Joy Ride: My One-Legged Journey to Self-Acceptance

By Karen Witt Daly and Mary L. Seereiter

Joy Ride takes us through a decades-long search for something Karen Witt Daly felt she had lost, something vital to her aliveness and far more significant than losing her right leg to cancer at age 11. Fierce, independent, and determined, yet she calls the fruits of her search “luck,” tripping over opportunities and bumping into generous beings who serendipitously appeared along the landscape of her inner and outer travels. The path life presented to this young girl upon which she would navigate to womanhood was rough terrain indeed, yet Karen used every bit of that rocky road to recognize its gifts and graces, to learn, accept, and ultimately triumph. With the discovery of a form of improvisational dance, clouds of doubt vanish and protective walls crumble, clearing the way for Karen to eventually understand the meaning of her search, then live the true purpose of her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543919110

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years.

PROLOGUE

The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s a complicated, tricky problem that you don’t know how to solve.

/ William Vollman

LOSS AND GRIEF, AND MY LONG AND winding road to self-acceptance are the essence of Joy Ride, for it's about the power a mind stuck in denial can wield over a being, the ability of a body to survive years of self-inflicted abuse, and the unwavering tenacity of a spirit that knows it’s lucky to be alive. It’s about peeling away the layers and welcoming the cracks in the armor, and slowly coming to know that my true strength is equal to my willingness to be vulnerable.

When I was eleven, following a three-year bout with bone cancer, I had my right leg and pelvis amputated. The year was 1962. My parents dealt with this situation practically rather than psychologically, just as they had dealt with many other devastating events in their lives. Because poverty, mental illness, suicide attempts, and alcoholism were present in both my mother’s and father’s extended families, I remember my mother saying more than once that we don’t dwell on those things, rather we accept them and move on.

When it came to my family’s reaction to the loss of my leg, it was not surprising that there was little talk about it. Our tacit agreement was that nothing had changed—I was the same person and the whole family was the same, as well. We never discussed it as a family, and I never talked about it with my friends or schoolmates. It was assumed we would all accept it and make the best of it.

Although it seems unimaginable now, this was not an uncommon approach in the 1950s and 1960s. Those were years, before the focus on feelings that swept the nation sometime in the 1970s, when families kept difficulties to themselves, and there was very little talk about anything other than how to put the best foot forward as an individual and a family. My best foot was the only foot I had to stand on, the only one I had to wash, and the one that led to my life-long search and rescue mission for solo socks that had been separated from their twin.

I refused to acknowledge the reality that I had lost a leg—in one breath I told myself it hadn’t happened and in another, I believed I’d fully accepted it. I wouldn’t or couldn’t see myself with one leg, and had little sense of the jolt others experienced when they saw the big emptiness where there should have been a leg. My inner masquerade was not so difficult to hold onto since I was given a wooden leg within a year of the amputation and I looked like I had two legs. Eighteen years later, when I gave up wearing the wooden leg, it was less about embracing my body as it was, and more about getting rid of that fifteen-pound burden.

For decades I denied the very fact of my body and did everything by and for myself. My staunch independence was a counter to my childhood fear that I would be seen as crippled—or worse, as retarded—and relegated to the special education class. Out of this pretense were born some functional but unhealthy coping patterns.

Functioning on one leg has never been difficult. My body seemed to innately know how to adapt itself to any challenge that arose. Without a thought, I’d find myself balanced on one leg or climbing a flight of stairs on crutches with grocery bags, or riding a two-wheeled bike. Improvising in the physical realm came naturally, and I’ve enjoyed the game of finding the most efficient way to move about. I discounted people’s awe and curiosity, and their claims that I was amazing in what I could do. I couldn’t acknowledge that, in fact, I was living on one leg. My mind was a master at denial and deception.

