Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (27 page)

I’d had big plans for junior year. At the end of the previous term, I was elected social chairwoman of my sorority. It was hard to conceive of a time when I’d had it together enough to win anything, let alone an election. I considered asking my opponent to take over the position, but she was Liz’s little sister and I couldn’t bring myself to concede. I groaned every time the phone rang. Out in the hallway I’d hear, “Has anyone seen Eileen?” Our house mom, Biddy, would reply, “Don’t disturb her.” Jamming my mailbox were requests from fraternities to schedule parties. I put off calling them back as long as possible.

On campus, I arrived late for a meeting that I’d scheduled with a professor. From outside her office, I overheard her asking a classmate, “What’s happened to Eileen Cronin? She was strong in my debate class. She hardly shows up for this one.”

I wasn’t doing any better in my part-time job. I’d worked since I was sixteen and, thanks to the examples my friend Claire and my sister Liz set, I typically balanced work and school fairly well. Now my hours in the bridal registry at Pogue’s downtown were being whittled away, which might have had something to do with the fact that I leaned into the counter and drew designs in my breath on the glass case.

Everything had gone askew. I was afraid to get out of bed for fear that I wouldn’t land squarely on the floor but instead slide on slanted ground, slippery and endless.

Finally I came up with a plan that would take me, emotionally, to a better place. I became a hostess in a historic German beer garden in Walnut Hills, which had been transformed into a four-star restaurant serving nouvelle cuisine. As the manager, Liz was initially against the idea of hiring me, but Colette, who was a captain, talked her into giving me a chance. Because of its location near campus, a lot of professors and physicians came in for lunch. Dr. Cabrera stepped into the bar one day with James and another son during the lunch-hour rush.

“We’ll sit in the bar,” said the father, striding past me toward a booth.

“It’ll just be a minute before we have a table cleared,” I said, flustered and making an effort not to look at James or his usually flirtatious brother and father. They seemed particularly businesslike that day.

“This is fine right here, thank you,” said Dr. Cabrera. “We’re in a hurry.”

I rushed upstairs to find Liz setting some extra tables. “Please,” I begged, “the Cabreras are down in the bar. They want to eat there. I can’t wait on them. You know I’ll mess it up.” Liz stared blandly as she smoothed a white tablecloth. She’d seen me topple a tray of peach coladas under the grape arbor. She followed me down.

From my hostess podium only inches from the Cabrera men, I tried not to notice them in a huddle, plotting their next moves. I envied James for the guidance his father gave him. Who would be my mentor? A car dealer? A homemaker? I wanted to be a writer. If I didn’t take myself more seriously, who would?

That may have been the last time I saw James. My grief over Frank clouds my memory, but I know the precise point on campus where I was walking with a friend when she mentioned that James had gone away to medical school. I couldn’t say which season we were in, whether the leaves were red, if there was snow under our feet, or the air was dense with pollen, yet I see the two of us walking toward Clifton Avenue. We’d come down the hill in front of McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, a Georgian building with a spire and stone lions at the entrance. I had seen so many friends leave town, but I’d never expected James to go.

We faced fraternity row, where James lived, or had lived. I pictured him driving the wrong way down Clifton Avenue as he tried to talk me back into the car the night we fought. Had that been our last conversation alone?

The wounds from Frank’s unexpected death reopened. Back in high school, when I was ambushed by my father’s leaving, I confused that loss with my first breakup. I’d almost given up over those losses. But Frank had viewed me as his equal. At times, he’d even looked up to me. I wanted to see myself through Frankie’s untarnished eyes, to become someone I admired. Instead, I was shrinking back into a timid and fearful girl.

All around me people were moving on. With every friend or sibling who left town, I craved new adventures. What was stopping me from finding my own?

CHAPTER 19

Taking the Plunge

L
ate in my junior year, a flyer showed up in my mail slot at the sorority house, announcing a meeting of the Disabled Students’ Union. I shredded it immediately and tossed it into the trashcan, bothered by the notion of anyone associating me with the word “disabled.” The paranoia this flyer stirred up signaled a problem that dogged me for days, then weeks, until I did something about it.

