“I don’t think I’m ready,” I stammered.
She just smiled as she secured the crutches to the back of my wheelchair.
When the elevator doors opened on my floor, my favorite nurse was there.
“Congratulations!”
That evening, she helped me get ready to surprise my parents. She picked the loosest pair of pants I had and put them on me, pulling them over my braces while I lay in bed on my back. She assured me the braces hardly showed when I stood leaning on the crutches, full of trepidation. I waited at the door of my room until she announced, under her breath, as she quickly walked away, “They’re here.”
I saw my parents heading toward my room, and I started stepping, right crutch, left foot, left crutch, right foot, very carefully, trying not to shake, hoping not to fall. My parents stopped in the middle of the hallway and watched me. I got within a few feet of them. My mother had tears in her eyes, and my father had a big smile on his face.
“Look how tall you are!” my mother exclaimed.
Then my father spoke: “I’m sure before long you’ll be able to walk without those sticks.”
My heart sank. It had been so hard to learn to walk with crutches, and now he expected me to learn to walk without them? How was I ever going to do that? Can’t this be enough? I wanted to yell. But suddenly, I felt so exhausted. I knew I couldn’t walk back to my room. When I turned and saw the nurse had brought out my wheelchair, I was so grateful.
A few days after, I fell in PT and fractured my right knee. They sent me back to Blythedale for six weeks, to give my bone time to heal. I was grateful for the reprieve. Though I kept saying I couldn’t wait to get out, in all honesty the thought scared me. What was I going to do when I went home? What was I going to do in the “real world”?
5
THE REAL WORLD
“One thing you’ll do when you’re discharged is go to high school,” the hospital social worker kept telling me. And I did, when I finally left the hospital, if only for a few months, the last few months of my senior year. I went to Grover Cleveland High School in Brooklyn, wheelchair-accessible by 1960s standards. Access was through the basement and there was an elevator to get to the classrooms. Though I’d learned to walk with braces and crutches as well as I could, I had trouble with distances. So I used the wheelchair most of the time in school.
A dozen or so of us rode the “handicapped bus” every day and, when we didn’t have classes, we sat around in the “handicapped homeroom” with our teacher, Mr. Maloney. I quickly made friends with my disabled fellow students. I also quickly fell in love—with Frankie. He’d had polio but walked with braces and crutches much better than I did. Tall, with curly brown hair and deep-set eyes, he was the handsomest boy in the world. But he didn’t seem interested in me.
“What’s wrong with you?” Audrey shouted on the phone when I told her about Frankie. “Why do you have to fall in love with a handicapped boy? Why can’t you get a crush on a normal student?”
One day, Frankie and I found ourselves alone in homeroom. Everyone else was in class, and Mr. Maloney had gone to the rest room. I kept my eyes somewhere in the middle of page 57 of the biography of Madame Marie Curie and pretended I couldn’t feel Frankie’s eyes on me. Then he was beside me, his arm around my shoulders, his warm breath on my face and his lips finding mine. I kissed him back with all the passion and awkwardness of young love.
On the bus going home that day, Frankie sat next to me. I was beaming. I wanted everybody to know we were now “an item.” But that’s not what Frankie had in mind.
“You’re a beautiful girl. Even though you’re handicapped, you look good enough to attract normal guys. You know, I’ve gone out with two normal girls already. Don’t get me wrong… I really like you. You’re the most beautiful handicapped girl I know. But why should we settle for each other when we can both do better?”
I wanted to say, Frankie, I don’t think I could do better. You’re the handsomest boy I know, period. But who was I to argue? I tried to ignore Frankie after that revelation, and I stopped talking about him with Audrey. I never told her about his kiss.
Thanks to Mr. Maloney’s recommendation, I was admitted to St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens. The Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, a governmental agency that assisted disabled people in becoming employable, approved payment of full tuition. My father was so proud, he told everyone.
To be closer to the college, we moved to Queens. My father bought a house in Bayside. He’d worked hard to save enough for a down payment. “La nostra casetta,” he called it, “our little house.” My mother loved the backyard, where she planted rosebushes.
My father promised to buy me a car so I’d be able to drive from our new house to St. John’s, which wasn’t far. I’d been learning to drive with hand controls. The device, which could be applied to any car, was surprisingly simple. All I had to do was pull up on the lever to accelerate and push down to brake.
Audrey was accepted at Hofstra University, on Long Island. Hofstra had a better reputation than St. John’s, and was known to be easier to navigate in a wheelchair. Her parents would be paying Audrey’s tuition, higher than St. John’s, undoubtedly. She had gotten a car on her birthday: a Mustang—bright blue, to match her eyes.
“I’m so glad you live in Queens now,” she said the first time she drove to visit me. “I don’t think I’d trust myself to drive to Brooklyn.” But she looked so sure of herself behind that wheel, she probably could have driven not only to Brooklyn but to Manhattan and even to the Bronx. She came over two or three times a week. She’d blow the horn and I’d come out of the house and get in her car.
We rode around for hours. Northern Boulevard, Utopia Parkway, cruising along, back and forth. If we were in the mood to speed, we’d get on the Long Island Expressway, then get off at one exit, make a left turn, and get back on. Seeing us in the car, no one could tell we were handicapped. We were two hot chicks, a blonde and a brunette, out joyriding. Guys on the street whistled when we stopped at a light; from other cars, some men blew us kisses, while others made lewd remarks—the kind of behavior women in consciousness-raising groups around the country were calling offensive and demeaning.
Not us. Audrey and I soaked in every lustful look. We savored every obscene word.
I thought we were just having fun. But then Audrey would say, “All I have to do is park, get the chair out, and they’ll run the other way so fast! We’re both beautiful… we could have it all. Why do we have to be handicapped?”
I didn’t have an answer to that question, but I don’t think she expected one. She went on: “I don’t want to live as a handicapped woman. I want to be a real woman; I want a real life; I want happiness. Don’t you?” She did expect an answer to that.
I didn’t know how to argue with her. I nodded in sad agreement. Of course I wanted a real life. Of course I wanted happiness.
“Why do we have to be handicapped?” Audrey asked again. And sometimes she sighed and said, “We’d be better off dead.”
Whenever people said “better off dead” when talking about disability, I tried to shield myself by pretending I didn’t hear. But I couldn’t with Audrey.
“I hate when you say that! I don’t like the way we’re treated, but I don’t want us to be dead. That’s really scary!”
“Chicken!” Audrey muttered.
I got my own car when I started college. It was a brown secondhand