The Road Taken (17 page)

She was there and she wasn’t there. Part of her was watching whatever she could see from her fetal position, stunned by all the activity, relieved that someone was going to do something for her. Her parents answered questions for someone with a clipboard, and after a while a man came by and wheeled her into a room and put her into a hospital bed, and a nurse gave her Empirin, which miraculously made the headache go away. Her parents, banished now, had disappeared. She was alone.

Not exactly alone. In the other bed there was a girl about her age, who was sobbing. “I can’t move my arms,” the girl kept saying. “How will I do anything anymore?”

Ginger surreptitiously moved her own arms and hands, relieved and a little guilty that she had been saved from that too. But what were they going to do about her legs? She was too miserable and frightened to think of anything comforting to say, and turned her face to the wall.

She lay in her hospital bed for three days with a fever, sometimes sleeping. Her parents were not allowed to see her because she was contagious, and she was too weak to protest that she had been living with them all this time and they hadn’t gotten it from her. Hospitals turned you into a vegetable, made you dependent. People in authority brought medicine, food, bedpans, dressed and undressed you, washed you, told you what to do. On top of all that she couldn’t move her legs, so she couldn’t get out of bed and she was in their power. Ginger could not remember ever being so depressed, and she wondered if it was a symptom of the illness or the actual helplessness that made her feel that her life was over.

As soon as the fever was gone a therapist, in that same pink uniform Ginger had worn such a short time ago at the other hospital where she worked—where she had been the healthy one taking care of other people—came into her room wheeling a big canister with steam coming out of it. She took hot packs out of it with tongs, and arranged them around Ginger’s legs. The hot packs had the smell of wet wool, which they were, wool that had been soaked in boiling water and wrung out. Under that steamy moist wool there was finally the blessed relief of pain so she could relax again for the first time in what seemed like forever.

They brought the hot packs almost continuously for the next few days, and finally her legs straightened out, although she still couldn’t move them. Then they took her on a stretcher into a room where there was a huge tank with a whirlpool in it. They lowered her into the warm swirling water and it felt wonderful. She began to understand that although she couldn’t move her legs she would still have all her feeling. That was what polio did; it was not like a spinal cord injury, it was its own thing, destroying nerve cells near the spinal cord but not the spinal cord itself.

Ginger had a wheelchair now, and a nurse put it near the window so she could wave at her parents down there in the street. “Why can’t they come up?” she demanded.

“They could carry the disease out to someone else,” the nurse said.

“So could you.”

A doctor came to examine her, accompanied by a different nurse. “Her legs are completely in flail,” he said. What a strange word. Flailing? Flopping?

“What does that mean?” Ginger asked, fixing him with a fierce look so he would answer her. She had already discovered that many medical people talked above her and around her as if she wasn’t there or couldn’t hear or understand.

“No muscle activity,” he said. The nurse was writing it down on Ginger’s chart.

Like cooked spaghetti, Ginger thought. The feeling of unreality that had touched her when she first realized she had polio came back.

“We’re going to send you home and start you on physical therapy,” he said, finally looking into her face, as if she were more than just damaged legs.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Will it work?”

“We’ll do the best we can.”

The best we can, she thought.

The girl in the next bed had gone home, her arms no better, and had been replaced by a very ill younger girl who didn’t move at all. The curtains around her bed had been pulled, and then to Ginger’s surprise two people who seemed to be the girl’s parents arrived, their faces covered with surgical masks. They went behind the curtains and she could hear the mother sobbing. Then they left, and a few minutes later the orderly who had brought Ginger into her room took the girl away, the sheet over her face, and Ginger realized she had died.

She had never seen anyone die before, and she hadn’t seen it this time either. It had simply happened. The girl was there and then she disappeared. My life is not over, Ginger told herself then. No matter what happens, I will fight.

At last she saw her own parents again, in the lobby of the hospital when she was released to their care. She had a wheelchair, her father had brought the family car, and an orderly showed him how to fold the wheelchair so he could put it into the seat beside Ginger. How will I be able to do that myself? she wondered nervously. I’m not strong enough. If physical therapy didn’t fix her legs, would it make her arms so powerful that they could do everything else? Fold and unfold wheelchairs, pull herself up to go to the toilet, to bathe? Walk with crutches? But therapy
would
fix her legs. She had to believe that.

When they got to the house Uncle Hugh and Joan were standing on the sidewalk watching the car drive up. Then Ginger saw that her parents had installed a wooden ramp for her leading down to the entrance of Uncle Hugh’s room. “You two can switch rooms just for now,” her mother said. “The stairs. . . .”

“Uncle Hugh . . . ?”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve already moved some of my things.”