First, I became a candy-striper at Children’s Hospital, transporting patients to and from physical therapy. Soon I met Susan, a twelve-year-old girl whose legs had been amputated below the knees. When I wheeled Susan back to her room, her nurse tapped the girl’s dozing father and said, “This is Eileen. She has two artificial legs.” The man’s strained face softened into hopefulness. “Susan could walk that well?” he asked.

“Probably better,” I said. “She has both knees.”

“But not tomorrow,” cautioned the nurse. “She has to get through rehab first.”

I stayed in touch with Susan after her release, taking her to movies and other activities so she would get used to going out in public. This helped me to heal from my own grief, and I hope it helped her. Meanwhile, I researched graduate programs and discovered a field known as rehabilitation counseling. Boston University had an excellent program. Bridget lived nearby. Ted would be about two hours away, at Williams College. This would allow me to go far from home and still have family close to me.

Dad supported my decision from the start. I came home one Sunday, and he folded his newspaper in the breakfast room to set it aside. “You really like helping this gal, don’t you?” he asked. I could see from his smile that he was pleased I spent time with Susan. This touched me because he smiled so rarely after Frank died. The grief that had engulfed my father came in the form of a ferocious silence. In the past he might have laughed out loud at an article, or groaned, but now it was as if he’d been cut off from his voice. I treasured the moment he set his paper aside to chat, even if it was brief.

Often, while I sat upstairs near the top of the staircase writing, Dad read alone in the breakfast room, and I could hear in his breath a broken heart. It was so subtle that one might easily miss it. Once he blurted out at the dinner table, “There is not a one of you who is half as good-hearted as Frankie.” I was hurt by the comment, but later I saw how sorrow had affected Dad. He did not feel worthy of outliving his child. The thought sickened him. Aside from that, he was right. Frank had invested more in his friends and family than in himself, while the rest of us were a competitive lot. Maybe Dad regretted his role in fostering that competitiveness, although I doubt that he knew any other way to lead this gigantic gaggle of children.

Mom reacted differently to my news. Her face went pale. She stammered, “Well, well, why would you do that?” She looked completely terrified at the prospect of my going to graduate school, and to study what? Rehab. Why would anyone do
that
?

David shared her skepticism. I told him while we were rushing to his car to catch a movie. “What about writing? Didn’t you just get honorable mention in that contest?”

I rolled my eyes. “The guys on the magazine said my main character was a ‘fairy.’ They wouldn’t publish the story.”

He stopped and held up a hand. “Hold on,” he said. Cold air whipped through me, and I just wanted to get into the car. “Those same guys who assigned you the mascot story? You’re going to listen to them?”

I had been writing for the campus magazine and had recently pitched my idea to do a story on sixties architecture that I thought was inspired by
The Jetsons
. I chose buildings with entrances like Jetsonian launch pads, and I planned to talk about how in the sixties we had all envisioned ourselves one day flying around in our own private saucers, but here in the eighties we had a fuel crisis and a floundering market for a surplus of ugly architecture. “That’s very interesting,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief had said. “Now go interview the Bearcat.”

I sped up my pace. “It doesn’t matter if I write.” We were climbing in the car when I added, “The point is I can’t make a living at it.”

Inside, David nudged me and eyed my unbuckled seatbelt. I fastened it while he said, “Doesn’t matter? You don’t just stop
being
a writer. It’s not a
choice
. And you don’t have to worry about money. I’ll support you.”

Anyone in their right mind would have embraced this man, but I decided that he must not “really know” me. If he did, he would see why I needed to confront the world of disability. Aside from that, he seemed to be moving toward marriage.

I knew so many women who were coming home to marry and start families. Liz and Rosa had recently married. Claire and two other friends had asked me to be in their weddings. Almost no one left Cincinnati for good. Their children and grandchildren would go to the same schools and the same parties. This was their dream.

