That Takes Ovaries! (20 page)

Before my disability, I saw myself as a political activist only when involved in a demonstration or protest. Now, however, I understand my very body as a site of resistance. Every single time I leave my house, people stare. Their eyes linger on my scars, my half-legs, and my wheelchair as they try to understand what happened and why I look the way I do. Their stereotypes about disability are written in their expressions of confusion and fear as they watch me pass. I am powerfully aware that merely by living life in a wheelchair, I challenge their stereotypes about what bodies look like and what bodies do. I feel like an activist just by rolling out my front door.

Sometimes, however, simply rolling outdoors isn’t enough of a statement. Sometimes you have to pee outdoors, too.

Three years ago, during my first semester of graduate school, I took an exchange class at a local seminary. A month into the course, I was assigned to give a presentation on the week’s readings. Halfway through class we took a break, after which I was to give my talk. I desperately had to pee, and I rolled over to the library, sure I’d find accessible toilets there. I was met only with a wall of narrow stalls—too narrow to slide my wheels into.

I dashed about campus, rolling from one building to another, hoping to find a wide stall door, muttering to myself, “There
has
to be an accessible can somewhere on this damn campus.” After checking every bathroom in every building, I realized I was wrong.

What the hell was I going to do?

Going home wasn’t possible because I would never make it back to school in time to give my presentation. “Holding it” also wasn’t possible because … well, when a girl’s gotta go, a girl’s gotta go. I exercised my only remaining option: I went outside, searched for a dark and secluded part of campus, hiked up my skirt, leaned my body over the edge of my wheelchair, and pissed in the grass.

It just so happened that the dark, secluded place I’d found was the Bible meditation garden.

I went back to class angry. With mild embarrassment, I told the professor what had happened. I felt validated when she stopped the class to tell everyone the seminary president’s name so they could write letters demanding an accessible bathroom at the school.

The next day, I, too, wrote a letter to the president informing him of both my accessibility problem and my solution. “Odds are,” I wrote, “I will need a bathroom again. And I am doubtful that my ‘christening’ of the Bible garden is a practice you would like me to continue.” In closing, I mentioned the Bible verse I’d found emblazoned on the garden wall (the one I’d practically peed on), and hoped its irony would not escape him. “Let justice roll down like waters,” the words proclaimed, “and righteousness like an everlasting stream.” Never before had the Bible seemed so relevant to me!

Within forty-eight hours, I had an appointment with the school president. He ushered me into his office and sat down across from me. “Before we discuss possible construction,” he said, “I just want to give you a moment to share your pain.”

I paused, thinking his comment a rather condescending way to begin a meeting. “I’m not in any pain,” I said curtly, “I just want a place to go to the bathroom.”

Our conversation could only go downhill from there.

The president informed me that although he wanted to provide me with an accessible bathroom, the school could not currently afford such construction. When I suggested that removing a forty-year-old skanky couch from one of the women’s rooms would free up space for an accessible stall, he responded with a sentiment as old as the couch: “Well, I’m reluctant to remove the sofa because some of the lady students like to rest there
during their time.”

Right. I’d forgotten how much we lady students, brains overtaxed by academia, liked to rest, bleeding, on musty couches in dank bathrooms. What a traitor to my sisters I must have been to suggest that my need to pee was more important than a couch that hadn’t seen human contact since 1973.

Not surprisingly, that meeting did not result in an accessible toilet. So, as threatened, I continued to piss in the garden and complain in the halls. What had started out as a necessity became an interesting combination of necessity
and
protest—a pee protest. Word got around, and to my delight most students supported me. Petitions were signed in a number of classes. One student even proposed a documentary on
The Bathroom Debates
to her film class, showing them a short teaser clip she’d made. I became a bit of a celebrity, known in the halls as “the bathroom girl.”

About a month after the first incident, I fired off another letter to the president informing him of my continued use of the Bible meditation site. This time I meant business. I told him I was ready to expose his total disregard of the needs of disabled Americans by going to the press with my story. Bingo. Construction began on the most beautiful accessible bathroom you ever did see.

Justice and righteousness were rolling down at last. They had just needed a little boost from a girl, her wheelchair, and a full bladder.

My daddy had a bootlegger named Lem. His still was way up in Burke County, on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about an hour’s drive on highways and backroads from where we
lived. Actually, Lem was a pig farmer, but he ran a nice little moonshine business on the side. Even in the boondocks, even in the Eisenhower years, they knew it paid to diversify.

Now I was never sure whether Daddy made that trip up to Lem’s every so often because he got word through the good old boys’ grapevine there was a new batch of corn liquor on the cooker, or he just hightailed it back for more whenever he ran low. I knew he didn’t like to be without, though I’d seen him go a month or two on the wagon after an especially grueling binge. But the particulars of Daddy’s drinking was one of those things the family didn’t talk about. He drank in secret, disappearing into his basement workshop several times a night to mix up and chug down his favorite combination of sweet Sundrop citrus cola and white lightning that had a kick like a mule. No one liked to mention those frequent trips downstairs or his steady evening slide into slurring, stumbling oblivion.

