I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (28 page)

The camera spans the hospital room walls which are covered in cards. The film is kind of fuzzy here, but I see a duck. I don’t know who they are from. I didn’t send a card. Didn’t know that I could or even where the hospital was until this year. I don’t know how many cards—fifty? Seventy-five? It’s one whole wall. “Happy Birthday Tommy” is written on three cards, one word each, and hung in an arc from the ceiling. Horrifyingly, a disco version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” begins to play, but calms down, becomes just a speedy version of the song. Julia holds Tommy up in his yellow hospital outfit, and he smiles. I see two teeth on top, two on the bottom.

The nurses told Dr. Treharne I’d been abusing my privilege of looking through the glass. When he examined me, he was silent. He left, forgetting to open the gray privacy curtain circling my bed.

There’s a flower that looks like a corsage, very green, that Julia takes out of a plastic container. Something for a prom, a marriage. She brushes it against the side of his face. But he really just wants the green lollipop the bearded man beside him is unwrapping. I think he may be Julia’s brother? Julia is in a rocking chair. I can feel his smile when he gets the lollipop.

Mark wheels Tommy in a highchair, up to a table set in the hallway of the hospital. He is crying at the commotion, but Mark is laughing slightly, as if it is so unusual for Tommy to cry, to protest. And then he’s at the head of the table happily eating. The table almost blocks the entire hallway. Sometimes a nurse walks past. Then I see a woman I don’t know smiling at Tommy, she
bends down and talks to him a long time, laughing, smiling. It’s Ellen. It’s the old woman I met in Falmouth, Mark’s aunt Ellen. She’s beaming down there with her knees bent, her hand on her chin, looking from Tommy to Mark and smiling.

Nana Smith looks right into the camera with an expression of fright. She’s sitting beside Mark. Julia on the other side. Both flanking Tommy, who is smiling very big. First Julia pretends to take something from his closed mouth, touching his lips; then, Mark does this. And both times, he looks at each of them with such tenderness, such love. They all move so slowly, as if they are underwater. Julia’s arm reaching toward him, the tiny red flower of his mouth. His head bowed slightly in a shy joy of knowing the game they are playing, eyes looking up at her smiling. When Mark reaches for him, Tommy gives him the same bowed head, the same calm tenderness.

It’s this moment that makes me think I should protect them, not send them the DVD. But protecting other people is where all the trouble started—the arrogance of deciding what another person needs. And what could I save them from? His love? Asleep in a drawer for almost thirty years. It was the only thing they’d asked of me. “We couldn’t do it.” Turn the Super 8’s into something they can see. They want to see him alive in the world.

Later, Julia is rocking Tommy on her shoulder. His face is watching the camera, eyes open. There is a small distress on his face, but as she rocks him, his whole expression changes. His eyes relax, his smile comes back. And she is smiling with her mouth closed—there is a contentedness in her face as she rocks him, even in this terrible time, even as he’s dying, she gives him all her happiness. She looks like a woman who knows what she’s doing, the corsage now on her blouse. The film shifts to Mark rocking Tommy against his chest. Tommy asleep, head tilted upward on Mark’s white shirt, mouth open. That contentment is in Mark’s
face too, contained joy, a small smile, but I can feel it—how happy he is to have Tommy asleep in his arms.

In another frame, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. Tommy doesn’t have the yellow outfit on anymore. There seems to a square board affixed to his lower leg. Nana Smith holds her fist to her mouth. Julia covers the board with a blanket. Everyone’s shoulders are bent, everyone is bending forward toward the floor.
I can feel your foot kicking—I can see it moving under my skin.

Then Tommy is in Mark’s arms. He’ll die in his arms.

