When we love anything too much, there's no way out. It's winter. I, Indigo, named after the
color blue sky our mother, the painter, best loved, walk hands knived into pockets. Along a stony beach. I am eleven. More
than anything, I want to write. The Hudson is slick, brightens like opaque orange, then darkens. I am wearing a cape. I
shut my eyes and remember a morning transparent; I play Mozart on the piano, translucent as when I play Rameau. The Baltic
silvers. Circles of snow geese climb the sky. The Dürer angel in our hall is Boy-girl. Androgynous like all angels,
the beauty of a woman, the prowess of a male.
***
Imagine bending in a fairytale to gather up the thousand shards of broken mirror. Without cutting
yourself. That was our life in the years following my illness.
Pockets, you are holding onto your childhood: And why not? You take and shake, frowning,
the big bisque doll head to talk to her.
You have "funny tummy," you tell your mum over the phone when you arrive to live with me, nervous
that your clear skin is getting rough after three weeks in the desert. "Pears soap," you smile, "is what I need."
***
In a photo from childhood that you show me, there
are the three nesting spoons. Down the
block is the primary school the color of mutton like mine. The moon is flat tin. The wallpaper is somber roses and trains,
spinach-green your windowpane gleams, a dark mirror in which to catch your face. You rub a steam hole against frost. "The
house had
good bones," you say, using your hands like the French. Those hands hold onto childhood. The dusting board
is covered with flour from the cakes Mother baked.
The oven is warm. I remember my sweetheart's little sister Patricia was spared polio because
swaddled, brought home in an epidemic, like all newborns she wore a mask. She had the protective halo around her I was denied.
"We need a fire-bottle," I laugh pointing to my feet, which are purple-blue. My lover shakes
her head. There are aspects of childhood I cherish: corners filled with lamplight, cradling Chel, who is my own little sister,
making music, two adolescent angels. But angels are ageless, aren't they? You are
safer holding on. In this little
ice age, everyone is looking for love. Sky is lowering, faultlessly ticking the clock of time in the sky, the sun sinking
into a Canadian winter making me think of the ticking on a pillowcase. One day there will be a space in the sky. Mother
will fly through it. After polio, I dreamt of flight.
Today my wheelchair ran over my favorite pearl, outlined in gold: the pearl head cracked.
It was my favorite gift from Grandmother Tisanne. It dropped onto the marble bathroom floor. Backing up I crushed it, and
bending, watched the rainbow-whitish covering come off in my fingers, tissue-thin, vulnerable as human skin. What if,
like breaking a mirror, this bodes bad luck? Just before I caught polio, our dining room mirror shattered.
The end of childhood was desolate. New Rochelle's downtown grid was composed in 1950 of the Presbyterian
church, the lingerie store facing north, looking over hip roofs in the poorer part of town. Nell was my bosom buddy. Sold
ecru and tea-colored under-things. We looked into those plate-glass windows reflecting girls in midriff, a stick of
Tangee
lipstick bought at the Five & Dime. Saturday afternoon was stifling. Shut the song birds into burial, whirled in an incinerator
like flakes of feathered ash, till autumn. When wood stoves were set burning and lamplight came to save us again.
Polio struck in July, 1951. Pockets of hope, pockets of depression alternated that June downtown.
Deep into night, the community shifted, restless, in darkness like stabled horses settling with uneasy muscles into their
mews.
***
Paralysis. "My first polio!" the pediatrician said when he slipped the slide under the microscope
with a drop of my spinal fluid. I'd had a spinal tap, the only child to have one and not cry, the nurse smiled. (Mother
heard this, not me.)
One thousand shards reflect our lives. My late childhood featured a bed with crank-hold. A nurse
in starched white cap and apron could raise or lower my body. Nostalgia for the hospital haunts me.
Only one who has endured a long hospitalization, perhaps particularly as a child, knows this.
The nostalgia rises with a palpable scent, like hyacinth or magnolia or even rose, dried, old and mulchy. The ward fills
with blue winter light, smells of ammonia, carts being wheeled in with thermometer in metal cups.
At the foot of the bed hung the case history held by clipboards. It haunted me most at twilight.
