Finally, Dr. Barsamian announced that in just three more days I could sit up, perhaps walk around the room a little. He would come to supervise this personally. He wanted me to know I would have to take it slow because after six weeks my legs were bound to be weak, and I would be dizzy.
Late that night, after even the late movie was off, I turned on the light. I rolled onto my side, and then slowly, slowly I sat up. I braced myself with both hands and waited. I sat there listening to the air-conditioning humming and, beyond that, my mother snoring. I didn’t feel dizzy. I touched the cold terrazzo floor with my toes. Then I lay back down.
The next night, I sat up again. Then I stood. My body felt unnaturally heavy, like when you have been swimming all day and then climb onto dry land, but my knees didn’t buckle. I walked slowly to the far side of the room, back again. My heart was pounding. I sat on the bed, stood, sat. It was almost daylight before I lay down again.
The last night before Dr. Barsamian came, I walked down the hall. The central air cut on, but otherwise the house was silent. Bertha and Gretel were asleep on their beds in my parents’ room. I moved from the carpeted living room to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The light seemed dangerously bright, but still I stood there. I put my finger into a container of Cool Whip, but with my jaw wired shut there was no way to lick it off, to eat anything in the refrigerator. I couldn’t even take a drink of water without a straw. I heard Lucky purring in his sleep, then the ice maker came on with a crash. I went back to bed.
The next day, when the time came for me to officially sit up, I said nothing about my rehearsals. My mother and father and Carol all watched as Dr. Barsamian helped me sit. “Whoa, now take it slow.” Then I stood. Carol and my father applauded. I told them how weird it all felt, describing from memory how it had felt the other night. No one could understand much of what I was saying behind my wired teeth, but they smiled and I smiled. I looked happy, and I was, but underneath I thought this: that I was not just faking it now—I had been all along. There had never really been anything wrong with me, and this proved it. Or rather, what was really wrong with me had something to do with why I could never get my homework done, why I was always trying to think up some stupid story to get me out of whatever trouble I was in. Falling from that tree seemed like the biggest dodge of all, one that had really worked. I felt guilty and a little sick.
I got my jaw unwired, and I was now allowed to walk around the house and to go for short jaunts in a wheelchair around the neighborhood. My mother pushed me. It gave us both something to do. Twice a week, I got to ride in the car to Dr. Barsamian’s office. I was so skinny that on the way to the doctor’s my mother would stop at the local Bressler’s 33 Flavors, where the owner would make me an ice-cream treat. He got into a competition with himself and each week made something larger and more exotic. We worked our way up to five flavors with six different toppings. He pinched my arm when I finished. “Almost ready for the oven,” he joked if he thought I’d put on weight. “Not enough meat for soup,” if I hadn’t.
A week before the end of the school year, Miss Davis came to see me. Off and on since I fell there had been some discussion about Miss Davis bringing by my schoolwork, about my making up what I’d missed, but now all that seemed forgotten. It seemed as if whatever my teachers had been teaching was not really important, as if all they had been doing was killing time. I really had gotten away with it. David Mize, though, failed and was being held back.
Somehow my mother and Miss Davis decided I was well enough to go to the end-of-the-year party, which was going to be a dance. I would have to go in the wheelchair, my mother said, afraid of rough boys who might knock me down.
Late that night, Carol came into my room. The PTA play was such a big success that she had just come from a command performance at the other elementary school in town. She was not wearing her silk ball gown, but her hair was still ratted on top of her head, and her cheeks were an unnatural red. “Hey, girl,” she said, and perched on the side of my bed. I told her about the class dance, about how I had nothing to wear that fit over my brace. I told her I was afraid that no one would like me, that I didn’t know how to remake the friends I had so recently made.
“Are you kidding?” Carol tapped my head lightly with one finger, as if she weren’t Cinderella but my fairy godmother. “They’re gonna love you.”
