Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (13 page)

CHAPTER 10

Passages

F
or the entire last week of that summer before fifth grade, Mom and I tussled. No matter how hard I tried to steer it my way, the argument always went like this: I’d stomp into the kitchen in a pair of tie-dyed cutoffs, the metal brackets on my left knee brandishing their pincers, while the spindly right leg made me part girl, part stork. On top, I wore an orange T-shirt that said, “The Devil Made Me Do It.” Because my outfit—purchased for my two weeks at Ursuline Camp—was not a hand-me-down, I wore it every day at camp. Finally a nun ordered me to change clothes. Here, at home, I just kept wearing it.

Standing with my arms folded under the devil on my chest, I’d say to Mom, “I’m not riding that
retarded
bus this year.”

Mom, with a baby clinging to each ankle, would flip another strip of bacon and say, “Well, you can’t walk to school. It’s too far and there’s the overpass.”

“You’ll take me.”

She’d raise her brows, smirk, and poke at the bacon with a giant two-pronged fork. I’d shove my jaw out, indignant. She’d level those two prongs right at my nose, bacon grease hissing from its tips, and say, “I told you no. That’s final.”

My lower lip would pucker. “But Mom! Everyone makes fun of that bus. The people who ride it are
retarded
.” I’d say this last word in a whisper.

“So?”

“So!” I’d explode. “So, I’m not re-tard-ed.”

“
Who
called you
retarded
?” She would be screaming this, and that’s when I’d hear the dribbling basketball outside the window come to a halt, making me cringe at the thought of my brothers’ friends hearing the word retarded directed at me.

“Well, that’s my point. If I ride the—”

“Never mind!” she’d holler. “We’ve gone over this a million times!”

In a panic, I’d start in with accusations. “Why not? Why can’t you just do one simple thing for me?”

“Look at me,” she’d say, pointing the prongs back at her face. She’d look harried, and it would only be eight in the morning. In a thinning nightgown, her skin losing its olive luster, a forgotten cigarette burning on the counter, she’d be impervious to the fact that two toddlers could take her down headfirst into a skillet of sizzling grease at any moment. “Just how do you expect me to get out of this house every morning? I’ve got three babies on my shins.”

“I only count two.”

“Where the two go, the other follows. You know that. Now listen to me, I never took a kid to school in my life. God help me, I’m not doin’ it. The answer is no. N-O. No!” One of my siblings would come through the kitchen at this point and give me the signal to stop. Rosa was the only child in this family equipped to beat Mom in an argument. I’d use her old trick and throw my chin out as if daring Mom to slap my face, but Mom would barely scoff when I tried it.

“Then I’ll ask Dad,” I’d say, knowing that I had even less of a shot with him.

Mom would toss her head back with a triumphant laugh, and I would stomp away.

On the day I did follow through with my threat, I found Dad shaving at his bathroom sink. I said, “Will
you
take me to school this year?”

“Nope,” he said, with a tap of his razor before he went back to shaving. I whimpered. He gave me the deadeye in the mirror. “Don’t pull that on me, Trix. You’ve got a ride to school. If you don’t take it, you can walk.”

The school was about a half mile from our home, and my parents had never allowed me to walk that far by myself. I wasn’t sure I could do it, not with the overpass and its forty million steps, nor could I continue with the existing plan.

But now, after this three-month-long and still losing battle, I needed to save face. So, as if I’d suddenly come up with a new plan, I shouted at Dad, “That’s it! Don’t bother to talk me out of it. I’m walking to school from now on!” I stormed off, convinced that he would never allow me to walk that far alone.

A
week later I found myself leaving the house way ahead of my brothers, since I would need to gain at least a block on them if I wanted to get to school on time. About seven houses into the walk I was so hot that I had to tie my V-neck around my waist. The matching cable-knit socks had slid down my shiny calves, which I didn’t discover until a boy passed me and said, “Pinocchio!”

Swarms of walkers had passed me before Ted came along. He was in second grade and just starting Saint Vivian. He called back to Frankie, “Look at Lear.”

“Look at what?” I huffed.

Frankie caught up to us, smiling with pride. “You’re walkin’ to school.”

“So?”