The camera pans the presents, the cakes—there are two. One reads “Happy Birthday Tommy” and has a merry-go-round in the corner. There are flowers inside a bear vase, and the camera focuses on an unreadable card. A green creature on the wall has a yellow balloon in his hand that reads “Happy Birthday Tom.” Tommy has a Mickey Mouse birthday hat on his head. He’s wearing a new outfit—it looks like a white- and blue-striped baseball player’s uniform, but there’s a colorful animal on the pocket. Julia takes his hands, and he walks over to the big cake, touches the merry-go-round, the frosting. And then he turns around, walks into Julia’s arms. Mikie is there is a dark suit. Standing by himself. He looks bigger than Tommy now, taller. Nurses are crowded into the little room outside, across the hallway. The station. They don’t wear nurses’ outfits. Maybe one of them is his doctor—she was a woman, Beth Gleghorn. She was doing her residency—young then. The women are watching the sick baby. They want to make him smile.

Tommy pushes his hat away. I can see Julia say, “Oh,” and laugh when it comes off. He sits with his ankles crossed on Julia’s lap and eats little bites of cake from his paper plate. Time has passed—Julia now has a sweater on over her long-sleeved blouse. There are flowers in the upper-right corner. Mikie leans against an armchair, looking nervous like Nana. They both eat their cake off the same tiny table, not speaking to each other.

A clown in a yellow hat, tie, and pants is twisting balloons in front of Tommy. I can see the clown is a bit much for him, but he’s polite, leaning back into Julia, watching the show. The clown has red dots on his tie, his shirt, a red nose. He looks diseased. Mikie, on the other side of the room, has both fists covering his shut eyes.

But Mark and Julia are smiling, the clown is drawing a face on a tiny white balloon, and Tommy is smiling at someone across the room (good-bye, good-bye). Maybe Ellen, the beaming Ellen. Nana Smith is smiling now too, smoothing her blouse down. The clown has made a balloon bee with black wings that Julia buzzes around Tommy’s head, but he barely notices, smiling at the person across the room. He turns. For a moment, he sees me.

epigraphs

From Brenda Hillman’s “Small Spaces” in
Bright Existence
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). Reprinted by permission.

Zonas, “Charon,” in
Dances for Flute and Thunder: Poems from the Ancient Greek
, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Viking, 1999). Reprinted by permission.

Constellation

Anonymous,
Go Ask Alice
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971).

Seven Works of Mercy

Caravaggio,
The Seven Works of Mercy
, 1607 (oil on canvas, 390 X 260 cm, Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples).

The Last Time I Saw Her

The epigraph is from Samuel Beckett’s poem “Cascando,” written in 1936.
Collected Poems in English and French
(New York: Grove Press, 1977).

The story from
The Paris Review
is Rudy Wilson’s “Impressions” (Spring 1984).

Regency

Source for the information on Edward Keaton’s crime and sentence: Debbie Salamone, “Career Criminal Gets Life for Kidnapping, Forced Sex.”
Orlando Sentinel
, 10 Nov. 1995.

The quote, “Covered with the shadow of it,” is from Psalm 80:10,
King James Bible.

Broadway

Source for the quotes: Charlotte Davis Kasl,
Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power
(New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), p. 205.

Palindrome

The two quotes are from
Volume Two: An Angel at My Table
(originally published in 1984) in Janet Frame’s
An Autobiography
(New York: George Braziller, 1991), pp. 233 and 248.

How to Make a Shoe

A 2006 online exhibition, “The Brockton Shoe Industry,” Stonehill College Archives and Special Collections, was consulted for information on shoemaking.

Source for the
Boston Phoenix
quote: Camille Dodero, “Decay Artist.”
Boston Phoenix
, 28 June 2006.

1982

Source for the quotes: Lynn S. Baker,
You and Leukemia: A Day at a Time
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1978).

Informant

The quote is from an original, unpublished poem written by Kelle Groom written in 1989 and inspired by “The Girl Without Hands” from
The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
(New York: Random House, 1972).

Guanyin

The essay referred to is “Rocky Marciano’s Ghost,” from
Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt
by Carlo Rotella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Radiolarians

In section 2, the following sources were consulted:

Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Massachusetts Community Health Information Profile: “Leukemia Report for Brockton”; “City/Town Cancer Profile (2002–2006) for Brockton”; “Kids Count Profile”; “Health Status Indicators Report for Brockton.”

Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,”
Environmental Health Perspectives,
Vol. 110, Supp. 2, April 2002, pp. 277–88.

CDC, MMWR Weekly, “Trends in Childhood Cancer Mortality—United States, 1990–2004,” Dec. 7, 2007.

Charles Duhigg, “Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering,”
New York Times
, 13 Sept. 2009.

Charles Duhigg, “That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy,”
New York Times
, 17 Dec. 2009. Link to “Toxic Water: A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators response” provides national database of water pollution violations. Interactive version showed current violations in Brockton (two contaminants above legal limits; six contaminants found within legal limits) and Bridgewater, MA (one contaminant—tetrachloroethylene, a pollutant from dry cleaning and various industrial factories; nine contaminants within legal limits):
www.nytimes.com/toxicwaters

In section 2, the quote from the report on childhood cancer in New Jersey is from the following source: Rachel Weinstein, et al., “Childhood Cancer in New Jersey 1979–1995,”
chapter II
: Rates and Risk Factors for Specific Childhood Cancers,
http://www.state.nj.us/health/cancer/child/index.html
.

In section 2, the information from
Sperling’s Best Places
is from the following source:
http://www.bestplaces.net/City/Brockton-Massachusetts.aspx
.

In section 2, the information on the Superfund site in Plymouth County is from the following source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Waste Site Cleanup & Reuse in New England,” Plymouth, Massachusetts,
http://www.epa.gov/region1/cleanup/resource/index.html.

In section 2, the quotes from the study are from the following report: Daniel R. Faber, “The Proposed Brockton Power Plant: Environmental Disparities in Brockton, MA,” 27 March 2008.

The public health official referred to is Neenah Estrella-Luna, MPH, PhD, Northeastern University, Massachusetts. A public health professional and social justice activist, she provided extensive and patient assistance, including retrieval of historical data on cancer incidence in Brockton, interpretation of the data, and lengthy correspondence with me on cancer incidence in children nationally, as well as specifically in Brockton.

All my gratitude and love to those who believed in and supported this book. Special thanks to Bill Clegg for his brilliance and passion and beautiful way of seeing. Thank you to Dominick Anfuso, Amber Qureshi, Alessandra Bastagli, and Nicole Kalian at Free Press for bringing my work into the world with such expert care, and to Teresa Leo, Terry Ann Thaxton, and Linda Frysh—dear friends and fellow writers who generously read drafts and innumerable revisions over the last four years. Thank you to Michael Burkard for his early encouragement of this work, and to Mike M., Mary P., Ray, Janet, Richard McCann and the writers in his FAWC workshop, Rick Campbell, Simen Johan, Kim and Frank Garcia, Don Stap, Lynn and Jerry Schiffhorst, Amber Flora Thomas, Laurel McNear, Ann Brady, Beth Greenfield, Alan Felsenthal, Guy Lebeda, Judy Bolton-Fasman, Kelly Cherry, and Terri Witek.

My thanks to the editors who published selections from this memoir before it was completed, sending light my way: Sven Birkerts and William Pierce at
AGNI
for accepting the first chapter I’d written and nominating it for a Pushcart Prize, Margot Livesey and guest editor Kathryn Harrison at
Ploughshares,
Amber Withy combe at
Witness,
Paula Closson Buck at
West Branch,
Reamy Jansen at
Bloomsbury Review,
Dinty Moore at
Brevity,
Ann Neelon at
New Madrid,
and Todd Zuniga at
Opium.

Grants and fellowships from the State of Florida, Division of
Cultural Affairs; the Atlantic Center for the Arts; and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts supported the research and writing of this book. For research assistance, my thanks to Neenah Estrella-Luna, MPH, PhD at Northeastern University and to Nicole Tourangeau, Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Stonehill College.

Finally, much love to my family: to my parents and my brother for their joy that this book exists, despite the darkness it reveals. My deep gratitude to my aunt and uncle for being my son’s parents, for loving him so much, and for trusting me to tell his story.