New Life, No Instructions

by Gail Caldwell

  These days I walk a hilly two-mile trail loop in the forests with the dogs, and I do it without fear or even much fatigue. I unnerved Shiloh the other day because I got ahead of what she perceived, with that vigilant sheepdog brain, as being my usual pace. I’m using both legs in the pool, and I finished the rowing season—a tougher season than I had hoped, but one that had its particular joys. For years I had over-corrected as I rowed, using my right arm to do what my leg could not. This year, overcorrecting automatically, I nearly swerved into a sandbar; my right leg was trying to pull its own weight.

  Polio-affected muscles and tendons still give me trouble and always will. Camp Gail is open permanently, I suppose. I’ll never run a marathon, or even a fifty-yard sprint, but I did do a waltz with the dogs on the pathway at Fresh Pond the other day, just to prove that I could.

  I don’t know yet what or how much I’ll get back. I’ve passed the crucial year mark, the period most professionals say it takes to fully recover from joint replacement, though my surgeon tells me that’s probably only halfway for me. Some days I still feel like the Tin Man, no oilcan in sight, my new and realigned parts adjusting to the reconstructed architecture of my body. Developing a leg at sixty requires more patience and acceptance than doing so at two, or seventeen, or even forty. But I am taller and stronger than I thought I would ever be again, and the hugeness of that trumps how hard it’s been to get here.

  When I went to see my doctor eight months after surgery, I walked into his office and said, grinning, “I think you should add, to your considerable résumé, ‘Cured polio.’ ” He liked that, though I don’t think he needed it—the best surgeons are already pretty happy with what they pull off. He tells me that over time I might recover as much as 85 percent strength in my right leg, a notion that seems astounding. Of course there is the counterforce of time, the forward march of life toward its great shadowy end. I do know that my real challenge is not the leg lifts or the river or the embrace of an unknowable future, but the task of receiving what happened to me as the blessing it is. My rewrite with a happy outcome.

  The other thing I know now is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it—the ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within, a deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead. One afternoon at the end of summer, when I was rowing, I started talking to Caroline, upstream by the reeds where I used to watch a muskrat. And I said to her, Are you there, are you listening? and tears started streaming down my face, which doesn’t happen much to me anymore. I said, “It’s just too lonely to think that you’re not. I need to think that my dad is still proud of me, and that you still understand me. Just too lonely without that.”

  And I thought, Maybe it would be too hard and complicated if you’re still there as CK, blond and skinny and laughing, because, let’s face it, there have been billions upon billions of people and that’s a lot of overload, even for God, that’s a lot of two-way cosmic dialogues going on at once. So maybe it’s a big huge bowl of Jell-O consciousness, where the individuals connect when they need to. That is what we interpret, earthbound, as memory and love: We are all angels unawares.

  It was ninety degrees and sunny, and suddenly the blue sky darkened and a cool breeze came out of nowhere and gave me about thirty seconds of respite from the heat. And I thought, Well, what else would they do if they were thinking, “Let’s send her a message that we got her message. Let’s send her a cool breeze for just a minute”?

  I thought all this between the muskrat and the bridge, and when I rounded the bend I heard Caroline telling me to remember to use my abs during the recovery. Then I rowed another half-mile before I turned at the sandbar and headed home.

  In late September I spent a sunny, blustery weekend in Westport, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border, where there are coves and causeways and miles of rocky beaches. The last day I was there I drove to the beach in early afternoon, hoping that the crowds might have thinned and that Tula and I could sneak onto the beach. We walked for about a quarter of a mile on a road above the dunes, and then crossed a planked bridge over the rose hips to the beach below. The only people nearby were a couple who had seen the signs in the parking lot—NO DOGS UNTIL NOVEMBER—and were hiding their little black dog under a beach towel. Then they saw Tula and we smiled and waved at each other.