Projection, rationalization, and intellectualization were my mind’s best friends. They refused to allow any unpleasant feelings to exist for more than a few seconds, always dismissing them with a rational argument for why they needed to be banished from my consciousness. They could twist any crazy behavior or unpleasant feeling into something that ultimately made sense to me. They convinced me that I could grow my leg back if I would focus my energy properly. For decades my mind rationalized my addiction to eating and purging as a way to purify my soul, whispering in my ear that E&T—my name for my eating and purging addiction—was my best friend, and a perfect way to eat and socialize without gaining weight. My mind is clever, cunning, and bright, and has been a harsh critic of any attempt to acknowledge the honest facts of my life or my emotional responses to them. Taming my mind, while embracing it, has been my biggest challenge.

My life began with parents who loved me, something I knew intellectually, but didn’t always feel. Nonetheless, it was their love, and knowing that I was a wanted child, that primed the strong spirit that kept me alive in spite of myself. There have been many mentors who loved, inspired, supported, and encouraged me along the way. Most of those relationships were short, deeply-felt connections that seemed to appear out of nowhere exactly when I needed what they had to offer.

In my forties, I was introduced to a form of improvisational dance, which allowed me to open the communication channels between three strong, yet deeply divergent aspects of myself: my body, mind, and spirit. Dance took me inside to the place where these three collaborate as I move about in life. All that came before I discovered dance had helped crack the shell of fear and bravado that allowed me to function, but would never be a path to joy. Dance connected me to a playful, and reverently irreverent part of myself that was free from the tyranny my mind had held over my body for so long.

When I began writing this book, it was for the simple purpose of telling my story. I never imagined the power that reliving the story of my life in words could have. In revisiting myself in all stages of this journey, I’ve developed compassion for myself and, subsequently, for others. It’s been an affirmation of my deeply felt sense that the journey unfolds on its own when I continue to show up.

It’s my wish that this book inspires you with hope so that when faced with your own difficult experiences you’ll know that the simple act of showing up and participating in life as fully as is possible can open doors to life-changing adventures, joyful moments, and a deep, profound sense of inner peace. And I hope you find a friend in the girl I write about.

As Mark Twain famously said, A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.

1      THE EARLY YEARS

A sacred illness is one that educates us and alters us from the inside out, provides experiences and therefore knowledge that we could not possibly achieve in any other way.

/ Deena Metzger

I STAND ALONGSIDE MY BROTHER BILLY IN his pram. I’m wearing a summer dress, anklets, and red T-strap shoes. My blonde hair is chin length, with inch-long bangs cut straight across my forehead. Billy’s one-and-a-half and I’m three. We’re at the foot of the steps that lead to our Hoboken, New Jersey apartment, which sits atop a candy store. Mom has put me in charge of watching Billy for a few minutes while she runs up to lock the door. I love being the big sister helping Mom. When she comes down, we go for a walk.

As she tells it, whenever we’re out walking, I stop at other babies’ prams and grab the angora blankets between my thumb and the first two fingers of one hand while I suck my other thumb. I love the soft, fuzzy feeling of the fluff that slides across my fingertips. Mom backtracks to retrieve me.

Karen, you have to stay with me. One day you’ll get lost and be all alone somewhere in the middle of the sidewalk. She pulls my thumb out of my mouth and, gripping my wrist, leads me back to the side of my brother’s carriage. She mutters apologies to the other mother and tells me, Now keep that thumb out of your mouth and stay with me.

I hold onto the carriage and try my best to forget about my thumb, but before long, it’s back in my mouth. To me, my thumb comes first. Angora fuzzies are a distant second. When there are no fuzzies around, I pull and twist the silky hair at the nape of my neck.

For a few days, I’ve had a nasty scab, like a mustache, on my upper lip from falling a few days earlier. I was running back to Mom from the swings in the playground we go to almost every day. Mom says I’m a clingy child. I stand with one arm wrapped around her legs and my thumb in my mouth while she holds Billy on her lap until she shushes me away.

Go play, Karen—I’m holding your brother. I like to run and skip and jump for a few minutes in between clutching Mom’s legs, and the scabs on my knees prove it. She says they ruin my pretty little girl appearance.

