at that girl’s legs,” she whispered, pointing at an older girl—at least sixteen—standing near the nurses’ station.
I’d never seen the girl before. She wore a jade-colored A-line dress with a big bow a little above the waist, and pointed pumps of the exact same shade with little heels. Her legs were beautiful. By the way the nurses and some of the older kids were fussing over her, I deduced she had been a patient on the floor and was now visiting. She didn’t look handicapped, though when she walked to the other side of the hall to get hugged by the head nurse, I noticed a limp.
“One of her legs is fake.” Audrey was leaning on my armrest. “Can you guess which one?”
“No way,” I said a little too loudly.
Audrey reprimanded me by slapping my shoulder. “She’s an amputee. She lost her leg in a car accident. Can you tell which leg is fake?”
I couldn’t. Both her legs were equally perfect. None of the kids I’d met in the hospital so far was an amputee. The boy with little wings instead of arms was just born that way.
“Amputees are better off than we are,” Audrey said. “They get beautiful fake legs, and we get scars and more scars and horrid heavy braces. She looks normal, doesn’t she?”
I had to agree. She looked as normal and dressed as fashionably as a model.
Audrey had found in Seventeen a picture of two long-legged models, a blonde and a brunette, standing with their arms around each other. The blonde wore a blue bikini with pink polka dots and the brunette wore a pink one with blue dots. Their smiling young faces vaguely resembled ours. Audrey had cut the page out and asked her mom to paste it on the wall between our beds.
“That’s what we would look like if we weren’t handicapped.”
“But we’re pretty, even though we’re handicapped, Audrey. Everybody says so.” I tried to make us feel better, but it didn’t work.
“In a way, that makes it worse.” She sighed. She looked so sad and serious, as if the weight of the world were on her shoulders.
I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t ask her to explain. I remembered the Sicilian women looking at me with such anguish whenever they said “Che bella bambina! What a pretty little girl! Che peccato! What a shame!”
The volunteer ladies who came to bring us candy had the same sorrowful looks on their middle-aged powdered faces.
“You’re such pretty girls.”
We knew it wasn’t a compliment; it was pity. But what could we do? These were facts of life. Such beauty wasted on us, crippled girls!
Yet I felt so grown-up and glamorous when I was all made-up and my hair was fluffy and shiny from Audrey’s hair spray. And when the boys in the hospital whistled to show their appreciation, it made me happy.
I had to make sure the makeup was off my face and my hair combed down by seven in the evening, when my parents came to visit. My father would have had a stroke if he had seen his little girl all made-up.
Sometimes I wished my parents were more like Audrey’s parents. Audrey’s mom bought the makeup and magazines for Audrey and taught her how to make herself look glamorous. My mom was beautiful, but she didn’t know about makeup and hairdos. My parents came to the hospital straight from work, looking tired and unkempt. My father’s clothes were covered with white dust from his construction job. Audrey’s parents were so elegant and perfect. Her father, who was a dentist, always wore a suit and tie. Her mom looked like she’d stepped out of Vogue. Often, while we were making ourselves up or fussing with our hair, we had a 45 on the record player. Audrey no longer needed to do charades to get me to understand the lyrics. Now, just for fun, we both acted out songs, making dramatic gestures and pretending we were hugging and kissing some invisible normal boy.
In the evenings, all the kids came to listen to Audrey’s records. We’d chip in and order pizza or Chinese food. We’d all be chewing, lip-synching, and licking sauce off our fingers or wiping it on one another’s casts. We’d be laughing and choking and chasing one another, and doing the Twist and the Mashed Potato in our wheelchairs. We may not have looked like the teenagers on American Bandstand, but we sure could dance.
I loved those hospital parties. I couldn’t imagine normal kids out in the real world having more fun at their parties than we had at ours. But Audrey said there was no comparison.
Of course, it wasn’t all fun being in the hospital. Having to strip naked to be examined by doctors while they talked about me as if I weren’t there; having every muscle prodded, every joint twisted, every inch of me poked, as if my body belonged to them and I had no say in what they did with it—none of that was fun. Neither was surgery: the disorientation coming out of anesthesia, the nausea and dizziness, and the unbearable pain. But all of it was worth it as long as Audrey and I could be together. Sometimes we managed to have our surgeries the same day, or a day apart.
Once, I woke up, disoriented as usual after surgery, and heard Audrey say, “Look, we’re blood sisters.”
I didn’t know what she meant.
“Don’t you see the bag of blood hanging from the pole?”
My eyes had trouble focusing, but, yes, there was a bagful of red blood hanging from the IV pole that stood between our beds.
“The blood from that bag is going into my veins and into yours,” she explained. “We have the same type, O-positive, so they’re giving us the same blood. That makes us blood sisters.”
I believed her, of course.
I seemed to be having more surgeries than the other kids. The cast came off my leg after a tendon was released, and right away I’d go back into the hospital to have my ankle fused. The doctors never talked to me. Sometimes they talked to my father, who had complete faith in them. He believed each surgery brought me closer to being cured. He kept assuring me: Presto guarisci, presto cammini. Audrey, who had spent much of her childhood in hospitals, said I had to catch up after those years in Sicily, when I lived peacefully at home and never once got cut up.
I got used to the surgeries. As horrendous as the pain was, I knew it would go away, as would the nausea and dizziness. As soon as we started feeling better, Audrey and I resumed our daily routine: made ourselves up, partied, chatted with the girls and flirted with the boys.
The volunteer ladies came regularly, smiling and bearing gifts. One of them always talked religion to us. How unfair that children who never sinned had to suffer, she remarked. “You’re right,” Audrey countered. “We should start sinning, since we’re already suffering.”
The lady could tell I was easier prey than Audrey, and she asked me to pray with her. I got flustered and didn’t know what to do. Audrey came to the rescue. “Come on, you had enough prayers in Sicily,” she said, pulling me away. Then she turned to the lady and said, “No candies, either, thanks; we’re watching our figures.”
Whenever I was in the hospital and Audrey wasn’t, I felt lost. Her mother brought her to visit me and I was happy to see her, but all she talked about were her friends at school—all normal and wonderful. She sounded cheerful, yet she looked uptight. Was she faking? Did those normal kids treat her as well as she said they did? Did she really like them more than the handicapped kids at the hospital? I wasn’t sure whether to be jealous or feel sorry for her.
