Morning Glory Jeans

by Lynn Strongin

for Anne & Jim who know the cell, the release

1.

Often they straightened our backs with braces: with Stryker frames which turned the child strapped into a bed  like a pancake now in this, now that direction; Reese jackets in extreme cases of curvature of a spine where a rod was inserted and a body cast held the backbone rigid from skull to toes. One was covered like a turtle. A girl’s, a boy’s face would peek out. Still, we hardly pecked at crumbs. We older kids took up smoking. My own spine was held in a corset with steel bones that cut my shoulder blades and made me think of Luncinda Violet, my aunt’s mannequin. She too had no flesh on her bones, picked dry by the blackbirds, Uncle would gaffe. These macabre jokes made me laugh in the ward. Without blushing like  a peony.

There was a certain milk-blue of morning glory that our jeans had turned. Not deliberately bleached but only by wear and by the sun. This was a colour badge we had to earn. Denim mixed with milk paint, squatting, running, climbing. No hiding under a frothy hat for the likes of me.

Once in a while on the ward, rather than being slipped into my ash-rose gingham, or the dotted Swiss, I asked for these jeans which had miraculously made it thru the fire with my lean twelve-year-old body the night I was stricken. On these star-occasions, which merited a marquee in my book, a Sunday nurse would draw them down from a wire hanger in the metal closets reminiscent of gyms which stood beside each of our hospital cots. On Sundays we were slipped out of regulation hospital gowns and dressed in whatever school clothes we had. Once in a blue moon, I asked for my jeans. The Sunday nurse had a rear end that was shaped like the bell of a gourd squash. I was a thin pear. They fit my lean-hipped frame.
These jeans  were echoes, mirrors from the summer I had been eleven: faded hollyhock, larkspur, magnolia. I’d climbed the final house frames I was to climb, wearing these jeans. I’d given my dog away when I pedaled over to the poor part of town and visited Skeezix (named from the comic strip) who had ended up there because for ten dollars I was commanded by mother Marcelle to sell him. “He has eight holes in him.” He’d got in a fight again and was cowering under our parents’ desk—it had belonged to both my parents until the divorcee. This desk had a deep knee hole and tooled gold green leather on top. Mysteriously, and indicting me forever,  the first two letters of my name had appeared cut with a letter opener in the right lower-hand corner of the Italian leather desk.

How was it that my blue jeans were not burned? All my clothing was there when the house was fumigated. It was as if they took the child’s flesh but left the skeleton standing.  . . Math tutoring had gone on in these jeans, scouring the country club which would not allow Jewish people to join. “We’ll get even,” I incited the other kids and we did, tobogganing over all the nicely sculpted gold ruts when blizzards came. I was light as a grasshopper-kid, the leanest, so I rode on the end and always flew off amid gales of laughter.

But with this virus there was no way to get even. A handful, I was not the type of kid who’d carp and grow bitter.  I was wiry and still leaping hedges in my heart  when I read the headlines from my hospital bed which spoke of the earliest vaccine coming in just the summer I was stricken. We’d jump the great divide between the ill and the well. Mother was standing firm, the ranks were closed: now I was a hospitalized child but there was another state of mind my imagination lived in.

This state had the hallelujah chorus, the survival meetings along river banks and it was my Mecca, the roof I might have jumped off in hospital gown—and flown.

There was no oasis outside. But Mother had given me an accordion file for letters so I could alphabetize all  the get-well  cards  or sympathy notes from schoolmates. I became briefly alarmed. I was trussed, the war was over only six years earlier. 1945-1951 we played jazz songs: currents running thru me like live-wire, my body was a hot house with red currants, gooseberries and raspberries growing. Here was Maggie’s card. Here Danielle’s. But would I ever see either of those girls again? No kids were allowed to visit: the needle and thread of poliomyelitis had looped thru me and I was left untouchable.

Mother had got rid of the yellow clock I nightmared over. In my dream our family sat in a circle. My Forever Family was to change, and the clock circulated like a mythical animal behind us. At whoever’s chair it stopped that person would die. I woke up screaming. When I actually came to die, I was silent. No white clock peopled and darkened my dream.

O squandered lambs.

Who was my Forever Family now? A brick incinerator I imaged to be a crematorium stood outside my end of the ward. A desperate dash up the path was made by the dog, Livingstone. He was the exact color of blood pudding. The sky was white as lard, the earth dark as dung. Dark that is until snow came, sugar powdering bushes, branches, buildings. I lay on the tilt table till my feet burned, itched to run. This was done to stimulate the circulation.