Mom wears pretty clothes and red lipstick. I want to be like her when I grow up. Sometimes she lets me hold Billy and feed him his bottle. But I’m afraid of her, too, especially when she screams at Dad or me. Mom knows everything and that’s something she tells me all the time. Because I’m the mother and I say so, she says, staring at me with her wrinkled forehead if I ask why I have to do something. You better do what I tell you to, or you’ll be sorry. Don’t for a minute think you can lie to me, either.

I do sometimes lie when I think she’ll be mad about something, like sticking my finger in the frosting of a cake or the butter dish in the refrigerator, or sneaking my thumb in my mouth when she tells me not to.

Calm down, Dor, Dad says when she yells at him for coming in late. What did she do? he asks when she tells him to punish me while he’s taking his coat off.

Tell her not to talk back to me. You’re out at work all day. You don’t know how much trouble she gives me sometimes.

Listen to your mother. Do what she says, or you’ll be sorry, he says in his stern voice as he glances at me with furrowed brow. Then he goes to his chair in front of the TV.

She’s a stay-at-home mom. We do lots of things on schedule, like eating and baths and naps and walks. I’m always meticulously dressed and expected to stay that way. Mom stays busy with dusting, vacuuming, sweeping, and running the clothes through the wringer washer and hanging them out to dry. I always want to help.

I made my bed, Mom, I smile wide, happy to be helping.

She takes one look and pulls the covers apart. You got the pillow all wrong. Let me make the bed. Go, she says, shooing me out of the room, get out of here. I can do it faster by myself. I hesitate. I know she’ll yell at me if I ask her anything.

Dad works day or evening shifts running the big printing press that prints the paper tea bag covers and tags in the Lipton Tea factory in Hoboken. He loves his job. When he works evenings, his favorite shift, he likes to sleep until ten in the morning and have a big breakfast of eggs and bacon, cooked by my mother. When I’m older, she tells when they were first married she’d sometimes break a whole dozen eggs before she got two that were good enough for over-easy. I wondered how that could be. Dad was not a fussy eater.

When he works days, Dad likes to go out with his buddies after work, usually to the tavern across the street from our apartment. When I’m old enough to cross the street, maybe five, Mom sends me there with Billy to remind Dad to come home for dinner. The place is dark and when the weather is warm, they leave the door wide open. The TV is always on, usually with sports or news. Before I even get to the doorway, I can smell the beer that flows out of the taps behind the bar. Inside, the men sit on high stools with shiny red seats and lean on a wooden counter.

As soon as they see us, Dad’s friends invite Billy and me in and lift us up onto the stools. The bartender slides a bowl of peanuts down the counter and brings us sodas.

Billy and I love going to the bar. Dad knows why we’re there, but he usually finishes his beer before we leave. Arriving home in his own time, he’d sometimes be met by Mom screaming.

You don’t appreciate me. Someday I’ll be gone when you get here, she threatens. One day when I’m about six, she really does leave while Billy and I are playing outside. We try the door but it’s locked. When Dad gets home that evening, we’re running back and forth across the side street. He’s furious. He grabs us, drags us into the house, and makes us eat Franco-American spaghetti and go straight to bed.

Mom comes back later that night. While they argue, Mom goes through the apartment closing all the windows so the neighbors won’t hear. When Mom comes through my room to close the windows, I close my eyes and pretend I’m sleeping. Mom says she doesn’t want other people knowing our business, especially when we’re mad at each other and arguing. I never get mad, though, because it makes her mad and sometimes she puts soap in my mouth or grabs my ponytail if I talk back or say a bad word.

In the fall of 1956, Mom and Billy walk me to my first day of kindergarten. I cry hysterically, clutching Mom’s leg, thumb firmly planted in my mouth. They turn to leave, and the teacher gently drags me into the classroom. She tells Mom to go. After they leave, I quickly warm up to my teacher and have fun listening to stories, drawing, and learning new things with the other kids. This morning scene is repeated several times over the first week of school. Eventually, I look forward to the attention I get for being smart and well-behaved, and I miss going to school on the weekends.

