Lying with the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

doors. He wouldn’t or couldn’t stop until Mom gave him a good smack.
    She tried to cure me of polio in the same fashion, with a stinging slap to the face. “Straighten up and walk right,” she demanded. But when that didn’t scare me into good health, she drove me to a doctor who took one look and declared, “Your daughter has P-O-L-I-O.” He spelled it out like the disease had gone to my brain and I couldn’t understand the word.
    Mom wobbled and sobbed, then promised me, “You’re not going to die.”
    The doctor hadn’t mentioned dying. I had never thought I’d die. Now I couldn’t think of anything else. It didn’t help my spirits that Mom removed the Miraculous Medal from her neck and looped the chain around mine. “Pray to the Blessed Mother for a miracle,” she shouted, as an orderly with a mask over his nose and mouth wheeled me into the hospital.
    The children’s polio ward was strictly black and white. Nurses in white bustled around, their starched uniforms crackling. Nuns wore crow-black habits with rosary beads rattling from their belts. The white doctors and priests dressed in dark suits, and the black orderlies in white smocks. The patients—boys, girls, and babies—were white. Black kids with polio got sent to a different hospital.
    The ward was the first air-conditioned room I ever slept in. A summer blessing, believe me, for Washington, D.C. But the stink of disinfectant and medicine made me gag. Every breath of air tasted like another swallow of sickness. I wanted to hold my breath and squeeze my eyes shut so nothing of that place entered me. But you couldn’t block it out. It was too strong, and I was weak and I couldn’t quit looking.
    At night, I sneaked out of bed and spied on the other kids. The refrigerated air cooled my backside through the slit hospital gown. But I shivered less from that than from what I saw. Kids with heads lolling on pipe-stem necks. Babies as twisted and bent as one of Mom’s discarded bobby pins. My roommate was a bundle of sticks in an iron lung. She breathed through a machine that wheezed and groaned while she gazed up at a mirror that showed her hollow-cheeked face. That’s how we talked, the two of us speaking into the mirror, her face paralyzed in a smile, mine frozen in disbelief. The worst thing was—I mean the weirdest—she had toys with her in the iron lung, but couldn’t move her hands to play with them.
    The black orderlies didn’t mind that I roamed the ward. I guess they agreed that I wasn’t sick compared to other patients. But the nuns and nurses warned me never to get out of bed by myself even to go to the bathroom. They made me use a bedpan, which I wouldn’t do until they threatened me with an enema.
    Polio had no cure in those days. It had to run its course. Some died. More wound up crippled. While you waited to see how things worked out for you, all you could do was stay limber. Each morning an orderly lifted me under the arms, lowered me into a tub of hot swirling water and told me to kick my feet. Kids who had no control of their muscles got dunked up and down. Their scrawny legs quivered like spaghetti strands in a boiling saucepan.
    After the whirlpool, a physiotherapist told me to reach for my feet. That, she said, was how they’d know when I was healed—when my fingertips touched my toes. In the beginning I could barely grab my knees. But I kept at it—the physio kept me at it—and my hands eventually moved down to my calves, one plump, the other stick thin. When I made it to my ankles, I was just six inches from home.
    In the evening, orderlies dragged metal cauldrons onto the ward, and the kids right away started crying. It was like a siren on a timer. One minute total silence, the next nothing but bawling. The orderlies jabbed tongs into the cauldrons and yanked out hot compresses, then went from aisle to aisle, wrapping our arms and legs. They burned like fire, those compresses, and my pink skin didn’t stop