All the Difference

by Patricia Horvath

  He’d disappear. Months at a time; later, years. Stop answering phone calls, sending cards. Not even Chipper would know. Then a call, out of the blue. I’m in town, business, your old man, he’s got something cooking, let’s have a drink.

  We stopped asking. This was normal, normal for us.

  He’d stay in touch. Long enough so we’d think it just might last. Birthdays remembered, Christmases remarked. Gifts, cards, phone calls, drinks. Before dinner cocktails, dinner drinks, night caps. One more nightcap, one for the road. Who wants another round? Your mother . . . Here he would put down his highball glass, touch a knuckle to his eye. Your mother’s a fine woman. Terrific, the tops! But you need something, you call your old man. Got that? You Call Me! Then he’d disappear again, leaving us to guess.

  So when he phoned me, I was only mildly surprised, less that he’d called than that he’d remembered.

  Your birthday! His tone was emphatic, his words slurred.

  Two days ago.

  Happy Birthday, sweetheart! Forty years old—wow! My little girl, forty. I can remember when you were just an itty bitty baby . . .

  Oh, God, I thought. Oh, my God. This will go on all night.

  Dad, listen, I have to . . .

  . . . you were a little baby in your crib, so helpless, a little miracle just lying there. And I said God, let this be pure. Please, God, don’t let this be corrupt.

  Well that stopped me. I didn’t know what to say. Who uses a word like “corrupt” to describe a newborn? Who invokes God, begging that an infant be “pure?” Somehow, instinctively, I understood that he was speaking not of me, but of Michael, his first child, the brother I’d never met. My father’s love, his paternity, had been “corrupted” by his son’s death, an event I’d never heard him mention.

  The next day I told my mother about our conversation. Two months after my brother had died, my mother was pregnant again—with me. A bittersweet pregnancy, one imagines, fraught with sorrow, filled with hope. My mother had not yet learned to drive, and for weeks she’d been after my father to bring home the photos he’d taken of Michael before he’d contracted spinal meningitis: a beautiful, healthy baby. My mother told me the story: how my father hadn’t wanted to develop the photos in the first place, how he demurred now, making excuses, quarreling. Goddammit, I told you, I’m busy. I’ll get to it! Never saying what needed to be said—that he could not stand to look at photos of his dead son.

  I can see them, my parents, married three years, still in their twenties, yet feeling so much older than their peers. My mother in a print house-dress, her auburn hair tied back with ribbon, dark crescents beneath her eyes. She’s not been sleeping well. A winter afternoon; she’s at the red linoleum table drinking Lipton’s tea. When she hears my father at the door does she rise? Does she bite her lip, smooth her hair? Earlier that day they’d quarreled again about the photos. She wants to see them, see her son, gone now three months.

  My father storms into the kitchen. A large man, physically imposing. Snow on his belted overcoat, in his cropped black hair. He pulls the packet from his pocket, tosses it on the table. Here, he says, here are some photos of a dead baby!

  Leave it alone. Don’t look back. Like my brother, who confuses “mastectomy” with “vasectomy”—Whatever, you know, I hate all those hospital words—like so many others, my father has no words for illness, loss, or pain. He will not speak of it, not his father’s death to lung cancer, nor his infant son’s meningitis, nor, later, his mother’s fatal stroke. Pressured by my grandmother, he came once to the hospital to see me, left within an hour, and did not return.

  Language, of course, is not neutral. It fosters dichotomies, judgments. Sickness and health. Straight (straight arrow, straight and narrow path, straight shooter) and queer (queer duck, queer as a three-dollar bill, queering the deal . . .). Black and white. Disabled and able-bodied ( . . . being of sound mind and body I do hereby . . . ) I was on one side of the equation, then on the other. But the boundaries are porous. Each one of us is potentially disabled. Looking too closely at the other becomes a vexed act.

