Pain Pulls Punches

Pain Pulls Punches

by Liz Whiteacre

All that I am and all that I have been all that I have done and all that has been done to me has brought me to this sacred moment in time.

Sarah Starnes

Joie de Vivre Shows on His Face

Morning Routine

Old canoes resist my pull through rotted duckweed, but I tug as I’ve always tugged, only bothered by mosquitoes’ buzz and horseflies’ nip. My body heaves and flips heavy canoes to drain.

Their silver bellies are pale and bloated like fish whose swim bladders buoy them to surface.

No fantasies during labor; instead, I focus on muscles’ flex, heavy heat, woosh of murky water, muted thud of metal hitting earth. Again. Yet, again. My body bends at will, a strong limbed automaton

set to tasks mapped in its young cells flip thud nip flip thud swat until these boats’ bellies soak up sun.

Boat Dock Duties

I check life vests for dampness and the heights of paddles and oars, these small things tethering boaters to air.

I pass them to boisterous strangers eager for a peaceful hour on the lake. Their buzz drifts on placid water shrieks and splashes fade like a passing heron’s cry. A thin man whose face droops on the left says, “May I paddleboat, please?”

I size his vest and lead him to the boat. His left foot bumps like the boats against the pier. Sitting on the rough dock, conscious of my ease, I fish the boat close and hold it with my calves, the steadiest I can make this yellow plastic.

He sits and scoots awkwardly until he drops his bottom onto the pre formed bucket seat. I help him put his left foot onto a pedal

I watch his sandal treads catch, avoid his eyes. “It’s not so bad out on the water,” I tell him. “I’m here a lot,” he says and waits for me to unclip mooring lines and push him off. Sunlight illuminates his glide past the slip’s roof. “If you need any help getting back,” I say,

“just wave your arm.” He churns water with one strong leg, managing a wide arching circle in the cove like my neighbor’s carp with finrot who swims lazy ovals through the pond’s reeds. Back warmed by the sun,

my eyes scan the brown water, the yellow, red, and silver boats bright like carp bound by shore.

Instead, He Leaps

“I’d like to join my friend,” says a big guy in pressed khakis, dark shades. I use a hook to catch the circling paddleboat, pull it to the dock.

Sitting again to steady the craft, I’m dwarfed by this newcomer he steps onto the boat but pulls his loafer back when it dips.

“Whoa.”

“Please,” I say, “take my hand,” raising it, resting my palm in the hot air.

“Got it,” he says. He leaps.

Hot plastic wrenches my legs; wood bites my flesh; bone, muscle, and cotton wrestle; frogs shriek and dive beneath the dock. His body topples, tackles, crushes me. I’m pinned arms struggle with his bulk, softer than the canoes, soft like water swallowing me after a capsize. My left ear presses my shoulder, my butt slides, shorts snag the rough wood. Adrenaline pushes this dead weight, suddenly it’s gone.

“You OK?” I breathe.

I don’t hear a splash. The air vibrates with water rot. The heron squawks at us to keep it down. I pull my legs from the boat, and they dangle like limp lines.

“Yeah, I’m good,” the big guy says from the boat. “Let’s go, man.”

Pedals balanced now, they pump their knees and paddle beyond the slip’s roof into sunlight,

beyond the cove toward the lake’s horizon. They don’t look back.

Rise

I breathe: dank water, ripe algae, sweat, damp wood, our sweat. I pull legs up to lift my body; pain shoots up my back. This isn’t right. Dizzy, I try to tuck my head between my legs, but bile rises when I bend. Lifeguards are too far to hear me unless I shout. I don’t want to cause a fuss a fat guy in khakis just fell on my head.

Hell. My body doesn’t respond as it always has. I can’t raise my hand up to wave pressed flat on the wood, cheek chafed by splinters, I grab my shorts and heave. My legs land heavy on the dock like the canoes on dry sand. Onto my belly I roll, scraping my knees when I gather them beneath me inch by inch. Every movement is fish on land.

It’s the kind of pain I can’t swallow, can’t identify a spit bait.

On my knees and still, no one notices I crawl to a short pillar, pull myself up. My feet suddenly disconnect from my body. The carp must feel this when its fins disintegrate, feel water pass where it shouldn’t.

Brace yourself.

My feet complain when I beg them to move. I shuffle plank by plank until my toes touch sunlight. The air is sweeter. I shake off a faint, see bright carp pushing their bodies through muck in figure eights. Each step new fire.

Hope, like sun, burns hot in my veins. Yes, beat circles, move forward I’ve got to do something, anything but stand still.

Cold in a Paper Gown

I eavesdrop in the emergency room.

Next door, past thin plaster, an orderly assures a stranger who cannot see out of her left eye that her doctor will soon arrive. Soon is measured by the number of emergencies.

I wait on X rays. I cannot feel my feet.

The pain in my hips and back mimics childbirth contractions imagined each time the PA plays lullabies. They let me keep my underwear, and the cotton’s a comfort when I stand or sit or lie down.

My spinal fluid weeps, and doctors whisper over my emergency.

In the hall, a nurse examines the woman-with-a-good-right-eye.

“Excuse me.”

In my doorway stands this blinded woman. She is barefoot in a fire engine red, mis buttoned power suit. “You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?”

The hallway empties. “Sure, I’ll be okay.”

I pray I don’t lie. She straightens her suit, “Me too.”

An orderly coaxes her by elbow back to her gurney. I still shake when a nurse comes with a wheelchair

and news he’s contacted me a ride home. When we pass her room, the woman snaps on her phone: “I’m waiting for the doctor

yes, soon no, I don’t know what’s wrong with me yet.”

Pain Flirts

Pain comes on strong, a sweaty hand on your thigh, back, arm, raising goosebumps, a little nausea, because you know you’ll have to be the asshole now, all night dodging hairy advances, clumsy innuendos, unmarked pills, watery drinks.

Aggressive, Pain wants you but bad zeros in, and suddenly swindled, you flee to bathroom solitude.

