Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (30 page)

I’ve asked myself hundreds of times since then why I did not just tell him what had happened, but I didn’t want to betray Liz. I thought it was between the two of us.

“Why don’t you just call her tomorrow and apologize?” Dad innocently suggested. “Put an end to this thing.”

I called the next day, but Liz’s husband told me that Liz couldn’t talk. I flew back to Boston, confused and feeling as if my tongue had been removed clandestinely while I was under anesthesia.

Weeks later, Liz called me, likely at Dad’s urging, to say she wanted to come for a visit.

“Great!” I said, nervous but looking forward to talking this out. She said she was coming into town on a Friday. I had class, so I suggested she take a cab to the Prudential Center and I’d meet her at the bar.

When the day arrived, I was both eager and terrified to see Liz. She called from an airport bar, upset because she was delayed in Newark. That evening, I found her at the Prudential Center, glamorous in a miniskirt with a cropped sweater. The restaurant manager had been pouring her drinks while they chatted. I think he’d even offered her a job as his assistant manager.

As we hugged, her muscles tightened beneath her sweater. Of all the daughters, Liz looked the most like Mom, with high cheekbones and dark, dramatic features, except that Liz’s green eyes lent her a savvier façade than Mom’s hush-puppy eyes gave Mom. Finding so much of our mother in Liz’s face now made me aware of her vulnerability. Our talk was probably weighing on her. Liz hated social awkwardness. This trait, and possibly only this trait, was where I had excelled as a child in contrast to Liz. I had no fear in the face of awkward situations. Already I’d lost a foot, midstep, as I came off the trolley in Boston, and I’d had to ask a strange man to help me cross Commonwealth Avenue to get to my job. He ended up hoisting me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And that was the least scary of my “lost foot” adventures. Liz had never had to cope with such indignity and vulnerability on a routine basis. I stored those situations close to my heart, saving them for cocktail parties, where they made me the belle of the ball. I had reached a place where I knew many women who respected me for it. That had made all the difference in bolstering my self-esteem. As long as I’d known Liz, she had worked hard to polish herself. She was a middle child looking for her own way to shine. I could hardly blame her for that.

Once again, she was throwing me a curve ball. Now she was boasting to this manager, “We serve four, five hundred a night. And it’s a four-star restaurant.” Was this a bolder Liz?

“Should we get a table?” I asked, pushing myself between her and the manager.

She shook her head. “Listen, I gotta go to bed,” she said. Then she looked me in the eye for the first time that evening and said, “I’m loaded.”

I sighed and led the way down to the street. In the cab, we sat close to each other. With the exception of Frank’s funeral, I had not seen her looking this forlorn since I was five and she was seven years old. We had been playing in my friend Penny’s backyard when Penny’s mother called her in and said she could invite only one friend into the house. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to choose.” Penny chose me. I squiddled past Liz so torn up that I leapt onto Penny’s sofa and stared out the window at my sister for what seemed like hours. She had dropped to her knees, staring ahead, her face so impassive that I couldn’t tell if she was crying.

Now I wanted to scoop her into my arms and hug her, but I had too many years of losing to her. When we were children, she had often led the charge to race up the stairs. It would be dark in the basement and after the others reached the top, someone would close the door and lean against it. I was not a stoic loser. I’d scream from the dark basement until someone opened the door. At twenty-three, I still had not outgrown my fear of being left behind.

As I opened the door to my apartment, with its cheap furniture, bamboo shades, and faux-wood paneling, she said, “Oh,” and stepped back.

“You mean I gotta sleep on that thing?” She pointed at the musty sofa.

“Yep,” I said on my way back to my room, shocked at myself for not volunteering my own bed.

In the morning, over coffee, Liz said, “We’re going to Bridget’s, right? How do we get there?”

I was unprepared for this shift in plans. “Don’t you want to see the city first?”

“I’ve seen it before. Let’s call Bridget.”

I had to stifle a moan. “But I thought you came here to see me.”

“Bridget lives here too, you know.”

I might have pressed for our conversation then, but I still believed that my every need boiled down to a selfish request.

