a different lifestyle. But as she walks away, she leaves a blueprint that, in time, Dr. Salk will pick up, and, in it, find possibilities. She has been successfully killing the virus by using formaldehyde, then inoculating monkeys with it and finding none are getting sick.
Salk, Sabin, Horstmann, and I—and, yes, even the one hundred thousand monkeys that will become the unsung heroes in the fifty-year search for a cure—are all leading parallel lives. Yet, we are living the same story.
•
I wake up and am moved downstairs into a ward. As the nurse wheels me on a stretcher past the monster iron lung machine, I see it so closely that I have to shut my eyes. But I have escaped it. It has not had to be turned on, even though in each foot the virus-vine has stolen muscles. I am as stiff as a child made out of fence wire. Nothing on me will bend, but I can breathe and swallow. The virus-vine has now backed off and run on to find someone else to be its host.
The room seems so large. Beds with rails are against walls, and mine is pushed beside a big window that looks out onto the hospital lawn. There is nothing to see there except grass and trees and a bench where visitors, when they come, can sit. My mother and grandmother are not allowed inside this part of the Isolation Hospital where I am now. They have gone home; but before they left, my mother told me she would be back tomorrow. She has found a room in a boarding house where she can stay.
The nurses change from day to night and then to day again. There are morning sounds in the hall, the tinkling of carts, the sound of footsteps. I sit up, my legs twisted under me in an odd way, because if I fold them this way, I can sit up. Then the room floods with men in white coats. Doctors, making rounds, circle my bed. They marvel at the way I have discovered to bend myself so I can sit up. “Look at this! Oh, my!” Sounds of celebration float across the ward; but then, one of them says, “Don’t do this anymore. It might make you worse.”
I lie down, and a board is put at the foot of my bed. “Push against this,” one says. “Keep your feet flat against this,” they all say. Keep your feet against the board. Hold them there. Sleep, eat, stay with your feet against the board. It will help them to stay straight.
Never in all of my life have I slept on my back. I want to be good, but I see no real use in this. The white coats walk out; the ward is now a sound of rattling breakfast trays. What can I do lying flat with my feet up against a board, especially when they are like cold taffy, twisted in odd shapes that cannot be straightened?
Now an urgent need pounds in my head. Back when I was four and had my tonsils out, my mother gave me half a cup of coffee mixed with milk to soothe my throat. And I drank so much that now I can’t seem to do without it. I’m the only kid in first grade who has to have a cup before doing math, opening a reader, or even answering the roll. If I can have a cup of coffee, I might make it through this. But then, the breakfast cart rattles next to my bed, and “Coffee please,” I say, which only makes the nurse laugh. “Coffee isn’t for children.”
Now I have a full-blown headache from caffeine withdrawal. I’m as unbendable as a coat rack. Sneaking a sit-up, I find only a ward full of children whom I cannot see. They are bodies in beds pushed against the walls. I have the torture-board at my feet and am chided for sleeping on my stomach.
When lunch comes, I know I am in real trouble. I ask for ketchup, and the nurse plops one little circle about the size of a quarter on my plate. At home, I poured ketchup on everything, at every meal. My grandfather laughed at my popping the bottom of the ketchup bottle to deliver a glob onto mashed potatoes, green beans, yellow squash, even Jell-O. “That’s enough. Stop now.” But I kept going, dousing peas, lettuce, carrots, bread. I could rattle my family, and yet, they could not think of a good reason for not letting me do it. My ketchup bottle became a symbol: me versus the ways of the world. Now, here, I desperately need my own bottle, gun-slinger close.
As the nurse walks by, she is writing on a clipboard, and I call out, “Can I have paper? And a pencil? Please?”
I have to get a message out to my mother.
3
THE UPSIDE - DOWN LETTER
Along with baseball scores and cotton prices, the polio list appears in the newspaper every week. All those who have recently fallen to the illness are named: A boy 7, a boy 16, a boy 3, and me.
Where I am, there is no sense of time; days and nights are barely separated. My mother comes every morning to stand at the window. She waves; I wave. She dresses like a movie star in fashionable tweed suits, flat-brimmed hats, gloves, and heels. We wave again, and then she makes the shape of a banana, a glass of milk, eggs and toast, and I nod yes or no, acting out what I have had for breakfast. We are comics in full flower, mimes in everyday dress. By way of a nurse I send my message out to her: I need catchup, a big botle. Reading it, she nods, then sends back in a toy train and a hunk of mail. I hook the train up and choo-choo it around my bed. But on rounds, doctors say, “Don’t do that. Stay on your back. Move as little as possible. Keep your feet against the board.”
In the afternoon, I open the mail. Every kid in my class has sent me a homemade get-well card. They all say how sorry they are I am going to miss the Halloween shebang, and remembering this now becomes a big deal, since I’d forgotten that. I’d been nominated weeks before to be in the school-wide King and Queen Contest. I was running with Richard Key who resembles Hopalong Cassidy and can make a yo-yo do “Around the World” and “Walk the Dog.” We were going to set up collection jars all around town to collect votes. One penny was one vote. Whichever couple collected the most votes would be crowned in the school auditorium with the girl wearing an evening dress and the boy a suit and tie. There is no way I cannot admit I was hot to be the Queen.
But now my schoolmates’ letters tell me that Gloria H. has been elected to take my place. She and Richard Key will do the Halloween thing together. Maib you will nx tim, Ruth Anne B. sweetly writes on her card. There, too, unexpectedly among the mail is a letter from Verna Mae.
Verna Mae comes three times a week to our house on foot and by way of the back door. Custom in southern culture requires that she not come in the front. She stays all day, washing and ironing, snapping beans and shelling peas. Her skin is as dark as roast coffee; mine is Dairy Queen light, which has taught me my first anthropology lesson—that people can come in different colors. This fascinates me as much as my grandmother’s teeth, which click when she eats. And though I do not know it at the time— because everyone who is not a child seems old to me—Verna Mae is only twenty-seven. She looks strong, has a full, round face with bright, teasing eyes, and a voice that is like liquid warmed on the stove.
But what really strikes me about Verna Mae is the way she can tell a story. She is so good at the sound effects that you can feel your skin prickling and your eyes water. She and I have each been making up disgusting stories about ghosts slinking around in chains, dripping pus and spilling blood, and mumbling things in throaty whispers—each of us trying to scare the holy baloney out of the other. We swap our efforts, me sitting on a stool in the kitchen and Verna Mae frying up our supper.
Hold this up to a mirror is written across the top of the letter Verna Mae has sent to me.
The nurse brings me a small mirror. I put it in my hand while lying on my back, then spread out the letter on my chest. In the hand mirror, each of Verna Mae’s backward letters rights itself so I can read the words. They are simple first-grade words she must have guessed I could read.
The letter tells me what is happening at home. Not much, it turns out: a cake baked for my grandparents, a load of wash, the front yard being raked, I am missed. Then she adds a riddle, How can you tell if an elephant is in bed with you?
I