But Pain knows no boundaries, follows you into the stall, lumbers to your car, trails you home, hovers outside your window, bellows, “come on, Beautiful.” Its shadow on the blinds, dancing a polka, keeps you waking until dawn.

Pain returns to your stoop with the paper and a bag of donuts, offers sweetly to make coffee while you put up your feet, hums when it presents Vicodin and OJ on a tray.

Just This Once

This nurse is horrified I leave my first appointment alone: this is her face at a party when a drunk squeezes past her on the way to a Mustang, the pinched lips through which she offers to ferry her guest home. She insists she wheel me to my car, parked down the street, and I expect her to ask next for my keys, which rough my skin through my pocket, pressed tightly between lining and brace. We’re awkward, our progress bumpy, and we chat about weather. She asks if my appointment was helpful. At the car, she takes the key ring from me, unlocks the Saturn, places my bag on the passenger seat. She locks each chair wheel slowly, my knees facing gray polyester. “Next time,” she says, “you really need to arrange a ride. You probably shouldn’t drive.” I smile and promise I will. I’m sure she’s heard this before.

We both know I don’t have a ride. For a moment, she seems unsure, settles on grabbing up under my armpits, does a practiced three count, and swivels me into my seat. She’s done this before. I thank her, but she waits until I’ve pulled in both legs, buckled the belt, adjusted the seat and mirror. She stays until the engine grumbles and coughs. I smile and wave. Wiggle my fingers

like an untamed teen. In the rearview mirror, she pushes the wheelchair up over the curb for probably the thousandth time shakes her head.

As she gets smaller and smaller, I wish I’d tucked her in my trunk, taken her and her swivel and lift home with me.

The apartment will be quiet and dim. The porch’s stairs steep.

I Can’t Remember What the Pain Clinic Doctor Gave Me

but I do remember washing one, a bright white button, down my throat, while composition papers slumbered on the coffee table, ready to wake, to have my pen rocket across them, leaving so many marks as starbursts after a comet. By late afternoon,

a soft sweat suit cradled my broken body. That was after the Biofreeze sweated my skin; Salonpas pads stickered acute pain in place. I remember the pillows climbed my spine until I was supported against the couch like so many

steps in a ladder. I remember I struggled to swallow the big, bitter pill invented for quadriplegics’ pain I think it was. Pen still in hand and papers asleep on the cushions, I woke to a world filtered by filmy eyes and dry lips my dreams

stolen by some chemical thief, each vertebrae sounding an alarm. I do not remember what filled my brain but darkness, and waking, I don’t think I felt any better.

Ten Days Later, I Tell Dad I’m Injured

Dad fights with me when he arrives. At least, as much as he can fight a daughter sleepy from Hydrocodone and Valium, propped by pillows, and bound by Ace bandages and Velcro brace around the torso. His compassion keeps him pulling punches. He wrestles with my logic my phone call delayed in light of the family’s pleasure, their one vacation of the year, the weak argument that there was nothing they could have done and heartbreak: his first born did not call him immediately for help. She didn’t want him. Need him.

It will take motherhood feeling the simultaneous ache of pride and anger at cultivated independence to burden the impulse rushed by heartbeat to gather up, kiss wounds, repair a child Dad finally said quietly, yes, there were some things he could have done, and then, as now, I love him for his anger.

Pain Pulls No Punches

steals your gait, grabs it faster than it takes you to hit the ground.

And with it, Pain picks up your turn of neck, so you can’t see Pain coming, pops it in a sack with your patience. You want to punch, kick, prowl after Pain to reclaim your stuff, but your body’s mute, stunned like that first time a boy told you he didn’t like you like that. Stunned like that first time you woke to your body bleeding your 14 th birthday slumber party sabotaged by your sister’s whine to Dad that you’re going to get blood on the sheets. Stunned like that one time Mary gave you a key to go into her room to get a CD and you saw Sally’d tied a boy to her bedposts. Stunned like that first time Dad caught you lying you put too many of your beans in your sister’s chili bowl and your face burned as you shoved it in your teddy bear’s chest. There’s no grin as Pain sidesteps out of reach, waggling your stamina to stand at a counter, cut carrots for your salad. There’s no joy in Pain’s heft of sack onto shoulder, weighed down by your swift dip to touch your toes. Loss burns in your empty bones: your marrow secreted away in Pain’s sack. You’re left propped in your bed by pillows, plotting, preparing yourself to take it all back.

Two Feet Shorter than My Usual Height

Embarrassed, she says, “I didn’t know if it was you in that wheelchair.” She’s talking about last Saturday when Dad drove me to the mall to cheer me up. He persuaded until he wheeled me, so I wouldn’t tire, strain, hurt. There was a long crutch to the bank of wheelchairs, and then slow maneuvering into stores

my first time, odder than showering under the eye of the middle school gym teacher. She shifts as she scans the room for someone else to talk to. “And was that your boyfriend?” she asks, sets the chip bowl in my lap, avoids my eyes. “I was in an accident. My dad came down to take me to tests, so I wouldn’t be alone.” I crunch and notice the chips are stale. She doesn’t even offer the salsa bowl. We’d rolled by a trendy store: Dad saw Hawaiian shirts on sale, wanted to check them out. He only left for a moment, to see how a bright shirt fit his tall body in the mirror. He didn’t know it would be hard to find me tucked between racks of obnoxious flowers and surf boards. I didn’t panic when he called my name twice. I didn’t feel lost, folded in the fabric, two feet shorter than my usual height.

Panic didn’t burn my throat until she stared wide eyed at me through the window when Dad

pushed me, two bags held tightly on my lap. She turned quickly. No smile. No hello. And now,

stale chips, lame party. I wonder what tokens will follow, wonder if I will ever again turn on heel, leave assholes in wake.

Yet another Referral

This next diagnosis could cut me. Like the seven inch chef’s knife, or a bayonet, shiv, oyster knife, each diagnosis has been different.

