Читать книгу All the Difference - Patricia Horvath - Страница 18

Caged

We drove to a place near the overhead tracks for Amtrak and Conrail. If you were to take the train through Bridgeport now, thirty years later, it would look much the same: piles of tires, car parts in abandoned lots, scabby triple-deckers—an abandoned, broken place.

My mother parked the car, locked it, and led the way to a storefront with prosthetic limbs in the window. There were walkers, bedpans, corsets, canes, all dusty. I did not want to go in. I may have said no, may have said let’s turn around, I may (more likely) have acquiesced. The brace—like the exercises, the orthopedic shoes, like fitness tests, mandatory friendships, and my mother’s remarriage—were all things to be endured.

We were greeted by a large, stubble-faced man who was smoking a cigar. He was the maker of these corsets and limbs, a man who would spread his tobacco-stained fingers on my torso, breathe his sour breath into my face. Dwarves came into the shop, cripples, amputees. He put his hands on them, too, gave them new limbs.

The man told me his name, Buxbaum, said he was going to put me in traction to make a plaster mold of my torso. My mind flashed to a black and white commercial from my childhood. Seat belts! an elegant woman complained. They’re so inconvenient, and besides, they wrinkle my dress. Ominous drum roll, quick cut to an accident victim (the same woman!) in a head-to-toe cast, her limbs suspended by pulleys from the poles of her hospital bed. Traction.

I must have blanched. In any case, the brace maker tried to reassure me, saying it wasn’t so bad. By now I knew enough to know that “not so bad” meant at least somewhat bad and probably worse than that. We went into a back room that was like an auto mechanic’s garage, only with braces and limbs instead of cars. Scattered about were all sorts of tools: saws, chisels, wire clippers, things I did not recognize. The room was drafty and cold. I undressed behind a flimsy wooden partition with a metal stool for my clothes, keeping on my underpants and socks. The floor was dirty. The brace maker wrapped my torso in gauze then strapped my head into a sling. He hoisted me up with a pulley until I was hanging by my chin, my toes barely touching the grimy floor. My hands gripped two monkey-bar-like handles for support, but my weight was all in my chin.

Buxbaum whistled as he stirred a large plastic bucket of plaster. His breath was rancid and there were moth holes in his cardigan. Each layer of plaster had to dry before the next one could be applied. With each new layer, the corset heated up and pressed harder against me, making it difficult to breathe. I hung by my chin, trembling. My jaw ached. I tried shifting the weight from my chin to my hands, but I was strapped in too tight. I couldn’t speak, so I moaned. How much time passed I could not say. When Buxbaum finally freed me, cutting the corset loose with a giant set of shears, I just about collapsed. My jaw was so stiff I could not move it. Bits of plaster clung to my skin. I got dressed, feeling soiled.

In school I didn’t tell anyone I would soon be wearing a brace. Being solitary, I didn’t have confidantes, and I doubt, in any event, that I possessed the ready language for such a conversation. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me or teasing me or making a fuss. I was glad to be excused from gym; other than that, I suppose I was hoping to go unnoticed.

I spent the days before my brace was ready in a kind of countdown state. Three more nights of sleeping “normally,” I’d tell myself. Two more days before everyone knows. One more day of freedom, one more day to be just another girl.

The hard plastic corset buckled in back with a thick leather strap. Attached to this new torso were metal suspenders. I stepped into the brace, put my arms through the suspenders, and grabbed the dresser for support. My mother tugged and tugged. The strap was heavy; it had no give. This was her first attempt at shackling me, and she was having trouble. The corset bumped against my hips. I sucked in my stomach. My mother pulled harder on the strap. I was a debutante being corseted for the antebellum ball. She gave one final emphatic tug and the brace shifted into place on my hips. I could feel the strap buckling, a screw being tightened at the back of my head. I looked at my reflection, looked away. This was me now—these metal bars, these bolts and screws. I pulled up my jeans, but they wouldn’t fit over my hips. My shirt was too tight to button.

The brace’s weight was incredible, a second body to lug. I was tall and slim, but caged I was a heavy, clunky thing. The corset made me stick out in back. I needed pants large enough to fit over my plastic torso, shirts that could accommodate my metal shoulder blades. But my limbs had not grown longer. My new, double-digit sized clothes were too long in the leg and arm. My mother spent evenings hemming, but do hemmed jeans ever look right?