“How do you feel, anyway?” Joan said. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too. You have no idea how much.” Her sister would never know that she had completely forgotten about her, about everyone but her parents, reduced to infancy. Ginger wondered if the polio had temporarily affected her brain. “How is Peggy?”

“She’s fine,” Rose said, “and she said she’s really sorry she can’t come to see you, but she’s afraid because of the children. I told her we’d call her tonight if you felt up to it.”

“Are people going to be afraid of me now?”

“Well, but no one knows anything about polio,” Rose said, looking stricken. “It’s so contagious.”

“But I’m not contagious anymore.”

“I know, dear. It’s all right.”

“Better safe than sorry,” her father said. “But we know better, don’t we.” He put his arm around Joan.

They all think she’s brave to come near me, Ginger thought, and felt a lump in her throat. How long am I going to be a pariah? First lethal, then helpless. Her father put her into the wheelchair and Rose pushed it down the ramp into Ginger’s new room. Her books were there, and there were fresh flowers in a vase on the dresser. She forced a smile.

“When do you think the visiting nurses will have me walking again?she asked.

“We aren’t going to get you home therapy,” Rose said. “You need more. Your father and I have made arrangements for you to go to Warm Springs. We were lucky to get you in. It’s the best rehabilitation center in the country.” Of course everyone had heard of Warm Springs, Georgia. It was the place President Roosevelt had founded. “You’ll go at the end of the week.”

“For how long?”

“You’ll be there for from six months to a year, but you won’t miss any school because they have a high school there,” her mother said brightly.

A year? I’m only sixteen, too young to go so far away from home, Ginger thought in dismay. But then she realized she had no choice. She wasn’t old enough to leave her family, now when she needed them more than ever before, but she wasn’t old enough for her life to be over either. At Warm Springs she would get the best care. They would help her. “Thanks for the loan of your room, Uncle Hugh,” Ginger said brightly. “But don’t worry, I won’t be using it when I get back, you’ll see.”

Her mother turned away, but not before Ginger noticed that her eyes were full of tears.

Chapter Twenty

The rehabilitation center at Warm Springs was unlike anything Ginger had anticipated. Deep blue skies, dark green Georgia pines, red clay roads, purple wisteria; and, although its hundreds of wooded acres housed every kind of modern medical facility, it had the feel and atmosphere of a college campus.

Like a campus it was laid out in a rectangle of low, white stone buildings. There was a dining room, a recreation room, a theater where movies were shown free three times a week, a school, a large heated pool and dressing rooms, a brace shop where appliances were made for the disabled (which everybody was), a library, a children’s ward, and even an apartment where a housewife could practice home management skills. Everything was nicely decorated.

Ginger’s room was in a dormitory with other teenage patients. Outside, on the campus, there were “push boys,” friendly and flirtatious, teenagers like her, who lived in town and had been hired to be always available to push wheelchairs wherever the patients wanted to go. There was a daily schedule of work: exercises with a therapist in the famous warm water of the pool or in the deep, claustrophobic Hubbard Tank, which she was not afraid of anymore, manipulation on a treatment table, land exercises on equipment to learn how to walk with braces and even climb stairs, and often there were patients watching and cheering the others on. Rehabilitation here was almost like a team sport. And there were parties, concerts, nice dinners, cute boys, romances, sex, and gossip.

But we are all damaged,
she thought,
that’s why we’re here.
And despite the cheerfulness and laughter, she could never get that out of her mind. She knew the name of every muscle in her body now, the ones that would never work anymore and the ones that might take over for them. In the mornings when Ginger woke up there was always just one moment when she forgot she could not get up and walk, when the warm summer sun in her eyes reminded her only that there was a new day with things to be done. And then it was real again.

When she learned how to get out of bed and put herself into her wheelchair without assistance it was a triumph. Then she learned how to get by herself from the wheelchair into a regular chair, and into a car. They told her she would go to the theater, but she wondered who would take her. Nobody would want to date her now.

It was fall. Ginger looked at the pine trees outside her dormitory window and thought about New York. There was a tree outside her bedroom window in their town house, and she had always liked watching the seasons change in miniature, just for her. The leaves didn’t turn here. She looked at her legs, already smaller, thin and dangling in her new metal braces, and at her arms and shoulders, by now stronger and more developed, larger, and remembered when she had thought she had the body of a ballerina. All that was over too. When she had arrived she had been impatient to get well and leave. Now she knew she would eventually leave but she would never be the way she’d thought she would be. She was afraid to go home.

