by Lynn Strongin

PART ONE: Carrying a Glass of Water

I must take care not to shine too much.

There are those about me simply balancing life like carrying a glass of water with great caution on a pewter winter day, being wary that not a millimeter of water lap over the edge.

I wish I could have two winters this year: Judd Lake and Apostle Islands. To compress twice the radiance life has bequeathed.

Bending back petals - "loves me, loves me not" - one afternoon last week, as she was leaving, the door to our apartment already wide open, her shoulder bag slung over her right shoulder, twirling car keys in her hand, she bent down and said in offhand fashion, "Love you."

The underbelly of loneliness flashed - blue as a dolphin's back.

The following morning, Pegeen phoned, "Yesterday the sky was - a sort of navy, today's it's gray."

My family is going thru its hardest time ever. My sister and her husband have two daughters. To buy time, each parent has one child - in Europe the mother keeps their younger daughter; in Texas, the father watches over their elder daughter. Nicole with her father, Alex with her mother. When they look back upon this winter, it will puzzle them how they survived.

When will I have the guts to tell my family how it is with me? To write Polio: A Memoir of Childhood. About the virus in my spine, stiffening, paralyzing me back in 1951? About mother not believing? About me, the apple of her eye, being borne out on a stretcher to a room with an iron lung like ghost in the corner, then being transferred for a half year to a concentration camp for children?

The whole family hates Texas. Austin has apparently three seasons: hot, hotter and hottest.

An intrinsic Yankee, born with my head in New England's piney woods - my toes are curled in the soil of the South. I lived in the region of the Everglades where kids formed a crocodile in poor pink dirt, going into the classroom as slowly as the rest of life moved down there during the forties: that time of peculiar, and rich emotional compression in which both Pegeen and I were formed like the child in the womb.

* * *

At the turn of the Millennium, this move to Texas turned out to be harbinger of brute, bitter times. The contract to teach at the music college, which the girls' parents signed seems a hand grenade or, to have been a handspike, that wooden rod used on board ship, a rod shod with iron.

Each daughter has been dangerously ill. Pneumonia is no longer dark escort to Nicole, elder daughter of twenty, it is only within the past few days that this chaperone has taken its hand out of Nicole's hand: her rib still aches where they drove the needle into her lung. Her mother was in Europe. It was only one of the smaller hospitals in South Texas.

Alex no longer injures herself (a behavior often forecasting borderline personality disorder).The marks are still fresh on her abdomen that still bears nineteen wounds. The light of blood still shines thru the sky window of their bathroom.

I still look up to the winter stars as though, in their icy clarity, they could grant answers to some of my questions.

"Pegeen," I ask the Irish woman who has survived the Blitz and who I'm thinking of hiring as research assistant, "Peg," I said, "I've got some tough things to research. Can you give me your word not to give up?"

"Of course, I won't quit. I'm a - seeker."

* * *

Two nights later, we meet, by chance. My sweetheart, Kera and I are walking home from the village past Peg's house down her hill: she waves from the drive in what I call her blue feathers: a tatty jacket with mock-fur dyed blue; she must have found it in some Secondhand Rose.

"Butterflies!" she came out laughing, pointing to the bay. "This mawnning it was full of white sailboats - thick as butterflies!"

Even the color of her mock feathers knocked me sideways.

Sweetheart has got a tightener for her hatband for the swish hat, her trademark: Australian, wide-brimmed, heavy leather for an outbacker.

"Now it can't blow away," she smiles.

Pegeen is suffering a setback. Good deeds are her driver, her purpose in life. A friend asked for a drive to the pharmacists. "Hell's Bells! We got arrested outside the drugstore. Brought down to the police station where all charges were dropped. I've accidentally walked into a nightmare."

"I do it all the time," I told her.

She and I still work best within the framework of formality. The trip to England is off. Her daughter will be here for two days to check out business.

I am sitting down formally today to begin writing: Polio: A Memoir of Childhood.

* * *

"Pru asked me to come over and watch her paint. But after the Police Station last night, I said, 'Can't, Pru." I have set out a photograph of Pegeen twenty years ago, as a blond. She bleached her hair when she started to gray and had received her Real Estate License. In the photograph, Peg sits twenty years ago her arm about a black child, about seven, from Trinidad, whose parents called her Joanine. "What parents would call a child that?" she asked. (Down South, I've heard Joanette and Mysty. Down where the Magnolia blooms and the mockingbird cries. That will go into the memoir, too.)