  Whenever people ask me where Tula’s name comes from, I tell them it’s an old Southern name I’ve always loved. That’s only part of the story. I named her after Cyd Charisse, the dancer whose athletic beauty belonged to the era of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. When Charisse died in 2008, several people sent me the obituary, because she was born and grew up in Amarillo. One friend added a commentary: “Are all long-legged Texans from Amarillo?” That was how I learned that Charisse was a small-town Texas girl, christened Tula Ellice Finklea, and that she had caught polio when she was six, in the 1920s. Her father, who loved the ballet, sent her to dance lessons to build up her strength, and opened the door to dance history.

  So I named my dog after a dancer—probably somewhere knowing that I might bestow her with the physical grace and agency that I lacked but always longed for. My Tula would be a four-legged showgirl, and anyone who has ever seen a Samoyed running through the forest will know that the image is not that far off. When she runs through surf, though, she does a little backward foxtrot and catches herself, then twists to the side and begins again.

  At the beach in Westport the tide was coming in and the sun was bright and the water temperature was about sixty-five degrees—an ocean too cold to swim in but too sensual to resist. The shoreline leading up to the water was rocky, treacherously so, with dinosaur egg–size rocks for as far as you could see. I navigated over the rocks in my sneakers, but I stopped when I got to the water’s edge, afraid to take off my shoes and go it alone. For years I had mostly slid myself into the ocean, straight from shoes to total immersion, a far better swimmer than walker. I didn’t know if I was really able to wade barefoot, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tried.

  And then I thought, Oh, so what’s the worst that will happen—you will fall on this beautiful sand. So I took off my shoes, and I could walk better than I had in years, and I remembered what it was like to have water running through my toes in the sand. I am Bernadette in ecstasy, wading in the grotto. And the farther I waded, the easier it became, with Tula herding me back and forth, galloping into the surf and out again. I was wading in the September Atlantic and looking ahead and thinking, Run, Tula Ellice, run past all your sorrows, and dance and keep on going, until we all fall down.

  For Dick Chasin

  Acknowledgments

  I tend to think of memoir as a prism; there is no shining a pure or direct light on the past. My sister, Pamela Caldwell Morrison, has been an ally and a tremendous help in my navigation of memory and narrative. Kate Medina and Lindsey Schwoeri at Random House offered a generous blend of perspective and editorial wisdom; my thanks to them for their guidance. Lane Zachary, my agent and friend, has been the best of both as I have thought my way through the book. Louise Erdrich, Jean Kilbourne, and Andrea Cohen listened, read, buoyed, and consoled; each gave me invaluable creative and emotional support.

  Two personal and social histories of polio reached out to me years ago: Kathryn Black’s In the Shadow of Polio and Jane S. Smith’s Patenting the Sun. More recently, David M. Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story provided what is probably the definitive social history on the U.S. epidemics and the race for a vaccine.

  What I’ve learned about dogs over the past two decades has come greatly from the dogs themselves. Humans have helped, too, and my particular thanks for their acuity and instruction to Peter Wright, Amy Kantor, Marjorie Gatchell, Dorothy Gracey, Kathy de Natale, and Janice Hovelmann.

  A number of friends gave freely of their kindness, forbearance, and splendid humor; I came through the past few years in their good company. My gratitude and love to Penny Potter, Nancy Hays, Peter
and Pat Wright, Donna Warner, Tink and David Davis, Chris Pasterczyk, Avery Rimer, Rocco Ricci, Peter James, Jill and Marc Schermerhorn, Morgan McVicar, and the women at the M.A.C. My special thanks for taking care of me to Stephen Ranere, MD, and David A. Mattingly, MD.

  Finally, two pillars of strength. The indomitable spirit of my mother, Ruby Caldwell, hovers throughout this book; several years after her death, she gives me courage to this day. So does Dick Chasin, who has helped me learn to walk in every sense. That’s why this book is dedicated to him.

  By Gail Caldwell

  New Life, No Instructions

  Let’s Take the Long Way Home

  A Strong West Wind

  About the Author

  GAIL CALDWELL is the author of two previous memoirs, Let’s Take the Long Way Home and A Strong West Wind. The former chief book critic for The Boston Globe, she received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 2001. Caldwell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.