In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
to cry about. She sounded exactly like my grandmother, Rosa Leu, Nurse-in-Charge, who always frightened me. I blacked out again.
Traction in 1973 was pretty primitive. I lay on my back in a bed, my left leg strapped into a device with weights at the end of my foot to hold the pieces of bone perfectly still while they knitted themselves back together. This was for seven weeks.
I learned all the Latin names for bones from the orthopedic surgeon. My femur was snapped in half between the hip joint and the patella; the tibia and fibula and phalanges remained intact, though covered with blood. The weights were attached to tape stretching along the sides of my lower leg, tape changed frequently when it pulled off my skin and slid down toward my feet. I had bloody stripes along my lower leg. I could move only my head and arms. I had a bedpan. I was not a child, but not an adult. I was supposed to be learning how to be a teenage girl. My various roommates were grown people who arrived and disappeared in the day and the night, whose ailments and surgeries entailed their moaning and crying and shouting. Sometimes I believed they died in the night, when a nurse pulled the curtain around their screams.
I was terrified. My mother was terrified of hospitals, too, maybe because of her own mother’s death. For the first few days, she came at visiting hours, but she had my three brothers and one sister at home, and children were not allowed to visit the orthopedic wing.
Then it got worse. My father wanted to visit. My mother and father could not be in the room together. My father insisted on renting a small television to hang near my right side. My mother was furious. She hated television. She listened to the Dodgers on the radio while knitting.
The second week, my stepmother brought me a makeup kit, on a Saturday. She knew my love for the thirty shades of beauty in tiny compartments—glittery gold and purple and green and blue, cream blushes in bronze and mauve.
My long hair was filthy. That evening, Miss Ledesma, the young Chicana LVN who checked on me every night, saw me with the kit. Her makeup and hair were always perfect. She brought a plastic basin and gently lowered my head into warm water, while I stared up at the ceiling. She lathered my head, her fingernails long and careful on my scalp, and I closed my eyes. No one had been that tender to me in many years. She rinsed out my hair, and combed it through, and blow-dried it. Then she helped me put on eye shadow, blush, and pink lip gloss.
My thin face, the dark circles of pain under my eyes, the scaly grime gathered in rings around my throat: in the hand mirror Miss Ledesma brought me, I was hideous.
On Sunday my mother walked in with yarn. Since I was laid up, she thought I should crochet granny squares for a blanket or new vest. She must have seen the sparkly powders on my face like a violent sunset. She handed me a hot washcloth and told me to scrub off that junk because it made me look like a hooker.
That week, my mother brought to my room the woman who cut her hair short every month. Too much trouble to take care of waist-length hair in the hospital. Her friend sheared my hair to my ears. Now I was a hideous elf. Without any sun or fresh air, my hair darkened to ash, and my skin looked like wax.
I was a completely different human.
When school began, a tutor was sent to my hospital room. I read all day, but there were not enough books. The skin on my left shin and calf was disappearing, long bleeding stripes turned to scabs and then reopened. My muscles were withered by disuse, and the bones reknitted themselves with a ball of calcium that stuck out as if a doorknob had been inserted into my upper thigh.
It was September. I watched hours of televised college football, hating the cheerleaders so much that I paid attention to the games. Football was complex and inventive, the formations intricate, and I was never bored by the passing routes, the offensive line blocking. When people asked what I wanted to be, as a girl of that time, I was given two choices: teacher or nurse. By now, I didn’t want to be a nurse, a woman who yelled if I didn’t eat the gooseberries in my fruit cocktail. Who the hell wanted to eat gooseberries? Why would you name them that? They looked like veined green eyeballs.
I decided to be a sportswriter. In my notebook, I wrote articles for each game, the plays and yardage, star quarterbacks and leaping catches and even the way the light hit the field.
I returned to junior high in November, wearing a body cast. It wrapped around my waist and contained my entire left leg, except my filthy toes. For weeks I’d had a bedpan; now I had to slant my body on the toilet and use a cup. My siblings found this hilarious.
I had crutches. No one remembered me. Everyone stared. Guys whispered to girls about sex, but the only thing guys asked me was how I went to the bathroom. I did not mention the cup. Not sexy.
My friends had swelling curves, tight jeans with two-inch zippers, and platform shoes. I had baggy pants that could stretch over plaster, sarcastic signatures near my knee, and really strong arms.
After two more months, the cast was sawn off. I stood in the hospital parking lot on my crutches, crying. My left leg was so thin and helpless that when the winter wind blew, my foot swung of its own volition. My calf was scarred deeply from the traction tape, with stripes of brown as if someone had spilled hot chocolate down my shins. It took weeks of physical therapy until I could walk again.
My grandmother Rosa paid a professional visit to inspect my leg. She said with detachment, “He did a good job, that orthopedic. He could have put screws. I thought her leg would be two inches shorter than the other. I thought you would have to pay for the special shoes—the ones that would make her normal.” Then she turned away.
Since she felt no love for us, I tried to study Rosa with my own literary detachment. She was a combination of Great-Aunt March in Little Women and the grandfather in Heidi. I knew by then my mother was like Francie’s mother in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn combined with the mothers of Toni Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye and Sula. I didn’t fully understand those women, but their soliloquies about illness and laundry and hardship were monologues I heard while I ironed or sorted my brothers’ jeans with dried mud like small hubcaps at the knees.
There is a watercolor painting here in my house: a still life of wine bottle and gathered fruit. My mother kept it in a folder that we children only glimpsed a few times. When I was an adult, and she moved, I rescued the painting from the trash. She said to me, “I took a painting class at the YWCA. Then I found a book—teach yourself to paint. My mother was an artist. She made beautiful sketches of our garden and our house in Switzerland.” She studied her watercolor, and said dispassionately, “Just after I finished this, I had you, and then I never painted anything again. My life was over.”
Also in the trash, I found the teach-yourself-to-paint book, with her last, half-finished still life of fruit and flowers. I have it here in my office.
I cannot draw anything. But I loved paintings, sketches, and photography. Maybe I got that from my mother’s mother, Frieda. Because I inherited nothing from Rosa, the only grandmother I ever knew.
Rosa Leu, Aeschlen, Switzerland, 1944
In the tiny village of Würzbrunnen, in the central mountainous German-speaking part of Switzerland that is called the Berner Oberland, which looks like a tourist brochure come to life—the brown cows with huge bells ringing as they walk and flower garlands around their creamy necks, the grass full of wildflowers and the wooden houses perched on the steep slopes—there is a very small church famous in Switzerland.
The Wolf Church, it is called by our Erb relatives, the family of Rosa Erb Leu. The Erbs have been in this part of Switzerland since the 1600s, in the village of Aeschlen and surrounding area. This church is beautifully simple, pale wooden interior carved with flowers and