WE ARRIVED EARLY, before the rest of the class, so I could get carried up the stairs and wheeled into place. I was not the only one at the dance in a wheelchair. Two other girls who had been out of school, Debbie Whitehead and Van Lewis, were back for the dance. They both had had rheumatic fever, something you got from having strep throat and your mother not being smart enough to take you to the doctor. At least this was what my mother’s tone implied when she saw Debbie and Van. The fact that Debbie and Van’s mothers were, oddly enough, the two scout leaders in town made my mother’s disapproval complete. They, of all people, should have known better. My mother added me to the row of wheelchairs against the green wall of the multipurpose room and left, telling me she’d be back in an hour. Debbie was saying to Van, “You can’t be on sulfa. That’s not what they gave me.”
The room was hung with streamers of black-and-white crepe paper, clusters of white balloons. Mrs. Boggs, who was our homeroom mother, had made a cake decorated with thirty little black-and-white sugar diplomas, although you don’t usually think of moving from fifth to sixth grade as graduating. She was taking cake decorating at my dad’s junior college. She saw me, called out that she’d bring me a slice, but before she got a chance, the kids came pouring in, intent on punch and cake.
I was surprised at how familiar the faces were, even the pants, skirts, socks, shoes, which feet bounced, which dragged. I recognized the back of Ralph Katz’s head from the hours I spent staring at it when we were seated in alphabetical order, in the same way Mark Lish got to stare at the back of mine. I saw Joanna Fosbleck and remembered the days we spent trying to build a Roman arch out of sugar cubes for our history project: the sugar cubes wouldn’t stay stuck together, kept absorbing the glue, and then one night the ants got them. I saw Marly, my once and future best friend.
I knew that Carol was right, I could wheel myself over, right into the middle of the whole cake-hungry crowd, and it would be okay. People would knock on the front of my brace, want to roll the wheelchair as fast as they could.
But I didn’t go, not just yet. I felt my wheelchair around me like my own private space capsule, my back brace a space suit inside that. Just for a moment more, I stayed where I was.
11
Before there were men in space, there were pets. Or at least animals. In kindergarten in D.C., our teacher had read to us about the brave chimpanzee Ham, Alan Shepard’s predecessor, and about Enos, who flew just before John Glenn. Both chimps survived their Mercury flights.
In 1957, the year after I was born, the Russians sent the first of a long series of lap dogs into space. Poor Laika spent a dark, hungry, and lonely week in space with no way to return. No wonder Laika is Russian for Barker. Belka (Squirrel) and Strelka (Little Arrow) were luckier. They not only had each other for company aboard Sputnik 5 in August 1960, a year before Ham’s flight, but also forty mice and two rats. Luckier still, they survived. Strelka went on to have a litter of six healthy puppies. Khrushchev sent one of
Even now, when I close my eyes and open the front door of our house in Cocoa and walk in memory out into our neighborhood, I think of the pets there, whose fates often echoed their families’ Luna Heights was basically a circle with a dozen low, one-story concrete block houses around the outside, four on the island in the middle, and only two roads in or out. One led into the older neighborhood of Indian Heights. The other street, next to our house, led down to the River Road.
Walking from our house around the circle, the first important pet was at the Mizes’, next door. They had a collie named Arrow—I doubt she was named after Strelka—who followed David everywhere. She was sort of
a neighborhood dog, our low-budget Lassie, who greeted the school bus every day. We recruited Arrow as the reindeer for our red wagon sled when we all went caroling one hot Florida Christmas. Later, when David had a paper route, she used to run in front of his bike, barking madly, waking everyone before their alarm clocks had a chance to go off.
Then one morning, running full tilt and looking back for David, Arrow flew into a telephone pole and broke her neck. It killed her instantly. At the time, it seemed an almost inconceivable tragedy. What would the neighborhood be without Arrow? Years later, when one of David’s sisters was killed in a one-car accident on River Road, probably just doing the same thoughtless, crazy teenager things we all did, my first thought was of what had happened to Arrow.
