Читать книгу Such a Pretty Girl - Nadina LaSpina - Страница 14

3

BLOOD SISTERS

About a month after the surgery, I was discharged from the hospital and given a wheelchair. Rosa had been wrong about my getting braces. The doctors told my father the next step was to release another tendon, this time in my left leg. After that, my ankles would need to be fused. And other surgeries would be necessary—it was hard to predict how many—before I could be taught to stand and walk. My father agreed to it all, happy that I was getting the best care.

I barely had time to get settled at home before I had to go back into the hospital for more surgery. But I was happy to go. More surgery meant more pain, but it also meant seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Best of all, it meant being with Audrey.

Audrey and I always tried to be in the hospital at the same time.

“Tell the doctors you can’t go in till next month. That’s when I’m having my surgery,” Audrey would say.

“Oh, please, see if they can do it earlier! I don’t want to wait that long!”

We were best friends, though we never got to see each other outside of the hospital. Audrey lived on Long Island. Her parents had a car and drove her places, but I guess my home in Brooklyn was too far. We were happy talking on the phone every day. Usually, I waited for her to call me, since a call to Long Island was long-distance and expensive. Audrey’s parents didn’t mind the high phone bills.

I’d made no friends outside of the hospital. I went out only with my parents and not very often. Our apartment without stairs still had one step at the front door. I couldn’t manage that step on my own in my wheelchair.

Audrey told me her house had a ramp, so she could go in and out without anyone’s help. I asked my father to build a ramp for me. He told me he couldn’t. Unlike Audrey’s parents, who owned their house, we rented our apartment, and the landlord would never agree to a ramp.

“Don’t worry, gioia, before long we won’t need that wheelchair.” Wasn’t that the reason we had come to America? Presto guarisci, presto cammini was the refrain I heard every day.

If I could have gone out in my wheelchair, I wouldn’t have gotten far, since none of the curbs had cuts, and there were steps going into most places. Besides, I wasn’t brave enough to venture out on my own. I was still the shy crippled girl from the little town of Riposto.

When I went out with my parents, it was to visit our cousins Vito and Concetta and their son, Vittorio, or Victor, who was a few years older than I. They lived only a block away in an apartment on the second floor. My father carried me up the stairs.

Cousin Concetta had found a job for my mother in the factory where she worked, right in the neighborhood. They made ladies’ coats and everyone there spoke some southern Italian dialect. They called the factory fattoria, which I thought was hysterical, since fattoria means “farm” in English.

“Are there cows where you work?” I asked.

She didn’t appreciate the humor. She took her job very seriously. An expert seamstress, she was proud when her work was appreciated by her boss. And above all, she was happy to have found a place where people spoke her language.

My mother had not been going to church but didn’t seem to miss it. Maybe there were no churches nearby. Or maybe after working Monday through Friday, she needed rest more than church services. I asked Audrey if she ever went to church and she laughed. Of course not! She was Jewish, she said. And she was not religious, and neither were her parents. I was glad to learn it wasn’t necessary to be religious in America.

Both my parents left early in the morning to go to work, my father to his construction job, my mother to the factory. I was alone most of the day, but I didn’t mind. It felt great to move around the apartment in my wheelchair—into the kitchen to get a soda or make myself a sandwich, into the living room to turn the TV on, and into the bathroom by myself. Although to get into the bathroom, I had to transfer to a stool, since my wheelchair didn’t quite fit through the door. Taking a bath was tricky and I could do it only when my mother was there to help me. Audrey told me her bathroom was big; she could get her wheelchair right next to the bathtub and get in and out by herself.

TV was a novelty for me, since in Sicily only rich people owned one. I loved our set, encased in shiny dark wood, with a huge nineteen-inch screen. I watched game shows and American Bandstand, trying to remember the words of the songs I’d learned from Audrey.