Shirts were especially difficult. The brace had numerous gadgets and straps. One white strap cut across my abdomen, another attached to the bars just above my clavicle and would peek out from low-necked shirts. Even in summer I wore turtlenecks and scarves. The material had to be thick or it would shred against the brace. Eventually my shirts sported balding patches at the right shoulder blade; these would give way to tiny holes. I loved glitter, gauze, Indian prints. I wore flannel, smocks, cotton pullovers. I rolled the sleeves back so they would stay. My earrings clicked against the brace’s metal neck ring, so I gave those up too, trading them in for gold “starter” posts.

Sleeping was the most difficult thing of all. The neck ring and molded plastic rest at the back of my head prevented me from lowering myself directly onto my pillow; instead I made a mound of pillows, high and soft enough to sink into. If I rolled over during the night, the weight of my brace often woke me. I slept intermittently, beginning a lifelong struggle with insomnia. I turned on the bedside lamp and read deep into the night. Blue crescents formed beneath my eyes. I became sluggish—what did it matter, I could barely move. A soap-bar shaped piece of plastic pressed continually into the small of my back. Since I couldn’t bend, I needed to sit in straight-backed chairs. I could not look down, nor see in any direction except straight ahead unless I turned my entire body. The metal desk-chairs at school provided little support—an oval back rest maybe eight inches high, an armrest for right-handed students only. To read or write I needed to lean far forward in my chair. My right shoulder blade chafed against its suspender, becoming red and sore. The corset left welts on my hips. Like a car, I would periodically check into Buxbaum’s garage for “adjustments” but I never felt adjusted, not for a single day.

The idea of a brace “fitting” is in a sense anomalous, as the purpose of a brace is to mold the body to its own contours. My right hip protruded too far, my chin not far enough. Alternately I would thrust my chin forward onto the chin rest or tuck it against my neck to avoid the offending piece of plastic altogether. Doing so, I pictured myself a turtle, retreating into its monstrous shell. But I also felt safer, less exposed. Because I was constantly on display. Children pointed. Old women, my grandmother’s friends, clucked sympathetic sounds. Strangers felt free to question me: What’s that thing for? How long do you have to wear it? Do you sleep in it?

At meals I could not bend to my plate, but had to raise my utensils level to my mouth. I made messes. My mother’s husband complained. Eating became unpleasant; besides, the corset sat heavily on my stomach. I ate small portions, skipped breakfast and lunch. Were it possible, I suppose I would have shrunk myself small enough to disappear entirely, slithering like Houdini from my shackles.

But in another sense, I was already invisible. For what people saw was the brace, not the object locked up inside. There are metaphors for this. Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty—the princess imprisoned in the fortress. Snatched from the world by some calamity, she whiles away her youth, unperceived and unperceiving.

I thought about this and rejected the metaphor. I did not see myself a damsel in distress. But the male gaze—is there any force more potent to the adolescent girl? The messages we received through television, advertisements, fairy tales, movies, music—especially music—encouraged us to define ourselves in its beam. Mick sang “Under my thumb,” Robert Plant sang “Shake for me, girl,” Steven Tyler sang “Beg for my big ten inch.” The boys in school were gawky and gross. They punched each other and belched; they made rude noises. Still, we were told, they and their older brothers mattered. A girl unremarked on by boys suffered more than a lack of stature. In a sense she ceased to exist.

Though I was cloistered, I was not the damsel in distress, the sweet, coveted thing. For one thing, I was too angry—full of silent “fuck yous” from morning till night. And then, well, there was the physical fact of me. Sleeping Beauty did not have a crooked spine. Rapunzel did not wear a brace. Either one could likely have elicited an appreciative belch from a fourteen-year-old boy. I was, however, locked away like them, subject to some awful power beyond my comprehension. Extending the metaphor, did that make my mother the witch? I suppose I must have thought so. After all, it was she who locked me in at night after my shower, that one-hour slice of freedom I enjoyed. She whose job it was to keep me caged: No, you may not go to the beach, take it off for So-and-so’s party, yes, I know it’s difficult to sleep, but.

How she must have hated that role. Trapped between the warring needs of her husband and daughter, stubborn creatures both, unwilling to bend, she now had the added burden of enforcing my confinement. I wheedled and begged: One half hour more, let me sleep without it, just tonight, look at this rash, my skin can’t breathe, c’mon! I raged: Why do I have to wear this stupid thing, so what if my spine’s a little crooked, who cares? I was sullen, resentful; I was thirteen and did not know how to make things easy even in easier times.

