My boss pitied the people under attack but she could not make the difficult leap from tolerance to acceptance. For Dame Ragnell acceptance came with the lifting of a spell, for me with the removal of a brace. But self-acceptance proved a more complicated matter than I’d imagined.
From my high school journal:
Got home in an awful mood. Out of money, the house a mess and to top it all off, my stomach screaming “Feed me! Feed me, you sadistic fool. It’s 2:30, and you haven’t fed me since dinner last night.” Terrible pest, the stomach. I stuck a bar of frozen cream cheese in the microwave to pacify the beast. Three minutes later I had a plate full of mushy molten mess. My eyes took one look at it, and my stomach instantly stopped its incessant screaming. That’ll teach it!
Breakfast was coffee with sugar and milk. Lunch a Dannon yogurt or a three-pack of chocolate chip cookies. I hoarded my lunch money, went in on ounce bags with my new friends, kids who took classes in writing and art. We huddled outside, cupped our hands around the joint, kept watch for the assistant headmaster, who wore pastel leisure suits and could be spotted in time for one last hit before someone stomped out the roach and I popped a breath mint, dessert.
Dinner was compulsory. I wanted to eat, but my appetite remained static. Still I was expected to eat the same amount as everyone else, my “May I Please Be Excused?” answered with “Not Until You Finish What’s On Your Plate.” My mother’s rejoinders were anxious, Tom’s punitive, but they amounted to the same thing. I cut tiny pieces, swallowed them whole and cold, soldiering my way through collapsed vegetables, unctuous potatoes, meat that leaked blood. I wanted salads, juices, air. I was afraid of growing big, like those field hockey girls with their bulging calves and mannish shoulders. At night, bracing me, my mother would tug on the leather strap, pulling it as far as it would go, buckling the corset at the tightest hole. The brace shifted, loose on my hips. My body was the enemy; made strong, there was no telling what havoc it might cause. I didn’t think this, not rationally, but my mistrust of my physical needs ran deep, as my journal attests. So I shaped myself into a blade.
Had I known the repercussions of this behavior, I might have made an effort to feed myself. Instead I starved my bones of all they needed—exercise, sunlight, nutrients. Partly this was unavoidable. One can’t exercise when one cannot move; nor, encased in metal or fiberglass, can one linger in the sun, nor eat much when corseted in plaster. Muscles and appetite shrink, lethargy takes hold. Still I suppose that, once unbound, I’d have tried to replenish my bones instead of starving my body to “get even” with it.
But perhaps not. I was self-absorbed, immersed in the present, which is to say I was a teenager. The future was too distant to hold sway. Even if I’d been able to fathom it, to gauge the consequences of my actions, I might not have changed a thing. My distrust of my body was a force resistant to reason.
A new year, and I was healed at last. People who hadn’t known me before, what did they know? During exams doctors admired my scar—so thin, so light. Its beauty lay in its near invisibility. To heal meant to fade. I would fade like my scar, be made thin like my scar, the ultimate synecdoche.
I needed new clothes, ones tailored to my body not my brace. My mother took me shopping, making an event of it, going from store to store—elegant little Westport boutiques, a Fairfield strip mall, a hippie emporium behind a beaded curtain in an ice cream parlor with marble-topped tables and nickelodeons that showed The Bum’s Rush and The Perils of Pauline. We splurged on ice cream in silver dishes, a single scoop I struggled to finish. Fed our change to the nickelodeons, turning the crank to see the train bearing down on Pauline as the hero galloped to her rescue. I knew she’d be saved, yet I savored the menace. So different, these excursions, from the ones we’d made a year earlier, sitting gloomy and silent in the Rathskeller after another hospital visit.
My new clothes were showy, but showed little of me. After years of being hidden, I felt suddenly exposed. My hated brace had nonetheless protected me from the predatory gaze. It had desexualized me, made me “safe,” the chaperone on other girls’ dates, the sidekick. Because of this I was unprepared in many ways for its removal. Freedom, comfort, I yearned for these things. But it was more difficult than I’d realized to be at ease in my body. I still felt the need to cover myself, chose clothes to hide behind. A long filmy shirt, sea green with a rope belt. A red peasant blouse with tiny mirrors sewn into the bodice. Flared jeans, hooded zip-up cardigans, a knee-length cable knit sweater that tied at the waist. Nothing clingy, nothing cropped.