Down from the Mizes were the Barnses, whose only child, Lori, was the girliest of girls, the one who never wanted to play with more than one of us at a time and never anywhere but at her house and never anything but Barbies. The Barnses owned a Chihuahua named Pepe who barked madly whenever I knocked on the door, throwing himself into the air in little jumping-bean frenzies, until invariably he’d stop and throw up on the carpet at my feet. Then Mrs. Barns would appear with a wad of paper towels and scold me. “Don’t excite Pepe,” she would say. As if there were any way not to.
Mrs. Barns and Lori seemed to spend all their time indoors with Pepe, drinking Cokes out of tall frosted glasses while painting their toenails and Pepe’s matching colors, while Mr. Barns, in his never-ending quest for the perfect lawn, spent hours down on his knees trimming the stray blades around his palm trees with a pair of special patented grass scissors.
Then Mr. Barns went on a business trip to California and never came back, leaving his wife and Lori and Pepe to carry on without him. In a few months, his lawn turned from putting green to sand trap. I can’t say Mrs. Barns or Lori looked as if they even noticed, but poor Pepe went into decline, barely hopping when anyone knocked. Before long he was buried under what was left of the lawn, in the loose, dry white sand.
I saw Arrow and Pepe when I went to see David or Lori, but I also knew the pets who didn’t live with kids, like Sir Galahad Worthington, the world’s oldest beagle, who lived with an elderly couple, the Worthingtons, on the far side of the circle. Sir Galahad was so old something had gone wrong with his hormones, making him smell like a female dog in heat. Mrs. Worthington had to walk him with a red, battery-powered cattle prod in one hand to shock any dogs who might get the wrong idea. Every afternoon they took a slow stroll—Mrs. Worthington smoked and had emphysema—down to the River Road entrance to the neighborhood where they waited until Mr. Worthington, returning from wherever he spent his days, stopped and picked them up in his big Lincoln Continental for a one-block air-conditioned ride home.
Sitting beside her one day as she waited, I had Mrs. Worthington tell me the story of how she’d gotten Sir Galahad. Years before, she said, she’d been a reporter in Chicago. Walking home one cold night, she had found Sir Galahad abandoned in an alley next to her newspaper’s offices. Because he had a broken leg, she took him to a vet, who told her Sir Galahad was obviously an expensive, pedigreed beagle. As a reporter, it seemed odd to her that someone would dump a dog worth real money.
So she wrote an article about Sir Galahad, asking if anyone had lost a beagle puppy. It turned out that Sir Galahad’s entire litter and his mother, a national champion, had been kidnapped from their breeder and held for ransom. The kidnappers had gotten rid of Sir Galahad when they realized he was hurt. When the article was published, the other puppies and their mother were set free, found, and returned to the breeder. When she heard the news, Mrs. Worthington prepared to give up Sir Galahad, knowing she could never afford to buy such an expensive dog. But the breeder, grateful for her help, had said Sir Galahad, with his bad leg, would never make a show dog and had let the Worthingtons keep him.
When I thought of this story, I imagined Mrs. Worthington as young and brave, a bit like Lois Lane on assignment from The Daily Planet, though if you grant Sir Galahad an ordinary span of dog life, Mrs. Worthington was probably at least fifty when the Great Dognaping happened. By the time I knew them, the Worthingtons and Sir Galahad seemed equally ancient, and even my mother wondered out loud who would take care of Sir Galahad and Mr. Worthington if anything happened to Mrs. Worthington. In the end, Sir Galahad died first, leaving Mrs. Worthington to take her slow walks alone.
Next to the Worthingtons lived the Stratoses, who had a frighteningly large red parrot, Astro, the only pet in the neighborhood with a true space age name. The Stratoses often left Astro tied to the clothesline in the backyard. Most mornings when we neighborhood kids, Carol, Marly, David, and me, cut through the Stratoses’ yard to get to the bus stop before school, Astro would have his head tucked under one crayon-red wing, as if deep in bird sleep. Four mornings out of five, he would stay that way. Then on the fifth, when we’d almost forgotten he was there, when we were walking along talking and paying him no attention at all, Astro would spread his wings, open his orange beak, and scream. Once Carol threw her algebra book in the air, scattering proofs everywhere. Once Marly’s little brother started to hiccup, then to cry.
