Mom opened her arms for a hug. I broke free, and for once, my mother dropped her hands and let me go.
That night, as I lay in bed, I knew that a baby really could kill someone.*
* While writing this book, I watched Heidi nearly as many times as we had back then. I was startled to realize that right in the middle of our favorite scene is the sudden loss of a golem girl. Klara’s resurrection takes place (of course) in the middle of the Sesemanns’ Christmas party. Klara’s doll is very large and very blond, a doppelgänger of Heidi herself. The housekeeper (the subtly named Fräulein Rottenmeier) is given the doll to hold. Klara steps from her wheelchair and into her father’s arms. Just as the newly cured Klara crosses the floor, Rottenmeier drops the doll. It shatters on the ground.
When I was little, this scene left me aggrieved over the loss of a spectacular toy. Viewing Heidi now, I see how the doll lies forgotten and irrelevant as Klara strides toward health (and, not incidentally, toward puberty). The golem girl is a sacrifice that takes the place of Klara’s previous, “broken” body.
The dreaded parallel bars, circa the mid-1960s. You can see the boy walking toward the mirror.
CHAPTER 9
Aerobicide
“Come on, you can do it, one more. Good girl. And now one more. You aren’t leaving this table until you do ten. Keep that knee straight. Eight, nine…okay, now turn on your side.”
I rolled away from Mrs. Robinson and started my reps of ten leg lifts. We had physical therapy every day, from kindergarten to graduation; this time, my session overlapped with Melanie’s, right after third-grade geography. I was up on the table; Mel was red-faced and sweaty from being put through her paces on the floor. She splayed on the blue medicine ball while her physical therapist droned, “Balance, balance, balance.”
Mrs. Robinson helped me off the table and over to the parallel bars. Mel flashed a rueful grimace; she knew how much I dreaded this part of our routine. Parallel bars were two twelve-foot lengths of steel pipe, on supports about thirty inches off the ground. These formed a narrow pathway with a full-length mirror at the far end. I held on to the pipes and walked toward my own reflection, doing my best to avoid the handrails and to learn to walk smoothly. Mrs. Robinson barked, “Lift! Lift that foot! Stop dragging!” The mirror blared that my limp wasn’t going anywhere.
Condon School lacked anything like a gym, or any physical games whatsoever, so we kids invented our own sports. My favorite game was hallway racing. The upper hallways were long, straight shots with a steep staircase at either end. A race team consisted of one wheelchair pilot and one walkie. The walkie’s job was to get a good running start and then hop onto the back. I loved to feel the wind on my face as the pilot’s hands blurred on the wheels. At the last minute, I’d drag my shoes so we’d reach the staircase without launching into a downhill slalom.
But my mother viewed the world through hazard-orange glasses. Most Condon kids were taught to ride a bike in the PT room, using extra-large training wheels. Nope, said Mom: I could fall off and hurt my back. There was a swimming pool in the basement, prettily tiled in celadon green. The pool had a crane that lifted you in and out of the water, and a ratio of one instructor per swimmer. I begged for lessons. Nope, said Mom, what if the instructor left me to sink like a forgotten tea bag? When it came to any conceivable physical risk, my mother’s vocabulary shrank to nope, nope, nope.
I needed someone who could show me how to be a kid. Luckily, I had Julie.
A classroom at Condon (not mine) circa the mid-1960s
I followed Julie’s willowy beacon into every new grade. Everything about her was glamorous, even her disability. Julie had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis for which she received “gold shots” directly into her joints. This only added to her luster—who else had a condition that was treated with actual precious metals? Arthritis gave her a distinctive, gliding lope, as if going for a Girl Scout badge in stilt-walking.
Whatever she loved, I loved too. She was passionate about the Monkees, so our lunchtimes were spent filling our notebooks with hand-copied lyrics and trying to decipher their meanings: For Pete’s sake, does he want her to go to Clarksville or not? In 1968, Julie decked herself in peace-sign necklaces and bell-bottoms so encrusted with patches and embroidery that they qualified as light armor. We competed to grow our hair long, like Peggy Lipton’s on The Mod Squad; in 1970, we agreed that Julie was a perfect Laurie Partridge. Julie encouraged me to noodge my parents for guitar lessons, even though, unlike her, there was no sign I had talent. I was defeated by the tuning fork.
The art room was the only place where I could be the leader, not a follower. I liked to open the glass doors where the paints and modeling materials were kept and breathe in the white-bread-and-salt tang of the kindergarteners’ Play-Doh, mingled with the basement pong of wet gray clay. I loved the slickness of paint on a brush, the shivery scrape of pencil on sheets of crappy newsprint. Every kid loves to make art, but I noticed that I got more attention and special praise. People would look at my work, and then look at me with a changed expression.
* * *
—
Cincinnati of the 1960s was a fractured palette of Black*1 and white neighborhoods, as sharply defined as houndstooth check. Thirty to forty percent of Condon’s students were African American, an unusual degree of school integration for the time.
A chain-link fence divided our parking lot from that of Rockdale Elementary, where all the students were Black. At recess, both schools emptied outside to play in the parking lots that were our playgrounds. I knew that some of my classmates, like Larry Freeman, lived nearby. I wondered if those scuffles were harder for Larry, if he had siblings or neighbors amid the bottle throwers. If he longed to jump the fence.
God knows, I was no paragon of understanding. I was as awkward and incompetent as any outsider, particularly around my classmates with verbal impairments. I’d freeze when trying to talk to Darlene, whose speech was affected by cerebral palsy. I’d mumble a cursory “Hi uh huh” and run away. I rarely thought about what it was like to be Darlene, seated at the back of the class, fighting to be heard through an entire answer while even the teacher bunny-hopped over her deliberate words. But Julie had patience for Darlene’s raucous laugh, for Shirley, whose fingertips danced on the Braille book open on her lap. I stayed terrified that I’d say the wrong thing, or simply not enough of the right thing.
In seventh grade, Tommy joined our class. Somehow, he ended up at Condon rather than at St. Rita’s School for the Deaf. Tommy was gorgeous, so I made a half-hearted attempt to learn the ASL alphabet, a challenge that Julie approached with the fervor of Sir Edmund Hillary on Everest. In no time it was Julie and Tommy, wooing each other with flying fingers. The entire school had a crush on their crush.