“It’s like saying piacere.”
Piacere is what Italians say when they meet each other—meaning “pleased.” It seemed the appropriate thing to say to the American doctors. And the word was easy enough for me to pronounce. So the next morning, when they all stood around my bed, I gave the American doctors my biggest smile and, careful to pronounce it correctly, said: “Fuck you!”
One of the older, more important-looking doctors was talking. He stopped in mid-sentence. The look of shock on his face was not what I had expected. All the doctors seemed shocked, though the younger ones also seemed amused. One, in particular, was trying hard not to laugh.
I knew Rosa had tricked me. I wondered what I had said. I looked toward her, but her head was under the blanket. I wanted to pull the covers over my head, too. But then the important-looking doctor started talking again and all the others turned to listen to him. They talked to one another a while longer, as if I weren’t there, then walked out of the room.
I expected everyone to laugh and make fun of me mercilessly. Instead, the kids treated me as if I were a hero.
“You said ‘Fuck you’ to the doctors? Wow! I wish I had the guts to do that!” It didn’t matter to them that I hadn’t known what I was saying.
Audrey explained to me the full meaning of the word fuck. She had to resort to gestures and drawings to make me understand. She couldn’t believe how innocent I was for someone who looked so grown-up.
In Riposto, when the neighbor girls came to sit by our front door on summer evenings, they would tell sexy jokes. Then they’d look at me, as if suddenly remembering I was there, then look at one another and stop talking.
“Come on, finish the story.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about these things in front of you.”
“Oh, please, I’m old enough.”
“But you’re a cripple, ciunca,” the Sicilian girls said.
How could I argue with that?
Obviously, disabled American girls weren’t told they couldn’t learn about sex. The girls at HSS knew all there was to know. Often, when they came to listen to Audrey’s records, after shimmying and bopping in our wheelchairs for a while, they all started talking about sex. I missed a lot of what they said because I didn’t know English well enough yet. I nodded and blushed and giggled, too embarrassed to ask them to explain.
Some of the girls had boyfriends in the hospital. I heard about the “things” Rosa did with a seventeen-year-old boy named Jim, who had dystonia. Audrey liked a fifteen-year-old boy with CP named Joe. She dragged me along to his room at the other end of the hall. They didn’t do much; he’d take her hand in his, which shook a little because of the CP. I smiled and looked around the room.
Joe’s roommate, Bob, also fifteen, had MD. If he was in the room, he tried to take my hand.
“Bella,” he said. It was the only Italian word he knew.
During the first two weeks in the hospital, I had my muscles tested, my bones x-rayed, my blood drawn several times. None of those tests was pleasant, and some were painful. But what bothered me most was that a nurse or an orderly would come to take me down for another test when I was having fun, listening to records or trying to understand a story someone was telling. When I got back on the floor, I was so happy to be with my friends again that whatever discomfort I had endured seemed well worth it.
One afternoon, I was taken to a floor I’d never been on. A nurse told me to take my clothes off and put on a hospital gown. Then she left me sitting in my wheelchair outside a closed door. I waited until a young doctor came out, grabbed my wheelchair, and pushed me into a big room full of doctors. Some I’d never seen before; others I’d seen on our floor when they made rounds. I recognized the important-looking doctor who was shocked when I’d said “Fuck you!” He asked a lot of questions of the younger ones, some so young-looking, I didn’t believe they were real doctors.
I was lifted by one of them onto an examining table. It was so high, I couldn’t have gotten on it by myself. Still, the young doctor should have asked if I needed help before lifting me. They all looked at me. Some came over to the table to touch me. They made me lie on my back and bent and stretched my legs, while I kept pulling down the hospital gown, trying to keep covered. Then they made me sit up again. One of the older doctors pushed on my back as he talked. I understood the word scoliosis. Some of the kids had surgery for that. They were in huge body casts, so they couldn’t sit in wheelchairs, but had to move around on stretchers.
Suddenly, I felt the hands behind me loosen the ties on my gown and push it off my shoulders.
“No!”
I thought I’d yelled loudly, but I didn’t hear my voice come out. I crossed my arms to hold the open gown over my swelling breasts, which still felt unfamiliar. The doctors kept talking and touching my back and pushing on my shoulders. Then one of the older ones grabbed me from behind under the arms, lifting me up. Another doctor held my hips down. The gown fell to the floor. I was naked. I shut my eyes as tight as I could to make all the American doctors disappear.
Then I was back in my wheelchair. My eyes were still closed, so I didn’t see who had gotten me off the table. When I opened my eyes, a woman doctor had picked up my gown and was helping me put it on. I had not noticed her before amid all the men. For a second, her eyes met mine. I thought she looked embarrassed. Maybe even guilty. Why did you let them do that? I wanted to yell at her. But she looked away so quickly, I couldn’t be sure what I saw in her eyes.
I raced to Audrey’s room the moment I got back on the floor. She wasn’t there. I went looking everywhere, wheeling so fast in and out of rooms, bumping into medicine carts, almost colliding with another kid, almost running over a nurse.
“Watch where you’re going! What’s the matter with you?”
“Audrey! Where’s Audrey?”
Finally, Chantelle stopped my wild run. A fifteen-year-old with skin like smooth, creamy chocolate and hair tightly pulled into a multitude of skinny braids, she had osteogenesis imperfecta and was small for her age, but she made up for her size with her sassy demeanor and her street-smart ways. She swiftly got in front of my chair with hers.
“Stop, girl, before you kill somebody!” she yelled in her high-pitched voice. “Do you wanna tell me what happened?”
“Where’s Audrey?”
“You can’t tell me? You can only tell Audrey? Okay. She should be coming up from PT soon.”
PT. That’s where Audrey was, of course. I went to Audrey’s room and waited, rocking back and forth in my chair, arms crossed over my chest. When Audrey came back, I tried to tell her what had happened, but I couldn’t think of the right words, and the words I thought of, I didn’t pronounce right. I kept starting over with the big room and so many doctors. Audrey knew right away what I was talking about. She hugged me, and I buried my face in her long blond hair and cried.
“I know” was all Audrey said.
“But I’m angry!”
“I know.”
“What they did was wrong!”
“I know.”
“I know,” Jane also said when Audrey told her what had happened.
“They’ve done it to Jane many times,” Audrey told me.
Rosa nodded. “You’ll get used to it.”
Standing near us was Matthew, an older boy, who in place of arms had little wings—that’s what they looked like. The doctors wanted to operate on him so he could wear artificial arms, which he didn’t want or need, since he could do everything with his feet. He had been listening to us girls.
“I wouldn’t mind being exhibited if they