One day my class makes a big United States flag on the wall with individual pieces of construction paper. When it’s my turn, I climb up the stepstool, all proud and confident, to put my piece in place.

You put it upside down, Karen, my teacher says. Go back up and fix it.

I burst into tears. I feel my insides tighten into a ball. Ashamed and scared, I want to disappear. I know my teacher’s mad at me. It takes her several minutes to reassure me that life will go on after an error, but I hope she doesn’t tell Mom.

Mom and Billy pick me up every day after school. Sometimes, before we head home, we stop at the candy-apple man’s cart on the corner. The cart is a small wooden box frame with shelves, a piece of white cloth draped over the top and two wheels in the front. There are two shelves, the bottom for the big ten-cent apples, and the top shelf for the little five-cent ones. We get the little ones, though we plead with Mom for the big ones almost every day. The candy coating is a soft, gooey red that smells like hot sugar and pulls off in long strands that melt in my mouth.

Be careful with those. I don’t want you getting stains on your clothes, Mom says. She whips out the wet washcloth she always keeps in her bag and wipes our mouths a few times before we even finish eating.

In the summer Mom takes us for swimming lessons at the YMCA pool, in a dingy brick building a block from our house. It’s a small indoor pool with yellowish blue water that smells a little like the bleach Mom puts in the washer. It’s always crowded and noisy. I love to jump in off the side, swim across the pool, get out and jump in again. Mom doesn’t get in the pool. She seems happy to sit out and let the teenage swim assistants take care of us. Sometimes on the weekends, Dad takes us to the small outdoor pool at Hudson County Park, with clear blue, cold water. It’s a pool for little kids. You have to be shorter than a line carved on the wall by the entrance. The sun is bright, and the grass is very green outside the fence. Dad splashes with us or throws us up, and we make lots of bubbles as we sink to the bottom, holding our noses.

When I’m seven, in May 1958, my second brother, David, is born. Mom loves having a new baby and so do I. I feed him from a bottle and carry him around in the house, and when we go on walks Mom lets me push the carriage. I still suck my thumb, but mostly just at home. I don’t get distracted by the other carriages anymore. In August 1959, my third brother is born. Mom hoped for a girl, and it takes a few days for Gerard to finally get a name.

It’s pretty busy in our five-room apartment that summer. I’m eight, Mom’s helper, her big girl, and I love it. I look after my brothers while she cooks and cleans and I walk to the grocery store, a block away, when she needs something. There are two other identical brownstones with eight apartments each, connected to ours so we have lots of other kids to play with. When I’m not helping Mom, I love bouncing ball games, where we throw our legs over the ball, and jumping rope on the wide concrete sidewalk, and roller skating down the uneven, bumpy slate hill that is perpendicular to our street, skate key on a string around my neck.

Soon after third grade starts, I begin to have terrible pains in my right leg. Why aren’t you ready for school? my mother asks.

My leg hurts, I cry. I’m lying on the living room couch.

C’mon, get up. It’s probably sore from that bruise you got on your knee the other day, she says. Why can’t you be more careful? Now go get dressed for school. Dory will be here to pick you up.

Dory, my new best friend from Mrs. Smith’s third-grade class, lives a block away, over top of a rug store, with her older sister Judy, and her mother, Ann. She’s skinny like me and has long dark hair. Her mom lets her wear nylon stockings and shoes with the straps buckled around the back. Her sister, Judy, at ten, is a couple of years older and sometimes she’s allowed to wear makeup.

Mom lets me play jacks, pick-up sticks, and jump rope with Dory outside our house but doesn’t let me spend time at her house.

Those girls are too grown up for their age. You’re too young for strapless shoes, stockings, make-up, and boys, she says when I ask why.

I don’t care about Dory. My leg hurts too much when I stand up. I don’t want to go to school today. I love school and playing with Dory, but that day my leg hurts whether I move or not. I lie on the couch staying as still as I can.