One day, I turned on the TV and a bunch of disabled kids were going around on a stage, some with braces and crutches, and a woman in a low-cut dress was guiding them and patting first one, then another on the head—all this while a funny-looking man sang some sad-sounding song. I wasn’t sure what they were doing. I got a strange feeling in my stomach, as if I was going to be sick. Maybe the ham I’d just eaten was spoiled.

“Send money so these unfortunate kids can walk,” the man pleaded. I remembered that my father had told me how in America they collected money on television to find a cure. I felt as if I were one of those TV kids. I felt like I had in Sicily when people looked at me and clucked their tongues, got all teary-eyed, and murmured, “Povera ciunca.”

“I’d rather not walk,” I told the man, as if he could hear me. Saying that made me feel better. But I was glad my father wasn’t there. When he asked that night what I’d watched on TV, I said game shows. But I told Audrey the next time she called, and she said she felt like puking, too, whenever she watched the telethon. That’s what that show was called.

Twice a week, the home instructor from the Board of Education came. He was a nice man who brought me books and praised me for my progress in learning English. I liked his visits, but I wished I could go to school and meet other kids.

Audrey was now a freshman—which was a funny word for a girl—in a regular school with a ramp at the entrance. Her mother drove her there. There weren’t many accessible schools, she told me. She was lucky to go to one, though she couldn’t get into the auditorium and the science lab in her wheelchair. She had lots of friends, but she complained that they left her out of many things they did.

Sometimes I wished I could live with Audrey in her house with the ramp and the big bathroom, and go to school with her. Then I remembered how difficult it had been for my father to bring me to America, find a ground-floor apartment, and the hospital and the doctors I needed. I thought about how hard my parents worked, and I felt guilty for wanting more than they could give me.

Whenever Audrey and I were in the hospital together, and especially when we managed to be in the same room, we were thrilled. The first few nights, the two of us were so busy catching up, we wouldn’t sleep at all.

“What’s going on in here, a pajama party?”

Janet, the nice night nurse stuck her head in the room, trying to sound angry, but we could hear the laughter in her voice. If mean Miss Martins was on duty, we had to be careful and whisper and put our heads under the covers to muffle our giggles. She heard us anyway and came marching into the room.

“The next time I come in here, I’ll give you each a shot.”

“You can’t do that without a doctor’s orders,” Audrey said, bravely challenging her.

“If I hear so much as a peep coming from this room, you’ll find out what I can do!”

Audrey’s favorite topic of conversation was Richard, a sophomore at her school. She had a major crush on Richard. She described the way he looked in the minutest detail—how his hair curled over his ears, his eyes slanted up when he smiled at her, his lips pouted just slightly…. When she described his cute butt, we’d both giggle so hard that if Miss Martins was on duty, she’d march in with her hands on her hips. If she was off, Audrey went on talking, both of us laughing harder and harder, until she got to the big bulge in Richard’s pants. At that point, we’d be practically having convulsions under the covers, and that’s when Audrey cried out, “Oh no, oh no, I’m wetting the bed!”

Because of her spina bifida, Audrey’s bladder control was not the greatest, and she did have an accident once in a while, especially when she laughed too hard or got too excited. Though I couldn’t see what she was doing under the covers, I knew her hand was between her legs as she tried to stop the pee from coming out. Polio had not affected my bladder at all. But I made believe I, too, was afraid of wetting the bed and I put my hand there and squeezed my legs together as tightly as my polio-weakened muscles allowed.

Audrey’s relationship with Richard never went past his smiling at her, saying hello, and two or three times pushing her from the elevator to her classroom. Yet I was jealous. I wished there was a boy I could talk about with Audrey. But since I hardly ever went anywhere outside of the hospital, I never saw any boys who weren’t handicapped, other than my cousin Victor.

In the hospital, Audrey and I were quite popular. But the boys in the hospital, as cute as some of them were, couldn’t compare with Richard. Richard was a thousand, maybe even a million, times better. Because Richard was not handicapped. He was “normal.” Audrey was sure that had she not been handicapped, Richard would have asked her out on a date, kissed her, and made out with her. It was a real tragedy that because of her disability she was missing out on Richard’s love. But she kept hoping he would fall in love with her in spite of her disability.

