Repose-Melinda Wheatley
Repose
By Melinda Wheatley
I was bent over, stripped down to my underwear. Cool fingers started at my neck and worked their way down my spine. Then she held my hips. I looked down at the white speckled tile, my arms dangling. My hair almost touched the floor in front of me. I expected to be dismissed in three beats. I had timed it while waiting in line and watching the other girls go in, come out.
Both curtained dividers were shirred, white, framed in metal, on wheels, too small (our feet showed from the bottom), and altogether inadequate. How we were reduced to this, nearly naked at a spinal screening during a school day, appalled me.
But instead of finishing up, she kept me down. “Sweetie, hold on,” she instructed, and her voice trailed. Her right hand moved up and lightly pressed down on my right shoulder. I watched her rubber-soled white sneakers while the blood continued rushing to my face.
More fingers tiptoed down and up my back. Finally, she rested both hands on my shoulder blades, sighed, and said, “Okay, honey, you can get your clothes on.”
“But it’s nothing, right?” I asked her after I had wiggled self-consciously into my jeans and buttoned my top. She sat at a little metal desk and wrote my mother a note. “We just need to get your back checked by a doctor,” she answered as she swiveled around, stood up, and handed me the envelope. “Make sure your mother gets this today. My number is on the note,” she said. “She’ll want to call me.”
“Thanks,” I said absently. For nothing, I thought. I put my shoes back on and left without asking more questions.
The specialist I visited two days later had a grey beard and told my mother that she resembled Mariel Hemingway. He hung two x-rays on a white-lit frame to show us my 20-degree, lower lumbar curvature. He pronounced it “extreme,” and said we needed to “retard” its growth. When I snickered at his choice of words (it just came out), he managed to drag his eyes off my mom long enough to unsmilingly explain that the curve could not get any better. “Instead, it can only be retarded, or stopped in its tracks.” He said this seriously, slowly, like I was a little kid.
I was molded that day. My mother acted like this doctor had bent over backwards by helping me in such rapid fashion. I found it suspicious that he was pushing me into this without a second opinion. When I mumbled this, she mouthed for me to hush.
It hit me then, rather violently, that I was being rushed through a series of irreversible events. I barely knew what was wrong with me. But I didn’t ask questions because it was more than I could wrap my mouth around right then. Inside I felt the urge to say, “God damn him” over and over, so I did.
My mother explained the alternatives on the drive home: If I didn’t wear the brace, the curvature could get worse, requiring surgery and a permanent metal rod in my back. “You don’t want that, honey. You really don’t want that,” she told me. You know what? There are lots of things I don’t want, Mom. But I kept my big mouth shut.
I received my corset brace the next week. It was a quarter-inch thick, a nude-colored plastic prison. It came underneath my breasts in the front, ending an inch above my pubis. It was higher in the back; it covered my shoulder blades, and it rode all the way down across the upper half of my butt.
He tightened it so much and so fast that I exhaled, “Oh no…” in one breath. This couldn’t be right.
“You’ll get used to it,” he told me.
I whispered, “But I can’t breathe.”
“She’ll get used to it,” he turned and told my mother.
Shortness of breath was secondary. I was a freak — the bearded carnival lady. My boobs pushed up in the front like an 18th century barmaid’s. Straight as an arrow, I wasn’t able to slump, lounge, lean, recline. I was undeniably different from my peers, my teachers, my family, myself.
I was a pipe stove: Stick straight until my thighs abruptly popped out roundly, too roundly. The brace’s bottom back edge pinched unless I smoothed my lower butt underneath me like one would to a skirt before sitting. The trunk precisely segmented my bladder, causing a sharp urge to pee that subsided whenever I stood up to visit the bathroom.
I had only one hour per day to remove it and bathe. When I did, I ached. I wanted to breathe deeply, but it hurt my ribs. It was like I’d been beaten.
I was exempted from P.E.; I was off the volleyball team. Jake Stevens, the boy I kissed at my locker not three weeks before, with tongue, told everyone he knew that I had scoliosis. In turn, I told everyone I knew that he slobbered and had bad breath. We were both telling unfortunate truths.
Out of necessity, I discovered that the brace fit into my locker perfectly if I carried my books all day. Each afternoon I would put it back on before I took the bus home.
There, little brothers knocked on my plastic encasing. They liked the sound it made. I was their personal musical instrument. They galloped the Lone Ranger with their knuckles. It was humiliating and I fought it. My dad took pity and tried to raise my spirits. He grabbed me at the waist, “tickling my ribs.” “See?” he said. “Not all bad, eh?”
Six months into it, the doctor said the curve had increased by half a degree. He tightened me further and drew a crude line in ballpoint pen on the straps in the back. This was to show me exactly where the metal teeth should puncture them.
“You’ll settle in,” my mother said on the way home. I didn’t answer her. I didn’t even know her. I had become sullen, whining on the inside. I couldn’t explain myself to myself, much less her.
An old Japanese woman from our church prayed daily, sometimes more, for the miraculous healing of my back. She smelled like sugar.
She followed me out of the sanctuary one Sunday morning as I slipped out during services to visit the ladies’ room. She told me what she was praying.
I stopped breathing as she whispered the prayer close to my face.
We were standing in the foyer on maroon carpet. A windowed display case was behind her with gleaming sports trophies. She had my hands in hers, elder to colt, the standard parishioners’ strike of pose.
I don’t remember the exact prayer, but I recall her fervently telling me that God didn’t want me to be miserable. He wants you to be happy, she told me.
I couldn’t talk back because I was melting in front of her. My already constricted chest got tighter, and all the sudden, my tears were pushed up the back of my throat behind my nose through my eyes over the lids down my cheeks in my mouth and down my neck. Her hands moved up my arms. Her eyes didn’t leave me.
I blurrily returned her gaze. She had cracked me open, but strangely, I felt calmer.
I tried to smile but it was upside down and open. She released my arms, regarded me, and then pulled me into her tiny frame: An embrace around my brace. I lowered my face to her shoulder. We stayed there, resolved. Her neck was sweet at my nose.
That night at home, I prayed to my Medicine Woman. Though I couldn’t explain what she gave me that morning, its settlement felt sure and real.
So I slipped off the bed to my knees and unhooked my straps. I peeled off the brace and laid it on the bed.
I breathed the deepest breath.
When I climbed back up, I laid with my arm encircling its waist like I would hold a friend.
I felt my bones move straight.
Copyright C. 2008 Melinda Wheatley