Recently, in a manila envelope stuffed with old family photographs, I came across a yellowed sheet of paper, typed on both sides and folded into quarters. I thought it must be some ancient draft of a story I’d abandoned and, curious, I began to read:

I feel the urge to write about the fears, anger, comic moments, and joy we experienced and hope this story may strike some familiar chords or help those about to face a similar situation.

An intelligent girl, shy in school, demanding at home, Pat at thirteen had too many adjustments to make at once. Adjusting to my remarriage, adjusting to junior high school, and adjusting to wearing a metal brace from hip to neck. Just when boys and awareness of her body loomed large on her horizon, POW, the doctor stuck her in a shiny metal contraption. The worst affliction that can occur to an adolescent: to be made to appear “different.” It didn’t help that I made allowances too often for these problems.

This was the opening to an English paper my mother had written some thirty years earlier for a university night course.

My mother hates to write. She’ll barely email. On the rare occasions she has to compose something more complicated than a thank you note, (the last occasion being a letter to the editor of her local paper) she’ll call me to ask if I’ll look over her notes, fix things up, make them sound “elegant.” Invariably she’ll hand me something that sounds like her own voice: thoughtful, articulate, immediate. The kind of voice many writers—myself included—struggle to attain. You’re a natural, I tell her but No, she says, it’s just too plain.

Knowing this, I can sense how difficult this paper must have been for her to write. Words are crossed out, typed over. Shorthand symbols and abbreviations are penciled in the margins. The page resembles a neater version of my own heavily edited drafts. Toward the end, the draft devolves into a series of fragmentary notes: Mention friends. J. Given the topic, my mother’s attempts to frame her thoughts on paper would have been particularly fraught.

As I read, I felt increasingly uncomfortable, as though I were invading my mother’s privacy. And it was unnerving to see myself presented so bluntly in someone else’s narrative. (Of course I plead guilty to mining the lives of family and friends; as a writer that’s my “job.”) Yet this is my mother’s story, too. I found the writing compelling for the insight it shed onto her perspective. What were these “joys” she mentions? I survived to write this piece, using past tense verbs. (We lived through it, she writes, that is enough.) By including me in the plural pronoun, she implicates me in her point of view. But the joy I recall occurred much later, when I was once again able to feel the sun on my body, sleep through the night, sit without pain. It was the joy of release. What, I wondered, were the “allowances” for my “problems” that my mother felt she made? How did she see this time? How did she manage?

I filed the paper in a folder with my medical records and the notes I’d begun to accumulate about causes and effects of scoliosis. Among other things, I’d discovered a link between spinal curvature and bone disease.

Bones, of course, are strengthened by exercise, calcium, Vitamin D. Once braced, I was excused from gym. I became lax about physical therapy. The whole point, as I saw it, was to prevent me from being braced, so why bother? I ate little, stayed indoors. The brace’s metal parts heated quickly in the sun. I sat out summers in my air-conditioned bedroom. I read and studied more than ever, made the Dean’s List, getting A’s even in subjects I did not like. If I could not be a body, I would be a brain, nothing less, nothing more.

I’d begun my research in a state of uncertainty. I knew by my doctor’s initial reluctance to authorize a bone density test that I was “different,” that I fit into some minute category that encompassed my brittle bones, my crooked spine, my wayward walk; that these impairments heightened my natural tendency toward introspection and solitude, a rejection of things physical which, in some circular fashion, had put me at risk for bone loss. I was angry at my bones. Why not lose them; they’d given me so much trouble? Why not become a brain in a jar or, better yet, a sprite—Ariel, Tinkerbell, Quisp the Cartoon Martian, androgyne, nearly bodiless, completely free? I had so many questions—about the nature of disability, about the body/mind dichotomy, about how disability shapes identity and what happens to that identity when physical difference disappears. Writing let me grapple for answers. I wanted to understand why I broke down crying when my doctor told me I had bone disease. Her diagnosis had made me feel vulnerable and afraid. Why was this so threatening? How had my experiences with scoliosis shaped my reaction—shaped, in a larger sense, the person I had become? These were the things I wanted to discover.

I decided to mention the English paper to my mother and tell her what I was working on. This, I knew, would not be entirely easy. I’d made a decision to dwell on a difficult period of my life, difficult not just for me, and now I wanted to drag my mother back there, to glean whatever insights she might have, use her memory to prompt my own. It was, I realized, a selfish decision and yet it felt essential.