The next day the pain is just as bad. That night I hear Mom and Dad talking about me, and the next day my mother takes me to see Dr. Spath, our family doctor.

He reassures my mother. It’s probably growing pains, Doris. Try to relax. Let her rest a few more days. Give her baby aspirin. The pain will go away.

Still, the pain persists. I go for an X-ray, and as soon as Dr. Spath sees it, he knows something is very wrong.

I think you should go see someone at Memorial Hospital in NYC, he tells Mom. I’ve called the pediatric department, and they’re waiting for you to call.

A week or so later, in early November 1959, we see a pediatric doctor. He refers me to Dr. Francis, an orthopedic surgeon. In mid-November, the same week we see him, he admits me to the hospital.

As soon as I get there, I have blood tests, X-rays, and a bone marrow test in my chest, close to my heart. I scream and kick. A few big people have to hold me down while the doctor pushes and pushes until the big needle jabs right in the center of my chest bone.

A few days later I have an operation called a bone excision. When the bandage comes off, my right thigh is skinnier than my left and twenty stitches that look like railroad tracks run from above my knee to the top of my thigh.

We took out the bad stuff and left the good stuff. You’ll be fine after a month of radiation treatments, Dr. Francis tells me. I have no idea what this means. What bad stuff? No one talks about what’s wrong with my leg, and I don’t ask, but everyone seems very worried. The good news is, the pain is gone. It hurts some around the stitches where my skin is tight and red. I’m weak but, after a few days, a nurse helps me out of bed. I can stand without pain on my skinny right leg.

• • •

For the next month, I have radiation treatments in Manhattan every day. Dad takes the mornings off to drive me there. Riding with him in his car, just the two of us, is a treat. We hardly talk, but I like sitting on the wide front seat of our green Chrysler, my feet hanging over the edge, watching my father maneuver the Lincoln Tunnel traffic. Cars speed by us and red brake lights flash on and off. Sometimes horns beep. When we get close to the hospital, Dad searches for a spot on the street. He’s a good parallel parker, spinning the wheel with his left hand as he stretches his right arm over the back of the seat, turning his head around to see out the back window. We always find a spot close to the hospital. As we walk through the streets on the upper east side of Manhattan, amidst the early morning hustle and bustle, he holds my hand. I’m happy to be with him.

In the radiation room, I lie on a cold, gray metal table under a big machine that hangs down from the ceiling. No one’s allowed in there with me because it’s dangerous for them. Dad waits outside drinking coffee and reading the New York Daily News.

This is going to help your leg get better. Now hold your breath, the radiation man says through a speaker. He’s a husky, dark-haired guy wearing green drawstring pants and a green top. His shoes are covered with paper booties. He stands outside a big window watching while the machine makes its radiation noise as it moves back and forth above my leg and chest.

• • •

The treatments are supposed to prevent my leg from getting more bad stuff in it. I don’t really believe this. I heard about what happened to some of the kids I met in the hospital. I imagine that what happened to them is going to happen to me since they had the same bad stuff as me (some people called it cancer) in different places in their legs. Take, for instance, Sally. She was four and had cancer in her knee. She had her leg cut off. Jimmy did, too. He was older than me, and I don’t know where the cancer was in his leg.

Is that gonna happen to me? I ask Mom, as we pass Jimmy and his mom in the hall, with a nurse pushing one-legged Jimmy in a wheelchair. My mom and his mom stop for a moment to talk. They hold hands and my mom’s face gets all scrunched up and sad looking.

No, they caught yours early. You’re going to be alright. I feel bad for Helen, though. As she mutters the words, she’s looking away and up toward the ceiling. Maybe she’s praying and I should pray, too. Even though Mom tells me everyone is praying for me, I pretty much think I’ll have my leg cut off one day, too.

Gloria, one of my hospital roommates while I was recovering from my surgery, had leukemia.