Agnes Peck, my favorite nurse, was in good health, tall and thin, had handsome legs, a haunting beauty about her movement, the type I saw coming for me till smash bang the virus came and exploded all over me like lit kerosene.


2.

Hip-huggers the jeans but boy had they ever circled my hips. I was a dirty blond. No Bearington Bears inhabited our world. It was parentless now. Nurses held the waystations. I was a child locked up beside a radiant ocean.

Mother and I used to chase each other round the dining table, I’d shove it up against the kitchen, scoot under. Very few children on the ward were allowed to enter a Griselda mood which might have occurred among pre-adolescent girls confined. Mother came to the ward once wearing her Beethoven wing collar. Was this to cheer me up? I was envious lying there with budding breasts in my white regulation hospital gown with numbers tamped inside it. I recalled with longing the glory days of our chasing one another round and round the dining table like numerals of a clock now totally ground to a halt, pulverized, ash dust which blew away when I held my palm up to the wind puffing out my cheeks as though blowing a turmpet.
It was dark and late.

No one came, no footfall. The night was lace. Cancerous, riddled. No escape. A dazzling light of being scrutinized was shone upon us children. Every freckle, wart, every curve of bone was seen by hostile eyes. Was it a bit like this in the prison camps? How can I remotely imagine. The shimmering colours swept me away.

That night when I was lifted out of my jeans I noticed the black and blue mark on my thigh. “How did that get there?” the nurse interrogated.

I did not know.

I shook my head.

“Was it the clamps, being measured for braces?”

“I don’t know, I told you,” I shook my head again. I went about my conquest in my own way. I could see that she liked me. Bluejeans were passion and hayfields, tall chive grass. She smiled. This passion freed me. I remembered in a flash.

I’d swung myself by one of the bars in the gym, hoisting my skinny body up by my hands last week and had fallen on the exercise mat in the railroad station cathedral light of the gym on a late winter day, early evening, bruising my hip. I didn’t feel much then. It was the most dire and extreme hour of all for me, the hour when my whole worldview or weltanshauung changed. Parents picked up kids but never me. October had come and gone and it was clear that I would not get better to return home with my kin. My Forever Family was changed. No more butterscotch, pencil-smelling schoolrooms with the snap-down maps I adored. The smell of old wooden rulers was still in my nostrils. The kids in the ward were now my block gang. I swallowed hard every Friday that last hour in the gym between four and five. I threw myself to the lions when I dared to lift my slender weight from the mat  with my strong though thin biceps. Then was when the bruise the size of a grapefruit bloomed. It might have been a boy’s hand in  rape, my first orgasm behind the barn. But I’d handled that myself too.

“Green eyes,” she smiled at me. It’s true that somebody had dubbed them Coke-bottle green.

I turned toward the wall.

I would not, could not tell her although a stream of Joycean lyricism came to my inner lips and I must have been close to a grin myself. One of the children had a cancer of the face and the surgeons could not figure how near her right eye it was rooted. This scared me, I saw the branches of innocence wrapped up in the arms of the children. I knew, however, where this fear was rooted, this fear of mine. I missed the hummingbirds back home dipping their needle beaks into red. Did I miss Chel? The world of the schoolroom was never again to be mine. I knew this although the ancient geographies they brought up on carts from the hospital basement made a makeshift schoolroom.

Out of my jeans, I realized they felt so good I’d frozen. I’d want to wear them again. Mysteriously, miraculously, to wear them in bed, knees pulled up to chin—I had to do this now with my hand—and burrowing a nose in a book as I had done when a walking child.

But now it was the silver wheelchair I wakened to every morning, went to bed from every night. “Goodnight, Pal, old horse, stallion,” I touched the icy silver. It, too, was the first thing I touched on waking.

What I had wasn’t cancer of the spine as I first dreaded. It wasn’t spreading but a lace was cast, a narrow net over the body with bowl haircut, heart armor breaking, cupping each breast in one hand, budding in Ward C bed #9 . Jack Frost I was called, “Jacklyn” because I loved painting with words.
I who had taken away peoples’ breaths performing Chopin at the music conservatory, I at whom they had gasped because I climbed down fir trees upside down, I was paralyzed and my only claim to fame was that I was having a story, “Holly Comes Home for Christmas,” my dream fantasy published in the Ward Words, the modest mimeographed publication of the hospital. I never saw the publication.


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