Today, I hope it’s quick, leaves a clean cut, one mended swiftly not the bread knife’s zigzag or the machete’s uneven slash.

I hope this doctor will offer concoctions I can massage on the wounds or, even better, a pill. I hope, in a perfect moment,

I won’t be cut at all: this diagnosis might arch, strike air all my time fretting, a benign mistake.

Funny, it’s never a Seax never a diagnosis that’s romantic, mystical, godly. I don’t dare name these diagnoses like old warriors named

their blades a familiar Betty or William would fester. No, I prefer them über pragmatic, utilitarian, unknown. Though I anticipate an attack

in this plastic office, like a mugger’s knife in a desolate alley, it will still shock. I don’t want to be cut, sliced open, my pain, its ache, its echo, leaving stains on each blade

I cannot wipe clean.

Passing Time

Knitting keeps strangers at bay in doctors’ waiting rooms most days. Could be the sharp needles, the pattern of knit and purl, or the air

of busyness in otherwise listless lobbies. Grandma taught me to pass time. I’ve probably knitted near 48 feet. Never fancy. I stick to scarves in rooms usually not quite as nice as this. The first was over six feet. Grandma hadn’t shown me how to finish yet. A lady with a cane two seats over tells me twice she’s had a stroke and that my yarn is beautiful. Three times she repeats, she used to knit hats, scarves, mittens. “You just knit the square and take a big needle and X stitch the edges together.” Claims she couldn’t do it now. She’s “had a stroke.” She still has all the patterns, but she’s “had a stroke.”

I ask her, why doesn’t she try again? An hour later, I learn she made dresses for years. She’s 5’11’’ too. “Store bought clothes were never long enough.” While she waits

for her cab, she explains how to make mittens. I nod and knit and purl. “I can’t start up again though,” she says. “I’ve had a stroke.”

Therapy’s Song

The purple carpet smells of stale sweat. The soft staccato of steel plates in the circuit grounds the grunts of men and women who’ve come here to work.

Voices join this found song: chipper encouragements, annoyed chides, lewd jokes between sets, and murmurs of this week’s doctor check ups.

It looks like a gym: worn, white muscle systems and strength training machines; elliptical trainers, recumbent bikes, and treadmills; balls and bands and benches

that flex and snap and groan; and snowy towels that hang on parts not moving. You can tell it’s therapy from the raised beds and bandaged ice packs, TENS units, massages and ultrasound machines. Here, canes, crutches, braces, and wheel chairs litter the few empty areas where exercisers and therapists step over, through, and around them, their focus on the next set in the circuit. Men and women, their faces pinched in pain, haul wooden boxes filled with weights in the narrow hallway past the green mats where others stretch

unwilling muscles. Fluorescent lights hiss and pop, and hope corrals them through their exercise lists. The redheaded trainer shouts his litany in the corner, “you can do it. You can do it. Only one set more!”

Trust Trained Professionals

Warm hands search vertebrae in my neck, wiggle my head gently to coax bones to surface.

This chiropractor doesn’t cheap on the gown soft cotton wraps around, ties in front.

Relax: lutes and organs lullaby softly. Relax: or he’ll start over.

His index finger presses my bone. It’s askew, so his palms grip my head, drop it backward off the funny

table, sturdy, like the grip on dorsal and pelvic fins before a sharp knife scrapes scales onto a cutting board.

Exposed, even in this dim office, I will my body to limp. Swiftly, he snaps my neck bones pop, gasp in protest

at their reordering. It’s unnatural, like seeing guts spilled on Formica. Yet I place my head in hands I know will snap

my neck, hands I trust to crack my spine the right way, leave me properly aligned to walk out the door.

I lay my head in warm hands in this dim room. Each time, hoping for catch and release.

Shoaling in Town

Lifeguards arrive bedazzled for dinner and dancing with two feeder goldfish. “The bowl needs a plant,” says Jess, “I told them we should have gotten a plant.” Kristy picks up a polished Petoskey stone my dad gave me and gentles it on the bowl’s bottom. “Perfect,” she says, resting the bowl by my loveseat. “They’ll keep you company until you get back to work,” Jenny says. And we leave, me crutching behind the girls, locking the door. This bar is sweaty and dark I watch them shimmer, and they bring me a fruity cocktail with an umbrella, bounce back to tell me stories of men they dance with to keep me from feeling lonely like, perhaps, the goldfish in the bowl on my table, circling, staring at all my distorted stuff, pissed they’ve downgraded no more leafy plastic plants, bright pebbles, pirate ships or deep sea divers a flashy paradise where they met new roommates each week as friends went home with strangers. When Jenny, bored and sober, rounds up the lifeguards, we pile in her clunker. They drop me off to a dark apartment, a dead fish. I scoop it out of the bowl, lamely one crutch it, limp in a slotted pasta spoon, to the bathroom and flush. It’s sobering to see its little body rise then sink with the current. I eye the fish left: black, orange, blue, purple, white and perky, bobbing in conditioned water with the spotted rock and promise it I will make things better as soon as I can get somebody to drive me to the pet store. I name him Skeeter, and we doze in starlight he floats while I moor myself to the sofa, liquor and pills dulling pain. We hover together. Keep vigil for the unnamed dead.

Pain Plays Dirty

It’s sabotage, really, the way Pain pokes at your shoulder in therapy when you concentrate on lifting the 2 lb weight to place it inside a box, impatient as the old ex boyfriend who insisted you used the squeegee the wrong way, wiping the windshield less efficiently than his flick of wrist did. Each time, Pain raps on your spine when you lift the box stand up straighter, you’re doing it wrong Its voice pinched like the ballet instructor who disliked your pirouettes. You start to think Pain’s on your side, but then a sucker punch, if you twist too quickly when you set the box down. The twinge lingers like fingernails dug into flesh, the hatch marks white as nerves when you start to do it wrong. You yearn for accolades, wait for the quiet that deafens after applause, after stage lights snuffed out, after a job finally done right.

