My father. Hopeless.
My grandparents, elderly, sick.
My uncle, just out of college.
My aunt with four children and another on the way.
It was possible, I reasoned, for Chipper to escape the orphanage. Tom might keep him. Someone to do yard work, watch ball games with. But who would want a moody, physically deformed teenaged girl? I was headed straight for a life of rags and gruel, a life where no one cared if I wore my brace or not, my spine growing more crooked until I was hunched and bitter, a fairy tale crone.
Perhaps this was already happening.
Because my mother was too weak to brace me, even after she came home, I had nearly a week of freedom. I could sunbathe, douse myself with the garden hose, wear a bathing suit, sleep unencumbered. I did all these things, enjoyed none of them. That is, I did them all with a sense of guilt. Drifting off to sleep I’d think, I should be in my brace. The only reason I wasn’t had to do with my mother’s fragility, which diluted whatever pleasure I may have, must have felt. No one else cared enough to restrain me, day after day, absorbing my rage. No one else held up the prospect of my future.
My mother was the sole capable adult in my life, the only one both willing and able to care for me. The brace served as physical reminder of my dependence on her. Without it, I was unmoored. Without it—without her—there was no telling what might happen.
She recovered, of course. My furlough ended. Once again I yelled, protested and scowled, all the while happy, secretly happy, that I was being forced to bear the thing I loathed. One reprieve had come to an end, but another more important one had been granted.
Monkey Girl
Stick up the butt. Tin Can. Hey, Robot! You sit like you got a broomstick up your ass. So-and-so loves you; he wants to go out with you. Kissing noises, grunts. I ignored the boys’ jeers. The girls were more polite; they left me alone.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. A childhood refrain. Was my back broken? It needed propping up; I needed propping up. In the refrain, a broken back is the worst of maladies. We’d jump over cracks to avoid its curse.
Ten months before my birth, my mother’s first child, a ten-month-old boy, had died of spinal meningitis. I knew this, knew there had been someone before me, the shadow of a baby, the mention of whom can still make my mother cry. Growing up, I rarely thought of him. I was the oldest, the first; I knew there had been someone else, but that was a long time ago, before I was even born.
You were in a glass bubble. I wouldn’t let anyone but your father and grandparents hold you. My friends had to put on a hospital mask and gloves before I would let them into the nursery. I was terrified of germs, terrified of losing you. Thank goodness your brother was born and forced me to ease up.
Strong, athletic, easy in his body, Chipper was my physical opposite. As a child he could not sit still. My mother had a wire playpen installed in the backyard. When Chipper screamed to be let out, she would toss him cookies. Later she had a fence built, one with a locking gate. In third grade, Chipper’s teacher tied him to his chair with jump rope and he ran around the room, chair strapped to his back, trying to make the other kids laugh. He played baseball, hockey, built forts, rode his bike into town to blow his allowance on candy. Playing Superman, he’d crashed through a screen door, splitting his lip on the concrete porch steps. Twice he’d cracked open his head. For fun he and his best friend held “dart wars,” ducking for cover behind couches and chairs, lobbing darts at each other’s head until, injured, Chipper ran crying to my mother, a dart stuck in his forehead. So rambunctious was he that once, in the crystal and glassware section of a department store, my mother’s best friend grabbed him by the arm and said, Chipper Horvath, you behave yourself right now. We don’t have time to go to the emergency room today!
Chipper never teased me about my awkwardness, my inability to ride and run and play sports. Perhaps he sensed this area was “off limits”; perhaps, given how inept I was, he just didn’t see the point. Certainly he felt sorry for me, my restricted freedom, a point driven home to him each spring when my mother took him to the pediatrician for a scoliosis screening. One afternoon a year, instead of playing baseball, he had to bend and stretch while the doctor examined his spine. He complained. This sucks; it sucks you have to do this all the time. But empathy extended only so far in either direction. My love beads and hippie hair, the way I talked to myself yet clammed up in front of others, all of these were fair game as were his afro, his preppy clothes, his fear of the dark.