Why normal boys were so much better than handicapped boys was not a question we ever thought of asking. Nor did we ask why normal boys didn’t consider us—handicapped girls—worthy of their attentions. These were facts of life, unquestionable and unanswerable.

Every morning before breakfast, without even thinking we might want to wash our faces, Audrey got her makeup bag out.

“What color eye shadow do you want to wear today?”

I’d shrug, too inexperienced to make such a decision.

“What if I wear blue and you wear green?”

Any color was fine with me. She grabbed the side table, which was on wheels and could be pushed back and forth between our beds, and placed all sorts of tubes and jars on it. At first I didn’t know what to do. I’d put on too much eye shadow, get it all smudged.

Audrey laughed. “You look like you got punched in the eyes!”

Then she’d show me how to do it right. I was a fast learner and before long I could apply makeup like a pro. What fun it was! Rubbing foundation on our noses and foreheads, defining our cheekbones with blush-on, carefully applying mascara on our lashes and frosty shadow on our lids. On our lips we’d wear light pink lipstick.

“You girls look like you’re ready to go partying,” the nurse’s aide said when she brought our breakfast.

Audrey put all the makeup back into the bag to make room for her tray.

As soon as we were up in our chairs, we’d work on our hair. When I was a little girl, my mother had always kept my dark, wavy hair short. It felt great to have it reaching down to my shoulders, almost as long as Audrey’s blond hair. I teased the top, puffed it up, and tried to get the bottom to flip—just like Audrey.

“Close your eyes,” she’d say, holding her can of hair spray. The spray made my hair look shiny and smell like almonds. Then she handed me the can so I could spray her hair. I made sure I did it from the right distance.

We always had a Seventeen magazine open in front of us. The goal was to make ourselves look like the models on those glossy, sweet-smelling pages. Though, of course, we never fooled ourselves. We knew that no matter how hard we tried, we could never be like the models in Seventeen. We were handicapped and they were normal. That knowledge was a source of constant sorrow.

“Look, what beautiful legs!” Audrey would hold up the magazine. “And our legs are so ugly. They’re shaped like sticks. And they’re all covered with scars.”

We looked at ourselves in the full-length mirror hanging in one of the bathrooms, seeing ourselves only from the waist up. If no one was around, we took off our tops and seductively moved our slender torsos—wearing our Maidenform bras—as if dancing to inaudible music, while keeping our lower bodies covered with sheets. We always tried to keep our legs hidden. We were happy when they were inside of casts.

One day, Audrey rushed into the room and grabbed the armrest of my chair, so I had to follow her. “Look at that girl’s legs,” she whispered, pointing at an older girl—at least sixteen—standing near the nurses’ station.

I’d never seen the girl before. She wore a jade-colored A-line dress with a big bow a little above the waist, and pointed pumps of the exact same shade with little heels. Her legs were beautiful. By the way the nurses and some of the older kids were fussing over her, I deduced she had been a patient on the floor and was now visiting. She didn’t look handicapped, though when she walked to the other side of the hall to get hugged by the head nurse, I noticed a limp.

“One of her legs is fake.” Audrey was leaning on my armrest. “Can you guess which one?”

“No way,” I said a little too loudly.

Audrey reprimanded me by slapping my shoulder. “She’s an amputee. She lost her leg in a car accident. Can you tell which leg is fake?”

I couldn’t. Both her legs were equally perfect. None of the kids I’d met in the hospital so far was an amputee. The boy with little wings instead of arms was just born that way.

“Amputees are better off than we are,” Audrey said. “They get beautiful fake legs, and we get scars and more scars and horrid heavy braces. She looks normal, doesn’t she?”

I had to agree. She looked as normal and dressed as fashionably as a model.