Kindness of Strangers

Outside the Hobby Lobby I crutch, push the cart, crutch again, creep to my trunk in the handicap space.

A woman hurries past me then stops, summoned by my crutch and push. She comes and takes the cart’s handle, mid crutch, asks where my car is. “Were you in an automobile accident?” “No.” I say. “A fat man fell on my head.”

It’s the shortest story for strangers. Usually, they smile. This woman nods.

“I’m a nurse. My daughter was in a car accident last year. She can’t walk.” “Yet?” I ask, but she shakes her head

matter of fact like this happens every day. “Make sure you follow your rehab,” she advises. “You’re too young to be so slowed down.” At the trunk she lifts the bags in for me. Before she leaves, she takes my hand. “What’s your name? Now, I’ll make sure to pray for you.”

I Hand My Razor to Kevin

In my shabby apartment, he squats in the blue tub and turns on the rusty tap. My torso bound by big brace, I weeble wobble back and forth, struggling to reach the toilet. He helps me stretch my shaky legs from the toilet to the tub’s cold, tiled wall, where he will splash warm water on me and lather the shave’s soap with calloused hands. This must be love: too young to be caretaker, he tends to my calves’ curves cautiously. This is the first time I have not pulled my razor up my shins myself. White foam troughs as he works the safety blade with expertise. A man who knows his own face in the dark, who takes one stroke at a time, careful not to cut.

It’s for My Own Good

I lie fetal on the treatment table, and you squeeze my hand, stroke my temple. Your job today means soothing me I can’t believe I’ve agreed to this

I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or that I wasn’t trying to get better or that I didn’t care, so I said, “Okay.” Now, I’m letting this doctor stick long needles in me.

I’m pinned in this thin paper gown, tense, and you, a stranger, stroke my head as my mother’s done while this doctor pushes each thick needle

into my hip and back and his assistant who smells of spearmint pushes and pokes my skin as each slides in to help find “just the right spot.” Each needle burrows

a tender tunnel. A cheese grater now, I’m filled with too many ragged holes stuffed with saline. Tracts throb when the metal’s removed. The doctor does it again

And, again. The Venus Fly Trap extract this doctor said would numb the pain doesn’t help at all, but you, a nurse who looks like my fourth grade teacher

Mrs. Goulding, gaze at me and whisper how brave I am and how much you know it hurts and how after it’s over, it will be better it’s for your own good

And I find myself soothed by your whisper, your tough: these slow invasions; the therapist’s kneading of liquid that ought not exist; the workouts and shots to follow

perhaps I will survive. Your voice hypnotizes I believe, finally, this bulky saline solution designed to tear my tissues apart will dissolve, and we rebuild my body, myself.

Retirees Pity Me during Water Aerobics

These decaying bodies barely covered by black lycra have bobbed and bent and flexed for over a year with me as I’ve instructed them in the community pool on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

They’ve complained affectionately if the blue water is less than seventy eight degrees and called me “Sweetheart.” “Take it easy on us,” they teased if I ordered one more set. Chores or Kevin’s visit the coming weekend were on my mind when I shouted ski or curl or push, churning chlorinated water.

Now, I’ve still bills to pay, chores to do, Kevin’s coming visit, but I obsess if my brace looks stupid stuffed beneath my new turquoise tankini. It’s vanity, really, working to hide it from these men and women some taking similar bursitis, arthritis, and pain medications. But it’s ugly, like the perm I begged my mom for in seventh grade. The two week home trial stuck, and months of hiding the frizz in pony tails until it grew out followed.

I check and recheck to make sure the straps haven’t flopped out, drag on my butt, invite stares. I instruct from a cold folding chair on the pool deck, goosebumped and on display unable to hide behind well coifed hair, well manicured clothes. My arms and legs feebly gesture moves these water aerobic veterans know by heart. Gossip and chatter is absent today but for calls of “How you doing, Honey?”

I’m no longer invincible youth no “age before beauty” jokes when the ladies shuffled with me out of the locker room. I was the girl on the shampoo commercial, shiny curls swishing, confidence showing in my perky routines. I used to bounce effortlessly in the water while they struggled to keep up, their bodies protesting.

And now, propped by ugly brace, I watch from the sidelines

as an eager pubescent watches kids dance in the gym from the bleachers. I call scissor, egg beater, sweep and their buoyant bodies respond, beautifully churn water.

Pain Courts

Pain seduces you slowly, until one morning you wake to find its toothbrush in your bathroom, its underwear in your laundry basket, its non fat vanilla soy milk in your fridge. Saturday mornings, Pain sips coffee with you on the sofa, laughs over New Yorker cartoons. Soon, you take Pain home to meet your family. It sits between you and Grandma at the long table, leaves with you at dusk and complains bitterly the whole drive home of the many miles, the bread pudding, the early Monday to come.

Inseparable, Pain helps prepare taxes, pick paint for kitchen walls, trim toe nails.

Each night before bed, it hums between the sheets; Pain is needy, doesn’t like when you’re unconscious, wakes you the moment you dream of something else.

Trashcan, Unmoved

At dawn, I wake alone with a start crutch quietly with precision like my first drive alone in the Escort: the carpet foreboding as rush hour traffic, the furniture fierce as intersections, the tile sneaky as ice. Stepping so gingerly my brace, sleep sweaty, does not move, my aluminum crutches lift up and up. We labor toward the kitchen. It takes twenty minutes, these twenty odd paces.

All the bags shoved into the ugly can reek of decomposed chicken carcass, sanitary napkins, and other rank food stuffs that cannot wait until the next collection.

The can’s belly is less than the width of the door, but how to move it?

I can’t heave it up anymore and march to the curb. It thuds when tapped at its base by a crutch’s toe. It won’t budge and pain shoots down my back, down my leg.

I live alone in an alley in a shitty apartment. Two hours until pick up two hours to get this can to the curb.

