Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (7 page)
Read Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience Online
Authors: Eileen Cronin
I slumped low in my seat, bangs hiding my face so I could peer at her without showing my tears. The leg man soothed her: “Ah, now, come on. You’ll be fine.”
I’ve done it again, I thought. Some people slow down when anxious, but Mom pushes harder—a habit I’d inherited, apparently.
Finally, I rubbed my index finger over one of the metal pincers on my new leg. They were every bit as sharp as they looked. I wanted to bang my head against the wall but instead grabbed one of the parallel bars. The pincers clamped shut as my knee straightened into a standing position.
The leg man shouted, “There you go! That’s it.”
I squeezed every muscle and broke out in a sweat. When I finally stood up, a girl stared back at me in the mirror. Sweat chilled on my neck when I realized it was me. I swayed up and back, tightening my grip as I tried to go for the other bar. My right side, with no leg to anchor it, now pitched forward. “Get her!” yelled Mom. She tossed her cigarette butt and jumped up, grabbing her handbag instead of me and clutching it as if watching a car swerve and miss her before it slammed into a brick wall. On his knees, the leg man threw a hand to my belly the way Johnny Bench’s baseball glove goes up on a strike-out pitch. He caught me.
I was steady, although I still couldn’t reach the other bar, and suddenly I felt my family’s signature hug: Mom’s fingernails digging into my armpits. Her purse, jammed into my back, leveled me. “See that? You’re doing it,” she said to the mirror.
“No, you are,” I said to her image in my head.
“Now,” he said, “guide her hand to the other bar. Good. She has to get used to standing alone. Okay. Let go.”
“Are you crazy?” said Mom’s eyebrows in the mirror.
My eyes swept down the mirror to myself standing beneath Mom. I still couldn’t believe it was me and yet it was the way I’d always imagined myself: a whole girl. And, even better, I would no longer have to squiddle. I would be one who walked.
As I admired the girl in the mirror, I noticed a doughnut of flesh topping the corset. No wonder it hurt. I was not a fat kid, not even chubby, but every ounce of baby fat on that thigh was being wrenched by the corset. I imagined Mom’s voice:
I’ll wring your neck!
The thought brought on a quake of laughter that almost took me down.
“What’s so funny?” asked Mom.
“Watch it. Don’t fall,” said the leg man. The muscles of my thigh tightened and cramped. This was too hard. I couldn’t walk even when holding onto the bars. How would I walk without them? Once a squiddler, always a squiddler, I decided. My knee wobbled.
The leg man winced. “Sit down. I don’t like how it’s fitting.”
I fell onto my seat, relieved, jubilant, and now that I was invested, a nervous wreck.
The leg man snatched up both legs and excused himself before I’d even tried on the second. The grass stains on my dress seemed to blot out my image in the mirror. The picture of myself as a whole girl receded with every clang of machinery from the workshop: buzzing, hammering, and a noise that took me to the place where questions endlessly thudded against the walls of my skull: “What if these legs don’t work? What sin have I committed?”
Sitting in The Hanger with my hopes pinned to a life of hauling my weight on wood with leather corsets and metal pincers, versus a life of squiddling, I realized something like “I am so screwed.” In a burst of agitation, I asked, “Why was I born without legs?”
Mom probably felt this question coming. She swallowed, as if nauseous, before she answered, in a strangely even tone, “When you were born, Dr. U. handed you to me and said, ‘Joy, your baby doesn’t have any legs.’ But I hugged you and said, ‘Eileen is my four-leaf clover.’”
I shook my head. That didn’t sound right to me.
Mom read my face and sighed. “Oh, Eileen ... if I could just give you mine ...” And for a moment I believed she would do that. Could a doctor put a set of legs on another body? I was giddy at the prospect. My brothers and sisters would never go for that, though. It dawned on me that there was nothing I could do to change this situation. I twisted restlessly in my seat.
“Now, that’s enough!” Mom whispered, as she dug through her purse for another cigarette. I stood on my knee, eyes level with Mom, and demanded answers. “Why? But
why
was I born without legs? What happened to
me
?” I wanted to dump this problem on someone else. And that, to Mom, was abhorrent: shirking responsibility was the lowest of crimes.
She stopped digging, and I steadied myself for the backlash.
