Replacement Child (9 page)

Next to this picture in the album is one of the four of us— Mom, Dad, Linda, and me—without Donna. To me, this is our family, but I wonder what my parents saw when they looked at this photo.

Photos of my father holding Donna and one of him holding me at the same age show a different kind of father in each.
Holding Donna, he has a youthful expression of “look at my baby—she’s mine,” and he holds her away from him. He’s young and trim with his full head of black hair. Holding me, he keeps me close to his cheek with his arm pulling me next to him, a serious expression on his more mature face. His lowered, scrunched eyebrows that I remember so clearly.

Two other pictures mirror each other, as if the second photo was staged to be an exact replica of the first, creating a photographic continuity of the family. The first is of Donna holding Linda as a newborn on her lap in front of her, arms protectively clasped around the baby. The second is of Linda holding me in the same pose, her pinched, scarred arms tightly around me. Her badly burned left leg sticks out of her skirt in front of her. The love in their eyes is the same.

It’s a strange comfort to see the two pictures together. One of the only connections I have with my two sisters.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

7:45
AM

M
Y FATHER PARKED
his car behind Goerke’s department store, waved to the attendant, and walked toward Broad Street. Goerke’s and Levy Brothers department stores were the signature stores of downtown Elizabeth. His older sister, Ada, worked at Levy Brothers, and he stopped in to see her now and then. Down the street was Woolworth’s five-and-ten.

The Rexall pharmacy blinked its neon sign across the street. The Con Edison showroom was full of modern gleaming white stoves and refrigerators. Around the corner, you could listen to 45s in a special booth in the record store before you chose one.

At the glass door of Goldblatt Jewelers, he stopped to choose the right key from the large set jingling in his pocket, turned the key in the lock, and heard the satisfying click. Standing in the doorway for a moment, my father surveyed the quiet store in the subdued morning sunlight coming in through the front windows. A spotlight on his day. Dust particles did pirouettes in the refracted light over the long showcases.

Locking the door behind him, my father set into his usual routine. He uncovered the showcases, placed jewelry artistically in the outside windows, and checked the cash register, whistling as he went through his checklist.

After the store was ready for the day, my father opened and relocked the door, then went next door to Pamel’s Luncheonette for coffee and a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. Pamel’s had a row of red plastic upholstered booths and a lunch counter with a real soda jerk who made sodas to order.

This day, Rita, the waitress he knew for years, smiled and sat down with him to kibitz for a few minutes while he drank his coffee and had another cigarette before opening the store.

1959—1964

A
T AROUND AGE
five, I dressed like a cowboy and climbed trees. My father began to call me “my son Judy.” Linda was more interested in having a girlfriend over to sit in her room and listen to 45s on her portable record player.

My father and I played baseball in the backyard until one fateful day—I must have been nine—when he hit me square in the nose while he was showing me how to catch a fastball. At first, he started yelling at me that I didn’t keep my eye on the ball and my glove in front of my face like he taught me. But when he saw that I was bleeding, he came running over. My nose was spurting blood so hard we couldn’t make it stop. My mother heard the commotion and ran out from the kitchen with a towel for my nose and ushered me inside with a stern look at my father. That was the end of us playing baseball and the start of my father treating me differently. Maybe he saw me as suddenly fragile, brought to the reality of my female status so abruptly, and was afraid to hurt me with rough boy-type play—afraid to have another child of his hurt in any way. I only knew that we stopped being pals.

After that, I was drawn to the boys in my neighborhood. Playing with boys was much more interesting than what the girls always wanted to do. Tea parties and dressing up Barbie was not my idea of a good time. Two brothers, Richy and Tommy, who lived across the street would let me come over to play army, football, or baseball with them. They treated me like one of the guys. I liked that they didn’t give me extra points in kickball or throw a ball softer to me. But they were pretty tough guys, and it turned out I was not. One day when I came home bruised from playing a game of tackle football with them, my mother forbade me to play with them anymore. She tried to foster some relationships with the girls in my neighborhood, which didn’t work out very well.

A
T GATHERINGS AT
our house, the men usually wound up in the living room and the women in the kitchen. Kitchen duty was just an excuse for the women to get away to talk among themselves, about children, cooking, and clothes. I would gravitate to where the men were gathered, trying to infiltrate their male world. I’d hang back in the corner of the room, nursing a piece of cake one crumb at a time. I wanted to listen to my father talk about his business, politics, and what he thought about world events, the way I never heard him talk to my mother and us. The men talked differently than the women and were not afraid to argue or disagree. I liked their frank talk better than the women’s, which avoided sensitive topics. The men’s discussions held clues about the larger world—and my father.