Kicking with foot, shoving with knee, sliding with chair and crutch, I curse and cry and pop Vicodin and eat a granola bar. Frustration floods my pores, the sweet sweat I remember from childhood when Mom flipped flash cards for mathematics, sitting parallel to me on the hard dining room chairs. The trashcan finally looms on the threshold’s lip,

ready to stumble down the stairs. I duct-tape the lid, so it won’t spill in flight.

Crutch cocked like shotgun, it leaps toward the can, launches it with furious chutzpah, down the steps, and there the plastic can lay, unbroken, at the bottom. Muscle spasms seize my back.

Spent and beaten, I’m a young woman who witnesses what random accident can do to flesh and bone, who is patched together with medications, elastic, Velcro, metal, wires, hope, who’s incapable of domestic chores so simple as taking out the trash.

Later that morning, this young woman crutches forty minutes from her handicap spot in the closest parking lot to work, thinking of the trash can, lying lifeless on its smooth unscuffed belly on the cracked sidewalk, like the dead kitten she’d found after school by the curb in front of her home. She feels her sweaty, chafed armpits moan, wipes them with paper towel after taking thirty minutes to pee. Then, she smiles at co workers, says, “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

Make Lemonade

It’s the lavender cardigan that catches my attention. She wears it each time I visit, and its buttons pull the buttons’ holes until they squint.

It’s hard to look away because she rests a mauve clipboard on her pot belly and taps it with a hand tipped by purple nail polish.

She calls patients’ names clearly and is the brightest thing in this office dampened by beige and chronic pain. The fatigued furniture mirrors the patients’ postures,

yet this nurse flits like a hummingbird from office to waiting room everyone looks up from magazines when she enters, Dr. Piernine’s Tinker Bell.

In a voice even brighter than her outfits, she talks with patients. She sweetens chit chat with pleasantries from youth: a stitch in time, Mr. Smith; really, Mrs. Jennings, the early bird does get its worm; now, Barney, you know a penny saved is a penny earned. I play a game where I guess which turn of phrase she’ll use before she slaps the swinging door with her palm, leads a patient to an exam room. When it’s my turn, my crutch catches the jamb, and I fall to the floor. My first thought isn’t profane or apologetic

I find myself in a terrible tangle wondering what wisdom or comfort this woman might give me. It takes the edge off my pain, this game. She doesn’t help me to my feet right away.

She squats, lavender sweater straining across her bosom, and sets her clipboard on the floor to hold open the door. “Now Elizabeth,” she says, “we’ve gotta try to make lemonade,

right?” And, I breathe in her Lilac offer to pull me to my feet.

“Up we go.” Settled on a padded table, I wait for Doctor Piernine, wait to be squeezed tightly, wait to be sugared and transformed into something lovely, something to sip, something to desire.

Home for the Holidays

This ornate golden dragon’s head, the glass flask secreted inside its wooden shaft, isn’t the cane Grandpa used most often after his knees’ parts were re engineered with metal and plastic, but the one given to him as a gift half joke willed to Dad.

I’ve just graduated crutches, home on holiday, and I fit the dragon in my palm. Cold, short like the fireplace poker, it bites: I know why Grandpa rejected it his great hands could smother my own.

My brown cane, bought at a medical supply store in a southern Illinois strip mall, has a candy cane arc nearly at my hip, a sturdy third leg, utilitarian, not flashy, a necessity when balance is fragile. I reject the ill fitting, cold head, lean it against the hearth, picture it nestled with other novelty canes at Grandpa’s home gifts from people who’d not yet needed a prop.

Try as I might, I cannot conjure his daily cane was it aluminum or wood the third appendage that lent him swagger to my school plays, ballet recitals, midnight church services in Decatur, the dinner table my Grandma set it remains translucent in my mind when I picture him, like the exact denim hue he wore, the twangy song playing on the bathroom radio, the L’Amour or McMurtry title that sat near his recliner.

Details fade like tonight’s snowflakes on the panes, but when I feel my cane’s heft, its smooth curve pressed into my palm, I remember his grace, the affectionate poke he gave Grandma’s bottom when she served dinner, the grip of his hand when we played later while dishes were cleared: he’d grab my fist and I’d pull and pull to let go

and he’d chuckle until his fingers sprang open, catching me, always catching me, before I fell.

Composition Students Pity Me in English 101

All term, I gimp around, first with wires poking from beneath my sweaters and crutches, then a staid brace and brown cane, now a flexible brace, which is sweaty and itchy.

I try to make light of my plodding, but their smiles hold pity: my injury has made them model students. They even take turns passing handouts and collecting homework unasked.

It’s awkward like the teddy bear a man from the community theater gave me on Sweetest Day when I was sixteen. I do my best to ignore these little gifts proffered by unsolicited compassion,

and the students act too, as if they’d pick up dropped chalk for any instructor. The most painful days, I take Valium, and they peer at me during writing exercises as if they’ve placed bets on when I’ll topple.

The Monday after spring break, I wait for the students, ready to begin a well rehearsed discussion of revision. But I’m distracted: I’m in love and the overhead projector whirs.

Highlighting editing marks on the screen, I’m interrupted by Brianna in the front row. “Is that a new ring on your finger?” she asks, loud and enthusiastic as a nervous cheerleader.

My cheeks burn. Flustered. I was instructed not to talk in class about my personal life, but I’m in love and say, “yes.” Immediately, students in the first and second rows nearest the projector stand and lean, hover like bees admiring the diamonds from Kevin’s grandmother’s wedding ring, ooo ing and ahh ing like my mother. “So, what, are you getting married?” Matt asks from the back row.

“Come on. Settle down,” I say, and they settle back into seats. They beg for a magical happy ever after story about a young crippled woman who patiently teaches composition until she falls in love.

They’ve paid attention in literature classes and want to believe in a theme of marriage + recovery = happiness, so they can believe everything will turn out well for themselves. And I indulge a little,

joy burning my face, because don’t I want to believe that too, that all my patience and hard work will pay off? Won’t the pain dissipate? I summarize the surprise proposal in a little Appalachian cabin

high in the mountains they applaud, like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me or to them. I hold up my hand to silence their clapping, ring bright in the projector light, say, “let’s get back to work.”