  More than gender, it was illness that had always separated my father and me. Illness, frailty, death, loss. I was the replacement child, awkwardly formed, dangerous to love. Buffer between the son who had died and the robust boy, two years my junior, whom my father named for himself and whom my grandmother nicknamed Chipper because, she said, he was “a chip off the old block.” My existence made it safe for him to be loved. It’s taken me all of my life to understand this.

  Legacy

  In between classes I sip coffee in one of the university’s Adirondack chairs, my face turned toward the sun. The lawns on this New England campus where I now teach are green and sloping, and the students, so close to semester’s end, race down them, giddy with the knowledge that they will soon be set free. It’s my favorite time of the school year.

  I still find it mildly astonishing to be in this place. The first person in her immediate family to attend college. The great-granddaughter of Hungarian immigrants who never fully learned English. The granddaughter of a woman who quit high school at age fifteen to support her family, and a man who’d been intermittently homeless as a boy. A woman whose mother chose her name for its many derivations. Pat, Patsy, Tricia, Patricia—I could change it to suit the surname of whomever I married. This was the world I was born into, a world in which women married young, stayed home raising babies if they were lucky, worked service jobs if they were not. When I accepted my first academic position, my mother said, I thought you were going to teach high school. I thought that’s what you went back to school for.

  I began to explain the difference between graduate degrees—MFA in English vs. MA in Education, the certification process for public school teachers, the import of a terminal degree. As I did so, my mother’s face took on the fixed look of someone struggling to feign interest. So I switched tactics.

  Well, I began, have you ever heard me say I wanted to teach high school?

  No, but . . . I just thought that’s what you wanted to do.

  What my mother was not saying but was expressing nonetheless was her legacy, the paltry expectations she’d inherited and to some extent, despite herself, had passed down to me. It was a legacy that had prompted her to suggest I take courses in typing and shorthand so that I might have something to “fall back on” when luck and wits failed me. For despite having married a lawyer, I think she found it difficult to envision her children, or perhaps just her daughter, the member of some “elite” profession. The women in my family were secretaries, beauticians, nurses, clerks. They wore uniforms, changed bedpans, took dictation, painted other women’s nails; often they stayed on their feet all day. I love every one of them. The men, whom I barely knew, joined the service; they worked in laundries or sold machinery or occasionally graduated to a middle management job.

  Through hard work and luck I’ve managed to fashion a different sort of life. Unlike my grandmothers and aunt, I needn’t spend days on my feet. Unlike my mother, I don’t require a husband for financial support. And this is partly what I mean by luck—the luck of living in a time of expanded opportunities for women. The stamina my job requires is mental, not physical. No one cares whether professors can stand up straight, lift heavy boxes, touch their toes. My job demands that I read and write prodigiously, and I do so in a comfortable chair in the privacy of my bedroom. If I have chosen to become a member of the “cultural elite,” it is because this is the club that’s my natural home. And I can’t help but wonder—how have my bones helped to put me here?

  The facts are straightforward enough. I was awkwardly formed. In a world where popularity was linked to prowess I could not measure up. I walked funny, struck out at bat, toppled from my bike. I hid in my room; I read and wrote. Bound in brace and cast, I reimagined myself a writer, someone at ease in the library, the classroom, the book-filled study with its upholstered chair and ottoman, images I’d culled from My Fair Lady and the board game C
lue. Writing helped me overcome a sense of physical inferiority; it was a way to fight against the invisibility and isolation that attach to the disabled. With words I could reveal as much (or as little) of myself as I cared to even while my body remained concealed. Of course it is my nature, this indolence and bookishness. But bones helped sculpt my character, too, turning it inward.

  Nature vs. structure, an unsolvable riddle. In the end there’s really no way to know how much my misshapen body shaped me except to know that it did. My feelings about this body are likewise difficult to sort out. Indeed I may never untangle these strands—vexed from blessed, bitter from sweet.

  Epilogue

  This is not a redemption narrative. I leave those to the fairy tales, where what follows metamorphosis is a life of happily ever after. As a writer, I resist that ending, contravening as it does all we know about messy life. And it seems to me that one’s former, unrehabilitated self can never entirely be effaced. Surely beauty, in the guise of a lovely lady, must harbor memories of beast, just as a butterfly retains the caterpillar’s vestigial form.

