anniversary of the Salk Vaccine, April 12, 2006.
Author’s Note
I wrote this mostly to get back at Ol’ Tennessee Williams for making that girl in The Glass Menagerie so pitiful she couldn’t get a boyfriend. But also to preserve a cultural history that is about to be lost. Since this is the story of one ordinary mind reacting to an unexpected, life-changing event, it can also say a good bit about who we are at the bottom of ourselves. It just happens to be my mind.
As for the wondrous story of the race for the vaccine that ended a national nightmare, one can gain deeper understanding from David Oshinsky’s Polio, An American Story. My distillation of what Mr. Oshinsky has given us is merely an attempt to place my experience on the rim of medical history and, in so doing, give a guided tour into the world of science, the workshop of miracles.
Shelley Fraser Mickle
Winter, 2008
1
THE WIPE OUT
We are three blocks from home. “Hold your legs out. Don’t get near the spokes.” My brother is bossing, pedaling, standing up, his backside going up and down, up and down. I’m perched on the bike’s back fender with my fingers gripping the seat like a cat’s claws. My brother has a rule: if I touch him, I have to pay for it, like having to clean his stinky fish tank. But he does have a point since, when I hold onto him, I unbalance him, which puts both of us in danger of a wipe out. “I mean it now. Don’t touch me. And don’t get near the spokes.”
I both adore and hate my brother; but most of all I want his admiration, so I hold my legs out like boat oars on either side of the back wheel. It is October, 1950. I have been in the first grade six weeks. Today my teacher has let me out early, and my brother has gotten the same permission. After all, it’s not every day your parents become famous.
For a week they have been in New York City—my dad on business; my mother, well, up to getting on the radio, which means she’s trotted herself down to all the game shows to see if she can be selected as a contestant. All her life she has craved to be an actress, even went to acting school in New York before she got married and had my brother and me. Then two days ago, bingo! She was chosen.
Now she was sitting in the audience of a game show called Rate Your Mate, where a husband “rates” what his wife will know. In about ten minutes, she will get up out of the audience and win a bunch of money, since we’re all dead certain she won’t know the answers to even the simplest questions. And when my father predicts that, they’ll win a bundle. It’s about the most exciting thing to ever happen in our little Arkansas town. Practically everybody is stopping work, turning on radios, spinning up the volume.
My brother is now heading onto the packed gravel road two blocks from our red-painted house. There, our three grandparents are waiting for us: two grandmothers and our grandfather, who’s the town’s retired doctor. Three against two—those are the best odds to care for us while our parents are away.
•
The announcer calls my mother’s name. She hurries onto the stage, taking her place behind the microphone. “So, where are you from?” the game-show host asks.
My mother looks out into the audience. “McCrory, Arkansas.” Her accent twangs.
“Where is that?”
“Down the road a piece from Bald Knob.”
“A piece of road?”
My mother bats back, “Oh, you know, it means just a little way.”
The audience roars with laughter. Obviously, she fits their idea of a hillbilly visiting the big city.
“Can you give us any more of an idea where exactly McCrory, Arkansas, is?”
“Oh, sure. It’s between Pumpkin Bend and Cotton Plant.”
The laughter now explodes. My mother doesn’t understand why. She looks down to see if her slip is showing. The laughter grows even louder. She fiddles with her buttons, making sure they are all closed. The laughter becomes deafening.
The game show host waits, delighted. Finally, my mother catches on. Aha! So, the audience thinks she is dumb. Well, she certainly knows how to play that role. She jumps on the moment like a butterfly hitchhiking on a biker. All her life, this is exactly what she has been waiting for.
“And what do you do there?”
“I’m a homemaker. But I used to be a teacher.”
“What did you teach?”
“Speeeeeech.”
•
In the second block toward home, I’ve concentrated so hard on doing what my brother has told me not to do, that I do it. The toe of my saddle oxford sneaks into the back spokes, and bang!—the bike throws us like a rank mule. Sprawled on the packed gravel, we look at each other. The back wheel is bent; the bike will not move. My shin looks like a carrot rubbed down a cheese grater. My brother is mad, but he is scared, too. “I told you not to do that! Now we’re going to miss the show.”
Half rolling, half carrying the bike, he holds my shoes because I cannot bear the tightness of leather on my swelling toe. We walk in the house just as the last few of my mother’s questions air. The game show host is asking my father, “Will she know who Amerigo Vespucci was?”
“No.”
“Can she name a river in the state of New York?”
“No.”
“Will she know who discovered how to pasteurize milk?”
“No.”
My father predicts perfectly my mother’s answers, and they win a lot of loot, at least what is considered a lot of loot in an Arkansas cotton town in the 1950s.
That night, I go to bed, bone-tired. Both my grandmothers rub cooling salve on my road burns. When I complain of mysteriously aching shins, my grandfather rubs on his homemade medicine. Even though he is the town’s retired doctor, he is still famous for the patent medicines he swirls up in tubs in his office. His doing this is not so wildly weird considering America’s love-affair with self-dosage, a culture rooted in a time when patent medicines, those available without a prescription, were widely distributed and as popular as wine.
Immigrants brought their remedies with them. Indians taught white people how to use leaves and roots as medicines. Coca-Cola was made as a headache remedy and a “pick-me-up” by Georgia pharmacist John Pemberton. In fact, in 1890, the greatest percentage of Atlanta’s income came from patented drugs.
For years, farmers had been using my grandfather’s medicines—one for the inside of the body; one, for the outside. Indeed, farmers were always quick to brag of half-dead pigs revived by my grandfather’s medicines and of ailing relatives made well and whole. We call his Inside Medicine “Vit-a-meeens,” and his Outside Medicine, “Stinking Stuff”—because it is. It tends to leave a trail on you that even a drugged, arthritic bloodhound will get up to sniff out. Now with the “Stuff” rubbed all over my calves, I smell like a tractor that’s been stuck in a swamp and is leaking oil.