I Finally Give Back

Soft sobs might have been missed if anyone else was in the bathroom. Eavesdropping with the illusion of concern, I peek under the stall, see an aluminum walking cane’s feet. This feels like a college dormitory bathroom, one where I might walk in on a weeping girl, but Twilight Zone ish.

I finally ask, “Need any toilet paper?”

I wipe, stand, zip and wait for a response that’s a long time coming. Washing my hands, I hear, “Please. Yes, I need help. I can’t reach my bag on the door’s hook.”

Puzzled, I reach over the stall and lift a bulky bag to me. “Should I slide it to you under the door?”

“No,” she says, “I can’t bend to reach it.”

“Could you tell me what you need and I could hand it to you under the stall wall?”

I feel clever.

She doesn’t reply right away.

“I guess,” she says, “that’s the best way to go about it.”

I move into the neighboring stall, “What do you need?” She sounds defeated when she asks me to collect one of the incontinence briefs from the pocket with the zipper. I try to be unceremonious the white rectangle disappears quickly.

“I’ll just ” I stop. I cradle her bag by a sink. When she swings open her door, cane in hand, she looks proud, as if she readjusted her spirit when she wrestled with her diaper.

She looks me up and down.

“Thank you,” she says and leans her cane against the sink’s lip while she washes her hands.

“You know,” she says, watching bubbles slide into the drain, “it’s a bitch.” I don’t reply. She wouldn’t hear me over the motor and whine of the hand drying machine. I smile and hand her bag to her as she turns to walk three legged from the small room.

“Sometimes, you hate your body,” she turns in retreat. “Sometimes, you want to kiss every part.”

Pain Packs Up

When you and Pain finally grow apart, everyone’s relieved. You pack Pain’s stuff in boxes, and when Pain doesn’t stop by Sunday as promised, you carry them to the attic.

When you next poke around, looking for your old, blue bowling ball, you see Pain’s boxes, stacked and dusty, and you think Pain might need this stuff, you should really phone; instead you lug your ten pound ball down the attic’s ladder.

When you search for your old golf clubs, see the dusty cardboard taking up your space, you decide Pain doesn’t need this stuff anymore. So, you bend at the knees, balance Pain’s heavy boxes. It feels good, hefting them one at a time to the curb.

Boxes gone, you take time, after you’ve showered, to erase Pain and Pain’s friends, even the doctors who were clever at cocktail parties, from your address book. It’s like Pain was never there. You don’t care what Melanie says, you’re happy if you never see Pain again.

1.

“Well, it’s more or less true,” I say to you. Years and pain medications have dulled humid memories of the July day. “A fat man fell on my head crushed me like a soda pop can.”

And I stop, for this is the moment you usually giggle or look at me with pity or disbelief. This is my embarrassment: am I hung up on this old accident?

Did soda pop can sound with a whine, a fizzle? Do seem desperate for attention, a hug? Cheeks burning, I find I rush queried details, bubbling: “I worked at a boat dock, and a guy who wanted to paddleboat fell on me, crushed my spine, so I couldn’t walk for a year.”

Then, I stop and listen because I see you think of your own story accident becomes adhesive. We are all bone, cells, mostly alone.

2. We could always embellish, I suppose, with more gallant details.

Well, “I guarded boaters’ lives and a large man dismissed my assistance; I was, after all, a woman, and he was entering a paddle boat. I assumed I offended his manliness. I did it all the time on the dock. Inevitably, the boat jostled him, and I cushioned his fall. I rolled him, unhurt, into the boat, and he paddled away with his companion. I, however, left in the shade, could not stand.”

That’s true. But, after a decade of therapy, recovery, re injury, marriage, motherhood, and more re injuries, it sounds cheesy. Embarrassing, perhaps, because for only one month I grieved my legs, doubted I’d ever walk again before a promising diagnosis no more impressive or odd than your story, than other stories I’ve eavesdropped in doctors’ waiting rooms, airports, trains, post office lines, church, gym, office water coolers, department store dressing rooms, gas station bathroom lines. My ears swivel, gawk, search for shared experiences: survivors’ strength renews my body’s spirit so that it might bubble to surface each morning.

3. In fact, on rare days when I wake to no pain, I disbelieve it myself.

Tall and able, I forget distinct smells of sun block, menthol, metal, sweat, uncoated aspirin. When I talk with you, they ambush me, leave me weary of re injury, make me

cautious and careful for a week. I’ve gotten better, mostly. Maybe you haven’t.

Accident lingers, reminds me of eggshells, our bodies protected only until impact breaks us. My dreams begin with perspiration, anxiousness for shift’s end, smell of rotting duck weed,

bob of a yellow boat, my hand empty, floating dimly in humidity.

Dreams end with great weight upon my body A moment when everything is wrong.

Then, a moment of happy fizzing in my chest, when I push his body into the yellow boat, and the odd couple paddle off. Finally, a wave of pain when I lift my dangling legs to the dock. Panic lonely in every pore, which echoes mornings and sleeps in my periphery until you wake it with your story

and it rises, grumpy and eager, to find another accident to reflect itself in, finally, it’s found company, for a moment

Pain Pouts

You push Pain’s digs away like the ghost voices of middle school boys who whittled esteem from your muffin top and secret crushes. You’ve picked this man, these subtly orthopedic pumps, and a dress that is kind to your torso easy to pee in. Its straps won’t slip, if you stand up straight. The woman who murdered your hair with a hot iron, you’ve forgiven. Your sister holds up the picture of the “practice do,” shaking her curly head. Your mangled haired matron of honor says this will be the thing you laugh about later, and Pain slinks to the suite’s mini bar, mopes with bourbon. You’ve practiced this walk on soft cotton, down a narrow aisle straight as the treadmill, your dad surefooted beside you. Banished to a corner, without place setting, Pain pouts. You ignore Pain’s bites and whimpers, a dismissed suitor who whines about what could have been. This is your day. You will not slouch on this polished floor, jazz jumping hot down your spine as your husband holds you.