  Here is what happened to Dame Ragnell.

  For five years she lived with Sir Gawain, who “never loved another woman so well.” Then she died of unknown causes, leaving him bereft.

  In Flowers for Algernon, that long ago book I read in ninth grade, the narrator undergoes an exquisitely painful moment during which he realizes he will shortly regress and die. Were these truncated lives a form of punishment for past sins, for residual ugliness and slowness? Most butterflies, we know, have a total life span of less than a year. Many years have passed since the events I describe took place. I am well into middle age, too old to die young. Yet so often the past feels more immediate than my quotidian present. A word, a look can bring back those years of difference.

  I’m walking home from work, taking a shortcut through Boston’s Copley Place Mall. Some kids are hanging out by a jewelry kiosk, drinking sodas, laughing. Seeing me, one of them yells, Hey, you walk just like Pee Wee Herman!

  In grad school one winter there’s a flu going around. I’m laid up for a week with fever, an ear infection, bronchitis. Because the bronchitis persists, the doctor on call at university health services wants to x-ray my lungs. There on film are my ghostly ribs, the daunting “S” of my spine, the rods that hold everything together.

  The doctor whistles, as though impressed.

  Wow, he says, you’ve got scoliosis up the butt!

  I go for a mammogram and the technician, frustrated that I cannot bend into the machine the way she needs me to, has begun repeating herself. Like this, she says, arcing her own supple body far to the left. I’ve already explained about my spinal fusion, explained that what she wants is impossible for me. Like this! She tries to wrench me into position.

  What are you doing? I knock her hands away. You could injure me.

  The expression on her face is one I recognize whenever I explain to a student why, after missing three week of classes, it is no longer possible to pass the course. Incomprehension and shock.

  You’re crooked, she says. I’m trying to help you stand up straight.

  I lower the hospital gown, show her my scar.

  You need to bend, she says.

  Central Park, I’m alone. I’ve been writing and need to take a break. On the path by the Harlem Meer, a man cuts toward me. I change sides, trying to walk around him, but he blocks my way. He looks enraged, unbalanced. I know that look and the way a certain kind of woman, alone and indifferent to the male gaze, can incite fury in a certain kind of man. My adrenaline is up; my heart feels loud. What does he want? How can I get past him?

  You walk like a God damned turtle, he sputters. What’s wrong wit chu? Huh? What the fuck is wrong wit chu?

  He waves his arm wildly then, his anger apparently spent, he continues on his way.

  I’ve just bought my wedding dress, sleeveless beige silk, knee-length, with lace at the top and a high bodice, nearly an empire waist, which will require some assistance from a new bra. This specialty shop on the Upper West Side has everything: sports bras, push-ups, and strapless of course, but also bullets, minimizers, racerbacks, convertibles, hook extenders, and something called “cleavage cupcakes” that I do not ask about. Still, the salesgirl has trouble fitting me. She brings maybe half a dozen selections, some of them lovely, none of them fitting quite right. In desperation, she finally calls in an older associate, a buxom woman who looks so much like my grandmother that I can’t help picturing her in a robe with a Manhattan in one hand and a smoldering Newport in the other.

  Nothing fits, the salesgirl moans. She’s lopsided.

  The older woman sucks in her breath. She gives the girl a withering look. They fit for prostheses at this shop, they fit women with mastectomies, they have bras in sizes AA to JJ. The nonconformist body is their business. I can just about imagine the upbraiding that will take place when I am gone. We do not—repeat do not—call our customers lopsided. Have I made myself clear?

  Like the older woman, I want to be formidable. Who is this girl to comment on my shape? What the hell does she know? But for whatever reason, I’m just not up to the task.

  It could be that word—“lopsided”—how it makes me think of lollipops, the sweet comfort of them after childhood visits to the pediatrician. Or perhaps it’s my new dress and the occasion it represents. Or maybe I’m becoming inured. Strangers will have their say. The girl, I sense, is well meaning enough. And unlike the doctor or the technician, she has no real power. There is nothing she can withhold.