My mother’s face shifted to the sure smile of a Bible salesman. As she opened her mouth, I squeezed my eyes shut. Why had I asked her again?
“You don’t have legs,” she said, “because baby Jesus chose
you
to carry the cross!”
I opened my eyes and saw the picture with the folded hands above her head. A salty taste built up in the back of my throat. I swallowed, fighting tears until my mind went numb.
F
inally I had legs. But who needed legs when my friend Penny and I were digging to China? Behind a bush we dug an escape tunnel with Frankie and Ted and the Taylor brothers, who kept yelling, “Faster, faster. The Russians are gonna drop the A-bomb!”
Several days a week I was learning to walk. In a pressed white uniform and a nurse’s cap, my therapist, Miss Connor, coaxed a champion out of me. Her eyes danced over a patient smile. Six months later, I was ready for kindergarten. But which school? Saint Vivian did not begin until second grade, and I was told I would not be attending the kindergarten in our neighborhood. Possibly Mom or the school district chose to keep me off of the regular school bus, and Mom had her own transportation policy: she would not drive a child to school.
In the end, Mom chose a kindergarten program at the high school she had attended because the nuns agreed to drive across town to pick me up. Briefly, and possibly experimentally, the school ran a kindergarten staffed by nuns who had fled war-torn countries. If this kindergarten in a high school was an odd combination, Mom didn’t question it.
My worries about walking in a pair of flesh-chewing baseball bats quickly faded in contrast to nuns who had escaped war. Two nuns came for me each morning. They demanded that I greet them in their native tongues, French and German. Otherwise they refused to budge, in which case Mom would scream, “I do not drive kids to school!”
“Bonjour”
and
“Guten morgen, Schwester”
might as well have been an epic poem. I could never memorize it.
On this morning I sprawled on the kitchen floor right next to Mom, who fried bacon and eggs while kids weaved past her in blue-and-green plaid uniforms. Several ate at the table, Bridget the mini-Mom made sandwiches at the counter, and Ted traversed the cabinets monkey-style. Baby Matthew gurgled in his high chair, hands outstretched like miniature stars webbed with pureed peaches.
From the floor I gripped Mom’s ankle and bellowed, “What are the lines?”
“For the play?”
“For the NUNS!”
“Get it right!” Mom screamed back with a stomp of the foot. She had all these kids to feed. “Not driving, no sir.”
In my head
“Schwester”
turned into Uncle Fester from
The Addams Family
. I howled in panic. Mom shook me off as she flipped the bacon and screamed, “Dick!” until Dad heard her from their bathroom upstairs. “Dick! She’s pitching a fit!”
Dad moved at his own pace. He came downstairs from his morning ritual smelling of aftershave, wearing a crisp white shirt, a tie that cut like a noose into his aging football neck, and one of his “Dutch” suits. Mom called anything that she considered cheap “Dutch.” She preferred tailored wools and linens, whereas Dad went for any suit that fit, and if it happened to come in a polyester plaid, so be it.
As Dad presented himself in the kitchen, Mom winced at his attire and the rest of us twitched from fear. He’d entered wearing his don’t-mess-with-me look. His black hair was now graying, but still thick. “What’s the problem?” he asked. All activity came to a halt, except the sizzling of bacon. Even Ted stopped swinging from cabinets.
“She doesn’t remember the lines,” said Mom. “What is it?
Guten
-what?”
“How long’s she been at that school? I tell you every morning. It’s
bonjour
and
Guten mor
gen
.”
“Uncle Fester?” I asked.
“What?”
“That’s not all of it. There’s something else,” I moaned. “They won’t drive me if I don’t get it right!”
“Not doing it,” Mom muttered under her breath.
Dad looked at me without emotion and said, “Get up.” He knew that this voice got every kid in the house moving, so the sandwich-maker went into overdrive, the breakfast-eaters downed their eggs, and Dad headed toward the den, calling Michael to fetch me and Kevin to find my legs, which might be anywhere: under Frankie’s bed, in the toy closet, or down in the basement. Kevin always got the impossible tasks, while Michael was often asked to present the prize on a silver platter. Michael snatched me up and carried me football-style, under his arm, to deposit me at Dad’s feet.
