hospital for a spinal fusion, Audrey was all done with surgeries and hospitalizations. She came to visit me right after I was admitted. She was carrying a boxful of 45s on her lap. Her mother was lugging her record player together with its little cart. She had a stereo at home now, Audrey explained, sounding almost embarrassed, and preferred albums, since they took up less room.
She handed me an envelope. I pulled out a get-well card with a picture of a bunch of red tulips. In it Audrey had written, “To my blood sister with love.” I asked her mother to tape the card on the wall over my bed. Then her mother moved my nightstand to plug the record player in the outlet.
“This’ll be a long hospital stay and you’ll need all the help you can get,” Audrey said.
I put on a record, without looking to see which one. “In the still of the night, I held you, held you tight…” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, as if holding an invisible boy, and rocked back and forth to the music. Audrey only smiled, maybe too self-conscious to act out in front of her mother. I was jubilant! Now all the kids would come to my room to listen to music, dance, and have parties.
But there weren’t going to be any parties.
I wasn’t prepared for what was to come. I’d seen the kids in the huge casts that covered their bodies and went over their heads. They wheeled around slowly on stretchers, lying on their stomachs, with sandbags under their plaster-encased torsos. They looked so big and round, we called them the turtles. I knew when the doctors talked of operating on my back that I would be in one of those casts. I heard one of the doctors explain to my father that the cast would go on first, and there would be screws embedded. They would straighten my back by turning the screws every day. When my back was straight enough, they would operate.
I also knew they’d have to cut my long hair. Still, the night before the cast went on, when they shaved it all off, I cried.
“Your hair will grow back thicker and curlier,” my mother said, trying to comfort me, kissing my bald head.
The next morning, they covered my entire body with stockinette, pulling it over my head, so I couldn’t see what was going on, and placed me in some strange traction device, which stretched my back as much as possible. When they pulled my head all the way back, the same way they broke chickens’ necks in Sicily, I started shaking.
“Are you cold?” they asked.
I whispered, “Yes.”
But I wasn’t cold; I was terrified. I kept shaking as they wrapped the hot plaster all around my body—around my thighs, around my head, covering my forehead, then under my chin. No plaster right on my face, only the stockinette. I couldn’t see them working on me. I shook violently, but I was inside the cast now, hidden.
They finally cut the stockinette and uncovered my face.
“There you are!” they exclaimed, as if I could have been gone.
They wheeled me back to the floor on a stretcher, on my stomach, a huge turtle, helplessly shaking inside her thick new shell.
When my parents came that evening, I was still shaking, encased in the now cold, wet cast. My mother tried to kiss me but couldn’t quite get to my face. She hugged my big plaster head and sobbed. My father’s face looked stiff, his eyes not blinking. Maybe he was wondering if he should have given up on the idea of a cure. He kept leaving the room to go smoke a cigarette. Then he tried to make me laugh by telling me the white cast around my face made me look like Sister Teresina. She had been my favorite nun, but I didn’t want to look like her. I started crying. I was not a pretty girl anymore. What was Audrey going to say? Would she still want me as her blood sister?
But Audrey didn’t visit me much. She was busy in high school, trying to get through math and win the attentions of some normal boy.
I cried on the phone to her. “I’m not pretty anymore.”
“You will be again, don’t worry,” she said, comforting me. “You have to get your back straightened. You don’t want to be a hunchback. It’s bad enough you have ugly, useless legs.”
I wasn’t sure a straight back was worth going through such torture.
I made friends with the other turtle kids. Margarita, who spoke little English, talked to me in Spanish and I answered in Italian. We understood each other perfectly. And Ellen, smart and sophisticated, older than the rest of us, read aloud poems by Dylan Thomas. Both Margarita and Ellen only had scoliosis, no other disability. Audrey said they were going to be “practically normal” once their backs were straightened. They might have a protrusion—that was the nice word for hump—but they would be able to hide it with the right clothes.
One girl, Susie, didn’t just have scoliosis; she had contracted polio as a baby, like me. I felt more of a bond with her, especially since she came from an Italian-American family. My father and Susie’s would stand in the hallway, having conversations in Sicilian.
Every day the doctors turned the two big screws embedded in our casts. They kept taking X-rays, and when they were satisfied our backs were as straight as they could get, they operated and fused our spines. Some kids needed surgery only once, others twice. It depended on how many vertebrae needed to be fused. Susie and I, because of our polio, had to have most of our vertebrae fused, requiring three surgeries.
My brain erased the memory of the pain. Of the days following each operation, only segmented memories remained. My mother, who had taken a few days off from her job at the fattoria, stood by the sink opposite my bed and turned the water on full blast, in the hope that the gushing sound would make me pee. It didn’t work. My bladder refused to empty and I had to be catheterized. And I couldn’t forget the vomit, which got on the cast, right under my chin. As long as the stench lingered, the nausea wouldn’t go away. My mother spoon-fed me tiny meatballs in a clear broth, her Sicilian cure-all recipe. But I couldn’t manage to swallow more than two spoonfuls before starting to gag. We tried alcohol, baby powder, perfume, spray deodorant. It took many weeks for that smell to fade away.
The worst thing about being in the cast was losing the independence I’d recently acquired. I loved moving around in a wheelchair and was gratified to be able to tend to my own personal needs. Now, not only couldn’t I sit in a wheelchair, I couldn’t even turn in bed. When I had to go to the bathroom, a bedpan was slipped under me. A nurse had to wipe me because I couldn’t reach down. When I got my period, a nurse put a sanitary napkin on me.
I’d just started to experience the tentative pleasure of exploring my body, looking, touching. Suddenly, my body was hidden inside the cast. I hated to feel a nurse’s hands in my private places. The nurses touched me so boldly, as if their hands had every right to be there. Some of them were so rough, they hurt me.
“Not so hard, please.”
But they laughed when I complained.
“Aren’t you delicate! Aren’t you the little princess!”
I tried to talk with the other girls in the big casts.
“I hate it, too” was all they said.
I couldn’t mention this to my mother. She was already too burdened. I thought Audrey would understand. But when I tried to tell her on one of her rare visits, she started pondering out loud about how it would feel if Harry—that was the name of the boy she had a crush on now—ever touched her there, and whether it would hurt the first time. I wanted her to comfort me, to hug me; I wanted to bury my bald head in