Liz looked terrified and hung over, her hands trembling as she hinted that I was holding her hostage in my ramshackle apartment. I wanted to hug her—well, slap her then hug her—but I needed her to have the upper hand. I don’t think I could have handled it if she had broken down and said she resented growing up with a crippled little sister. On the other hand, if she believed, like Mom, that “baby Jesus chose me to carry the cross,” why had she never thanked me for carrying it for her?

On the train out to the suburbs, she wore dark sunglasses. Angry as I’d become, I also felt sorry for her. She might have mastered her fear of strangers, but she had not mastered her fear of me.

As she rested her forehead against the windowpane, I imagined that she hoped to numb her hangover against the cool vibrating glass. I’d done it myself on dozens of subways.

We never did have our talk. Throughout the rest of the weekend Liz and Bridget went antique shopping, while I lagged behind. It might have been my imagination, but by the time we dropped Liz at the airport on Sunday, I could have sworn that Bridget had begun to show signs of frostiness toward me.

A year later, I called Rosa, who was pregnant for the first time. She had been inviting me to visit her in California for months. Until then, I had viewed Rosa as nothing if not direct. Perhaps she would share with me what Liz was saying about her trip to Boston. I hoped she would employ that authoritative voice of hers to influence Liz to at least listen to my point of view.

When I called to schedule my visit, Rosa told me she’d changed her mind. I shouldn’t come because I did things to people. “Like what?” I asked. She pointed to the Christmas Eve when I went off on Liz, which struck me as odd coming from Rosa, who had more than once coached Liz on how to taunt me.

What was even more confusing was that Rosa had been encouraging me to stand up for myself. I might have told myself at this exact moment what Mom had been telling me as a child when I cried to her about Liz and Rosa: “That’s just girls, I-lean. Get used to it.”

Instead I shrieked, “You’ve gotta be kidding me! You kept telling me that I should stand up to Liz!”

Rosa told me she had no idea what I was talking about and hung up the phone.

The next day I heard from Mom, who asked what the heck I had done to Rosa. “She’s so upset. Honestly, I-lean! I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

I’d read about families who had broken up over thalidomide, and I wondered if these explosions in my family weren’t a delayed reaction to my talking about my disability, trying to find out what caused it, and standing up for myself. As I saw it, I could never go back to being the girl I’d been in Ohio. That girl had tried to kill herself. Maybe she had been more successful in doing so than I’d ever imagined. A new woman had replaced her.

I decided to go home over spring break, since I would not be going to California. For some reason, I had an idea that everyone in my family had changed along with me, that suddenly we were a family who talked through our problems. Also, I wanted to see Dad. The news of his illness was only getting worse.

At home, I kept putting off my plans to talk with Mom. There were problems with Dad’s kidneys and more tests to be run. I was nervous for Dad, for myself, and, on top of everything else, it had not been long since I’d learned things about thalidomide that I’d never wanted to know but needed to find out. If I didn’t ask Mom my questions, I would spend more sleepless nights back in Boston.

On my penultimate day in Cincinnati, I found myself alone with Mom in the kitchen. “Mom,” I said, “I want you to understand that I would never blame you if you took thalidomide. You couldn’t have known what it would do. No one did. But I have to ask you this before I leave. Did you take thalidomide?” Her eye twitched and she stepped away from me. “I never took that drug!” she boomed. She backed away again, banged her head into the phone on the wall, and glared at me as if I were wielding an axe.

“Mom,” I pleaded. “I need to know this if I’m going to have kids.”

“We get the kids we get!” She threw up her arms.

“Please stop yelling,” I whispered, self-conscious.

“I told you I loved you the minute the doctor handed you to me! Stop badgering me. You’re just upset because you’re alone. If you had kids of your own, you’d know that!” She left the room, raising a fist to the sky and muttering through clenched teeth, “Why you want to do this instead I’ll never understand! You sow what you reap, I-lean!”

Alternately ashamed and angry, I didn’t even catch the fact that she’d turned the proverb around. How can you sow what you reap? If this had been Ted’s argument with Mom, he would have laughed in her face and by dinner the conversation would have become a story with Mom laughing until she cried.