Joie de Vivre Shows on His Face

This octogenarian follows me in the YMCA circuit, and I think it might bother him when his face puckers any time he must pull a pin and place it at a weight lesser than mine. He’s as tall as me, sweaty and well built no droop of spinal arthritis or off balanced hips. His muscles look Old Hollywood, well trained after seventy odd years of gyms. They are compact and deft his tanned skin like that of a basted chicken.

His grunts invite me like a waggled finger to peek between my repetitions. Working industriously, he flexes, his trapeziuses strain against the steel bricks. I want his strength to pull and push steel every other day without complaint. He looks back, and I glance away ashamed, think this man as old as my grandfather should not be ogled at but his wink tells me he knows he’s still got it, and he’ll be damned if he lets it go without a fight.

Treadmill

You’ve set my gait, left me to dash down hallways, no dawdling. ‘Til Ida remarks on my swift steps, I don’t notice my shoes chew carpet four feet at a time where ever I go, classes, meetings, after dinner hikes, bridal aisles, the zoo. I blame you, your measured frame, measured speed, measured incline. You have left your imprint. I walk like a hamster in cyclical steps, beating, re peating, pounding pavement, concrete, porcelain tiles in precise steps. I no longer remember my pace at twenty two. I am stuck at 4.2 on a good day. We sweat together; our efforts, as we grow old,

synchronize. Our resolute march toward the last red column flashing a victory, as long as we don’t break stride.

Pain Finger Waves

over the produce. Just a gentle wave while I squeeze the avocados. I leaned a bit too far in search of something ripe. I didn’t want to wait on nature, hungry for dinner, forgetful of how fragile we are: when pushed too hard, we break.

I Covet What He’s Got

In a corner of the YMCA between the ab and back machines, he boogies in his orange hooded sweatshirt he’s got moves of The Temptations and Four Tops.

He dips, ball changes, raises arms, washes air with his palms, and brings his hands down to his large belly for a clap. This, I don’t see every day, and later, when I move to the shoulder press, he’s still at it.

A spin starts at his ankles and reveals his face eyes closed, hood up, ear buds inserted, lips moving to some Motown favorite, he sways, shimmies, and claps in the corner while dozens of us grimly workout, watching his show in snippets jealous of his moves, passion, and inhibition.

I want his moves. He’s the only one of us having fun. Fun like age nine fun: being Gloria Gainer in my black leotard and purple leg warmers in the Bloomfield living room with my little sister. The stereo pounding while Mom vacuumed and Dad mowed.

Our bodies, sweaty and spent, spinning furiously, launching off sofas, and bellowing, I’ve got all my life to live, I’ve got all my love to give…hey, hey

I Crumple My Paper Gown

after I witness the heartbeat of a curled bean floating in static ultrasound. I pull clothes from their neat pile, dress, and flip a switch to let a nurse know I’m no longer nude. Funny how I slid bras so carefully from beneath shirts in middle school; my broken body has been paraded before so many strangers with an illusion of modesty proffered by thin paper. I no longer care.

This OB/GYN is pleased, his only concern my patched S 5 L 1 disc, where epidurals are inserted at the birth. You never can tell with needles. He explains why I might want one, but there’s no guarantee. I’m anxious to tell Kevin, who likely reads another book about pregnancy patiently, the same paragraph over and over.

Phoneless on the long drive home, cars lined before me tensile threads of tissues weave fissures closed in my muscles. Scar tissue, thick like my sister’s braids thick cords I admired while mine hung limp. I make up my mind by the fifth red light: I won’t get an epidural. You never can tell with needles. Maybe an IV where I can see it flush against my hand, protruding from its veiny web.

My hips were designed for this. They will open: this baby will come as she’s meant to. My body will heal again, yes, as it’s meant to. But there’s no guarantee. The body fragile: the body tenacious: the body miracle.

I drive with my hand pressed against flesh, pubic bone, bladder, uterus, amniotic sac, and the baby no, Hattie blossoming, snug in my womb. I ready myself for pledged pain, more thin, boxy paper, and strangely comforting witnesses.

Sun Salutation

We breathe in Tadasana. Eight and a half months of yoga class has taught us to move in sync like swimmers in an Esther Williams’ number. My bright yoga pants and sleeves slice air as we Uttanasana

and lunge, and you, submerged, stretch to Ravi Shankar’s sitar plucking melodies, which transports us to a place far from this basement that smells of curry and sounds of feet treading cobbled stone.

I can’t help but think of your spine curving like a little prawn’s in my womb when I Adho Mukha Svanasana

I began this class in fear when you were pea sized, hoping flexibility would save my battered vertebrae as you grew, stretched me into motherhood.

We no longer Urdhva Mukha Svanasana; instead, we lunge, lift our arms in Salutation and fold our hands in Prayer at Tadasana. We wait for classmates in Balasana to catch up, and I’m joyful I can no longer see my toes almost time. Impatient, you kick my abdomen.

You’re happiest when we move, don’t press on my lungs or bladder then, my breaths circulating our bodies in a quiet, dim hour when all we have to do is Surya Namaskar in coordinated rows, our hearts beating in warmed bodies, both anxious for your coming.

Pain Pushes

Pain holds my other hand, and before I close my eyes, I see Kevin through the oxygen mask that he gentles to my cheeks. His hand cradles my knee in air.

The doctor’s latexed palm presses my inner thigh when she guides the needle holding local anesthetic. A nurse soothes my forearm, ready to sprint for the next thing needed. Still Pain stays steady, knows after all these years to whisper. Don’t push. I hear contractions rock me.

Pain pricks my spine to punctuate the doctor’s warning, helping, like Kevin, like the nurse, like the doctor cutting me.

