Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (40 page)

Because I didn’t have a road, because I was in the process of the journey, I still didn’t know why I was between two different cultures. I still had to jump-start an image of my broken self.

The Bible is full of journeys. It’s why I think it is home.

That second morning at the Sun Dance, I watched the men lie on the buffalo robe. I watched as the holy men pushed the skewers under their skin. That’s where it suddenly connected for me.

My son, when he was 17, had open lung surgery. He had holes in his lungs and they had to be stapled. When his lung first collapsed, the doctor pushed a tube into his chest. I was sitting outside the curtain. The opening for the tube was the size of a yellow jacket stinging with a stinging he couldn’t push away.

I was not an outsider to this. I am the mother who listened to him suffer. I smoked and drank when he was conceived, and those habits interfered with his chances for development. I think so anyway. I’ve had a dream of snow in the yard. He was looking from the window. I tossed the snow at the window calling him until he disappeared.

He was born blue and mottled. Wrapped in the tissue paper of the evening sky. There was also a second surgery. His kidney, that time. He was pierced in the side like Christ, and not all the pages of the Bible can change it.

I wished I could go back and conceive him again. I wished I could put on his overalls and pull a shirt over his chest again. He survived. He went through officer training at Quantico and spent four years in the Marines. He went back to school and now teaches.

That morning in the open field on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, during one of the rest periods between the rounds of dancing, an elder spoke over the loudspeaker. He said the Sun Dance is a form of Christ going to the cross. For me, it was finished on the cross. But the ceremony of linkage to suffering and release is still here, in this manger of sorts, this place where cattle usually graze. This place where boats unload and repack to start back on the river.

In the afternoon, I drove with two friends to the White River, nearly to Murdo. I heard the birds and insects in the grasses from the window of the car as I passed, like Oklahoma and the open places I’ve traveled. We picked some sage in a field along the road, leaving an offering of tobacco.

We had lunch at the Cook Shack in Mission and returned to the Sun Dance grounds for another hot afternoon. That evening as the dance finished, the announcer said there was a severe storm warning. We could see the clouds to the west because you can see far across the prairie from the ridge where we camped. Less than an hour later, we were in our tents trying to hold them down in the wind.

That evening I rode out the storm in the borrowed tent, the sides puffing as if it were a large bird trying to take flight. I heard the snap and hum of the lightning. I could even smell it.

Afterwards, while it was still light, I heard someone say,
look at the rainbows
. When I looked from the tent, I saw the two rainbows over the camp grounds. I stood in the slight rain that was still falling and the wind still whipping the tents and felt the oneness with the sky and earth. I felt survival. I felt promise. I felt what I hadn’t known I’d been looking for. Significance.

Later in the night, I heard the eerie noise of coyotes, the hecklers, laughing at what I had found. But I stuck with it.

I wanted a journey of meaning in ordinary life. I’d always liked the plain land under the sky. The routine of housework and grading papers and writing and teaching and traveling, transformed by the act of its own ordinariness. Just as Jesus walking through the wheat field, these moments became more than themselves.

My mother used to talk about the Maypole dance she experienced as a girl. The ceremony of the tree goes back in history. The cross of Christ. The cottonwood tree of the Sun Dance. It is a connection to the past.

…I hung

on the windy tree…

gashed with a blade

bloodied for Odinn

myself an offering to myself

knotted to that tree

no man knows

wither the roots of it run.

— Dr. Brian Branston,
The Last Gods of England

The Sun Dance is also a connection to the Plains Indian culture I had read about in school, which is different from the woodland Cherokee heritage my father had left. It always left me with a sense of confusion as to what an
Indian
was.

I know now I was looking for meaning in the heat and community and sometimes the boredom as a Sun Dance observer.

I knew I already had it. When my son’s chest was opened during surgery, when I had come apart, when I needed the construct of strength and meaning and hope, it was Christ. I’ve always gone to church through the years. I was saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. I spoke in tongues.

I believe in ceremony. There were many ceremonies at the Sun Dance, which is itself a ceremony.

The next morning, the clouds were low when I dismantled my tent and left. It felt as if the day would be cool, but I knew how soon the heat comes.

I watched the road ahead of me as I drove back toward Interstate 90 to the north. I watched the road’s reflection on the hood of my car. I had made an expedition to a place I was not from. The low, rolling hills of South Dakota under the sky that lidded them. I felt the air in the window. My hand on the wheel.

I turned east onto Interstate 90 toward Minnesota. The cars and trucks moving along the highway were unaware of the Sun Dance just a few miles over the hills. And the Sun Dancers, when they came in their vans with their teepee lodgepoles tied on top and turned onto the Interstate, would pass along the road with the other traffic. They would carry with them their
significance
, which is a blanket over the pitfalls of the earth. Well, we do fall into them sometimes, but get lifted out.

It’s why I wanted to write — to touch words — because the touch of words was alive.

Lucy Grealy

 

LUCY GREALY
, an award-winning poet, was born in Ireland in 1963. She lived in the United Kingdom and in Germany but spent most of her life in New York, where she grew up. She died in 2002. She is the author of a collection of essays,
As Seen on TV: Provocations
.

 

There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected just how omnipresent are our own images. I began by merely avoiding mirrors, but by the end of the year I found myself with an acute knowledge of the reflected image, its numerous tricks and wiles, how it can spring up at any moment: a glass tabletop, a well-polished door handle, a darkened window, a pair of sunglasses, a restaurant’s otherwise magnificent brass-plated coffee machine sitting innocently by the cash register.

