CHAPTER 7

May You Be Sick and I Be Sound

I’m afraid of the dark. When I walk through the house at night, I flip on every light along my way. I can’t watch horror movies the way Amy and her brothers do. They love the Friday the 13th movies and A Nightmare on Elm Street. They laugh at the fake blood and guts, Freddy Krueger’s leather glove, his razor-blade fingers. It’s just corn syrup, Amy tells me, it’s just a prop, but it doesn’t matter. I know it’s fiction, that the images aren’t real. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the things in the movies could happen. Every scene represents some kind of evil that could exist. Scary movies are tempting fate. They’re tempting possibility. Anything is possible. I know that. Just because you’ve never seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I had nightmares for two weeks after Linda dared me to watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video on MTV. After it was over, I went to the bathroom, and she waited quietly outside the door until I was done, then jumped out and scared me when I opened it. I screamed and fell to my knees. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell our mother.

Amy doesn’t want to act out scenes from Fatal Vision with me. We could play the dead daughters, lying on the floor in pools of our own blood. But who would play the killer, Amy asks? She doesn’t want to pretend to die from leukemia either, thinks it’s strange when I act out the final scene from a movie I watched about a little girl with cystic fibrosis who only lives to be eight years old. In the movie she dies propped up in her little girl bed, pillows and stuffed animals and ruffles around her face.

I’m too healthy, and I think about what it would be like if I had a disease. I watch the commercials for St. Jude’s Research Hospital, the kids with their smooth hairless heads, their smiles, surrounded by mounds of greeting cards in their hospital rooms. I wouldn’t mind receiving that kind of attention. Maybe my mother would feel bad about being mean to me then. Maybe she would see my sickness as punishment for her cruelty. She’d beg and plead to the sky, to the stars, just make Karen well and I promise I’ll be better! The kids at school would feel horrible, too.

Julie Walls would cry and pray for me to be okay, and she’d feel sorry for teasing me about my hairy legs and arms. Sitting next to me in reading group last year, in first grade, she made up a song, kept whispering it in my ear, cupping her mouth with her hand as if we were sharing a secret: hairy hairy hairy legs, hairy hairy hairy arms.

Julie’s mother is named Edie. She’s my mother’s age. They were kids at the same time in South Connellsville, playing on the monkey bars together. One night as it started getting dark and they both walked to their houses, Edie complained to my mother that her legs hurt. The next morning, when Edie woke up, she couldn’t get out of bed. She’d contracted polio. The year was 1951 and my mother and Edie were ten years old. Jonas Salk was at the University of Pittsburgh, only fifty-seven miles away from us, developing the polio vaccine. It would be officially announced to the public in 1955, but that would be too late for Edie. She has been in a wheelchair ever since, and because she played on a rusty set of monkey bars, my mother doesn’t want me or Linda going anywhere near them. Maybe Julie is mean because her mother is in a wheelchair and that makes her mad at the world. I understand that, really I do. I just don’t understand what that has to do with me and my hairy arms and legs. I don’t understand why I’m here, other than to be the girl others use when they need someone to scare, someone to blame, someone to hurt.

We have a small playground just a block down the street from our house. Most kids in the neighborhood hang out there after school, and all day long in the summer. When we drive by in the Lincoln, on our way to Warehouse Groceries or Uniontown Mall, I’ll look out the window and see girls on the seesaw, boys on the swings, daring each other to see how high they can go, jumping off at the highest point, sticking the landing the way a gymnast does at the Olympics. My mother says she knows that polio is a viral infection, but isn’t it a coincidence that Edie fell ill right after she played on those rusty bars? There must be a connection. Some things, according to my mother, can’t be explained by science. Sometimes you just feel the answers. And even though you have no way of proving it, you just know it’s the truth.

★ ★ ★

Linda and I are in the shower together, in a hotel room somewhere in North Carolina. We’re practicing our tap routines, our bare feet splashing water out of the tub, soaking our clothes, which are crumpled on the floor beyond the frosty shower curtain. We’re on our way to Orlando, Florida. We’re going to Walt Disney World, and I’m going to get my picture taken with Mickey Mouse, but for now, we’ve stopped here at a Days Inn for the night.