Her blood is getting eaten away. Those mayonnaise and pepper sandwiches are not good for her, my mother tells me while she’s visiting. She hardly eats anything else. I have no idea why mayonnaise and pepper sandwiches would be bad for someone, but I don’t ask. Mom usually tells me not to ask so many questions, and it’s even more that way since I’m in the hospital. She paces around the room and in and out while she’s visiting. She leaves whenever the nurse is doing something with Gloria and me. She asks the nurse to get me up in a wheelchair so we can go to the playroom.

One day when visiting hours are over, Mom takes me back to the room.

The nurse says, Let’s leave her up, Mrs. Witt. Take her back to the playroom. We’ll come get her for supper.

Can Gloria come, too? I ask the nurse. We like to make finger paint pictures together sitting at a big, low table. The paper is shiny on one side, and the paints are thick and gooey. We make pictures of our houses and families and flowers and animals. Gloria loves cats. She always puts them in her pictures.

Gloria’s not feeling strong enough to go today. She needs to stay in bed and rest, the nurse says. She wears a cap like an upside down cupcake liner on the back of her head and a white dress with big, deep side pockets. She keeps everything in those pockets: scissors, tape, Band-aids, a clamp that looks like scissors with a bent over point, and even lollipops. She offers me a red one that day.

Can I stay here with Gloria? We can watch TV, or maybe the cart will come by, and we can make something together. I’m worried about her.

It’s best if you go to the playroom. Gloria’s mom and dad are coming to keep her company, the nurse says.

I want to stay with Gloria. She’s my friend and we have fun laughing at cartoons and eating ice cream Dixie cups, the kind that are half vanilla and half chocolate split right down the middle. When I come back to my room a few hours later, the curtain is pulled around Gloria’s bed. I can’t see her.

Can I go in there and say hi to Gloria? I ask a different nurse, one with a pointy cap that looks like a paper airplane’s landed on the back of her head.

Not tonight. Gloria’s not feeling well, and the only people she wants to see are her parents.

What’s wrong with her? I ask.

She’s tired. Now be quiet so she can rest, the nurse says sternly.

The nurses go in and out of the curtain, but they won’t tell me anything else about Gloria. Later that night they get me up in a wheelchair and take me out to the nurses’ area. When they take me back to the room, Gloria’s bed is gone.

Where’d she go? I ask.

Gloria died. She was very very sick. Now she’s more comfortable, the nurse says as she helps me up into bed.

It’s hard to sleep that night. I’m thinking about Gloria and where they took her, what it means when someone dies. I wonder about Sally and Jimmy, too. I feel cold in my bed. I lie very still, looking straight up at the ceiling. I suck my thumb and feel the soft hair at the back of my neck, but nothing helps the big fat hole I feel in the middle of my chest. My right leg throbs as I imagine the stitches opening up and bad stuff pouring out all over the bed. I’m afraid to go to sleep. I keep thinking I just want to go home.

I think about all of this while I lie on the radiation table. It makes me really sad and I know that someday I’ll have my leg cut off and I might die from the cancer or whatever the bad stuff is. I don’t tell anyone. They’ll just tell me it’s not true. But I know it is. The operation place on my leg heals up and it doesn’t hurt anymore. My mother buys me knee-length skirts and shorts to cover the big scar on my right leg. My third- grade class welcomes me back after Christmas. Nobody asks me anything about where I was. I settle in as if nothing happened.

• • •

Every year I look forward to watching Miss America on TV. I sit on the couch or the floor with my brothers, Mom and Dad each in their own chairs. My parents pick their favorite girls, usually different ones. To me, all the girls are really pretty, even the ones Mom says are a little chubby look beautiful to me in their swimsuits and high heels. We sing along to Here she is, Miss America…. I imagine being Miss America, thinking I would learn to tap dance for my talent, even though I’ve never taken dancing lessons. I know my mom would be proud of me if I were Miss America.