  Remember? Do you remember how we’d stay up all night, go to clubs, after hours parties, show up for class in the morning not even tired? Amazement in her voice.

  This woman, my best friend, is a model of industry. We’ve known each other practically all of our lives. In college she’d been a dancer and her posture is still regal. Both she and her husband are athletic; they run, hike, play tennis, ride their bikes all over New York. Among other things, Carey has renovated two homes, a brownstone in Harlem and a gutted building in the East Village. She’s built a house in upstate New York, started a community development corporation, and helped to create affordable housing in post-Katrina New Orleans where, as a hobby, she’d constructed makeshift bus shelters because she couldn’t stand seeing old women waiting on the sidewalk in the sun. All this while caring for a one-hundred-and-two-year-old aunt in the South Bronx.

  Who are you kidding? I say. You do more now in a day than we did during an entire week back then. Maybe an entire semester.

  It’s true, she concedes. But these days by eleven o’clock all I want is to go to bed.

  Tonight, well past eleven, we are celebrating. A prestigious new job for Carey and my marriage, two days earlier, in the living room of her Harlem home.

  Like me, my new husband is thin, small-boned; “your twin,” people have joked, and I think it is true, the way so many couples resemble each other, the narcissism of love. Unlike me, he is a former athlete, a runner and soccer player, quick moving, a good dancer, light on his feet. He has never spent a night in the hospital, never had anything physically wrong. His diagnosis of leukemia is four months away. Soon there will be DNA tests, white blood cell counts, CT-Scans, a bone marrow biopsy. His arm will bruise from the needles as mine once did and, like me, he will become dependent on others for his care. His appearance too will change, marking him. Cold sores, an enlarged spleen, lymph nodes so swollen he will be unable to button the collars of his dress shirts. He will go through pneumonia, shingles, a month long bout of flu, then six months of chemotherapy that will finally send him into remission, a remission I will never entirely trust, one that keeps me mindful of the Fates, those grim sisters with their thread and tape measure and scissors. Exhausted, he will make jokes to cheer me, mimicking that peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I’m not dead yet!” He will endure. And whenever he tells me how frightened he feels, how vulnerable in his hospital gown, I will do the only thing that
makes sense to me, which is to hold him and say, “I know.”

  But tonight we do not know. Tonight we’ve come to the Lenox Lounge for open mic. A huge woman in a tiara and electric blue gown has arrived too late to get on the performance list. She screams at the emcee, the aptly named Patience, calls him a “fuckin’ motherfucker!” threatens to “tear the place apart” before she is escorted out. No one here is shy. Obese women, bald paunchy men, skinny hipsters, a diva or two, a Japanese girl with acne; good, bad, mediocre, they each get up to perform. I watch, fascinated. What makes people so unabashed? When the house band kicks in and Patience takes up the sax, the room really starts to swing. But by then Carey needs to go home.

  It’s the PMS, she says. The PMS and the job—she just can’t stay up so late anymore—and the PMS. My breasts are killing me, she says. I feel like I weigh a ton. Her husband says he will walk her home and come back to join us; we should order him another drink. Again Carey apologizes.

  You ever feel so uncomfortable in your body that it’s like you’re in some foreign space? she asks. It used to do everything I wanted, and now it won’t. It’s frustrating, you know what I mean?

  Yes, I say, yes I do. I know all about that feeling.

  Trick foot, Pee Wee Herman, “scoliosis up the butt.” The comments still sting. Their subtext is clear: you are an alien in the realm of the able-bodied, holding no passport here.

  Unlike my athletic friend, however, I will stay for the set. I will walk home unassisted; will walk, in fact, over the Brooklyn Bridge and back to help raise money for blood cancer research. My body will never do everything that I desire. It will never permit me to swim great distances, ski the Alps, bike the French countryside, skate in Central Park. But it does a lot more than I’d once thought possible.