There’s only a month left of second grade, and I get to miss an entire week for the trip, promising Mrs. Swan I’ll bring her back a souvenir, something Florida-ish, a starfish or a seashell. Dad drove the four of us here from Pennsylvania in the Chevy Blazer, Linda and I sprawled out on the bench seat in the back, eating Hostess cupcakes and practicing spelling-bee words from Linda’s practice book. “Loquacious,” I say somewhere in West Virginia.

“That’s easy,” Linda says. “L-o-q-u-a-c-i-o-u-s.”

“You forgot to say the word before and after you spell it,” I remind her. “And remember, you can always ask for the definition or part of speech.” I love the rules of competitive spelling, how rigid they are: the judges and their emotionless faces, the little bell they ring when a speller is eliminated. There are no second chances in the spelling-bee world. One mistake and you’re off the stage. You’re history.

Linda and I know we are too old to shower together, but my mother wants us to get ready for bed as quickly as possible. So we splash around a little longer, emptying the tiny hotel-size conditioner into our long hair, then turn the water off and wrap ourselves in the thin white towels the hotel staff has provided.

Outside the bathroom door, my mother is sobbing to my father, but I can’t make out the words. All day, she’s been unhappy about something. She didn’t want to drive in the first place. She wanted to take an airplane to Florida, like we did last year when we took a trip to Fort Myers Beach. My mother planned that entire vacation through a Sears travel agent—flight, rental car (a Lincoln Town Car), hotel on the beach, even a day trip on a fishing boat where Linda and I caught nothing but blowfish. Their bloated bodies looked brittle, as if they were made from paper. I’d reel in my line and scream when I saw one hanging there, its spines dripping with water from the Gulf of Mexico.

This year’s trip, to Disney World, was my father’s idea. He didn’t go though the travel agent at Sears in the Uniontown Mall. He booked everything on his own. So far, my mother hasn’t approved of one thing about this trip. Right now, she’s sobbing because our motel room is on the corner of the hotel complex, close to the Dumpster. When Linda and I come out of the bathroom in our nightgowns, our towels now fashioned into makeshift turbans, Mother is rocking back and forth on the edge of one of the double beds, the floral bedspread a horrible mix of burgundy and green.

“I just feel doomed here, next to the trash. It’s scary. We could be murdered in our sleep, our bodies thrown in the Dumpster,” she says. “It could be days before they find us!” she screams, then marches into the still humid bathroom, closing the door with a slam behind her. Linda and I glance at each other, but we don’t speak. Linda sits down on the bed and starts studying her spelling words, while I find my Rainbow Brite doll, fussing with the few strands of bright orange hair that have escaped from her ponytail.

My father picks up the phone, dials the front desk. He requests another room, goes to the lobby to trade the keys. Mother emerges from the bathroom with mascara smudged all over her face. She is silent. Dad and Linda and I lug all of our stuff into the new hotel room, which smells like an air-conditioned ashtray. Mother peels back the scratchy bedspread on one of the beds, lies down, and closes her eyes.

We’ve been to Disney World once, in 1980, but I was only three years old, so I don’t remember the trip. I’ve seen pictures of Linda and me sitting on a beach wearing matching souvenir T-shirts. They are bright yellow with smiling oranges on them. The lettering says Fresh-squeezed from Florida! as if the oranges are more than happy to be turned into juice. My hair is parted down the middle, two thick braids hanging to my waist.

On that trip back in 1980, there was a caravan of us making the drive. My grandfather, JR, was still alive and he financed the entire thing. Pam and her first husband were just married, and they followed us in their Caprice. Then Uncle Roger and his wife, Joanie, followed in their car. JR rode with them so he could smoke the whole way down. We stopped at South of the Border, that famous tourist attraction off I-95. It’s modeled after a Mexican village. My mother bought a scarf there, pictures of tiny cactuses and sombreros all over it. My father bought Linda a pair of castanets, me a set of maracas. We must have made our own little band in the vinyl backseat of the car.