Outside on that busy campus there were so many wheelchairs they might have been an army. There were kids much worse off than she was, some in full body braces, some with utensils attached to their arms because they couldn’t use their hands, and even ones almost like her, but who couldn’t sit without discomfort because their gluteus muscles were gone. But despite all this tragedy, everywhere there were smiles, friendliness, joking, the sense of community. If people broke down and wept, and how could they not, you never saw it. Each one, in his or her way, had managed to make time stop. They all knew they were never going to be in a place like this again, where everyone was alike. Here, no matter how badly off, everyone was the norm. Nobody stared or turned away. Nobody talked over your head as if just because you were lower you were also deaf. Everyone understood.

Outside I’ll be a freak, Ginger thought. We will all be.

She called her parents every few days and pretended to be happy. In a way, though, she
was
happy, because every little thing she learned to do on her own was a triumph, because every moment was filled with either useful activity or social life, and because she had made so many friends. But even these friends would be taken away from her when she left, she knew that. Scattered all over the United States they would go back to the real world and try to fit in. Somehow it didn’t seem fair that each one of them would be alone. How could anyone, Ginger wondered, even her devoted parents, or sympathetic Grandma, or her worldly unconventional uncle, or her sisters whom she’d known all her life, ever know what it was really like for her? She very much doubted that any of the boys who had admired her in high school would want to ask her out now.

She was young, and healthy in every way except one. Such a big way. . . .

But there was a boy here she liked. He had been at Warm Springs longer than she had, and he was in a wheelchair, too, with paralyzed legs. As soon as Ginger met him she realized that he understood everything. He was her age, sixteen, but somehow, perhaps because of what he had been through, or because of his nature, he seemed older. He was the first boy her age Ginger had found interesting.

She had met him when they sat next to each other at the movies. The movie was
Gone With the Wind,
which they had all been too young to see the first time, and she thought it was painfully romantic. “Scarlett was such a fool,” she told him when it was over, “and yet you have to admire her spirit.” That broke the ice, they started to talk, and then they went to have coffee together.

His name was Christopher Riley, and he was from Boston. He was an Irish Catholic boy named after a saint, but one look at him and Ginger knew right away he was a rogue. He had greenish eyes and curly sandy-colored hair, sensuous lips, and a turned-up nose with a dusting of freckles on it. Standing up, he would have been tall. The minute she saw him come into the theater she was oddly attracted to his strong forearms and his long, graceful fingers, the way he wheeled himself around so expertly, as if it were only a game. At the coffee shop when he needed to cross his legs he plucked a piece of his trouser leg between his thumb and forefinger and flipped the leg over the other one with a casual nonchalance she admired. She knew his leg muscles were more atrophied than hers were in order for him to be able to do that so easily, but she also knew that hers would be that way too eventually. She supposed she would also be casual, but it seemed hard to imagine. She thought he was very brave.

“Try this,” he said, putting a piece of coffee cake into her mouth. Then he smiled, and she smiled back. There was something extremely sensual about his feeding her, and they both felt it.

“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” he asked.

“Finish high school. Go on to medical school if they’ll let me, and become a doctor.”

“No! So am I!”

“You’re going to be a doctor too?” Ginger exclaimed.

“I’ll probably do research,” Christopher said. “You can sit down a lot in research, and also I want to solve medical mysteries and save an inordinate amount of people. That’s all, just a minor little ambition.”

“That’s just what I want to do.”

During that first long evening they made lists of things they had in common, things they liked and disliked, things they felt, and they told each other secrets. Ginger told him how she had walked all night when she knew she had polio, and how that had probably made her case worse than it would have been, and Christopher understood and said that even though it had been a dumb thing to do it represented survival and he was surprised he hadn’t done the same thing himself.

“It was the last time I walked,” Ginger said.

“Then that night was worth it.”

They looked at each other. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him, and felt a little shiver of excitement. “They say I might be able to be on crutches sometimes,” Ginger said. “But I’ll always have the chair.”

“Me too.”

“Everyone wants to be on crutches. It’s like you’ve advanced into the real world. Just to walk . . . ! But you know, I find a wheelchair a lot more efficient.”

“So do I. Still, you should try both.”

“Oh, I will,” Ginger said. “And if I have crutches I’ll put ribbons on them.”

“Good for you.”

“It won’t change what they are. But I’ll do it anyway.”

“I bet you will.”

“Would you ask me out if you saw that? Colored ribbons? My bravery sign? Telling everyone who’s sorry for me to go to hell?”

“I’d ask you out anyway.”

I think I love him, Ginger thought.

“There’s a lot of sex going on here, I guess you’ve heard,” he said with a mischievous grin.

“Oh, I’ve heard.”

“In the bushes. The third bush on the left after you leave the dining hall is a popular place.”

