were quite a few kids whose disability was polio. When they had surgery and their legs were in casts, their braces stood at their bedsides. After the casts came off, they went down to physical therapy, PT for short, where they practiced walking with their braces and crutches. I was the only kid with polio there who didn’t have braces.
“Don’t worry, they’ll give you braces soon enough,” Rosa told me. She hated her braces with a passion. She talked about what she was going to do when she didn’t need them anymore, after her surgeries: take them to the Staten Island garbage dump, throw them in the East River, melt them down with a blowtorch…
In the room across the hall, there was a beautiful girl named Audrey. When I first met her, I thought she, too, must have had polio as a baby, since her legs were small, like mine. But her disability was spina bifida. It had affected her from the waist down, so she had never walked, just like me. She had undergone many surgeries, and she was being taught to use braces and crutches in PT, though she wasn’t at all eager to learn. Audrey and I were very grown-up; we had been getting our periods for almost a year, we wore bras and didn’t need to stuff them with tissues, and we both instinctively had a way of making people notice us. We were the same age and the same size, but we didn’t resemble each other. I had dark hair and she had blond hair; I had brown eyes and she had blue eyes. Yet some of the volunteers asked if we were sisters. The other kids called us “the Bobbsey Twins” and teased us because we were always together.
In the morning, the one who got into her wheelchair first raced across the hall. Audrey had done her best to make her room more like home. The wall above her bed was covered with get-well cards. On the night table was her radio. On a small cart by the foot of the bed was her record player. Stacks of records and piles of magazines were on the windowsill.
I loved listening to records with Audrey. I couldn’t understand the lyrics at first. I just enjoyed the music. But if the song was one I particularly liked, Audrey stopped the record and repeated the words slowly. She used dramatic gestures, acted out funny scenes, or drew stick figures, whatever she could think of, until she made me understand.
I learned a lot of English words by listening to Audrey’s records. I learned about boyfriends and girlfriends, hugging and kissing, cheating, breaking up and making up again…
After only a week in the Hospital for Special Surgery, HSS for short, I knew at least a hundred English words, maybe more. The kids laughed at me when I made a mistake or, by mispronouncing a word, ended up saying something totally different. Because vowel sounds in Italian are rather uniform, I had trouble distinguishing between long and short, open and closed vowels. So I might say “peel” instead of “pill” and instead of “bedpan,” I’d say “badpen.”
My roommate, Rosa, couldn’t stop laughing when, thinking I was asking for a sheet, I asked the nurse for a “shit.” She told everyone about it. They were hysterical. But I didn’t mind being teased by my new friends. Their laughter came at me like soap bubbles, bursting and disappearing in the air. It didn’t jab me like the Sicilian children’s derisive laughter had.
The American doctors, maybe a dozen of them, came to our floor in the morning and checked each one of us but talked only to one another. They bent and stretched our legs and checked the incisions of those who had just had surgery, but said nothing to us. Their visit was called “rounds.”
“Get ready, the doctors are making rounds!” the nurses yelled.
After the doctors left our room, I asked Rosa, “What did they say about me?”
“I don’t know what they said about you. I don’t know what they said about me, either. I don’t understand them.”
“But you know English, Rosa!”
“Oh, they’re not speaking English, believe me. They’re talking medical mumbo jumbo.”
I wanted the American doctors to acknowledge me, to notice how grown-up I was, and how quickly I was learning English. I wanted to get their attention by saying something intelligent to them.
“What can I say to the doctors?” I asked Rosa.
“Oh, you can say ‘Fuck you!’”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s like saying piacere.”
Piacere is what Italians say when they meet each other—meaning “pleased.” It seemed the appropriate thing to say to the American doctors. And the word was easy enough for me to pronounce. So the next morning, when they all stood around my bed, I gave the American doctors my biggest smile and, careful to pronounce it correctly, said: “Fuck you!”
One of the older, more important-looking doctors was talking. He stopped in mid-sentence. The look of shock on his face was not what I had expected. All the doctors seemed shocked, though the younger ones also seemed amused. One, in particular, was trying hard not to laugh.
I knew Rosa had tricked me. I wondered what I had said. I looked toward her, but her head was under the blanket. I wanted to pull the covers over my head, too. But then the important-looking doctor started talking again and all the others turned to listen to him. They talked to one another a while longer, as if I weren’t there, then walked out of the room.
I expected everyone to laugh and make fun of me mercilessly. Instead, the kids treated me as if I were a hero.
“You said ‘Fuck you’ to the doctors? Wow! I wish I had the guts to do that!” It didn’t matter to them that I hadn’t known what I was saying.
Audrey explained to me the full meaning of the word fuck. She had to resort to gestures and drawings to make me understand. She couldn’t believe how innocent I was for someone who looked so grown-up.
In Riposto, when the neighbor girls came to sit by our front door on summer evenings, they would tell sexy jokes. Then they’d look at me, as if suddenly remembering I was there, then look at one another and stop talking.
“Come on, finish the story.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about these things in front of you.”
“Oh, please, I’m old enough.”
“But you’re a cripple, ciunca,” the Sicilian girls said.
How could I argue with that?
Obviously, disabled American girls weren’t told they couldn’t learn about sex. The girls at HSS knew all there was to know. Often, when they came to listen to Audrey’s records, after shimmying and bopping in our wheelchairs for a while, they all started talking about sex. I missed a lot of what they said because I didn’t know English well enough yet. I nodded and blushed and giggled, too embarrassed to ask them to explain.
Some of the girls had boyfriends in the hospital. I heard about the “things” Rosa did with a seventeen-year-old boy named Jim, who had dystonia. Audrey liked a fifteen-year-old boy with CP named Joe. She dragged me along to his room at the other end of the hall. They didn’t do much; he’d take her hand in his, which shook a little because of the CP. I smiled and looked around the room.
Joe’s roommate, Bob, also fifteen, had MD. If he was in the room, he tried to take my hand.
“Bella,” he said. It was the only Italian word he knew.
During the first