The den had a wall of bookshelves with a fireplace and a brick hearth, a stereo inside a buffet table, and a sea of toys spread over its electric-blue carpet. Often the toys got under Dad’s feet, causing him to mutter curses. On this carpet we held nightly flying contests. Rosa and Michael would flip and toss us on their feet until one of us little ones would fly into the brick hearth, barely missing a lively fire. Then Dad would call from the kitchen, “Kevin, if I have to tell you to cut that out again.”
Now, I looked up at Dad and bolted, but he grabbed me by one arm and lifted me onto the sofa. “Settle down,” he said, and called impatiently to Kevin, who was probably on his fourth bedroom upstairs, empty-handed and frantic. Finally Kevin rushed in and dropped the legs next to us. “About time,” said Dad.
Meanwhile, the French nun came to the back door, and someone yelled from the kitchen, “They’re here!”
“Stall ’em,” Dad yelled back.
He knelt down with a sock in one hand and a leg in another, mumbling, “Damned if I know.” He said this every day, and I’d wonder:
Know
what?
We both stared at the metal hinges on each side of my knee as he fixed the leg over chewed-up flesh. He tightened the laces around my thigh, gritting his teeth until he turned red as fire. “That oughta do it,” he said.
My thigh throbbed, and I stood up which made the whole leg go numb. The left one burned since Dad had wrapped an Ace bandage around it and yanked the end of the bandage from a valve at the bottom, sucking me in as if I were being swallowed by a mongoose. “That tight enough?” he asked.
I nodded and my eyes watered, but Dad said, “Oh no you don’t. Now, get going.” He patted my shoulder and stood up.
Wobbling like the Bride of Frankenstein, I took off for my hiding place behind the couch. Michael stood in my path.
Finally Dad carried me to the back porch, where we faced the dogwoods, which I thought of as our palace guards. In the driveway, the idling station wagon was spray-painted off-white over a dark unidentifiable color. Dad set me in the backseat and nearly slammed the door before plodding back up to the house. Pressed against the torn plastic seat cover, I saw only black cloth in the front seat, the German nun at the wheel. Both nuns waited in bitter silence until I said, “
Bonjour
, Uncle Fester.”
“No,” said the German nun from inside a shaking wimple, “no, no, no.”
The French nun turned to her, eyes stressed in a silent plea.
My anxiety escalated with the thought of another tardy slip from my teacher, a nun who had escaped from a Chinese concentration camp. Mom would always say, “I loooove Sister China,” and I would nod, even though “Sister China” marched from aisle to aisle slapping a yardstick on random desktops and calling out problems in accented English: “How many pennies in knicker? How many knickers in dime?” I was terrified of her yardstick.
Briefly, the French nun turned and smiled, while the other kept her hands locked on the wheel, mouth clamped. Then the sympathetic nun turned to her window and prayed. Up at the house the screen door slammed and Kevin, on his way to school, came through the evergreens that flanked the basketball court. He spotted my pleading face, shrugged, and headed back into the house. Seconds later, Mom’s voice escalated from inside, “I will not ...!” and before she finished I heard the screen door again, then Dad stepped out of the dogwoods, face tight. My panic escalated until he stuck his head in the window and said, “Morning, Sisters!” The nuns nodded, and the French nun started to say “
Bonj
—” but the driver nudged her.
Dad’s face was right in front of me. He bit his lower lip, trying to hold back from a scolding or trying to remember the lines himself. He was not solidly on my side, but this was the best I would get. He was out there, maybe only because Mom had shoved him, but he was there. “Honey, I just told you. It’s
Bon
j
....”
And the line seemed to fall from the sky. I cut him off. “
Bonjour
and
Guten morgen, Schwes
ter
.”
Silence filled the car. Dad’s eyes narrowed, then he fussed with my hair. “Have a good day, Trix.” The engine started. Exhausted, I fell into the seat. This was the easy part; awaiting me at the school across town was the yardstick-tapping Sister China. As we left the driveway, I tugged at the nylon laces of the corset on my thigh. It might take a while to break out of it, but by 3:30 I would be digging to China, having stepped from this ancient chariot and kicked myself free of my bindings.
L
ate in the summer during Mom’s tenth pregnancy, Dad hosted a reception at his new showroom. He was moving from the shadows of the Procter & Gamble smokestacks to the commercial strip north of the city. For the big event, Mom bought a misty-green chiffon dress and scheduled an extra trip to Ken’s Beauty Shoppe for a fancy up-do.