Sister Kenny was the Australian outback nurse who thought up hot wool wound round stiff limbs, Hubbard tanks of scalding water
with the thermometer at the foot of that stainless steel shape, and limb-stretching— done: when the smell of starched
cotton mixes with wax and ammonia to create vertigo. At the head of the cot on metal nightstand stood a little pleated cup
with medication beside the eternal everlasting light of a tin cup.
Extraterrestrial, like a whooping crane, Mrs. Staunton came to me. She had long legs, our beloved
night nurse, the one beloved in a world of strangers. She unfolded like a kite. While you roll your ball of water, your hoop
of water, sweetheart, missing your childhood, I'll continue to fold and refold years in their pattern like starched linen.
I
will go back and braid the lamp-tassels, dark, silky in our living room. Blue-bottle sky, like the cartilage around
a heart overlooking the water towers of West Side mid-town Manhattan where I was brought home.
Sweetheart, you can talk to the doll head but the doll head of bisque is dead. I will turn out
the light, return my childhood to its ward where the globes blink like fish. I will shove back in our top drawer, a pocket,
a detailed map of downtown New Rochelle with the circle I have drawn in blue crayon around the church where Nell's father
was organist and where I last walked. Nell was my best friend.
Now that the head of the duck from grandmother has cracked,
What will befall me? Will my trophies
be stolen? The small Canadian flag with red maple leaf on crayon, the lock of my sister Chel's hair I saved when pressed
into service to trim her bangs, which I saved in a brown paper bag.
After polio, the pocket of
my childhood was turned inside out. All my toys were fumigated
but miraculously this brown bag containing my sister's hair, her auburn locks remained. The fumigators left it behind as
trash. In the drawer I lay
the very last letter I received from Jake, my soldier sweetheart, that final inexplicable
afternoon I spent walking. My uncle had sailed into New Rochelle harbor. I leapt out of a sickbed, saying "
Oooh, can
I go?"
I did not like my uncle. He reminded me of Uriah Heap. He was miserly; everything about him phony,
yet I leapt at this unique opportunity. It seemed that day on the small motor-boat, intensely blue sky pouring down like cobalt,
as if I could walk upon the water in climbing heat, miraging pain in my spine, the virus already in my myelin sheath, the
invisible killer that would paralyze me, and which climbed as the sun sank the final sunlit day of my ambulatory childhood
(a week after the mirror shattered). I felt too ill to finish my lemonade. So the ultimate day of childhood scrolled, inscribed,
written in indelible India black ink went down.
The Dürer angel Mother and Father have hung in the entry hall glows like a flake of ash, a crumb
of fire. When we love anything too much, we are goners. In glacial Canadian winter, Pockets, my love, you tote home a stack
of children's library books, laughing: You give me back a simpler world, fragile yet durable as lungs.
I let mine go: Parchment kite floats on sky, inscribed by the calligraphy of my life, translucent
like Rameau's music I play on the sepia piano. The kite with my history is almost transparent when I play Mozart, during the
long hard years of rehabilitation, learning crutch-walking on braces, climbing stairs backwards. The image of those years
includes me playing music often, depressing the pedal and black and white keys. The pitch-black, the ivory. In the kite are
the ineradicable roads etched by memory, those that intersect and those going off the globe, and those few that collide and
bump miraculously like stars. Pockets, sweetheart with your dimple and your European upbringing, you brought me my last day
walking and I hold with careful hands, shake it up like a snowball, till I grin a clown's grin at the blizzard.
All homecomings are symbolic. They draw arterial blood. Silence, the eyes become archangels resting
upon the girl in the acute phase of polio. The silver diver of the iron lung—that eerie cylindrical shape—stands
waiting in the corner of my room in isolation.
Since I was a child in a hospital for half a year at age twelve, homecomings—always intense
for me, during the war, throughout the divorce of our parents—intensified tenfold. My memories are like nests of measuring
spoons. They had a voltage that could run through me as flame runs through the eye of a needle, as loss runs through one parting
with a child to death. They seared me at homecoming when I saw our lamp burning in our window. Luminous conflict painted me;
both to be home and to be back on the ward with the kids, coated me like titanium white paint.
There is a terrible secret that any child who has been in a ward knows: Such a child can wait
forever. So I would stand on street curbs in December while Marcelle, our mother, tried to hail a cab. They hardly made
money on a kid on crutches and her mother, desperate to get in from the cold: Clambering in and out of the Checker cab with
the jump seats took too much time. I felt I became a statue child, so frozen. So one waited forever for orgasm under the
white sheets in hospital as other hospitalized children do.