Among my new clothes were two cashmere sweaters: a thigh length, raspberry turtleneck flecked with white angora, and a beige cowl neck. After so many years of coarse, brace-resistant fabric, their softness was a shock—cashmere on my neck where so recently metal had been.
In February a blizzard closed the schools for a week. The National Guard was called in to help clear away snow, and we couldn’t open our front door against the drifts. Chipper and I stayed in my room listening to records, playing Scrabble, making up hard rock versions of soft rock songs on the acoustic guitar I was learning, badly, to play. We couldn’t go anywhere; I may as well have stayed in my pajamas and robe, but every day I wore one of those two sweaters. My body had been going through the usual changes of puberty—hair and blood and odor—and the sweaters began to smell like something new, a yeasty smell, not unpleasant, but slightly distracting. I was becoming aware of my body in a different way, not as a thing to be withstood, but as a source of possible pleasure. And this frightened me. What obligations resided in the cashmere? What obligations had I been kept safe from? Touch me, the sweaters said, but I wasn’t ready to be touched. I still had so much to learn.
When the blizzard ceased, when the drifts were cleared from our door, I went outside and lay down on my back, spreading my arms and legs to make snow angels. I was too old for this. I didn’t care. All those years I couldn’t. I swept my limbs back and forth, the snow so light and supple. I sank down into it, a creature more flesh and blood than she had ever felt before, imagining herself an angel.
I’ll call him John. In truth I don’t recall much about him, not even his name. Friend of a friend’s boyfriend, something like that, he’d finished high school and was just hanging around. Most likely he had a job; how else to explain the car and the weed, neither of which were mine. The boy was not mine either; that is, I didn’t think of him that way, although later I came to understand that, like the car and the weed, he thought of me as his.
We’d talked a few times at parties and once, with some other people in the car, he drove me home. So when he asked if I wanted to go to the beach and smoke some good weed it seemed like an okay idea. Better, anyway, than staying home watching reruns of Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart with Chipper. I was nearly seventeen. None of the girls I knew were virgins. If I wanted to pass for one of them, those hair twirling, lip glossed girls who seem to know so much, I had some catching up to do. Only I wasn’t at all sure what it was I wanted.
With the windows cracked I could smell the brine of low tide. He was rolling a fatty, one-handed, showing off. The radio must have been on because the radio was always on, Gregg Allman ramblin’, Roger Daltrey leaving his girl behind, or, once in a while, a woman—Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt—someone long-haired and plaintive. John and I shared a warm Rolling Rock. Other couples had come here to do the same thing and I could hear the music from their cars, smell their weed, see them making out. I’d known John a short while; he’d never seen me in a brace. I felt certain that had I been in one I would not have been in his car. Because of this I felt superior to him, the possessor of secret knowledge.
What had I supposed would happen when I said yes? On the one hand, I thought of my virginity as just another unwelcome difference. In theory I was blasé about sex, but I was skeptical about the enterprise as it applied to me personally, anxious about what it might entail.
John passed me the joint. I drew on it hard. He watched me sm
oke, as if expecting something. He was handsome, with black hair, light blue eyes, skin so pale I could see the threading of veins at his temples. For some reason their pulsing fascinated me. I took another hit. The song on the radio turned shrill and remote. Rainbow trails streamed from the headlights of passing cars.
I’m really stoned, I said, and John laughed and said, Yeah, I laced this with angel dust. Then he leaned in for a kiss.
Up close like that his teeth looked massive. His lips were salty and dry. His tongue fished about; I could feel the stringy tendon that attached it, clam-like, to the base of his mouth. He pressed against me, the muscles in his arms small and tight. I knew I was supposed to want him, or at least pretend that I did, placating him somehow, this boy who’d doped my dope, who thought that was an okay thing to do. But I didn’t want him. The thing he’d done made me angry and scared. I pushed him away.
What? he said.
C’mon, he said.
Why’d you come here anyway if you don’t wanna have fun?