The Stratoses were the talk of the neighborhood while they lived there. They had made all their money selling Mink Oil Bath Beads in a pyramid scheme run by a man named Glen Turner who appeared on TV telling everyone to Dare to Be Great. They had moved into an empty house, painted it bright Athenian blue, and put two naked Greek statues in their front yard. They put a sign over the door saying WELCOME TO THE STRATOSPHERE and invited the neighbors over to let them in on the great Mink Oil deal.
Eventually Turner went to jail. The bank foreclosed on the mortgage on the Stratoses’ house. They moved out in the middle of the night, taking with them not only their furniture and the statues, but the garage door, the toilets, the bathtubs, the water heater, the light fixtures, and even some of the wiring. These were things the bank thought it owned. Astro, though, they set free, and he joined several other parrots who’d escaped from jungle attractions and roadside zoos around the state.
Astro remembered where his home, or at least our neighborhood, was. Once, a woman driving through the neighborhood stopped and rang our doorbell to tell us our parrot had escaped and was sitting in an orange tree. I peered cautiously into the front yard. Astro glared back at me, no friendlier than ever. I told the woman we didn’t have a bird and slammed the door before Astro could open his beak to scream at me.
The last time I saw him, I had opened the backdoor to take out some trash and found Astro and five large green parrots with orange beaks and feet sitting on the telephone wire looking down at me like so many vultures. I had just seen Hitchcock’s The Birds. I dropped the trash and jumped back inside. We had a couple of cold winters after that, and I thought maybe the cold had gotten Astro. Years later, my father sent me a clipping about exotic birds taking over south Florida, driving out the indigenous species. I swear the bird in the illustration, perched high in an oleander somewhere near Miami, was Astro.
Looking back, I can’t help feeling that Arrow’s death fore-shadowed David’s sister’s, the first tragedy preparing the way for the next. Or that Sir Galahad Worthington’s death was clearly a sign of things to come for the human Worthingtons. Astro’s fate was an example for everyone who came to Florida with high hopes and stayed even when they weren’t necessarily welcome.
I was part of a family that raised dogs’ status to the level of children’s. (Remember my mother’s four-legged girls and two-legged girls?) Snapshot for snapshot, there are more sleeping cats and dachshunds than people in any box of our family photos. We took turns hugging and kissing the pets instead of each other. We loved our pets. They loved us. We were a family.
Then one day, for no apparent reason, Bertha tried to kill Gretel. The trouble had started earlier, with growls and fierce looks that left Gretel shaking. This time, while the pets were on their morning walk, my mother holding their leashes, Bertha went for Gret
el’s throat. There was blood and howling and a trip to the vet. My parents decided the only thing to do was to give Gretel away. Bertha, though obviously in the wrong, would never adjust to a new family, they said. Gretel, on the other hand, who we had always joked would have happily gone home in a sack with any burglar, would do just fine. My father asked around and found a couple that taught at the college who agreed to take her.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table—Gretel at our feet, Bertha banished to the garage—and being told of my parent’s decision. Carol started crying. Gretel was her favorite. I wanted to protest, but I didn’t know what to say, how to put into words the magnitude of this violation. If our dogs were family and one hated the other, what did it say about us? If Gretel was my mother’s four-legged daughter, what did it mean that she was willing to give her away in the name of harmony and practicality? Bertha had always been my favorite, but goofy and bowlegged Gretel was duck-footed and easygoing me in the family mythology. The dog me was being sent to join another family.
We went to visit Gretel in her new home just once. Carol and I had begged and begged, but my parents kept putting us off. Gretel needed time to get adjusted, they said. It wouldn’t be fair to her new owners. Finally one Saturday, we did go. Her new owners lived in the same subdivision on Cocoa Beach where the Henrys had lived. Their house was pale yellow and on a canal. It could have been the same house Carol and I had run through on our second day in Florida.
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