Soon both boys broke into a gallop and rounded the corner ahead. They disappeared only to be replaced by Liz and the girl next door, who zipped past on their bikes.

My books heavy, my brown-bag lunch twisted into a rope, I finally hit the main road. Rush-hour traffic pushed south toward Procter & Gamble and downtown. I headed in the opposite direction toward the gleaming mesh-metal walls of the overpass about a hundred yards ahead, the scariest part of the trip.

By the time I reached the overpass, there were only a few stragglers left on the path to school. I lodged my left foot on the first step and my knee trembled. Instead of my reliable saddle shoes, I’d put on my new penny loafers, which now threatened to slip off. My right leg dragged behind. As I neared the top, I tried not to look down on the cars passing briskly below, and I became mindful of the term “feet firmly planted on the ground.” With legs like stilts, I was hardly grounded. I felt top-heavy, as if I might spill over the railing into the traffic about twenty feet below. Terrified by that thought, I next heard the pounding feet of an older boy rushing to make it to school on time. Eighth-grade boys pulled pranks on the overpass. I’d seen them plug up the stairs while a mob of students shoved from behind. If this boy pushed me aside from the left I might go under the railing and down. I shifted my things to my right hand so I could block his push, if necessary, but as I grabbed the railing on the right I dropped everything. My binder plunged to the street, then an apple punched through my brown bag, and a car swerved to miss the pile.

In a panic I turned to the boy, who said, “Geez, that’s tough,” and stepped up his pace. In the distance, the morning buzzer sounded. School was now in session.

Sister Luke’s door was closed by the time I reached it. Inside, lecture underway, about thirty kids sat in desks arranged in rows that squared off to face the chalkboard. Her favorite pupils were assigned the desks closest to hers, and the last empty desk was just to her right: my desk. I started for it when Sister Luke stopped addressing the class. Staring down at her folded hands, she said in a wounded tone, “Mary. Eileen. Cronin. You are late.”

I started to explain.

“Does this make you
special
, Mary Eileen?” The perspiration on my back turned to goose pimples. Only minutes into the fifth grade and already I was being dropped from Sister Luke’s list of pets.

At least once a month, Sister Luke rearranged the desks in her classroom. By late fall, mine was inching back toward pariah status. And yet when we changed classes she stood outside her door, where she bowed to me as I entered, folding her hands and nodding as if she were greeting the Pope.

We were almost at Christmas break when I was again the last person in the door, and after Sister Luke greeted me with her bow she stopped me at the threshold. The hall empty, she called on her latest pet to lead the class in a song. As my classmates launched into a half-hearted “Waltzing Matilda,” Sister Luke wordlessly ushered me down the hall.

Inside the girls’ lavatory on this winter day, I had my back to the marble wall. In the warmer months, the lavatory was cool—the place I went to shut myself in a stall, sit down, and close my eyes. It was my sanctuary. About the only place that I prayed—not recited mindlessly, but prayed—was on one of these toilets.

Sister Luke’s eyes oozed with disappointment. Why had she dragged me in here? I got up the nerve to ask, “Did I do something wrong?” Then she smiled. Her hand on my shoulder was cold in spite of the radiator’s intense heat. Suddenly I was fighting nervous laughter.

“Mary Eileen,” she said, “do you know why I bow to you?”

To keep from giggling I bit the inside of my mouth. My voice was high-pitched and quivering when I finally said, “Yes, Sister?”

“You do?”

“Um, no.”

She shook her head, gazing upward and reminding me of an apostle from one of her film slides: a man in conversation with God. I decided that she was Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John rolled into one. I clamped my hand over my mouth to contain a worried giggle, which was working up to hysterical laughter.

“You need to take yourself more seriously, Mary Eileen,” she whispered.

This advice hit a nerve, and I stopped laughing. A bit of humility might have actually sunk in except that Sister Luke said, “You have a heavy cross to bear, young lady. I look at you and see the suffering of Jesus.” She always nodded on the word Jesus, which infuriated me just now, and my shift from panic to laughter to anger happened so quickly that by the time she warned me to stop “goofing off,” I was unhinged.

Then she whipped her black skirt around and left me standing there.