My mother says that JR knew he would die soon, and he wanted to do something fun with his remaining son and daughter and their families, but the trip seemed to be plagued by bad luck. First, Pam’s husband lost his turnpike ticket in the crack between the car’s windshield and dashboard, so they had to pay the highest fare when they arrived at the tollbooth. Then, after a few days in the Florida sun, Pam got a sunburn so severe she could barely move, wrapping herself in a soaking wet towel under an umbrella the rest of the week. Then Uncle Roger and his wife, Joanie, stole all the towels and bedspreads from the hotel in Kissimmee and my grandfather was humiliated at the front desk, the clerk threatening to call the police if he didn’t pay for the damages.

I don’t remember any of these things. I’ve only heard these stories from my mother, so the trip remains a shiny memory in my mind. There’s another picture of the whole group of us standing in the breezeway just outside our hotel rooms. It’s a Polaroid and has that hazy look that I’ve come to associate with the 1970s, a decade I was born in, yet have no concrete memories of. In silent home movies from when I was a baby, my mother and Pam wore bell-bottom jeans and floppy hats. We didn’t have our in-ground pool back then, and no fancy landscaping in the backyard. Instead, there was a blue inflatable baby pool and lots of grass to roll around on. There was a driveway made of gravel, and Linda and I used to throw the stones at the fence just for fun, or at least that’s what I’ve seen in the home movies.

My mother doesn’t like being photographed unless she’s posing, and my father likes nothing more than to snap candid photographs of her. This has resulted in many reels of film consisting of my father sneaking up on my mother and surprising her with the camera. She always puts her hands up to the lens like a movie star shooing away photographers. Finally, she fixes her hair for a second, then smiles, turning away when she’s decided Dad has had enough.

This new trip to Disney in 1985 is different—but still haunted with bad luck. I think the worst part of it all is that I’ll be old enough to remember it this time.

On the second day of our trip, we drive from somewhere in North Carolina all the way to our hotel near Disney World. It’s a long day, my mother sitting motionless in the passenger seat, my father trying to keep things light by playing memory games with me and Linda like The Picnic Game, a game where we take turns listing items we’d take to a picnic, trying to remember what the other players have said. You begin your turn by saying I’m going on a picnic and I’m going to take . . . and you fill in the blank with something that starts with the first letter of your first name. The game ends when someone can’t remember the list of items or when someone can’t think of any more picnic items beginning with the first letter of their first name.

These games are hard for me because there aren’t many words that begin with k, and I’ve already used Kool-Aid, kangaroo, and kaleidoscope. Bringing a kangaroo to a picnic is a bit of a stretch, but my dad and Linda allow it.

My mother can’t be bothered with having a good time on this trip. On the days we’re not at the park, she’s in the hotel bed while the rest of us go swimming and miniature golfing and out for ice cream. Of the three days we’re scheduled for visits to the Disney parks, we’ll spend two at Magic Kingdom and one at EPCOT, which is the newest addition to the park. It’s an acronym that stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and while I’m there I believe I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.

I fall in love with the Journey Into Imagination ride, the small purple-winged dragon named Figment projected into the darkness as we roll along in small pods. I want to ride it a second time, but my father isn’t sure we’ll have time to wait in the line again before the night ends. It’s our last day at Disney, and I’m afraid I’ll never get to see Figment again. In the gift shop, my father buys me a small stuffed version of Figment. He wears a yellow and red T-shirt with his name on it.

Yellow and red are my two favorite colors. Amy knows this. For my last birthday she wrote Happy Birthday, Karen inside my card with red and yellow markers, alternating colors with every letter. When I opened the card, I was embarrassed to find out she cared about me enough to do that. I didn’t know how else to feel. I could tell Amy was waiting for me to say something about the gesture, but I couldn’t. I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

We ride the little tram from EPCOT to the parking lot, where the four of us load into the Blazer. My father puts the key in the ignition and it turns over, that familiar grinding and whirring, that familiar click of the gears as he puts it in drive. I’m crying in the backseat in the dark, holding my Figment, my impossible creature.