• • •

Every couple of months Mom takes me to Manhattan for an X-ray and an appointment with Dr. Francis. I always wear one of my best dresses, anklet socks, and patent leather shoes with straps across my feet. Mom wears a nice dress and high heels, red lipstick and eyebrow pencil that shapes her eyebrows the way she likes them. We take a bus from Hoboken to the Port Authority, walk a few blocks to board another bus that takes us close to the doctor’s office, then walk the streets to his building. It’s a glass skyscraper with a doorman who gets the elevator for us. The man in the elevator wears a blue uniform with red stripes on the shoulders and pockets, and a stiff cap with a brim. He welcomes us and pushes buttons that make the elevator go up. I love going to New York, but Dr. Francis scares me. I just know one day he’ll say he wants to cut off my leg. My mother seems to love seeing him. She smiles and offers her hand, which he takes in both of his.

Have a seat Mrs. Witt. You, too, Karen. He escorts us to two brown leather armchairs positioned in front of his enormous desk. They have gold-colored round buttons running up one arm around the back and down the other arm. The chairs are so big I get lost in them. When I grip the arms and slide back, my feet don’t touch the floor. There’s enough room for another whole person to sit beside me.

Everything looks good today, he says. I had an X-ray the week before, and he says it’s fine. Whew! I slide out of the chair and take big steps toward the door. Let’s see her in another six months, in December. Have another X-ray before you come. He turns to me with a smile. Hold on, you. He comes over and gets down on one knee, facing me. You’re doing great, kiddo, he says, looking me square in the face. He hugs my shoulders. I squirm and turn away, ready to bolt out of the room as fast as I can.

Thank Dr. Francis, my mother tells me.

Thank you, I mumble. I’m already halfway out the door.

In August 1962, we move to Flemington because the Lipton Tea Company, where Dad works, relocates and asks him to go along. My parents are delighted for two reasons: Dad worries it would be hard for him to find another good job and Mom will get a house, something she’s always wanted. She’s so anxious to move that they buy a house a whole year before the company actually moves. Mom moves with us kids and Dad stays in Hoboken with his mother, coming to his new home on weekends.

Our house has a creek running down the hill behind it and I see cows in a yard just beyond the creek. I’d never seen a cow close up or lived in a house. In Hoboken, we lived in buildings with eight apartments on four floors, and most of the trees grew out of holes in the concrete near the street. Our new house has lots of grass and trees all over the place. We can walk to the store, a good thing, too, because we only have one car and Dad has it all week while he’s working in Hoboken. It doesn’t matter about the car anyway—Mom doesn’t know how to drive.

I’m ten when we move there, and my mother lets me have a bike for the first time. My cousin Bernadine gives me her old one, with hand brakes and skinny tires—just what I want. One day while I’m riding around a curve, I slide on some gravel and tumble to the ground. The hand brake pushes deep into my left thigh. I lay there in the gravel with the bike on top of me, praying that nothing bad has happened to my good leg. I’m in a fog of fear, convinced I hurt my bad leg and my good leg, until a car stops in front of me and I see a man walking toward me.

What happened? he asks as he bends down to take a look.

The brake is stuck in my leg, I wince, trying hard not to cry.

Here let me help. He pushes gently on my thigh while moving the bike away from my leg. The brake slides out along with purple, gooey stuff, but no blood. I wonder if it’s the same bad stuff I had in my other leg.

It’s not too deep, but we better get you to the emergency room, see if you need stitches. Where do you live?

I know I have to go to the hospital but I don’t want to. I’m scared to go to any hospital, especially to have them do something to my legs.

Around the block. I point toward my house as he’s carrying me to his car. We stop for my mother, who gets our neighbor to watch my brothers.

I hate that bike, she says as she gets into the car. Thank you so much for picking her up, she repeats and repeats as we drive to the hospital. She barely looks at me and doesn’t look at my leg at all.

It’s a puncture wound, they rarely bleed, the emergency room doctor says as he puts in two stitches. My mother and the man wait in the waiting room.