1960

I
T SEEMED THAT
my parents were always prepared for some kind of disaster. Canned goods lined my mother’s pantry in case of blizzards, or worse—war. We didn’t have a bomb shelter, but we knew neighbors that did. When my father held my hand crossing the street, he let me know that even if a car waves me on, I shouldn’t trust them, I should let them go first. My mother would check each restaurant and shop we went to for the emergency exit.

When I was six, I witnessed my first real emergency situation when Hurricane Donna hit us. It felt like the roof was blowing off the house.

My mother warned me to stay away from the window where I stood watching our street fill with fallen trees, a window awning, and even some patio chairs and tables. My father took us down into the cellar when the storm got bad “just to be safe.”

My mother made hot chocolate with little marshmallows. My father got candles and a flashlight so that we could play cards.

Later, when the storm had truly been spent, my father went outside in the backyard to check on the damage while Linda and I watched out the kitchen window. It was a real mess. Branches
and leaves were all over the place. Our clothesline was lying clear across the yard, its metal arms at its side and lines tangled like long fingers.

Then he saw a branch a little bigger than the others, with the roots still attached. He stopped to examine it closely, shook his head, and carried it into the garage.

With the sun back out the next day, I followed my father outside to clean things up. He stood the clothesline back up and secured it into the ground. Then he brought that branch out from the garage and studied it for a moment. He looked up at me like he had a great idea.

“Let’s plant it,” he said. “It will be our Donna tree—from Hurricane Donna. We’ll always remember, right, Juicy?”

We walked the yard to pick just the right spot for the new tree.

“We need to give it plenty of room,” he told me. “This is going to be the biggest tree in the yard someday. You’ll help me nurse it back to health.”

It was that same year that Linda had the surgery where they broke both of her legs to set them right again. I remember hoping that afterward she’d be able to ride her bike with me, or go for a walk on the beach in the summer.

Linda’s roommate in the hospital, Chi Chi, was from Brazil. Her leg was mangled in a motorcycle accident, and her mother brought her to New York in an attempt to save the leg. Chi Chi’s leg, however, was ultimately amputated.

The mothers of the girls got them each a Spanish-English/ English-Spanish dictionary. The first word they looked up was pain,
dolor.

They made up their own sign language for important things like “change the TV channel,” “I’m hungry,” “It hurts,” and “When do we get out of this dump?”

Between them, they had one good leg, Linda said. But they both used it. When Linda needed a bedpan quick, Chi Chi would hop over to get it for her.

As the two mothers got to know each other, my mother learned that the trip from South America and the extended stay in the United States was a considerable hardship on her new friend. She was running out of funds and had nowhere to stay, so my mother brought her home for the remainder of Chi Chi’s hospitalization.

“Another stray,” my father muttered when she broke the news. The time before it was their housekeeper who had run into hard times.

Linda told me that no one had prepared her for the pain she had after this surgery—it was the worst she had ever had. She concocted her own method for dealing with it. With absolute quiet, she could increase her tolerance by closing her eyes and analyzing what she was feeling—exactly where the sharpest point was, how it intensified, and why it was happening. Was it less than yesterday? If it was, that meant it would be less tomorrow. Somehow, telling herself she could stand it helped more than trying to kid herself into believing it didn’t hurt. My mother used to try to distract her from the pain, but eventually she understood and gave her the quiet she needed to concentrate.

I knew my eye surgery didn’t compare with anything Linda had been through. She was a scrappy foot soldier, and I was a turncoat running for cover from any hint of discomfort. She was valiant; I was a whiner.

When they brought her home, the ambulance pulled up with its red lights on, and I ran to stand at the top of the stairs. I had on the nurse uniform that my mother got me especially to greet Linda. I loved the little white hat and the white dress with big pockets. I imagined waiting on Linda, carrying cookies for her in those pockets. A blue cape finished off the outfit, making me feel like I could fly around the house to bring Linda anything she needed. I felt powerful in that costume, like I could heal my sister with just the right smile.

When they started to unload her from the back of the ambulance, I saw the wide white cast from her waist to her toes, with a bar between her legs. It took three men to carry her, but when they got to the front door, they stopped. My mother looked over at my father, who had that worry crease in his forehead, and they both ran down the stairs. Linda, in her cast, couldn’t fit through.