr. Iler expected. She didn’t even ask if she could come early the next morning to see me before I went downstairs to the waiting room with the iron lung.
“Ask Lindsey to stay in the hotel,” I said.
“Don’t worry. Lindsey is uncomfortable in hospitals,” my mother said, blowing me a kiss. She always left me with a kiss, blown across the air space between us. There were no sentimental goodbyes, no tears. We had gone through this scenario many times in our lives together.
That night I couldn’t sleep at all, but I kept my eyes closed for Sandy Newcombe, jabbering away in the next bed about how she had been about to play the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and on opening night, just as she was going onstage, she got sick and then sicker and by the time she went home that night, she had polio.
“Am I keeping you awake?” she asked.
I didn’t answer, but someone called out from across the room, “Please. You’re keeping all of us awake.”
We were polite to one another in the Girls’ Ward.
Sometime during the months at Warm Springs, I had learned to move pain, as if it were an object, from one part of my body to another. After the stabilization, still sedated, on my back, propped slightly up, the bottom of my bed raised to minimize the throbbing, I found satisfaction imagining that the pain in my ankle was actually in my arm. It was miraculous to be able to move it from one place to another with my mind. By thinking it to my arm, the arm didn’t hurt, but if I imagined the pain just above the ankle, I didn’t feel it in the ankle either. Like an experiment in chemistry class, mixing this and that and the combination becomes something else altogether. Of course the trick didn’t last because pain is pain, but I wasn’t entirely at its mercy, and that was something.
Waiting was a condition of our lives, especially during the weeks after surgery. There was nothing to do. We couldn’t move or read or watch television or even listen to the radio. There was no entertainment in any case, except Saturday movies or trading cards or books or card games or conversation. In those long weeks of waiting I had hours of white space to fill.
It was similar in discipline to my experience with traces. I knew there was a muscle, say, in my foot, and if I thought “foot,” I should be able to contact the messenger and lift the foot. I could even feel its place, but concentrating on moving the muscle did no good. Nothing happened. With a trace there is a little ping of recognition, a tiny cry of I’m here but just barely, but no movement. It is that ping that promises the possibility for a muscle to restore itself.
I filled the white space. I could wait for hours and not be restless if I slipped into the empty pool and made believe it was full.
Years ago, after I’d written the Warm Springs book and decided I wanted to be a writer but was worried that I had nothing to write about, I read an interview with Joyce Carol Oates. When she was asked where she found her material, Oates replied, “In my fantasies.” And vroom, like a small explosion in the brain, I had stories and stories and stories as a gift from those months of waiting. I was always somewhere else and the narrative took over. I had the illusion of living a life in full.
But that restless night before surgery, I was afraid, not of the surgery itself, but of something else, something I wanted to have and couldn’t ask for. I remember the feeling specifically, was aware even at the time it was happening. I turned on the light for the nurse, with the intention of asking her to call my mother at the hotel, but when she arrived, I was embarrassed and asked if I could have a glass of water, knowing I could not.
Maybe, I thought, I wanted my father to be there.
I never remember thinking, Why didn’t he come to Warm Springs? I wouldn’t have asked him to come, but that night I wished that he were there with my mother, that Lindsey were back in Urbana, and that the following morning my parents would be standing so I could see them through the window of the waiting room, clasping hands.
When my youngest child was small and after her father and I had divorced, she said to me that all she wanted in her whole life was to walk between us, holding our hands.
I must have been sad, but that’s retrospective thinking. For years I fought sadness as if it had the power to extinguish my life, and the antidote to its creeping insistence was work.
I couldn’t wait until the surgery was done and I was back in my wheelchair, hustling through the corridors with bedpans and mail, brightening the Children’s Ward with my urgent attention.
I was slow to wake up from the anesthesia. What I remember hearing was a girl’s voice chattering in my ear as if she were right next to my head, blowing down my ear canal.
“You screamed all night,” Sandy Newcombe was saying. “I mean these long screams, and we were lying in bed, all of us listening for you to take a breath, and the scream just went on and on.”
I looked over at the place where my mother should be, the chair next to my bed, and no one was there, only a sliver of Sandy Newcombe’s face straight on me.
“It must hurt something terrible,” Sandy said. “Does it hurt a lot?”
I didn’t answer.
“We thought you’d died when you didn’t take a breath.”
I pushed the light for the nurse, and when Miss Riley appeared and I asked for a Coca-Cola, she said I couldn’t have one yet. Twenty-four hours, she said.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Dinnertime,” she said. “Smell the chicken?”
The smell of fried chicken was strong and made me ill.
“Do you know where my mother is?”
“She’s been here all day since you came up from recovery. She’ll be back.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t like that I had screamed out without my knowledge, and so I fought to stay awake.
“Pain?” someone asked in my ear.
It was dark, so it must have been late, but not late enough for lights out.
“No pain,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. I could feel it coming, marching, marching, the way pain does, starting as a whisper, then louder and louder in a steady crescendo.
“Turn on your light if it hurts.”
I nodded.
I wanted to ask about my mother but was worried that if I said her name, said Where is my mother?, said mother out loud, I would weep.
Later, the ward hushed with girls’ whispering, I felt her hand over my forehead, her fingertips on my cheeks.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked.
She didn’t reply. Then she said, “I can tell it hurts.”
“A little. Just a lit
tle,” I said.
“You should take pain medicine if they offer it to you.”
“It makes me feel sick,” I said.
“Ask for half, then,” she whispered.
It was dark and I settled into the safety of her hand brushing over my face, the steady rhythm of it, her soft breathing next to my ear.
“What’s going to happen with Lindsey?” I asked.
“She is going to be too hot and complain about it,” she said.
“Is it hot? I feel shivery.”
“Not too hot,” she said.
All night, I could feel my mother’s presence while I slept, conscious of her hands running down my arms, stretching my fingers, her fingers lacing through my hair.
In the morning, she was gone.
“Your grandmother called the hospital when it was still dark,” Sandy Newcombe said. “Miss Riley came in really early this morning and told your mother that your grandmother had called from the hotel for her to come back because your grandmother was very sick.”
“So she left?”
“She left. She told Miss Riley she’d be back soon.”
A girl I’d seen before but whose name I didn’t know, a big girl with square bangs and long, dark hair and long casts on both legs sticking out in front of her, stopped by my bed.
“You had a bad time last night,” she said.
“I was too woozy to feel a bad time,” I replied.
“Trust me,” the girl said. “You were crying. I was so glad when your mom came back from dinner and settled you down.”
She said her name was Jennifer and she was from Florida, on the beach, and her family had a boat.
“So I actually cried?” I asked.
“No kidding,” Jennifer said.
“I never cry,” I said.
When my mother returned it was still morning, my second day after surgery. She was wearing a straight beige dress with a long skirt, a high mandarin collar, tiny black bead earrings, and high heels. I could hear her coming from the elevator and knew who it was. Only my mother would wear high heels in a hospital.
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