All the Difference - Patricia Horvath

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were many patients, one doctor; the wait, I discovered, could take all afternoon. When the nurse finally called my name, I trailed her and my mother into the examination room. My mother helped me tie the blue cotton gown in back. She looked me in the eye when the doctor would not and politely rephrased his third-person questions (“How does she sit?” “Honey, how do you sit?”) until he took the hint and asked me directly.

      I lay on the examining table and the doctor measured my legs. I bent over while he took a protractor to my spine. I stood on one foot then the other. It was a game of Simon Says. The doctor muttered as he wrote things down. I was the body in the room, there yet invisible.

      That day I was x-rayed for the first time and saw what a misshapen thing my spine was. It started out straight enough but about a third of the way down, my spine began a dramatic curve to the left, making an “S” shape as my lower vertebrae snaked back in the other direction before managing, somehow, to merge into my tilted pelvis. It was a wonder, I thought, that I could stand at all.

      Dr. Mangieri explained that I had idiopathic scoliosis. I hated that word, idiopathic, the way it sounded like idiot, suggesting some causal link, some malfunction not only of body but of brain. Was this why I’d been lumped in with the slow girls in guidance? What did brains have to do anyway with a crooked spine? Later my mother explained to me that idiopathic meant the cause of my curvature was unknown. For scoliosis, this was common. Left untreated, the doctor continued, my condition could lead to progressive deformity, chronic pain, possible damage to pulmonary and cardiac function. My translation went something like: This is serious, pay attention, do what he says. And what he said was to exercise. Because I was still growing, he felt that a physical therapy regimen would strengthen my back muscles, helping them prod my spine in the right direction. If that didn’t work, I would have to wear a brace. And if that didn’t work . . . But on that first visit I don’t think he brought up surgery. What I remember is that the threat of the brace turned me into a physical therapy zealot, willing my muscles to straighten my recalcitrant spine. I would not become like those girls in the waiting room, a spectacle encased in plastic and steel.

      To correct the half-inch imbalance in my leg length, I would have to wear a shoe with a built-in lift. The lift was expensive and the shoe had to be sturdy. In the dawning era of platform heels, I started junior high with two pair of orthopedic shoes—sensible brown oxfords and saddle shoes. They were heavy things, nothing like Hermes’s winged sandals. They made me feel earthbound, and I loathed them.

       Good Girls

      Twice a week I went to physical therapy. Because my mother worked, she arranged for her mother to pick me up from school and drive me to the rehab center.

      My grandmother built her week around these excursions. A few years earlier she’d left her beauty parlor job and had begun a quick slide into a whiskey-fueled retirement. When my parents divorced she let us have the house and moved to a one-bedroom apartment, which she and my grandfather uneasily shared. She slept until mid-afternoon, gulped down handfuls of brightly colored pills with an orange juice chaser, then fixed herself the first in a long string of Manhattans. Most days she didn’t bother to get dressed. Sometimes though, when we stopped by for a visit, she’d be wearing the longline bra girdle-garter belt ensemble that meant she was going out. This she kept partly concealed beneath an open robe, a modest touch. The garment, with its hooks and straps and elastics, fascinated me. My grandmother wore it whenever she had errands, most often a trip to the pharmacy for cigarettes. Was this, I wondered, what old women had to do to leave the house? My mother wore normal underwear—bra, panties, an occasional slip. My father’s mother, who wore stockings and white cotton gloves even in summer, wouldn’t dream of showing her underwear. Did she, too, wear one of these things? Would I have to?

      My grandmother sat on the couch, feet up, tissues, cigarettes, and drink in reach. She smoked Newports by the case, two packs a day, coughing her way through conversations, railing against the doctor who’d told her to quit, triumphant when he dropped dead of a heart attack. Doctors—what do they know? And she’d gesture toward my grandfather, silent and unmoving in his La-Z-Boy. Had doctors been able to cure his Parkinson’s disease? She’d fix herself another drink.

      Squat and pugnacious, my grandmother cherished a fight. She needed an antagonist, someone around whom she could build a dramatic narrative. Her sons-in-law—the deadbeat, the bully. The neighbors with their yapping dog. The paperboy who always came late. And the Tomlinson Junior High School crossing guard who had the nerve to expect her to park in the visitors’ lot when her granddaughter had a medical condition and needed to get to therapy and how the hell difficult was that to understand?

      From high up on the school steps I’d see her, vivid in a paisley dress, her gold Camaro first in a line of idling buses. Bet the other kids think your grandmother’s pretty cool, huh, driving a Camaro. Bet they wish they could come too.

      The longer I waited on the steps, the greater the commotion. My grandmother always parked up front, ahead of the buses, which, she pointed out, had plenty of room to maneuver around her. This was true. But she was up against a Rules Are Rules crossing guard who, like her, was convinced of the moral rightness of his stance.

      The crossing guard wrote a citation. My grandmother tore it up. Buses honked. My classmates watched. I was certain that my great love Señor Raul, the handsome young Spanish teacher with the red Corvette and the 007 license plates, was watching, too. Señor Raul who—from what misguided impulse I cannot say—slipped me love notes in the halls: Patricia, mi amor, mi corazon. No, I wanted to holler, this woman with the lacquered hair and gold car, the one waving her arms and shouting, no she did not belong to me. But she did and, chastened, I scurried over to the car, sinking low in the passenger seat.

      It’s okay, I’d say. You can park around back. I’ll find you.

      And get caught in that traffic? We have to get you to therapy. You have a medical condition—I told him so! Trying to make me go around back. We pay taxes! Who the hell does he think he is?

      On and on it went. I put a textbook up close to my face until we were out of school range.

      In rehab the other patients soaked in whirlpools or practiced using walkers. They bragged about grandchildren and complained to their therapists about their aches and pains. My therapist was a brisk woman with a German accent and a husband who’d run into trouble with the local Board of Education for barring girls from his high school shop class after the law changed to let them in. The therapist claimed these girls were troublemakers who did not know their place. I, on the other hand, was a good girl, meaning I did not care about shop. By confiding in me, the therapist implied that she and I were conspirators, united in our disapproval of these willful, boyish girls. Never did it occur to her that I might recoil from the idea of being limited and defined by one’s body. Years later, when her husband was at last fired for discrimination, I was glad.

      The therapist and I worked on “balance and resistance.” I walked a wooden beam, inches from the floor. I lay on my stomach, trying to keep my arm raised while the therapist pushed against it. Gut girl! she’d cry, encouraging me. But I did not want to be a good girl. I did not want to take shop, I did not want to lie on my stomach behind some therapist’s partition of curtains, I did not want to wear orthopedic shoes. I wanted to be David Bowie, whom I’d recently discovered on FM radio, or Twiggy, whose glammed-out face appeared on the cover of Bowie’s album Pin Ups. I wanted a different body, no body, an elongated body like the one I had, all jutting bones, elbows, clavicle, only different. A body that would land me on the cover of an album rather than a therapist’s table.

      The therapist gave me exercises to do. Every night, for twice as long as she specified, I practiced with the headphones on, listening to Mick, to Bowie. Or I practiced to Cher’s variety show—another one-name wraith with attitude. As I did my arm lifts and push-ups, I imagined myself onstage, a back-up dancer shimmying in glitter.

       I am a tightrope walker, see me so lithe. Arms outstretched, schoolbooks piled by the high curb in front of the Mobil

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