I also learned in the hospital days that hope is the way through despair, not around it. No detours
exist. Hadn't little sister Chel and I decided, if we ever felt suicidal as children, we'd make ourselves very thirsty.
We'd live for the glass of water.
***
"Pockets," I say tonight putting my arm around her shoulder, brushing back her dark hair, her
bangs so like Rachel's. "Let's open the big family photograph album tonight." It falls open, chronicling the years of our
lives, telling the truths of our laughter and our tears, yet, even then, not touching the surface of the depth of our suffering.
What resulted was a double exposure: one image placed upon the other. What comes back to me as I try to focus on my ninth
summer, climbing a tree is something entirely other: Karenine, my cubicle-mate, dying of bone cancer is a dream photograph,
since of course I never took one. Bridey, the Irish washerwoman, held up the little pocket mirror and blessed herself. The
girl had ceased breathing.
We shut the photograph album and pull the beadchain on the light.
***
I lie in the dark, for hours, chafing my legs in my hands trying to get them warm. Then I lie
awake another sixty minutes reflecting. Although I will be sixty-five at my next birthday—it is the Pension birthday,
sixty-five—that young girl who died, Karenine, is always with me. I move objects like paper cup, pleated, white, from
right to left hand balancing, as I wheel to the night stand because the movement of two toes on my left foot were the only
muscles that ever returned.
I am symmetrical, bilateral, and able to think of myself in these balancing acts with wings. I
glance up at the towel rack where I have hung a chalk blue pullover with one white snowflake embroidered above the breast.
I wore a sweater like that when I was developing knobs for breasts, age twelve, 1951, the night I was brought home—Thanksgiving.
I think of this one whirling flake as a ski-spoke with needles incising me.
Lying there nights, after the master switch to the ward was dimmed, I was able to
dream up a girl just my age, 12, whom I called Holly. She longed to go home for Christmas so she made a small doll with a
poinsettia head, round clothespin face, feather feet. Holly spoke to Sophia, her doll. "I miss them, Sophia," she whispered
in the chill night. "The milk bottles on our back stoop, the radiators banging on in morning." A miracle happened. On the
third night one word came from the wooden face with rose cheeks. That word was Home. Holly leant in close to catch the syllables
but they fell away from her. Only that one word was left upon bleak midnight hanging like the frosty breath of an angel.
Home. Mother must often have felt in those hospital days when I was incarcerated, How will I ever get through to
see my child again? Will I tell this to Pockets one day soon? Will I tell her how I loved my father? It is earlier than
1951. It is 1944.
I was protected from Mother Marcelle that last visit our father paid me. Old Patriarch, Abba,
out of the Bible. We allowed ourselves to be gentle with each other this one time. "We didn't know what to do with our brilliant
child," he said to Ava. Was he speaking about me? "Was I bad?" I asked him, remembering the incriminating words Marcelle
had hurled at me, "I hope the first truck you meet at the corner runs you over." Breath drawn, I waited for his response.
"You were," he said, "A very good little girl."
***
The war-office . . . the milky swirl of his cigarette smoke . . . that too I adored
. . . its browns. The doctor, a major in khaki, who would come into civvies, exchanging his major's stars and U.S.A. insignia
for the white frock coat and become again "Dr. Strongin," civilian smiling through the ashen mask of exhaustion.
Pockets, listen. When we opened the photo album tonight, I saw clips of my Father in his herringbone
tweed lifting me at age twelve, transferring me into the car from a wooden wheelchair. How could I tell my parents I hated
leaving Karenine? She had promised not to die without me around. She did wait. I did not catch polio; it caught me. Patricia,
an infant, my lover's youngest sibling, flashes thru my mind,
la Precsiosa, the baby of my beloved Pocket's family.
Suddenly I am stabbed through the heart, envying baby Patricia. She benefited by what I was denied and what twisted my life,
or drove it in a spiral heavenward—depending on what way you look at it. I wanted to be a writer.
Pockets, I don't
have to tell you what you taught me about life in Paris: "I must learn to knife-fight and not cry every day until I die."
—By Lynn Strongin
Read more about Lynn on her Poems page.
Another version of "Holding onto My Childhood" appeared in Artistry of Life under the title,
"Catching Polio," 2006.