Given the disappointments I’d known, marriage seemed one more setup for disillusionment. I wasn’t ready to trust anyone that much. As for my dreams, they were satisfied by writing, at night and alone, often with alcohol and cigarettes. Based on what I knew about marriage—wives promptly gave birth and raised children—what kind of a bride would I make? My mind had shifted. It was now focused on accomplishments—my accomplishments, not my children’s or my husband’s accomplishments.

One night over dinner, David told me that he had helped deliver the baby of a mother who smoked. “It’s an awful mess,” he said. “I don’t want to see you that way.” And I thought, “I don’t want to see myself that way.” But my next thought was this: why aspire to motherhood when one might aspire to live like Dorothy Parker instead?

About this time, a sibling with an alcohol problem told an anti-Semitic joke with David at the table. We didn’t talk like that in our family. Three times Mom said, “Stop!” Embarrassed, my father apologized to David, but I regretted that I didn’t take David’s hand and leave the house instantly. David was so easygoing about the fiasco that I’d let it go, or so I believed.

For days going into weeks afterward, I turned this incident over. It was my responsibility to take a stand for David and for us as a couple, but I was not deft at handling aggression. If I could have managed this situation with maturity, I would have asked my sibling to call David to apologize and then make an apology to the rest of the family at another dinner. Eventually the day came when I received an apology, and I accepted it. There was no apology or discussion with the family, though. As for an apology to David, it would become clear that I was the one who owed him that. Before that I would return to my earlier ways, where I would destroy my own dreams before I’d allow anyone else to destroy them, so I poisoned my confidence in a relationship that was the healthiest part of my life to that point.

The poisoning began with me turning things over obsessively:
But why is David so good to me? Is he my Pygmal
ion?

Yes! Now, get over it.

Just think of the hours he’ll be g
one.

Hours to be spent at the typewriter.

As soon as I’m attached, he’ll destro
y me.

Are you sure it won’t be the other way around?

It was exhausting. In no time I would forget about David, about Frankie, about everything but a fictional world in which “an underachieving lover picks up a birdcage at a flea market but it’s the woman (a rich college girl who slums in a jazz club) he wants for his collection. In the end he’s the one caged by his obsession.” Even my stories were turning into obsessions.

My worries snowballed. Aside from my belief that I was helpless to prevent our religious and cultural differences from being trampled on, I had not even begun to face my fears about birth defects. Were mine genetic? I could not simply hope for the best. If I wanted technical answers explained in scientific terms, I would have to seek them myself. I understood that if thalidomide had caused my birth defects, my pregnancies would be at no more risk than anyone else’s. David talked as if children were in our future. But my mother was telling me she’d never taken the drug. If she knew that I had these fears about passing along the defect, she wouldn’t persist in allowing me to believe in some other cause, would she?

F
or better or worse, I was reevaluating my priorities. The promise I had made to myself to hold onto this gift of a relationship with David was now as remote from my consciousness as a promise made to a fellow Girl Scout around the campfire. Life had jerked me at the last second too many times. But if any good had come of Frank’s death, it was that I was beginning to take myself seriously. I needed to believe in myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I was a strong person, not the feeble-minded, weak-spirited girl I saw when I thought back on my life so far.

And God help me, as Mom would say, I broke up with David.

I
n the fall of 1982, I moved to Boston for graduate school. While I might have been forging a lonely path, I thought I could control my fate.

As an intern in the Developmental Evaluation Clinic at the Boston Children’s Hospital, I attended Friday afternoon lectures on every birth defect known to man. From those lectures I struggled to construct my own philosophy of birth and illness, childhood and death. On Friday nights, if my roommates had dates and I was alone, I called my mother, almost in tears. Disease was a scary business, especially on Friday nights.

I couldn’t admit to Mom that I was lonely. Instead, I would throw tough moral questions at her. “Mom,” I said in one such phone call, “have you ever heard of Tay–Sachs disease?”

“Tay who?”

“Babies, Mom. Mostly Jewish babies. They’re born with a genetic disease that will kill them.”