pills?”
She nodded, still smiling.
“Where did you get them?”
“From my mother. I ask her for one now and then, saying I can’t sleep. And I steal one or two when I get the chance. I’ve been hoarding them for months.” She spread them all out on her bed and started counting.
“How many do you think I’ll have to take to die?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think I have enough yet.” She shook her head.
Though still exhausted, I wasn’t sleepy anymore. “Would you really do it, Audrey?”
“Do you want to live, just to be treated like a leper?” She was good at answering a question with a question.
“The guys at the club weren’t treating us like lepers, Audrey.”
“Did any of them ask you for a date?” She had a point there. “Men notice us because we’re beautiful and act sexy. But that just makes us more freakish, don’t you see? When they’re attracted to us, men feel like they’re not normal, and they resent us for that. I guess if we were homely, things would be simpler.”
She was playing with the pills, scooping them back into the bottle, then making them fall out onto the bed again.
“Oh, come on, Audrey! You make it sound like we don’t have a right to be attractive. The way I see it, if men resent us, it’s their problem.” I pulled the blanket over my shoulders.
She sneered at me. “Oh, yeah? It’s their problem? But we’re the ones who will never have a real relationship, get married, have a family, be happy…”
I’d been learning about the women’s liberation movement, had even read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, so I proclaimed, “I don’t need a man to be happy.”
“Oh, excuse me! Are you going to become a lesbian? I doubt it would be any easier with women.”
“Nothing wrong with being a lesbian, but that’s not what I meant, Audrey.”
“Oh, forgive me; I forgot. You’re going to have a career! You think that when you graduate, they’ll be waiting for you with all kinds of job offers. That’s why you study all the time. Are you going to make the dean’s list?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked again, “Would you really do it, Audrey?”
She had put all the pills back in the bottle and was putting it back in her jewelry box.
“What do you think?” Again she answered with a question. “Do you think I’m chicken, like you?”
I did make the dean’s list. Audrey’s average was barely above a D.
What’s the use? Why waste the time? That was Audrey’s attitude. Was she right? Was I wasting my time trying to get good grades? What job prospects were there for handicapped girls? I had decided to major in English. According to Audrey, I wanted to prove I’d gotten over my “language difficulty.” And I was minoring in Italian—to show some loyalty to my native tongue, again according to Audrey.
My father was thrilled when he got the letter of congratulations. He had it engraved onto a gold-colored metal plate and mounted. He hung it up on the living room wall. Anyone who entered our house was escorted straight to it. “Leggi qua! Read here!” my father ordered. And they had to read the whole letter, couldn’t just read the first sentence, say “How wonderful,” and walk away. If the visitor couldn’t read English, my father translated the whole letter, adding a few superlatives here and there. Though embarrassed, I was happy to see that my father was proud of me.
But I knew my success in college didn’t make up for my not being “cured.” I saw the sadness in my father’s eyes whenever he looked at me struggling with my braces and crutches. I noticed the angry way he handled my wheelchair when getting it in or out of the car—as if he wanted to smash it on the ground. I knew I was not to blame; still, I felt I had failed him.
My father didn’t tell me how he found the new doctor. I knew he had been calling hospitals. We went to see him, and he said a series of muscle transplants might help. Since the muscles used to bend my legs were stronger than those needed to straighten them, they could be repositioned, so I could use them to lock my knees and stand. This type of surgery worked best on children, but with a lot of therapy, I might be able to get rid of the braces. No guarantee, of course.
Following the examination, his secretary explained that though the hospital expenses would be covered by Blue Cross, the doctor’s fee was a little high. “No problem,” my father said, interrupting her. He told her that he would make up the difference, work overtime if he had to.
What could I say? That I didn’t want to get cut up anymore? That I wanted to take the Shakespeare course the next semester? Wasn’t I happy to be given the chance to get rid of the braces? Wasn’t I grateful to my father? I went into the hospital in the fall of 1966, as cheerful as ever.
The hospital was drab compared to HSS. Very few of the patients were young. The few who were never stayed long. They had broken bones, mostly. None were disabled like me.
Usually, in my room were women in their nineties with broken hips, who slept constantly. A few times, I rang my bell to call a nurse, suspecting my roommate was dead. But the nurses knew I needed urgent care only if I’d just had surgery. The best I could hope for was a “Can I help you?” over the intercom.
“I think my roommate passed away!”
“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute!” the voice on the intercom told me. I knew it would be at least a half hour. Luckily, no one died.
I read to pass the time, anything from Shakespeare to Harold Robbins, from Rolling Stone to True Confessions, and watched the soaps on TV.
I was in and out of that hospital for almost a year. I missed a year of college. I missed two big NYC demonstrations against the war. I didn’t go to San Francisco during the Summer of Love. I did wear flowers in my hair, which was probably all I would have done had I been out of the hospital. I had transplant after transplant—four or five or six. My mind erased the memories of pain associated with the surgeries. Pleasant memories of my time there were retained: my mother spoon-feeding me her tiny meatballs in broth; my father reciting poetry in Sicilian; Sarah, my Blythedale counselor, visiting me and playing her guitar.
Other memories of that hospital would have been better forgotten: being pushed in my chair to therapy by an orderly and feeling his hard penis pressing against my back and the nape of my neck; waking up in the middle of the night because my breasts were being fondled or a man’s hand was between my thighs.
I was young and enjoyed male attention, especially since outside of the hospital I didn’t get much. Often I flirted without realizing I was doing it. I flirted with the orderlies, the X-ray technicians, the interns. Then, when they did things that shocked and humiliated me, I didn’t know how to react and resist. I passively submitted, feeling it was my fault.
A cute intern often stopped by my room to tell me how beautiful I was. He asked what I was reading or what I was watching on TV. He said he wanted to take me out on a date when I got out of the hospital. I smiled a lot, told him he was cute.
One night, I woke up from a deep sleep—especially deep due to the sleeping pills the nurses generously and indiscriminately handed out every night. The intern was by my bed. My young body was responding to the skillful movements of his hands. Then he was on top of me, and before I knew what was happening, he was penetrating me.
When he was done, he lay on top of me for a few minutes, and I lay quietly under the weight of his body. Then he got up and left. I pulled a tissue out of the box on my nightstand and wiped between my legs. There was blood mixed with his sticky semen. My blood. He had gotten all the way inside me. I definitely was not a virgin anymore.
Was it rape? Or was there consent?