I could have gone upstairs to share some of this with Nina, but she was only seventeen. She and Liz were the last daughters left in town, and I worried that she would buy into the notion that I’d become intolerably negative. Nina’s lovely disposition had deepened. With her black hair and white skin, she could have worn a tiara and called herself Snow White. Nominated for homecoming queen, May fete queen, and prom queen, she lost all three elections. She laughed heartily when Mom called her “the triple crown loser.” Who could be upset with Nina? But I couldn’t rely on a teenager for the kind of support I needed.

The next morning, Mom and I stood at my gate in the airport, both at a loss for words, until she said, “Are you sure you want to go back to that school? You used to laugh.”

“I’m happy,” I snapped.

“You know,” she said calmly, “men don’t like intelligent women. Your father might not tell you that, but I know how he thinks. It’s not good for you being in school so long. At some point you have to grow up.”

I got on the plane and worried that she was right.

I
n the spring of 1984, my parents came to town for my graduation despite the fact that Dad was on dialysis. His face swollen from steroids, his fingers trembling, he drove a Volkswagen bus, stopping at antique shops along a five-hundred-mile trek. He’d refused to accept a donor kidney from one of us, and was on the waiting list for an anonymous donation.

At the end of a weekend spent at Bridget’s house, Dad dropped me off in town. After he pulled up to the curb, there was an awkward silence. Dad bit his bottom lip and stared straight ahead, which I took to mean that he was in a hurry. I said goodbye and hopped out. As I reached in for my overnight bag, he asked, “Eileen?”

“Yeah?”

His eyes darted from the road over to me, but only for a second. “Honey, I’m proud of you.”

“Really?” My voice cracked.

“Okay,” he said, pulling away before I could thank him.

As I watched him drive off I worried about him.

S
ince I would be consulting in three states for my first job in rehab, I bought a car, a white VW Rabbit. Then I went to the Boston Registry of Motor Vehicles to get a Massachusetts driver’s license. I was waiting in line after handing in my current license when a police officer motioned to me and said, “Come hee-ah.” I followed him into a lunch room, where about four officers were sitting around a table. “What’s the problem?” I asked, panicked.

“We was gonna ask you the same,” said one of the officers.

“Whaddaya mean?” I tried to sound indignant. By now I knew that only the loudest and most infuriated drivers were taken seriously in this town.

“What’s this restriction about an ahtificial limb to drive a caaah. It’s on this license you got from,” said another officer, “from where?”

“O-hi-o,” said the first officer.

“O-hi-o?” the other repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “And that’s not a restriction. It just indicates that I drive with my left foot.”

“What’s wrong wich yah right?”

“I don’t have one.”

“What about yah left?” asked the first. He pointed to my below-knee leg. I was wearing a skirt with opaque hose that barely covered the screws at my knee.

“It has a knee,” I said.

“A knee!” said another, clutching his skull. “Jesus.”

“Look,” said the first. “They might issue licenses to you folks in O-hi-o, but hee-ah it’s different.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, surprising myself. “I have a pedal on the left side. It’s made for
folks like me
so we can drive. Legally. I’ve been driving for seven years. I don’t think you’re allowed to do this to me. I’ll have to get a lawyer. Lucky for me Boston has a very active community for disabled people’s rights. You know those people in wheelchairs who picket restaurants and movie theaters? I do. They will sit in your parking lot with protest signs because you can’t take someone out of a line who has committed no violation and deny them a license. We do not have people in wheelchairs picketing in O-hi-o, but you are more progressive in Boston.”

“We ah, ahn’t we?” said one of them, patting his stomach in a satisfied manner.

“That you are,” I said, and from there we cut a deal: I could have a license but only if I took handicapped plates. “If I have to,” I said. In my license photograph my eyes are leaden, although it’s not a bad poker face.

Emboldened by my recent success, I wanted more. My father was seriously ill and might die before his name came up on the kidney donor’s list. Anyone could see that he loved us, but he’d never said those words to me. So I wrote a letter and asked him.

For the next month, I raced to my apartment every evening and found no response. Then the day came when I pushed open the door to find an envelope on the telephone table. Dad’s Volkswagen logo was on it, my name in his handwriting. Too anxious to take off my coat, I rushed in and opened the letter. My hands shook as I read and reread my father’s words, not able to make sense of them. In fact, they were quite plain: