put them on me, lacing them, starting at my feet and going all the way up my thighs. Then, holding me under my arms, she stood me up. I learned to keep my balance by holding tightly on to my mother’s hand.
“Look how tall you are!” she exclaimed, but I didn’t care.
“They hurt my legs, Mamma.”
When I got those braces, my mother, in order to hide them, made me a pair of pants. I must have been the only little girl in Sicily who wore pants. The other children laughed at me, but I rather liked wearing pants. The best thing about the braces was that when she took them off, my mother always massaged my legs. The doctor in Catania told her massage was the best therapy. I loved to feel my mother’s cool hands moving up and down my thighs and shins. Then she tickled my feet and made me laugh.
The braces made me too heavy for my mother. She put them on me less and less frequently, and when I grew out of them, I didn’t get new ones. But even when I stopped using the braces, she had me wear pants.
“This way, people can’t see your legs.”
My mother’s words forced me to pay closer attention to my legs. I noticed they weren’t growing as fast as the rest of my body. They seemed smaller and thinner than the legs of other girls my age. In place of calf muscles, I had only soft flesh. My mother thought it best to keep my legs hidden, because she was ashamed of them. So I learned to be ashamed of them, too.
If I had to choose between going to doctors or being taken by one of my grandmothers and my aunts to healers and witches, I’d choose the witches. Oh, they scared me, but it was an exciting kind of scared. All they did was say funny words, rub my legs with weird-smelling herbs, or have me drink something bitter. They didn’t hurt me like the doctors did.
I never thought they could make me walk, but I secretly wished they would teach me how to fly. Some people swore they’d seen the witches flying in a circle, holding on to one another’s hands in the dark of night! My grandmother said that wasn’t true. But I liked picturing the circle of flying witches. What a great game it seemed. Even better than girotondo, ring around the rosie, which all the girls loved and the boys snubbed. Once in a while, I played girotondo. My mother sat me in a chair in the middle of the circle and I sang along, watching the other girls go around me.
Whether I was taken to doctors or witches, it was clear to me that I was no good the way I was, ciunca. I needed to be fixed. I wished my father could fix me himself, like he fixed everything else. The people who loved me—my parents, my grandparents, all my relatives—none of them wanted me to be the way I was. Only the nuns thought I should accept my destiny and offer my suffering to the Lord. But they agreed such a destiny was a cruel one.
My father worked hard and saved money so he could take me to the best hospitals and the best doctors. Every time we went to a new doctor, his hope was renewed, only to turn into disappointment afterward.
“Italian doctors are too ignorant,” he told me when we came home from yet another trip to Rome. “They don’t do research. They’ll never find a cure.”
Then my father smiled his big bright smile to show me he was not defeated. A new plan had been germinating in his mind. We would leave this backward town and this country where injustice and ignorance ruled. We would go to America.
In America, doctors were different. They were brilliant, and they were always doing research with money that was collected on television. “In America,” my father told me, “every house has a television set, and when they show children like you, people send money to find a cure.”
The American doctors, my father was sure, could accomplish what ignorant people in Riposto would call miracles. There was even a president in America who had been cured of polio.
“In America, guarisci, you’ll be cured,” my father promised. “In America, cammini, you’ll walk.”
I always believed everything my father said. I wasn’t sure how far America was, or how we’d get there. But if that’s where my father wanted to take me, that’s where I’d go.
As the years passed, I started to worry, because sometimes my father’s plans didn’t work out—the money he expected to get for building a house never came, or the mafiosi put their dirty hands in his business and caused him all kinds of trouble. What if we never made it to America? What if I never got cured?
As I got bigger and heavier, my mother had difficulty carrying me, and she complained about her back hurting. Sometimes an uncle or an older cousin carried me. Once in a while a big neighborhood boy offered to carry me. At first, I was happy, especially when he took me on the main street. But then I started not liking it. He squeezed me too tight and tickled me in places where I didn’t want to be touched.
I didn’t mention it to my mother, because I didn’t want her to get sad. I wanted her to laugh. She always laughed when my father was home. And when she outran my grandmother and got her pick of the fruit my grandfather brought. But sometimes she also laughed when it was just the two of us. She laughed when the neighbor’s cat carried her kittens one by one by the scruff of their necks to our house, and laughed, rather than getting angry, when I knocked over the ink bottle on the table while doing my homework. She struggled to carry me up the steps to the roof terrace, complaining about my being heavy and her aching back; then once we made it all the way up, she pretended to drop me, laid me down on the cement floor, and lay beside me, both of us laughing wildly. At those times, my mother didn’t look like the Addolorata. She called me gioia. I kissed her flushed face, and wondered how I could be both her cross and her joy.
I knew my mother worried about what would become of me as I grew up. Sometimes she said, “I should have given you a sister who could help take care of you.”
“Oh, yes, I want a sister! Can you give me a sister, please?” And I imagined that sister, how she would play with me all the time. But then my mother got sad and said it was too late; she couldn’t raise another child when she had to take care of me.
I heard there were disabled people living in the town, but I never saw them. The women talked about a man who had fallen off a scaffold while working in Catania on a tall building, and was left paralyzed. A good-looking man he was; God should have taken him, poviru ciuncu, the women said. His unmarried sister sacrificed her youth to take care of him.
My grandmother talked about a friend of hers who took care of her husband, who’d had a stroke and couldn’t walk anymore. Her daughter helped out when she could. I understood crippled grown-ups had to have wives, sisters, or daughters to take care of them, and had to stay home all the time because they were too heavy to be carried.
I didn’t know any disabled children. I often asked my mother if there were others like me. Ever since I could remember, my mother had always told me that, yes, there was a girl just like me who lived in another town. Maybe she made her up, so I wouldn’t feel I was the only crippled girl in the world. I thought of that girl as a lost sister. I fantasized that I would one day find her, and we would talk and laugh together, and hug, and play girotondo.
2
THE BEST HOSPITAL
For years, my father worked hard, saved money, kept talking about America, waiting anxiously for very important documents. A few times, he went to Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and once or twice to
