my father smiled his big bright smile to show me he was not defeated. A new plan had been germinating in his mind. We would leave this backward town and this country where injustice and ignorance ruled. We would go to America.
In America, doctors were different. They were brilliant, and they were always doing research with money that was collected on television. “In America,” my father told me, “every house has a television set, and when they show children like you, people send money to find a cure.”
The American doctors, my father was sure, could accomplish what ignorant people in Riposto would call miracles. There was even a president in America who had been cured of polio.
“In America, guarisci, you’ll be cured,” my father promised. “In America, cammini, you’ll walk.”
I always believed everything my father said. I wasn’t sure how far America was, or how we’d get there. But if that’s where my father wanted to take me, that’s where I’d go.
As the years passed, I started to worry, because sometimes my father’s plans didn’t work out—the money he expected to get for building a house never came, or the mafiosi put their dirty hands in his business and caused him all kinds of trouble. What if we never made it to America? What if I never got cured?
As I got bigger and heavier, my mother had difficulty carrying me, and she complained about her back hurting. Sometimes an uncle or an older cousin carried me. Once in a while a big neighborhood boy offered to carry me. At first, I was happy, especially when he took me on the main street. But then I started not liking it. He squeezed me too tight and tickled me in places where I didn’t want to be touched.
I didn’t mention it to my mother, because I didn’t want her to get sad. I wanted her to laugh. She always laughed when my father was home. And when she outran my grandmother and got her pick of the fruit my grandfather brought. But sometimes she also laughed when it was just the two of us. She laughed when the neighbor’s cat carried her kittens one by one by the scruff of their necks to our house, and laughed, rather than getting angry, when I knocked over the ink bottle on the table while doing my homework. She struggled to carry me up the steps to the roof terrace, complaining about my being heavy and her aching back; then once we made it all the way up, she pretended to drop me, laid me down on the cement floor, and lay beside me, both of us laughing wildly. At those times, my mother didn’t look like the Addolorata. She called me gioia. I kissed her flushed face, and wondered how I could be both her cross and her joy.
I knew my mother worried about what would become of me as I grew up. Sometimes she said, “I should have given you a sister who could help take care of you.”
“Oh, yes, I want a sister! Can you give me a sister, please?” And I imagined that sister, how she would play with me all the time. But then my mother got sad and said it was too late; she couldn’t raise another child when she had to take care of me.
I heard there were disabled people living in the town, but I never saw them. The women talked about a man who had fallen off a scaffold while working in Catania on a tall building, and was left paralyzed. A good-looking man he was; God should have taken him, poviru ciuncu, the women said. His unmarried sister sacrificed her youth to take care of him.
My grandmother talked about a friend of hers who took care of her husband, who’d had a stroke and couldn’t walk anymore. Her daughter helped out when she could. I understood crippled grown-ups had to have wives, sisters, or daughters to take care of them, and had to stay home all the time because they were too heavy to be carried.
I didn’t know any disabled children. I often asked my mother if there were others like me. Ever since I could remember, my mother had always told me that, yes, there was a girl just like me who lived in another town. Maybe she made her up, so I wouldn’t feel I was the only crippled girl in the world. I thought of that girl as a lost sister. I fantasized that I would one day find her, and we would talk and laugh together, and hug, and play girotondo.
2
THE BEST HOSPITAL
For years, my father worked hard, saved money, kept talking about America, waiting anxiously for very important documents. A few times, he went to Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and once or twice to Rome. Finally, in 1960, he had all the long-sought crucial documents and was able to leave for America.
“I must go first,” he told my mother and me. “I’ll get everything ready. Then you’ll come.”
I was already twelve. I begged my father to hurry, worried that the older I got, the harder it would be for the American doctors to cure me.
My mother cried when my father left and every day after that. I wasn’t sure whether she missed him or was afraid of the uncertain future that awaited us.
After a year, my mother and I were able to join my father. We went to Rome first, then flew to America on one of the new “jumbo jets.” Since my uncle, who drove us to the airport, wasn’t allowed to carry me onto the plane, the captain himself, the tallest man I’d ever seen, carried me. He deposited me in my seat, in what resembled a giant bus. There I sat, sick to my stomach and sucking on lemon slices for eight hours.
At the New York International Airport, my father had permission to carry me off the plane.
“You’re in America, gioia!”
He was surprised to see how much I’d developed.
“Our little girl is a signorina now,” my mother told him. I blushed, because being a signorina meant I was already getting my period.
“You won’t need to be carried much longer.” My father kissed me as he lifted me in his arms out of the taxi we took at the airport and carried me into our new home. “Presto guarisci, soon you’ll be cured.” He was triumphant.
He had rented an apartment in Brooklyn “senza scale,” without stairs, which he had furnished completely. He had found “un buon lavoro,” a good job, doing construction. He didn’t mind having to work for a boss. It was the only way to get the best medical insurance for me, which was called Blue Cross. He took the card out of his wallet to show it to me: his Blue Cross card, my ticket to being cured.
Most important, he had found “il migliore ospedale,” the best hospital for me. Every day, as we waited for the call from the admitting office, he repeated, “Presto guarisci. Presto cammini. Soon you’ll be cured. Soon you’ll walk.”
My mother was afraid… of this country so different from Sicily, of the tall buildings and wide streets, of all the people who spoke a language she couldn’t understand. And she was afraid of what the American doctors would do to her daughter.
I knew the doctors would hurt me. The doctors in Italy had always hurt me. How different could the American doctors be? I didn’t quite share my father’s optimism. But, at the same time, I didn’t share my mother’s fear. I was too excited. I couldn’t wait to find out what life in this new country had in store for me.
I didn’t have to wait long. Less than a month after my arrival, I sat with my parents in the admitting office of the Hospital for Special Surgery, in Manhattan, near the East River. My father struggled to answer questions, showing off the English he’d been learning in night school. My mother and I sat next to each other, anxious and confused.
“We have to wait before we can go up to the room,” my father explained, when there were no more questions to answer. And we waited quietly, my mother and I afraid to talk to each other, as if we were in church.
Finally a nurse appeared. She was pushing a wheelchair. My father stood and started speaking in his tentative English. I was sure he was telling her we didn’t need the wheelchair, because he could carry me. The nurse didn’t understand or agree with him. She pushed the wheelchair