O
n a spring afternoon, following another shuffle of desks, I silently celebrated my placement in the last row. I was especially grateful that this put me right in front of the windows, where a gentle breeze from the pines in the courtyard comforted me. My friend Debbie, a new student in our school, was across the room and also in the back row. Her straight blond hair was parted down the middle. I thought she looked hip, even if she did wear bookworm, blue-framed glasses. This was religion class. On a typical day, Sister Luke moved from “synod” to “sin,” consumed with passion, while we fought sleep. To wake us up, she thought nothing of invoking the names of the fathers of her pet pupils. We heard about Dr. Willke’s battle against abortion, but mostly she lingered on pornography. She said Charlie Keating battled sinners daily in order to uphold justice and moral decency in our city. If that didn’t wake us up, she threw in a bloody martyr story.

I watched Debbie’s foot wag over her crossed leg while she examined her hair for split ends and yawned. Her bored response prompted Sister Luke to test her. “Deborah, what did I just say?”

Debbie parroted everything back, and Sister Luke fumed.

Sometime after that, in the midst of my own drowsy stupor, I heard my name called. I straightened up to search the faces of my classmates, frantic for a clue to what was being asked. Debbie’s foot had frozen mid-wag. I whipped my head back to Sister Luke, who said, “Well, anyone?” No one responded, so I raised my hand and asked, “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

“Not you, Mary Eileen. I’m asking the class. Does anyone here know what happened to Mary Eileen Cronin? Why doesn’t she have legs?”

With that I felt my head tip backward as if it were falling off. I touched my ear, relieved to find it in its place. I looked to Debbie, who had one perfect silk brow raised over her glasses as she twisted herself sideways to get a better look at Sister Luke.

“All right,” said Sister Luke, as if resigned to taking on some grave responsibility. “I’ll have to explain.”

Humiliated, I slumped over in my seat and braced myself for the “suffering Jesus story.” Instead, Sister Luke explained to my whole class that my mother had confessed to taking a pill while she was pregnant with me, which caused my legs to shrivel up in the womb.
A pill?
I could barely take in the details. Next I heard a new word: thalidomide. I didn’t know what it meant, or how it might be associated with me, but if that were part of my story why was Sister Luke discussing it with my class?

Confused and hurt, I sought compassion in the eyes of children I’d known all my life. But I felt my classmates distance themselves from me as if
I
had said something wrong. Some were even drawn back in their seats. Surely my eleven-year-old classmates must have been as puzzled and helpless as me, but I was hoping for more. Perhaps I expected too much, but then Debbie, the new girl, seemed to recognize Sister Luke’s behavior as cruel.

Her reaction grounded me at that moment. I saw her face scrunched into a knot of disbelief, outrage, and everything I was too numb to express myself. In Debbie’s face I could see that someone in the room understood my exact feelings: the shame of having my family’s secret exposed in class, a secret about me and one that I’d never heard until now. And then there was the matter of trust, my trust in a family and in a religion that had been telling me for years that these legs were no mistake—this was God’s choice, and not mine to question.

W
hen the screen door slammed behind me that afternoon, I was almost hoping not to see Mom, but she was at the mirror in the powder room off the kitchen. My confusion, which had escalated to anger, instantly dissolved into guilt. Ever since she had been hospitalized, we stepped gingerly around Mom for fear that we might put her back in the hospital permanently.

Mom was just finishing her makeup and patting her hair when I stomped in to say, “Do you know what Sister Luke told our class today?” Her hand froze at her temple; she locked her eyes on her own face in the mirror. Then she put a hand to her forehead as if checking for fever. Her voice was uncharacteristically calm as she said to herself in the mirror, “What did Sister Luke say?”

“She said you took a pill. She said that’s why I don’t have legs.”

Mom turned to me, her eyes lit up now. “She said that? Sister Luke?”

“Yes!” I said, ready to incite a riot, although I tried to say it as calmly as possible. “That’s what she said you told her.”

Mom gasped. “I never said that.” She stepped out of the bathroom and away from me. She was slipping away. Please don’t leave me, I thought. Not this time. In my desperation I pushed harder. “Sister Luke
said
you told her this story at Daily Donuts!” But by the time I finished the sentence, I didn’t even believe myself anymore. Was it all just in my head? “You do take her to get coffee after church, don’t you?”