"Joanine would rather have been white. She got a black rubber doll and shoved it into the trash-bin," said Pegeen.

* * *

Nicole now home from the hospital, is unable to go to my sister and brother-in-law's due to cat dander. The dander may take up to four months to get rid of even with industrial cleaning. Does she not feel homeless? An exile? My sister's eldest daughter is living in with friends of her parents: a couple who play the double-bass (he), the violin (she) and who've just adopted a Chinese toddler since they couldn't have their own child.

Pegeen last night laughing "butterflies" razored me. A brick grammar school bloomed like fire on my eye. It could have been in the States or in the U.K. but it was definitely during the war, the early forties. Nostalgic, I recollected my own mother, Mrs. Sophy Cohn Rosenblum, a few years ago one of the times I was close to dying, speaking with a nurse friend.

"She's going thru withdrawal, that's why she's suffering this merde," she said.

"You just used a dirty word," our mother said.

"I did?"

"Yes, suffering."

* * *

Our mother, Mrs. Sophy Cohn sleeps with the unabridged dictionary by her bed even though she's legally blind.

"Why do I?"

"Jewish curiosity, Jewish thirst."

"Wouldn't it be nice if we found a widower for Pegeen?" Kera returns to her suggestion.

Pegeen knows exile. She endured it purely till one night she smashed a glass: her fist went to her forehead, she collapsed at the kitchen table, there was blood. (We are not able, like young Alex, to make a little slit on the outside to let pain out which is inside.)

"I like your jacket," I lied to Pegeen, about the mock blue-feathers.

"Do you?" she laughed. "It's old as the hills, old enough to drive. I'm one who goes back over and over at a rummage to check out if I've missed a bargain, the way you check your hotel room before leavin.' "

Sweet Jesus (I think), Death will come like Mt. Aetna scattering us all like ashes before too long.

PART TWO: A Seeker

We are all searchers, no? Our mother seeks peace. My sister, Danielle, bought our mother Sophy Cohn Rosenblum, a kitten from "Adopt a Cat," down in Texas. Mother needed companionship. Mother, largely blind, wouldn't take the responsibility. No kitten. No companion.

Now this unadopted kitten stands darkly prophetic of all the breathing ailments to descend upon our family, like a flock of carrion.

The dander will take so long to get rid of that my kid sister considers selling the home.

Between Nicole, this older child sick with asthma, and Alex, weaning herself of self-injury with her papa's razor - it's a killing situation.

* * *

Pegeen speaks of her daughter, "Can't the girl - the woman - let me know where she is from time to time?" which implies a craggy relationship between them.

It might have been an evening bleak as Liverpool but then the light shone. Paralysis confers grace. For example, one can do such things with panache, as swing one's arm by the body weight or cross my legs the way I do on the Avenue.

* * *

It is dark in churches even at noon. Peg vaunts that she learned to be the soul of discretion. She learned during the Evacuation of London not to speak until spoken to: to hardly speak even then.

I must lie low: Be careful what I ask for. Apple of my mother's eye, not to let my light shine fully. I see the pale spectral body of Nicole descending the stairs. Now there is a new problem: both children have a phobia of the home: haunted by memories of blood drawn from her abdomen by a razor as thin as a needle. Nicole can face a dark day, imagining it as a disc in her mind's eye then surround it by Saturn-like bands white light. I think of Japanese cranes, taking off or settling, as explosions of ice in a ballet.

* * *

The kitten, mystically, becomes milky-blind, instead of our mother, and wanders homelessly back alleys of dream-cities, cities with no names.

(The two children circulate like sleepwalkers dipped in milk-hands outstretched before them like children made blind.)

I recall from the New England part of my girlhood Judd Lake and Apostle Islands.

Night inks the windowpanes of what was a navy blue noon.

I go about carefully seeking, seeking some thing, some one (as though balancing an invisible glass of water.) I must take care, as I count winter stars, and break off petals - knowing at last darkness will scatter us all like ashes - I must be cautious, although I am trembling - to subdue my shine.

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