I’m too stoned, I said. It’s too much. Meaning the angel dust, meaning everything.
Maybe because the windows were open and there were other cars in the lot, because I could’ve yelled or tried to run or maybe because, at his core, there was a speck of decency in him, John finally gave up. He drove me to a girlfriend’s house. We didn’t speak on the ride there and I never saw him again.
Straddling
I no longer recall why I was in New York alone, that is without Chipper. Always before we’d traveled together, meeting our father on one of the subterranean platforms at Grand Central, then riding in his dark green sedan across town and down the FDR Drive to the East River high-rise he shared with two other divorced men. From the living room I could see the river, its tugboats and ferries and gulls all headed somewhere. I liked these New York weekends better than the ones we’d had in Bridgeport, with their enforced visits to his girlfriend’s house, her four kids run amok, endless games of touch football and Capture the Flag. By the time my father moved to Manhattan, the girlfriend was gone. Instead of playing in her yard, we went to Italian street fairs or ate Chinese takeout—Real Chinese, not that American chop suey crap you kids eat—and if Wide World of Sports was on I’d read a book but mostly we watched movies on HBO, my father talking all through Sleeper or Cabaret: Jesus this is some crazy stuff, you kids understand what’s going on here? To which I would always answer, yes.
I loved how New York contrasted with my quotidian life. Here was food I’d never tasted, people on the streets at night, apartments in the sky, pay phones set into red and green pagodas. Panhandlers, sidewalk musicians, a dancing chicken in a box. I had a sense that anything was possible. I pretended New York was my home.
It may have been, on this particular day, that Chipper had Little League. A fussy eater, he might not have wanted to waste an afternoon on strange foods. It’s even possible that the occasion, a food festival in Central Park, was for me alone, a celebration of my newly acquired mobility. Eight months free of braces and casts, I was about to enjoy my first summer as a “normal” teenage girl, a girl unmarked by physical difference.
Be careful, my mother had warned and, to my father, You keep an eye on her. That summer the news coming out of New York was not good. Arson, crime, graffiti. A serial murderer who preyed on young women and called himself Son of Sam. Vigilante groups, subway muggings. The city was broken and broke.
Fifth Avenue did not look broke. We rushed past Cartier’s, Tiffany’s, Saks, my father keeping up a steady patter. Jeez it’s hot, you hungry sweetheart? Where we’re going . . . every food in the world, you’ll see, what’re you now anyway, sixteen? Wow! My little girl, how’d you get so old? Each word a stone in the wall between us. Charming and irrepressible and fun, a handsome man who sang in public and gave money to panhandlers, my father was everything Tom was not. Despite the pain he’d caused us, I wanted him to like me. But the clamor all around him—the girlfriends and roommates and other people’s kids, the ringing phone and abrupt changes in plans—had always felt impossible to breach. He wanted not people so much as an audience. Now, alone with him for an entire afternoon, I was unsure what to say, how to act. I kept quiet to his torrent.
At Fifty-Ninth Street carriages lined the park’s edge, the horses blinkered and bridled. I felt sorry for them. Still, I was excited. It was my first time in Central Park.
Once inside the gate my father seemed to relax. He let his shoulders sag. Food stalls had been set up on the lawn and he bought handfuls of tickets so we could have as much as we wanted, anything we craved. We ate voraciously, indiscriminately; we ate the way I read, going from burritos with salsa verde to hummus to garlicky Greek salads. For once I didn’t care how much I ate. I wanted everything, all the foods and smells and noises in the park.
A few months later I would skip school to go to New York with Jimmy. The park that day would be mid-week serene and I would fantasize about living nearby. But on this afternoon there were jugglers, musicians, three-card Monte men and mimes. The grass was shiny, packed with people, late hippies and early punks and people like my father in suburban sportswear. A man in a ruffled yellow shirt played the steel drum. A dreadlocked man danced along, ecstatic, his hair streaming. I had the sense of being in a world apart, a bordered world, benign. At one stall a man was making banana daiquiris. My father bought two. We climbed a rock and sat in the sun, drinking the daiquiris, which were cold and sweet and mild. My father asked if I wanted some pie. Wait here, he said. I sipped my daiquiri and looked down at the people in the park. The sun was warm on my back and I felt drowsy and content.