It’ll be fine in a week. The nurse shows us how to clean it and the man takes us home. Mom wants to pay him but he refuses.

After that Mom doesn’t like me riding that bike, but I still want to. Sometimes, if I plead with her, she lets me ride it in the backyard and to the corner of our street. I guess she’s scared I’ll hurt myself again and get another scar somewhere. I am, too, but I really like how free I feel when I ride.

• • •

In September 1962, I start sixth grade in a new school in the town we moved to over the summer. Billy and I walk together in the mornings and sometimes Mom comes by with David and Gerard, my two younger brothers, to walk us home as she did in Hoboken. The building sits back from the road, and there’s a big circular driveway the school buses drive up to unload. My old school sat right on the sidewalk, and everyone walked to school.

In my classroom, the desks are in pairs. Two boys named Barry and Steve sit at the desks in front of me and a girl named Mary. On the first day, as we’re all getting settled, Barry turns around and drops what sounds like a marble onto my desk.

Mary and Steve exclaim almost in unison, Barry! Why’dya do that? It’s her first day.

The hard round thing rolls across my desk. It’s not a marble. What is it? I grimace as I shrink down in my chair.

It’s his eye, Steven chimes in with a sort of eerie glee. See? He points to the sunken area on Barry’s face where his eye should be.

Barry wears a spooky grin. Yeah, see, it goes in here…like this. He picks up the orb and pops it back into the socket. I lean forward, amazed. He smiles and pops it out again. The two boys burst into hysterical laughter, while Mary sits there watching. She leans over and whispers, Don’t worry, they’re really nice. Really.

Our teacher, Mrs. Denbigh, looks up. Steve, Barry—turn around NOW and face the front of the room. She pauses. NOW. I mean it. She rises from her perch behind her desk. Barry pops his eye back in.

Later Mary tells me, Somebody threw a scissor that got stuck in his eye when he was younger and they had to take the eye out. That’s why he has the glass eye.

Yuck. Who threw the scissors? That must’ve hurt a lot. I’m thinking about the kids without legs and arms I saw at Memorial Hospital. Now I know someone without an eye, too. I hope that soon I’ll forget about all those kids and that I’ll stop worrying about having my leg cut off.

I don’t know who threw them. He never told me.

As the weeks go by, Barry pops his eye out when I least expect it. No matter how many times he does it, I get chills when I see the eye rolling around on my desk and glance up at Barry’s sunken face. Still, it’s a way we connect. We’re four eleven-year-olds, clueless about how to engage the opposite sex.

No one in my class, including Mrs. Denbigh, knows I had cancer. I try not to think about it. What if it happens again? My big secret leaves me feeling like a bag of mush. I pray no one finds out.

I love my new school and Mrs. Denbigh. She makes us work hard, with homework every night except Friday, but she lets us go outside to play every day. There’s a big playground with swings and slides and monkey bars and lots of grass and trees. Sometimes the boys organize races and invite us girls to join, even though we’re wearing skirts. I love running, and I’m pretty fast, so I win a lot. When I do, I throw my arms in the air and yell yahoo! Playing tag is like that, too. It’s fun to run fast and dodge whoever is it, laughing out loud and collapsing onto the grass when the bell rings. Three times a week we have gym, with volleyball and girl’s hockey, my favorite. Some of the girls hate the one-piece blue gym suits with the short legs and snaps up the front, but I feel ready for anything when I put mine on.

Even though we’ve moved more than an hour away, Dad and Mom continue to take me to see Dr. Francis in Manhattan for X-rays and blood tests. The X-ray taken on December 13, 1962, makes everyone very nervous.

Dr. Francis looks straight at me from behind his fancy desk. I think there may be more cancer inside your leg. I want to do some other tests in the hospital. Mom and Dad sit on either side of me.

I protest. But my leg doesn’t even hurt. Not even when I run. I don’t want to go to the hospital again. I hate it there, I squirm in my chair, wanting desperately to run away. I want to go home! I shout as forcefully as I can, holding back tears. My