25. Come to me
So much later, when she was so long gone, when I was practically an old woman myself, I found them: the postcards she wrote to her mother from the hospital. The handwriting is heartbreakingly childish; the cardstock yellowed, dusky, addressed on the other side in Grandma Janie’s careful cursive.
When my mother was six she almost died of a strep infection; she was in the hospital for a month. Strep was still a dangerous disease in those days; penicillin had not yet been discovered, and small-s science had not yet found a reliable way to stop the fatal progression from strep throat to scarlet fever, scarlet fever to rheumatic fever, rheumatic fever to disability or death. Sulfa drugs, with their nauseating rotten-egg smell, sometimes helped, but not always. And yet Modern Science (capitalized) retained its supreme confidence, its iron certainty, its regimes of control. Because Modern Science knew one thing for certain: that parents –– particularly mothers –– must be kept away from their hospitalized children. Parents –– particularly mothers –– just upset the children, the good doctors proclaimed. When their mothers were there, the children wept, they howled, they fought back, they got hysterical, they resisted the intrusions of medical personnel. When their mothers were gone, the children grew quiet. They lay still. They allowed their bodies to be handled, treated, poked and prodded. They were cooperative.
It was only later, years later, that small-s science, with its careful, humble, attentive ways, learned the truth: the children weren’t ‘cooperative.’
They were broken.
1.
d mama
Mrs smith brut me a
doll come
to see me
2.
d mama
how are you
feeling
I put my doll to bed
every night
will you
come?
3.
dear mama
Mrs. Dill gave me
four balloons
you better
come sunday
love
Norah
4.
d mama
you better
let me go
home sunday
I need you
to come
to me