From an adjacent rock a man came clambering over, a hippie-looking man, about twice my age, with a brown scruffy beard. By now I’d more or less outgrown my childhood fascination with hippies. To me the man looked dated, a relic. At first I didn’t entirely grasp what he was doing on this rock—my rock—why he was pestering me, asking my name and how I was enjoying myself. I was not yet used to men noticing me. A year earlier I’d been invisible. Only the old women had noticed me, pausing to ask questions or say how sad. I was used to the old women, not the young men.
Partly I was flustered, partly annoyed, but mostly I felt apprehensive. Here I’d been enjoying myself when this man had appeared, demanding my attention, making me self-conscious. Should I flirt? Tell him to fuck off? Flatly, tersely, I answered his questions. Yes I like the food, all the food, no I don’t live in New York. My name? It’s Patti. And then I saw him, my father, bounding up the rock, a plate of pie in each hand and a terrible look on his face. Seeing it too, the man scurried off to try his luck on some other rock. My father boomed, loud enough for the man to hear, Jesus Christ, I leave you alone for five minutes and look! Every weirdo in the park . . .
Look at what? I wanted to answer because despite my discomfort I also knew that what had just occurred was ordinary enough, something I’d have to learn to navigate. And I was embarrassed in the way of a sixteen-year-old girl who had just been “rescued” by her father.
We ate our pie and left the park. The street was hot, unshaded, pulsing with too many bright things—taxis, buses, blinking signs: Walk and Don’t Walk. The daiquiri had given me a buzz. A man in a wheelchair came pushing his way up Fifth Avenue, an obstacle course of pedestrians and vendors: pretzel and hot dog carts, sketch artists with easels, tourist groups, photographers hawking glossy skyline shots. People parted to let him pass. Slowly he guided his chair toward the park. I knew what he felt like, at least a little bit. The way your arms get tired, the way you’re forced to look up at people who won’t look back. A doctor had claimed that I might never walk again, but by the time I was using a wheelchair, post-surgery, I knew that was not true.
Suddenly I had to stop myself from crying. Not because I was happy or sad—I was neither of these things—but because the sense of my own autonomy, my freedom to move about in the world, was still so new I had difficulty believing it would not be snatched away.
I had one year left of school. To the hippie in the park I had no history. That was what I wanted, a blank slate. The year before had been something very different, and the following year would be different, too. Like Janus, Roman god of the new year, my gaze was fixed at once on the recent past and ahead toward the murky future. I longed to go unimpeded into that future, whatever that might turn out to be, but I feared being pulled back.
Gone
My mother arranged a trip to the Cape, just the two of us. We had three days, Tom’s credit card, a hotel in Dennis Port. A reward, she explained, for all that lay behind. It was my last year at home; in the fall I would go to college in Boston.
On our first day away we wander the streets of Provincetown sharing a box of chocolate fudge, ruining our dinners. Even though I live in a beach town and love the ocean, I’ve spent so many years in seclusion from it that the sea air makes me feel slightly woozy, wanting to laugh at nearly everything: the bare-chested man with the snake around his neck, the patchouli and bong shops, the man in the dog collar. Here, I think, is a town where you can do what you want. I can do what I want now, too: go to the beach, take long showers, wear clothing I like, the remarkable recast as mundane. At a boutique my mother buys me a bikini, rust colored, with metallic stripes. Trying it on, adjusting the straps, tugging at the bottom, I am so taken by the newness of the experience, the liberation it represents, that I never consider the way the suit exposes my scar.
That night we go to a waterfront restaurant where my mother lets me order a glass of white wine. I’ve walked more than I’m used to walking, spent more time in the sun, and I feel sleepy and content, wishing every day could be like this one, with new things in it. And then, because I’m seventeen, I think why not? My mother is saying something about how much she’ll miss me. First you, she says, then Chipper. Things between her and Tom have been more tense than usual. I can tell by the way she looks at him, the way he comes home from work and starts drinking, reading the paper with his feet up, waiting for her to make dinner even though she’s worked all day too, stopping off to buy groceries or pick up his suits from the cleaners.
All the Difference Page 14