Audrey had found in Seventeen a picture of two long-legged models, a blonde and a brunette, standing with their arms around each other. The blonde wore a blue bikini with pink polka dots and the brunette wore a pink one with blue dots. Their smiling young faces vaguely resembled ours. Audrey had cut the page out and asked her mom to paste it on the wall between our beds.

“That’s what we would look like if we weren’t handicapped.”

“But we’re pretty, even though we’re handicapped, Audrey. Everybody says so.” I tried to make us feel better, but it didn’t work.

“In a way, that makes it worse.” She sighed. She looked so sad and serious, as if the weight of the world were on her shoulders.

I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t ask her to explain. I remembered the Sicilian women looking at me with such anguish whenever they said “Che bella bambina! What a pretty little girl! Che peccato! What a shame!”

The volunteer ladies who came to bring us candy had the same sorrowful looks on their middle-aged powdered faces.

“You’re such pretty girls.”

We knew it wasn’t a compliment; it was pity. But what could we do? These were facts of life. Such beauty wasted on us, crippled girls!

Yet I felt so grown-up and glamorous when I was all made-up and my hair was fluffy and shiny from Audrey’s hair spray. And when the boys in the hospital whistled to show their appreciation, it made me happy.

I had to make sure the makeup was off my face and my hair combed down by seven in the evening, when my parents came to visit. My father would have had a stroke if he had seen his little girl all made-up.

Sometimes I wished my parents were more like Audrey’s parents. Audrey’s mom bought the makeup and magazines for Audrey and taught her how to make herself look glamorous. My mom was beautiful, but she didn’t know about makeup and hairdos. My parents came to the hospital straight from work, looking tired and unkempt. My father’s clothes were covered with white dust from his construction job. Audrey’s parents were so elegant and perfect. Her father, who was a dentist, always wore a suit and tie. Her mom looked like she’d stepped out of Vogue. Often, while we were making ourselves up or fussing with our hair, we had a 45 on the record player. Audrey no longer needed to do charades to get me to understand the lyrics. Now, just for fun, we both acted out songs, making dramatic gestures and pretending we were hugging and kissing some invisible normal boy.

In the evenings, all the kids came to listen to Audrey’s records. We’d chip in and order pizza or Chinese food. We’d all be chewing, lip-synching, and licking sauce off our fingers or wiping it on one another’s casts. We’d be laughing and choking and chasing one another, and doing the Twist and the Mashed Potato in our wheelchairs. We may not have looked like the teenagers on American Bandstand, but we sure could dance.

I loved those hospital parties. I couldn’t imagine normal kids out in the real world having more fun at their parties than we had at ours. But Audrey said there was no comparison.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun being in the hospital. Having to strip naked to be examined by doctors while they talked about me as if I weren’t there; having every muscle prodded, every joint twisted, every inch of me poked, as if my body belonged to them and I had no say in what they did with it—none of that was fun. Neither was surgery: the disorientation coming out of anesthesia, the nausea and dizziness, and the unbearable pain. But all of it was worth it as long as Audrey and I could be together. Sometimes we managed to have our surgeries the same day, or a day apart.

Once, I woke up, disoriented as usual after surgery, and heard Audrey say, “Look, we’re blood sisters.”

I didn’t know what she meant.

“Don’t you see the bag of blood hanging from the pole?”

My eyes had trouble focusing, but, yes, there was a bagful of red blood hanging from the IV pole that stood between our beds.

“The blood from that bag is going into my veins and into yours,” she explained. “We have the same type, O-positive, so they’re giving us the same blood. That makes us blood sisters.”

I believed her, of course.

I seemed to be having more surgeries than the other kids. The cast came off my leg after a tendon was released, and right away I’d go back into the hospital to have my ankle fused. The doctors never talked to me. Sometimes they talked to my father, who had complete faith in them. He believed each surgery brought me closer to being cured. He kept assuring me: Presto guarisci, presto cammini. Audrey, who had spent much of her childhood in hospitals, said I had to catch up after those years in Sicily, when I lived peacefully at home and never once got cut up.