We posited ourselves as opposites, each having carved out a place in the family. The smart one vs. the athlete. The introvert vs. the friendly kid. The one you’d want to help with your homework vs. the one you’d want to hang out with. I was jealous of Chipper’s prowess, his ability to make friends, and doubtless he was jealous of the easy A’s I brought home while he made do with B’s and C’s. We fought, called each other names, even pummeled each other before I was braced. We were siblings; we could do that. Let anyone else make fun of me, though, and Chipper would intervene, standing up, saying Leave my sister alone! He was big, it always worked, the bully backing down without a fight. Chipper was like an older brother in that way. But he was two years younger than me and because of that age difference we were in separate schools the entire time I wore a brace.
In Home Ec, girls talked about their periods; they talked about boys and kissing. My period had not yet come. I was flat-chested, my “bras” like cut-off undershirts with lace for affectation.
We were becoming sexual. We wore flavored lip-gloss, nail polish. I grew my nails long, shellacked them with glitter. The fast girls wore mini-skirts, blue or green eye shadow. Everything about them ready. They kissed by the lockers, necks craned back. Cried in bathrooms, their friends in a circle, commiserating. Girls on the rag. Girls whispering in study hall, She’s so on the rag, I’m on the rag, who has a Kotex? I started high school two months shy of my fourteenth birthday and still not on the rag.
I knew about periods, of course, knew what to expect. One afternoon in fifth grade the school nurse had shown the girls a movie—Why Can’t Jane Go Swimming? or some such. It would be messy, we were told; it might hurt. Perhaps, for no clear reason, we would cry. The stories we’d been told about the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus had all been lies. There was no free money, candy, toys. Jesus on the cross however was real, and to prove it, each Sunday we’d dressed in scratchy clothes and knelt in pews where we heard sermons denouncing us as miserable sinners. From this I concluded an early, important lesson. If the story concerned suffering, it was likely true. If treats were promised, it was probably a lie. Menstruation was inevitable, only when?
The nurse had demonstrated a sanitary belt: a white rubber device with metal clasps dangling from it. The belt went around one’s waist, and a thick sanitary pad attached somehow—I was not certain how—to the clasps. My mother had one of these belts on the top shelf of the linen closet. The pads were maybe half an inch thick—diapers for women. The apparatus had baffled me; for years I had shut it from my mind. But now I began to wonder how I’d manage. Would the belt fit over my brace? How, without bending, could I attach the pads? Would the metal clasps click against the corset, announcing me? No one had mentioned tampons; they were not for “beginners.” But if I had known about them (applicators! strings!) I doubtless would have found them scary. I wanted my period, wanted to prove that in at least one respect my body was normal. Yet I was relieved when it didn’t come.
In high school there were two other girls with Milwaukee braces. One came from the junior high across town. Although we had different schedules, we would pass each other in the hallways. As strangers, we never greeted one another, never acknowledged our shared disability. She had long blonde hair, a face that was pretty and benign.
The other girl upset me. She was severely disabled, one among a group of about twenty Down syndrome students who had classes in the building. These students were notorious in o
ur school for the disruptions they caused. They raced down hallways, knocked into people, stripped off their clothes, locked themselves in bathroom stalls and would not come out. Once a Special Ed student crammed a watering can’s spout up the faucet then turned on both taps, flooding the bathroom. Of course these students were irresistible targets for the tough guys.
The Special Ed kids ate during Fourth Lunch shift, which was also when the kids who took shop and auto mechanics ate. It was the worst shift; people were hungry, the cafeteria ladies were packing up, the pizza had run out. Fortunately, I only had Fourth Lunch during math, every six or seven days on our rotating schedule.
We had twenty-five minutes. The Special Ed kids clogged the line. They screamed for cake, smeared mashed potatoes in each other’s hair; they dropped their trays and cried. Behind them, the tough guys made bleating noises. They shouted. Hurry up, retards. Morons. Fuckin’ geeks! All during lunch the tough guys kept this up. They lobbed milk at the Special Ed students’ heads. They pitched pennies and laughed at the frenzy to retrieve them. No one ever told them to stop.