At the time, I had just moved, alone, to Scotland and was surviving on the dole, as Britain’s social security benefits are called. I didn’t know anyone and had no idea how I was going to live, yet I went anyway because by happenstance I’d met a plastic surgeon there who said he could help me. I had been living in London, working temp jobs. While in London, I’d received more nasty comments about my face than I had in the previous three years, living in Iowa, New York, and Germany. These comments, all from men and all odiously sexual, hurt and disoriented me. I also had journeyed to Scotland because after more than a dozen operations in the States, my insurance had run out, along with my hope that further operations could make any
real
difference. Here, however, was a surgeon who had some new techniques, and here, amazingly enough, was a government willing to foot the bill: I didn’t feel I could pass up yet another chance to “fix” my face, which I confusedly thought concurrent with “fixing” my self, my soul, my life.

Twenty years ago, when I was nine and living in America, I came home from school one day with a toothache. Several weeks and misdiagnoses later, surgeons removed most of the right side of my jaw in an attempt to prevent the cancer they found there from spreading. No one properly explained the operation to me, and I awoke in a cocoon of pain that prevented me from moving or speaking. Tubes ran in and out of my body, and because I was temporarily unable to speak after the surgery and could not ask questions, I made up my own explanations for the tubes’ existence. I remember the mysterious manner the adults displayed toward me. They asked me to do things: lie still for X rays, not cry for needles, and so on, tasks that, although not easy, never seemed equal to the praise I received in return. Reinforced to me again and again was how I was “a brave girl” for not crying, “a good girl” for not complaining, and soon I began defining myself this way, equating strength with silence.

Then the chemotherapy began. In the seventies chemo was even cruder than it is now, the basic premise being to poison patients right up to the very brink of their own death. Until this point I almost never cried and almost always received praise in return. Thus I got what I considered the better part of the deal. But now it was like a practical joke that had gotten out of hand. Chemotherapy was a nightmare and I wanted it to stop; I didn’t want to be brave anymore. Yet I had grown so used to defining myself as “brave” — i.e.,
silent
— that the thought of losing this sense of myself was even more terrifying. I was certain that if I broke down I would be despicable in the eyes of both my parents and the doctors.

The task of taking me into the city for the chemo injections fell mostly on my mother, though sometimes my father made the trip. Overwhelmed by the sight of the vomiting and weeping, my father developed the routine of “going to get the car,” meaning that he left the doctor’s office before the injection was administered, on the premise that then he could have the car ready and waiting when it was all over. Ashamed of my suffering, I felt relief when he was finally out of the room. When my mother took me, she stayed in the room, yet this only made the distance between us even more tangible. She explained that it was wrong to cry
before
the needle went in; afterward was one thing, but before, that was mere fear, and hadn’t I demonstrated my bravery earlier? Every Friday for two and a half years I climbed up onto that big doctor’s table and told myself not to cry, and every week I failed. The two large syringes were filled with chemicals so caustic to the vein that each had to be administered very slowly. The whole process took about four minutes; I had to remain utterly still. Dry retching began in the first fifteen seconds, then the throb behind my eyes gave everything a yellow-green aura, and the bone-deep pain of alternating extreme hot and cold flashes made me tremble, yet still I had to sit motionless and not move my arm. No one spoke to me — not the doctor, who was a paradigm of the cold-fish physician; not the nurse, who told my mother I reacted much more violently than many of “the other children”; and not my mother, who, surely overwhelmed by the sight of her child’s suffering, thought the best thing to do was remind me to be brave, to try not to cry. All the while I hated myself for having wept before the needle went in, convinced that the nurse and my mother were right, that I was “overdoing it,” that the throwing up was psychosomatic, that my mother was angry with me for not being good or brave enough.

Yet each week, two or three days after the injection, there came the first flicker of feeling better, the always forgotten and gratefully rediscovered understanding that to simply be well in my body was the greatest thing I could ask for. I thought other people felt this appreciation and physical joy all the time, and I felt cheated because I was able to feel it only once a week.

Because I’d lost my hair, I wore a hat constantly, but this fooled no one, least of all myself. During this time, my mother worked in a nursing home in a Hasidic community. Hasidic law dictates that married women cover their hair, and most commonly this is done with a wig. My mother’s friends were now all too willing to donate their discarded wigs, and soon the house seemed filled with them. I never wore one, for they frightened me even when my mother insisted I looked better in one of the few that actually fit. Yet we didn’t know how to say no to the women who kept graciously offering their wigs. The cats enjoyed sleeping on them and the dogs playing with them, and we grew used to having to pick a wig up off a chair we wanted to sit in. It never struck us as odd until one day a visitor commented wryly as he cleared a chair for himself, and suddenly a great wave of shame overcame me. I had nightmares about wigs and flushed if I even heard the word, and one night I put myself out of my misery by getting up after everyone was asleep and gathering all the wigs except for one the dogs were fond of and that they had chewed up anyway. I hid all the rest in an old chest.

When you are only ten, which is when the chemotherapy began, two and a half years seem like your whole life, yet it did finally end, for the cancer was gone. I remember the last day of treatment clearly because it was the only day on which I succeeded in not crying, and because later, in private, I cried harder than I had in years; I thought now I would no longer be “special,” that without the arena of chemotherapy in which to prove myself, no one would ever love me, that I would fade unnoticed into the background. But this idea about
not being different
didn’t last very long. Before, I foolishly believed that people stared at me because I was bald. After my hair eventually grew in, it didn’t take long before I understood that I looked different for another reason. My face. People stared at me in stores, and other children made fun of me to the point that I came to expect such reactions constantly, wherever I went. School became a battleground.