I got used to the surgeries. As horrendous as the pain was, I knew it would go away, as would the nausea and dizziness. As soon as we started feeling better, Audrey and I resumed our daily routine: made ourselves up, partied, chatted with the girls and flirted with the boys.

The volunteer ladies came regularly, smiling and bearing gifts. One of them always talked religion to us. How unfair that children who never sinned had to suffer, she remarked. “You’re right,” Audrey countered. “We should start sinning, since we’re already suffering.”

The lady could tell I was easier prey than Audrey, and she asked me to pray with her. I got flustered and didn’t know what to do. Audrey came to the rescue. “Come on, you had enough prayers in Sicily,” she said, pulling me away. Then she turned to the lady and said, “No candies, either, thanks; we’re watching our figures.”

Whenever I was in the hospital and Audrey wasn’t, I felt lost. Her mother brought her to visit me and I was happy to see her, but all she talked about were her friends at school—all normal and wonderful. She sounded cheerful, yet she looked uptight. Was she faking? Did those normal kids treat her as well as she said they did? Did she really like them more than the handicapped kids at the hospital? I wasn’t sure whether to be jealous or feel sorry for her.

When the doctors decided they had to fix my scoliosis and I went into the hospital for a spinal fusion, Audrey was all done with surgeries and hospitalizations. She came to visit me right after I was admitted. She was carrying a boxful of 45s on her lap. Her mother was lugging her record player together with its little cart. She had a stereo at home now, Audrey explained, sounding almost embarrassed, and preferred albums, since they took up less room.

She handed me an envelope. I pulled out a get-well card with a picture of a bunch of red tulips. In it Audrey had written, “To my blood sister with love.” I asked her mother to tape the card on the wall over my bed. Then her mother moved my nightstand to plug the record player in the outlet.

“This’ll be a long hospital stay and you’ll need all the help you can get,” Audrey said.

I put on a record, without looking to see which one. “In the still of the night, I held you, held you tight…” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, as if holding an invisible boy, and rocked back and forth to the music. Audrey only smiled, maybe too self-conscious to act out in front of her mother. I was jubilant! Now all the kids would come to my room to listen to music, dance, and have parties.

But there weren’t going to be any parties.

I wasn’t prepared for what was to come. I’d seen the kids in the huge casts that covered their bodies and went over their heads. They wheeled around slowly on stretchers, lying on their stomachs, with sandbags under their plaster-encased torsos. They looked so big and round, we called them the turtles. I knew when the doctors talked of operating on my back that I would be in one of those casts. I heard one of the doctors explain to my father that the cast would go on first, and there would be screws embedded. They would straighten my back by turning the screws every day. When my back was straight enough, they would operate.

I also knew they’d have to cut my long hair. Still, the night before the cast went on, when they shaved it all off, I cried.

“Your hair will grow back thicker and curlier,” my mother said, trying to comfort me, kissing my bald head.

The next morning, they covered my entire body with stockinette, pulling it over my head, so I couldn’t see what was going on, and placed me in some strange traction device, which stretched my back as much as possible. When they pulled my head all the way back, the same way they broke chickens’ necks in Sicily, I started shaking.

“Are you cold?” they asked.

I whispered, “Yes.”

But I wasn’t cold; I was terrified. I kept shaking as they wrapped the hot plaster all around my body—around my thighs, around my head, covering my forehead, then under my chin. No plaster right on my face, only the stockinette. I couldn’t see them working on me. I shook violently, but I was inside the cast now, hidden.

They finally cut the stockinette and uncovered my face.

“There you are!” they exclaimed, as if I could have been gone.

They wheeled me back to the floor on a stretcher, on my stomach, a huge turtle, helplessly shaking inside her thick new shell.