In English we were reading Flowers for Algernon in which the narrator, an intellectually disabled man, undergoes some kind of experimental therapy that slowly transforms him into a genius. He recalls how throughout his life people he’d considered his friends had mistreated him. Being in ninth grade, I took the theme to mean “Ignorance Is Bliss.” But I didn’t really believe that. The Down syndrome kids, with their food-matted hair, their foreshortened limbs and submerged, aquatic faces, were a source of derision. Not even their teachers protected them. To me their ignorance seemed something awful.
The tough guys singled out the girl in the brace. They called her the same names they called me, made the same kissing noises. Rather than feel sorry for this girl, I felt repulsed. My disability had made me watchful, even passive, a passivity I believed was sometimes mistaken for a lack of intelligence. After all, I’d been forced into sixth grade guidance sessions with the slow girls just because I wouldn’t talk. Each semester on the Honor Roll was a triumph I was never entirely convinced I could repeat. My brain set me apart, just as my body did. Now I worried that people would conflate this girl’s dual disabilities, somehow seeing them both in me. In some fundamental way the girl with Down syndrome threatened my sense of self. Every time I saw her, I quickly turned away.
Larry Doyle had been harassing me since sixth grade. I hated everything about him: his greasy Hitler hair, his crooked smirk, and his untucked flannel shirts. He made monkey noises at me in the hallway. I’d walk past, a monkey indeed, hear no evil.
Maybe it was that smirk. Or disgust at the way he and his friends threw pennies at the Special Ed kids. Or anything, nothing, I don’t know. He was coming toward me. Making monkey noises. Before I could register what I was doing, I blocked his path. He scratched his armpits and hooted. Fuck you! I yelled. People around us stared. Larry stared. I felt scared, exhilarated. What would he do? He couldn’t hit me, he’d hurt his hand on the brace. I wanted him to do something so I could scream at him again.
To my amazement he snuck around the corner, shoulders hunched, eyes downcast. Neither he nor his friends ever bothered me after that. Had I finally shown them what they wanted to see? That I had feelings, I could crack? Or were they simply as scared and limited as I was?
Chastity Belt
He licks his index finger, touches the paper where it burns too fast. Passes me the joint. Slow, he says, take it slow. He leans in, cups his hands to my face.
New Year’s Eve. Carol’s brother Steve is teaching us to smoke pot in the woods behind their house. At first I choke, feel nothing. Steve pats my shoulder. Easy, he says. The joint goes around. One of Steve’s friends sparks a new one.
So quiet in the woods, I can hear twigs fall. My jacket with the fake fur collar is too flimsy for winter, but I do not feel cold. The sky is vast, bright with stars. The archer, the crab—who saw such things in them? Why not the rock star, the giant cat, the chocolate bar? I begin thinking up my own constellations. The joint comes around. Someone laughs and says, Patti’s stoned.
I’d made two friends, nondescript girls from chaotic families. Janine’s parents fought incessantly, her Sicilian mother wailing—Porca miseria, I’ve ruined my life!—her father, screaming back in Yugoslavian, heaving their possessions into the street. Dishes, records, a bowling ball, even the vacuum cleaner. What an asshole, Janine would mutter as we cowered in her room. We listened to music for hours. We drank her father’s homemade wine and watered down the dregs.
Carol’s parents were rarely home. Professional cellists, they were away at performances, practice, tutoring jobs. She and her three brothers had the run of the place, so we spent most of our time there.
Hers was a house filled with boys—her brothers, their friends, cars in the driveway, music blasting, people stopping by, raiding the fridge. Steve was sixteen, shiny blonde and acned, the introvert in a highly social family. I liked him simply because he talked to me, asking questions about books I’d read, turning me on to new bands. But our relationship was platonic. I was the Girl in the Brace. I could never be his—or anyone’s—girlfriend. He already had a girlfriend, a freshman like us, and he spent a lot of time at her house. When he was home, he or his friends would sometimes share their weed with us. These were boys with facial hair, cars, spending money. Voices that had broken and were disconcertingly low. Gentle, directionless boys who excelled at nothing in particular, who lived for music and pot. We did not know them, their parents, where they lived, how they acted in school. They appeared from nowhere, a boon. I felt shy around them.
