never used a wheelchair before, never even seen one. But the feeling of moving on wheels was a familiar one. My mother had pushed me in my baby carriage, and when I started middle school, my father had bought me a bicycle with training wheels. He added a back to the seat, with a handle so I could be pushed.
I wasn’t sure whether it was hard to get wheelchairs in Sicily, or whether my father didn’t want to see me in one. He looked unhappy as he watched me get into the wheelchair. He rushed over and kissed me on the head.
“Don’t be afraid of the chair. It’s only until they cure you.”
I wasn’t afraid. As the nurse pushed me, I savored every second of the smooth ride. My parents had to walk fast to keep up with us. I couldn’t keep my hands from moving down toward the push rims, knowing instinctively what they were for. The nurse must have guessed I was itching to push myself, because somewhere in the middle of a long corridor, she let go of the push handles and pointed straight ahead. “Go!” she said. I knew exactly what she meant. And I knew exactly what to do.
Without hesitation, I took off. Arms pumping, wheels turning. Go! For the first time in my life, I was moving on my own. No one carrying me, no one pushing me. I could go straight ahead. Or curve to the right, or to the left. I could go full speed or slow down to let my parents catch up. Stop and turn around to see how far I got. Then go again!
That day, in that long corridor in that American hospital, I fell in love—with the wheelchair. It was a heavy, ugly hospital wheelchair. Shiny chrome and green vinyl. But I loved it. Arms pumping, wheels turning. Go! On my own. Go! On my way. On my way to start my new life in America.
I was put on a floor with children and teenagers. Since I was thirteen, I went on the side with the teens. I felt very grown-up.
This hospital was different from hospitals in Italy. It was a cheerful place, with colorful pictures on the walls, kids in wheelchairs racing and laughing in the hallways, music coming from the rooms. Some rooms had four beds; some had two. I went to a room with two beds.
“Non aver paura, gioia, don’t be afraid,” my father repeated. But I was excited, not afraid.
Seeing the tears in my mother’s eyes when she kissed me good-bye, I reassured her: “Non ti preoccupare, don’t worry! I like it here.”
My roommate’s name was Rosa. She spoke some Sicilian, which she had learned from her grandmother. My being placed with Rosa was no coincidence. The thoughtfulness of the social worker, who knew I couldn’t speak English, was behind it.
Rosa had polio, like me. She was older, already fifteen, and knew how to put on lipstick and set her hair on pink plastic rollers. She started teaching me English words—pillow, blanket—making me repeat them until I pronounced them right. When I made mistakes she called me babba, dumb. She said her grandmother called her that, so I didn’t mind.
I made friends right away. I was ecstatic. In Sicily, I thought I was the only crippled girl in the world, and here I found myself surrounded by so many disabled girls and boys. The first English words I learned were the names of their different disabilities. Some of the names were difficult for me to pronounce: cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spinal muscular atrophy… I was glad when I found out I could use acronyms: CP, MD, SMA… The names of other disabilities sounded Italian and were easier to pronounce and to remember: dystonia, spina bifida, osteogenesis imperfecta…
“I don’t understand how you can say osteogenesis imperfecta and not cerebral palsy!” complained one of my new friends, Jane—personally offended, since her disability was cerebral palsy. To make up for the offense, I told her how easy it was for me to understand her. Because of CP, her speech was wonderfully slurred, so I grasped a lot of what she said, while I couldn’t understand the other kids, who spoke too fast. I was glad that in English my disability was called the same as it was in Italian: polio. I didn’t know what I would have done if I had one of those hard-to-pronounce disabilities. I figured polio was the best disability for me.
There were quite a few kids whose disability was polio. When they had surgery and their legs were in casts, their braces stood at their bedsides. After the casts came off, they went down to physical therapy, PT for short, where they practiced walking with their braces and crutches. I was the only kid with polio there who didn’t have braces.
“Don’t worry, they’ll give you braces soon enough,” Rosa told me. She hated her braces with a passion. She talked about what she was going to do when she didn’t need them anymore, after her surgeries: take them to the Staten Island garbage dump, throw them in the East River, melt them down with a blowtorch…
In the room across the hall, there was a beautiful girl named Audrey. When I first met her, I thought she, too, must have had polio as a baby, since her legs were small, like mine. But her disability was spina bifida. It had affected her from the waist down, so she had never walked, just like me. She had undergone many surgeries, and she was being taught to use braces and crutches in PT, though she wasn’t at all eager to learn. Audrey and I were very grown-up; we had been getting our periods for almost a year, we wore bras and didn’t need to stuff them with tissues, and we both instinctively had a way of making people notice us. We were the same age and the same size, but we didn’t resemble each other. I had dark hair and she had blond hair; I had brown eyes and she had blue eyes. Yet some of the volunteers asked if we were sisters. The other kids called us “the Bobbsey Twins” and teased us because we were always together.
In the morning, the one who got into her wheelchair first raced across the hall. Audrey had done her best to make her room more like home. The wall above her bed was covered with get-well cards. On the night table was her radio. On a small cart by the foot of the bed was her record player. Stacks of records and piles of magazines were on the windowsill.
I loved listening to records with Audrey. I couldn’t understand the lyrics at first. I just enjoyed the music. But if the song was one I particularly liked, Audrey stopped the record and repeated the words slowly. She used dramatic gestures, acted out funny scenes, or drew stick figures, whatever she could think of, until she made me understand.
I learned a lot of English words by listening to Audrey’s records. I learned about boyfriends and girlfriends, hugging and kissing, cheating, breaking up and making up again…
After only a week in the Hospital for Special Surgery, HSS for short, I knew at least a hundred English words, maybe more. The kids laughed at me when I made a mistake or, by mispronouncing a word, ended up saying something totally different. Because vowel sounds in Italian are rather uniform, I had trouble distinguishing between long and short, open and closed vowels. So I might say “peel” instead of “pill” and instead of “bedpan,” I’d say “badpen.”
My roommate, Rosa, couldn’t stop laughing when, thinking I was asking for a sheet, I asked the nurse for a “shit.” She told everyone about it. They were hysterical. But I didn’t mind being teased by my new friends. Their laughter came at me like soap bubbles, bursting and disappearing in the air. It didn’t jab me like the Sicilian children’s derisive laughter had.
The American doctors, maybe a dozen of them, came to our floor in the morning and checked each one of us but talked only to one another. They bent and stretched our legs and checked the incisions of those who had just had surgery, but said nothing to us. Their visit was called “rounds.”
“Get ready, the doctors are making rounds!” the nurses yelled.
After the doctors left our room, I asked Rosa, “What did they say about me?”
“I don’t know what they said about you. I don’t know what they said about me, either. I don’t understand them.”
“But you know English, Rosa!”
“Oh, they’re not speaking English, believe me. They’re talking medical mumbo jumbo.”
I wanted the American doctors to acknowledge me, to notice how grown-up I was, and how quickly I was learning English. I wanted to get their attention by saying something intelligent to them.
“What