When my parents came that evening, I was still shaking, encased in the now cold, wet cast. My mother tried to kiss me but couldn’t quite get to my face. She hugged my big plaster head and sobbed. My father’s face looked stiff, his eyes not blinking. Maybe he was wondering if he should have given up on the idea of a cure. He kept leaving the room to go smoke a cigarette. Then he tried to make me laugh by telling me the white cast around my face made me look like Sister Teresina. She had been my favorite nun, but I didn’t want to look like her. I started crying. I was not a pretty girl anymore. What was Audrey going to say? Would she still want me as her blood sister?

But Audrey didn’t visit me much. She was busy in high school, trying to get through math and win the attentions of some normal boy.

I cried on the phone to her. “I’m not pretty anymore.”

“You will be again, don’t worry,” she said, comforting me. “You have to get your back straightened. You don’t want to be a hunchback. It’s bad enough you have ugly, useless legs.”

I wasn’t sure a straight back was worth going through such torture.

I made friends with the other turtle kids. Margarita, who spoke little English, talked to me in Spanish and I answered in Italian. We understood each other perfectly. And Ellen, smart and sophisticated, older than the rest of us, read aloud poems by Dylan Thomas. Both Margarita and Ellen only had scoliosis, no other disability. Audrey said they were going to be “practically normal” once their backs were straightened. They might have a protrusion—that was the nice word for hump—but they would be able to hide it with the right clothes.

One girl, Susie, didn’t just have scoliosis; she had contracted polio as a baby, like me. I felt more of a bond with her, especially since she came from an Italian-American family. My father and Susie’s would stand in the hallway, having conversations in Sicilian.

Every day the doctors turned the two big screws embedded in our casts. They kept taking X-rays, and when they were satisfied our backs were as straight as they could get, they operated and fused our spines. Some kids needed surgery only once, others twice. It depended on how many vertebrae needed to be fused. Susie and I, because of our polio, had to have most of our vertebrae fused, requiring three surgeries.

My brain erased the memory of the pain. Of the days following each operation, only segmented memories remained. My mother, who had taken a few days off from her job at the fattoria, stood by the sink opposite my bed and turned the water on full blast, in the hope that the gushing sound would make me pee. It didn’t work. My bladder refused to empty and I had to be catheterized. And I couldn’t forget the vomit, which got on the cast, right under my chin. As long as the stench lingered, the nausea wouldn’t go away. My mother spoon-fed me tiny meatballs in a clear broth, her Sicilian cure-all recipe. But I couldn’t manage to swallow more than two spoonfuls before starting to gag. We tried alcohol, baby powder, perfume, spray deodorant. It took many weeks for that smell to fade away.

The worst thing about being in the cast was losing the independence I’d recently acquired. I loved moving around in a wheelchair and was gratified to be able to tend to my own personal needs. Now, not only couldn’t I sit in a wheelchair, I couldn’t even turn in bed. When I had to go to the bathroom, a bedpan was slipped under me. A nurse had to wipe me because I couldn’t reach down. When I got my period, a nurse put a sanitary napkin on me.

I’d just started to experience the tentative pleasure of exploring my body, looking, touching. Suddenly, my body was hidden inside the cast. I hated to feel a nurse’s hands in my private places. The nurses touched me so boldly, as if their hands had every right to be there. Some of them were so rough, they hurt me.

“Not so hard, please.”

But they laughed when I complained.

“Aren’t you delicate! Aren’t you the little princess!”

I tried to talk with the other girls in the big casts.

“I hate it, too” was all they said.

I couldn’t mention this to my mother. She was already too burdened. I thought Audrey would understand. But when I tried to tell her on one of her rare visits, she started pondering out loud about how it would feel if Harry—that was the name of the boy she had a crush on now—ever touched her there, and whether it would hurt the first time. I wanted her to comfort me, to hug me; I wanted to bury my bald head in her beautiful blond hair. But how could I? I was just a big round turtle made of plaster. I didn’t dare ask if we could still be blood sisters.