We’d troop into the woods then sit around the den, my girlfriends sprawled on couches, me upright in a straight-backed chair. The pot made everyone quieter, introspective; it made me feel centered. The boys talked more than we did. Janine and Carol cast furtive glances, flipped their hair. Shaped their mouths into perfect O’s when the joint came around. They began to wear midriffs, low cut shirts, dangly earrings. Janine sat leaning forward, her shirt hiking in back, revealing the perfect, knobby alignment of her spine.
At home, unshackled for my shower, I would run my hand along the planes of my torso—my bones as sharp and smooth, I imagined, as polished dominos. My hair was long and wavy. To make it longer I straightened it with a curling iron, let it curtain my face. Wiped steam from the medicine cabinet mirror, where I could not see below the neck. Pushed my hair aside and stared at my reflection. I practiced the expressions I’d seen my friends make—The Pout, The Arched Brow, The Alluring Smile. I was not beautiful, but I could pass for pretty. How was anyone to know?
I spent my days in bedrooms—my own or the bedrooms of friends. We stacked albums in milk crates, kept a steady rotation on the turntable, painted our nails, played with make-up we’d swiped from Caldor’s, lounged around like odalisques, me sitting on the bed, rigid. Sometimes they went to the beach, its heat and shimmer too much for me, all those glistening bodies. I’d spent days there as a child, digging in the sand with Chipper, eating gritty hot dogs and candy necklaces, but now I preferred the movies. It didn’t matter what. For a few daylight hours I could linger in air-conditioned darkness, the theatre nearly empty, row after row of balding velour seats.
Summer nights I went outside. We’d sit on Carol’s front steps flicking ashes onto the cement, smoking down to the filter, flipping butts into the bushes. I didn’t like cigarettes, didn’t even inhale, but the gesture felt purposeful. We spent whole evenings like this.
Couples formed. A hand on someone’s knee staking a claim. An arm around a waist. Not my knee or waist. Boys would stop by Carol’s house and stay even when Steve wasn’t home. They offered us rides, night trips to the beach. I tagged along. I was for safety, a chaperone for girls who did not want to go too far, at least not right away. A couple in front, one in back; me, unable to bend, leaning back at a forty-five degree angle next to some boy, not my boy, close enough to smell the tobacco on his skin, the soap tr
aces in his hair, his sweet pot breath. Summers the tidal reek came in all briny; winters the windows fogged. After we’d done a few hits, the driver would start the car. I’d be home by nine.
Saturday nights my mother and Tom went out. I’d heat frozen dinners and watch the television line-up: Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, the room loud with canned laughter. Chipper would eat a bowl of ice cream then go to bed at eleven so he could be up for hockey practice by five.
The romances of fourteen-year-old girls are brief. No one wanted to go all the way. Everyone wanted to look around. There were so many boys. After a break up, my friends were briefly disconsolate. They’d call me up and cry. I was the sympathetic ear for their sagas, the metal shoulder to lean upon. Eventually, though, they would relax back into themselves, talking a little louder, asking if I wanted to go hang out at Caldor’s, complaining that, once again, there was nothing to do.
Percentages
This fifteen-year-old girl has a four-year history of idiopathic scoliosis. She has been treated for a two-year period with a Milwaukee brace. Despite the use of the brace, she has had a mild progression of her curve and is admitted for a spinal fusion. At the time of admission, the patient had a right thoracic and left lumbar curve . . . x-rays show a curve to the right from T-6 to T-11 of 45 degrees, and to the left from T-11 to L-5 of 49 degrees. . . .
—Dr. Wayne Southwick, Chief Orthopedic Surgeon
Yale New Haven Hospital
The School of Medicine, Section of Orthopedic Surgery, Yale-New Haven Hospital, was far nicer than the Bridgeport clinic, with magazines in the surgeon’s waiting area, an actual room as opposed to a hallway, one with carpeting, end tables, freestanding chairs. To me, these details were unsettling. They emitted a visual warning: You have entered a formidable place, do not be lulled into comfort.
All the Difference Page 6