This was our dead elephant in the middle of the room, the one everyone tried to pretend wasn’t there as they gingerly tiptoed around it. While he was in the basement, lifting another juice glass, my grandmother might make a wry comment like “What do y’all reckon Bill’s working on in his shop tonight?,” answering herself with “Must be mighty interesting.” Everyone else would ignore her, shake their heads sadly, or paste on an ironic smile, pretending it didn’t matter but praying he’d soon shuffle quietly off to bed, hoping it wouldn’t be one of those nights when some little remark or gesture would set him off and turn him into a dangerous weapon. Even though he mostly took out his rage on the furniture, tossing it around the room or out the back door into the yard, there was always the stomach-churning thought that one of us might be next. And being the youngest in the family, with the least amount of practice keeping my eyes downcast and my mouth shut, I was convinced that “one” would someday be me.

Once we made it safely through those nights, with dawn came the hangovers, the regrets, and the unsolicited promises he’d “straighten up, fly right, and never do that again,” without ever
specifying exactly what “that” was. By the time I was old enough to know what a promise meant, I knew better than to believe in his. They only lasted as long as it took him to get thirsty again.

Sometimes Daddy took me with him to Lem’s. He never told me that was where we were going. The two of us would just be up in the country paying visits to his kinfolks, and then first thing you know I’d be sitting in our old Ford in Lem’s dirt driveway that overlooked the hog pen while the men took the empty jugs out of the trunk and, leaving the lid up, went off down in the woods to make the deal.

With the windows barely cracked, I sat alone, broiling in the afternoon sun. I never got out of the car because I was told not to. Besides, Lem had a couple of mangy dogs in the yard that bared their teeth to strangers. I’d know the deal was done when I heard them slam the trunk lid shut.

But finally, the summer I turned eleven, one weekend when I hadn’t gone with him to Lem’s, when he’d come home with a snootful which he proceeded to top off throughout the course of the afternoon and evening, leaving the furniture intact but acting awfully mean and nasty, slicing us up pretty good with cruelly barbed comments calculated to ruin everybody’s Saturday night, I figured I’d had about enough.

After he’d gone to bed, leaving the rest of us breathing a collective sigh of relief, I snuck down to the workshop where he kept his gallon jugs of clear white lightning in an old wooden cabinet with sagging hinges on the doors. There were a dozen jugs in all. Two at a time, one in each hand, I carried them out the cellar door, across the yard, into the pasture, and halfway down the worn dirt path the goats made on their way to the barn. When I came to a good open spot that sloped down to the creek at the bottom of our land, I took those jugs, uncapped them, and by the light of a full moon poured that liquor on the ground. It wet down the dusty path, trickled down the slope, and gave off a powerful smell so reminiscent of Daddy’s sour breath I turned around twice to see if I’d been caught. But I hadn’t, so I went on hauling and pouring till I’d emptied every
last jug, including the half-full one sitting on his workbench beside a carton of warm colas. I didn’t leave him a single drop.

When I’d finished and put the empty jugs back where I found them, I felt righteously exhilarated, for about two minutes—until I realized I was now in serious trouble. I’d be the first one he’d suspect, and if he asked me I’d be sure, foolishly but proudly, to confess. Plainly put, I was a goner, destined to be struck down dead by my own father’s hand, unless he decided to hold me over for slow torture.

Seeking absolution, before I went to bed I told my mother, who was watching Lawrence Welk and His Champagne Musicmakers, what I’d done. First stunned into silence by the magnitude of my crime, she soon recovered, secretly pleased, I imagine, that someone in the family had finally done something, and that her daughter could actually be so bold.

“Well,” she said in her nonconfrontational way, “let’s just wait and see what happens. Maybe he’s had enough for now.” Her advice was twofold: not to say anything to him about it, which was easy, and not to worry, which was hard.

I lay awake all that night, listening for him to wake up and slip down for another drink, find his jugs empty, and go berserk. I was coiled like a spring, ready to leap out my bedroom window at the first sound of slamming doors or breaking furniture. I finally dozed off at dawn, but I heard later what transpired. I was asleep, with Mother in the kitchen cooking grits and sausage, when Daddy made his first trip of the day downstairs for a “hair of the dog.” In a matter of seconds he stormed upstairs again.

“Something wrong, Bill?” Mother asked him.

“You know, don’t you?” he hollered. “So where the hell is it?”

“While you were sleeping,” she said calmly, stirring her grits, “your daughter poured it all out in the pasture.”

Daddy’s mouth dropped open. “Wha—why would she do such a thing?”

Mother turned from the stove and looked him straight in the eye. “Why do you think?”

Of course, he knew the answer, so that was the end of their brief conversation about our dead elephant.

It would be nice to say that morning marked the end of his drinking, but it didn’t. Daddy left the house and drove away, probably over to a drinking buddy’s to get his Sunday morning miracle cure. I made sure to stay out of his way as he came and went that day, though Mother assured me he was too shocked to even discuss the matter, let alone punish me for the deed. That night we could hear him in his workshop, banging and hammering. Still waiting for the ax to fall, I imagined he was knocking together a cheap coffin to dispose of my lifeless body once he’d killed me, and after he went to bed I snuck down there again to see. He had tightened the hinges and attached Yale locks to the upper and lower doors of that cabinet where the jugs were kept. With all the doors sealed up tight, it was a pretty safe bet he’d made another trip to Lem’s that afternoon with a trunkload of empty jugs, and brought them back filled. I was clearly fighting a losing battle.

Still, I reckoned we both knew where we stood on the subject of moonshine after that. I never poured his liquor out again, even when I discovered where he kept the keys to the cabinet, and he never invited me to go with him to Lem’s anymore. He never did quit drinking either, till he got too old and sick, which doesn’t really count. But he hasn’t said a word to me about that night, not to this very day. Since we both knew where we stood, wasn’t nothin’ left to say.