“A girlfriend of mine told me she and a boy stopped the elevator between floors and did something or other,” Ginger said. “I can’t imagine they had much time.”

“They had time,” he said. “Everybody thought the elevator was out of order.”

“You knew about it?”

“It wasn’t the first occasion.”

She had also heard, since there was an abundance of gossip here, mostly sexual, that people used Saran Wrap to make condoms, but of course she didn’t mention it. She had only the vaguest idea of how you would keep such a contraption on. At home every unmarried girl was a virgin or pretended to be, and a pregnancy without a husband to make you respectable was every girl’s worst fear. “This place certainly doesn’t sound like home,” Ginger said.

“Not the home I know.”

They looked at each other.

“No rules,” he said.

“Hooray for no rules,” she said lightly. “Sometimes I think I’m dreaming.

A few months ago she wouldn’t have believed she could be talking about sex like this with a boy, particularly one she had just met; but somehow here, and now, with this boy, it seemed right, safe, accepted. Like every girl she knew, Ginger believed in love at first sight. She had been fantasizing about the unknown lover for years, but she thought how amazing it was that just when she thought her romantic life was over before it had begun, she should have met this devastatingly attractive boy, here of all places.

Their hands inched together along the tabletop and then their fingers touched. I really do love him, she thought. He’s gorgeous, he’s perceptive, he’s easy to talk to, he likes what I like, he wants to be a doctor too, and he’ll always understand about being different.

“Do you know why they let us do what we want?” he said.

“Why?”

“They want us to feel normal. It’s their way of getting us back into the mainstream. But being here is really a kind of vacation, Ginger. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

His smile faded. “What we all know is that when we get out of here and go home we’re going to be freaks.”

There, he had said it.
Freaks:
what Ginger had always thought, had always known. The world she had left behind for this brief time was too conformist; everyone had to be complete. “I won’t leave,” she said. “I’ll stay here forever, I’ll work here. I’ll learn physical therapy.”

“We’re sixteen. We have to go home.”

His hand, when he took hers, was strong and comforting, as she had known it would be. For the first time since all of this had happened to her, Ginger began to cry. The few people in the coffee shop ignored her and let her have her moment. She was shaking with sobs, and Christopher put his arm around her.

“I wish you lived on my street,” she said. “I wish we went to school together. I wish you were my best friend.”

“I could still be your best friend,” Christopher Riley said.

“It’s so unfair. Just this, just us, just everything.”

When her grief subsided he pulled a handful of tissues out of his pocket and dabbed gently at her tears. “Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Where? In what stupid, perfect world?”

“Well, we’re here. Could we start with here?”

“Yes,” Ginger said.

They wheeled out of the coffee shop side by side, as if they were taking a walk—by themselves, without calling the push boys to help them—and they went to a secluded place they both knew about and he kissed her under the stars. The breeze rustled the pine trees and carried the scent to her with the sound. She had never been kissed like that; she felt it running through her body like electricity. His lips were full and soft and firm, and not wet like the boys she had known, even when he opened his mouth. He must have been practicing kissing for years, Ginger thought, and then she stopped thinking.

Their chairs impeded them and it was awkward, but they were able to hug and to feel one another. When he put his hands under her blouse Ginger did not stop him. When he touched her nipples she felt it clear down between her legs and could hardly catch her breath. When he tugged at the elastic of her panties she helped him. His fingers were caressing her then, inside and out, and she pressed against his hand, feeling waves of pleasure that were a revelation. She was an innocent girl of her time, despite everything, despite what her mother thought, and she had never masturbated. It was what the husband was supposed to do to you. To do it to yourself was embarrassing. She did not want Christopher Riley ever to stop.

He unzipped his pants with his other hand and took out his long, hard penis, white in the moonlight, and put her hand on it. Just holding it was enough; he was a boy, after all, and he ejaculated right away. He had more tissues for that. In a little while they did it all over again, and that time he showed her how to rub.

She couldn’t believe she was doing something like this. For years, it seemed, she had been warned about getting “carried away,” and she had thought it was parental propaganda. But all she wanted was to be with him, to be with him forever. “Carried away” was sex and it was love.

After that night they met as often as possible, and everyone was aware they were a couple. Since Ginger was determined that carried away would not be allowed to be the same as “going all the way,” they did everything with their lips and hands. He taught her things she had never read about, and she told him to do the things she had discovered she liked. Despite the virtual absence of rules, you couldn’t bring a person of the opposite sex into your bedroom, so everything she did with Christopher Riley happened out of doors, even when it got too cold. Once they tried the stop-the-elevator trick, just to see how it would be, but it made her nervous. They were Romeo and Juliet, they were fated for tragedy, and they were insatiable.