LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

this week I’ve crashed to my death. Chin up, don’t look down, ignore the spectators—my fans—pumping gas, wiping windshields, digging for change in their pockets. My foot slips, misses the curb, and I tilt dangerously, flailing my arms. Close! But this time I make it, all the way to the end, hopping down with a twirl of my invisible parasol. The gas station attendant applauds, embarrassing me, but I am pleased, too. See what I have done!

      Once a week our seventh-grade class met with the guidance counselor, who showed us movies about drugs. Drugs would make us hear voices, kill ourselves. Look at Diane Linkletter, daughter of the TV show host. She’d taken some LSD then jumped out a window. We saw a filmed reenactment of this and another educational movie in which a young man takes an assortment of mismatched pills and winds up in a hospital. His voice, in halting monotone, told of his experience: It was three weeks before I could remember my name.

      These movies were overwrought, hard to take seriously, but the etiquette films were worse. One, about how to date, starred a very young Dick York, the first Darren from Bewitched. With his bug eyes and wide white part, that nasal voice, we recognized him right away, the boys in class chanting “Durwood.” Here he played a teenager who trolls around his father’s garage fixing antique radios. Concerned, his father tells him to swap his suit jacket for an argyle sweater, “act natural,” and start meeting girls. Another film, on the do’s and don’ts of dating, depicted the travails of a young man named “Woody.” Woody makes a mess of things, mashing his poor date at her doorstep as she cries “No, please!” This, we were informed in voice-over, was Wrong! Let’s try again. This time Woody mumbles “Well, so long,” abandoning his befuddled date at the door. Finally, Woody gets it right. He tells his date he had a great time, promises to call her next week, says good night—without the two of them touching.

      It was ridiculous. A kid named Woody. The guy from Bewitched. We’d seen Dick York turned into a monkey, a werewolf, seen his ears grow to the size of feet. What was our guidance counselor thinking? In retrospect, though, the movies had a message, one that we couldn’t help but absorb: boys act, girls wait to be acted upon.

      I began eighth grade the tallest girl—nearly the tallest student—in my class. A couple of important things had happened over the summer. First of all my mother had remarried. Her new husband was a short-tempered short man, a Nixon Republican, fervent drinker, and junior partner in his brother’s law practice. He could tolerate Chipper, but as for the bookish, sullen adolescent who’d suddenly taken up residence in his home, he made it quite clear that he’d just as soon I find somewhere else to live. Except when absolutely necessary, Tom and I did not speak to each other for the twelve years he and my mother were together.

      Another big change had occurred that summer: my growth spurt. I’d gained nearly two inches since seventh grade, much of it over the summer. As I grew, my spine became more twisted. I could feel the curve, the wayward vertebrae just beneath my skin. My hipbone stuck out so much that when I wore low cut jeans, I looked all out of proportion. My right sleeve hung lower than my left; I was always pushing it back. And in school, my right shoulder blade knocked against my chair, bone chafing metal. No matter how I shifted in my seat, I could not get comfortable.

      I was still going to physical therapy, but I was slipping by degrees. Every three months I returned to the orthopedic clinic. The routine was always the same. Wait in the corridor outside the examination room. Change into the thin blue gown, then wait in a cubicle to be x-rayed. The x-ray room buzzed with machinery like a low, persistent headache. I would lie on the table and hold my breath as the machine passed over me. Right side, left side, hips hard against the table. Then the table would be tilted upright and I’d do another set, standing.

      The doctor began to scowl almost as soon as he switched on the light table. He drew white lines on the films, measured angles of curves, compared current and previous x-rays, and the comparison was never good. For over a year I had been exercising daily and going to therapy twice a week, but by the time I entered eighth grade, it was clear that this was not enough. My spine now looked to be on a collision course with my left hipbone. The doctor explained that I would need to wear something called a Milwaukee brace, a chin-to-hip plastic and metal apparatus like the ones I had seen girls wearing in the clinic waiting room. The brace, he said, would prevent my scoliosis from getting any worse, but would not reduce the severity of the double curve. I would live in this carapace for twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week, until I stopped growing, which he estimated would be in three years. The doctor explained all of this in his customary technical language. Beyond the raw details (brace, twenty-three hours a day, three years) I don’t think I took much in. Questions? he asked, but I had none. His sentence was final; it brooked no appeal. He switched off the light table, and my illuminated spine disappeared.

       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

Скачать книгу