I forget the husha husha he he Pain elbows my ribs, makes my breath pop. Breathe Don’t push. We negotiate, Pain and I, like we might over the remote, who’s running back to the store for the forgotten eggs, whether the garden can go another week without weeding no, like we might over the best path to Texas where we’ll take her this Christmas.

Soon

Pain teaches me patience that my body can unfold, muscles bloom, nerves pulse neon, in these moments when I ask it not to push and it doesn’t and when I ask it to push and it brings life unburdened.

I Forgot to Bend with My Knees

The doctor pokes my back with precision, a well practiced kneading of vertebrae circling like the wedding ring quilt my mother gave us. Winces pause her deliberate work snags in fibers that ought to be ironed-cotton smooth. I should know better. I should not be here. Each time she picks at the pain, like I might a knot in a hem I’m lengthening, pain staccatos down my spine. Yesterday, I just bent over the dirty laundry basket and my vertebrae, small traitors, dug in heels like the sewing machine’s foot’s stumble when the thread’s gone out of its groove. A tangled mess jams it up. Makes it stop. I’m left a basket that I cannot carry. I’m left bent, muscles snagged in spasm. I should know better. I should have bent with my knees. And now, I’m left like a loved garment that’s too worn, which must be repurposed into something new. Stretched, snipped, washed with softener, like Kevin’s hole pocked flannel I twisted and stuffed to make the cats a new bed. It’s soft, a comfort on winter afternoons, warmed by the fire and their furry purr. As the doctor marks my seams, fashions new postures, I wonder at what my body is yet to be.

Pain Plays Hooky

Pain twines my fingers, squeezes, as we wait in this room freckled with anxious people. Finally, the forms, and I return to Kevin still collapsed in the wheelchair.

Gripping the insurance ID card, I trip up remembering his social his eyes squeezed shut, I hate to bother him. I start thinking of the overturned semi on I 65

blocking my path to our treasured date. Two hours I tried his cell, only to find him at home perched in underwear on the top of the staircase, unmoving. A stillness my body knows.

His broken back guru, I forage for stale pain pills, Ibuprofen, ice packs anything to stop his hurt. I can’t believe I can’t remember his soc. Probably its my favorite number.

The action film is discarded for the ER. I curse, and Pain helps me grab a T shirt, a pair of shorts, slip on shoes, our car keys. Pain had promised to take the day off, yet we pull clothes on his tense body as his spine shoots

fireworks through tender flesh. I duck under his arm and slowly we pull him up. We inch down stairs we never imagined to be so high. As Pain natters apologies in my ear, he tells me over and over he had no idea

how much this sucks. Now, he rattles off his soc as I try to stay inside the boxes. His jaw clenches. Practiced, yet I still fluster when I hand over the clipboard, ask them when? Soon, they tell me, then I sit and take his hand.

Wresting Control

I hit my baby teeth with a hammer to throw them in the compost.

I’ve stashed the small jewelry box five or six times this past year, after Mom brought it to me last spring, and Hattie unearths it each time, presenting it to me as if it contains her favorite jelly beans.

She asks me what I’ll do with the little yellowed teeth, their roots posed like oak branches in air.

She shows me her teeth, spring’s first Snowdrops, Galanthus bright against thawing dirt. They’re beginning to wiggle, she says, and doesn’t understand when I tell her the wiggle won’t really begin until six. She wants to play with my baby teeth, but the falsetto voices she gives them pretending at tea parties grate their voices ghosts from my childhood.

So, I hide them until this afternoon, hammer in hand, finally in control of my old cells’ demise.

They’re harder than I thought they’d be harder than wood, metal, or plastic. They crack and bounce when I smash them with the hammer against a board. I whack

little spirits from my youth: bologna sandwiches devoured by the bustling creek bed,

Christmas cookies sweeter because I still believed in Santa, watermelon savored while barefoot, lollipops presented by my dentist for good behavior.

The Mäori bury placentas to tether people to earth, bonded to ensure the health of both. I sit here alone hammering teeth like nails, unsure if this is where I want to be tethered, unsure if it’s healthy to keep secreting these teeth until someone discovers them after my wake.

It’s a burden hording pieces of myself, but destruction and decomposition doesn’t seem easier.

A baby molar shoots across the garage floor. I stand to retrieve it, my bones cranky as I start my walk, my grown up teeth self conscious.

I retrieve my feisty tooth, take it back to its guillotine determined to hammer it into dusty calcium, dentine, enamel, cementum

that will help the Snowdrops bloom next year, these spirits let loose, finally, free to dance among the white bells.

Author’s Note

It happened. Really. A man fell on my head the summer after I started my MFA program at Southern Illinois University and crushed my spine like a soda pop can. It took about two years of therapy and lots of support from family, friends, and the medical community before I could walk without aid. I woke up that sticky July morning strong, ready to head to a lake to guard lives and teach boating safety. That night, I lay on my bed, alone in the dark, thankful I wore sandals I could pull off with my toes I couldn’t do anything else. My life changed immeasurably in the instant it took to hit the dock. This collection glimpses the lives of people I hold dear and people I met in passing during moments of vulnerability. I have done my best to represent them with grace and respect. My apologies for anything I didn’t get just right.

Liz Whiteacre

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the following publications that have published versions of the poems that appear in this collection: Wordgathering, Disability Studies Quarterly, Breath and Shadow, The Survivor Chronicles, Disabled World, Etchings, DuPage Valley Review, and Prairie Light Review.

Some of the poems in this collection also appear in the chapbook Hit the Ground (Finishing Line Press in 2013) and the anthology Their Buoyant Bodies Respond (The Inglis Poetry House, 2010).

I’d like to acknowledge and thank the following people who provided support and assistance: Michael Northen, M. Ann Hull, Elizabeth Weber, Kevin McKelvey, Brett Griffiths, Emily Pruitt, Leah Maines and the editors of Finishing Line Press, and my family, especially Kevin and Hattie who tend my heart and keep me going body and soul.