Left Neglected

Chapter 15





I’m sitting in a wheelchair (I refuse to call it my wheelchair) in front of a full-length mirror in my room trying to put my pants on. I’ve been at it for a while. I can’t say exactly how long I’ve been at it because I’m not wearing my watch. That part of the daily Iron Man that is “Getting Dressed” will come after I wrestle myself into my shirt. If I have the strength for it.

For some reason, getting everything south of my waist dressed is infinitely easier than dressing everything up top, and even that is infinitely far from easy. I can now get socks onto both of my feet, all by myself. My left toenails are painted the brightest Hoochie Mama red my mother could find at CVS, and my right toenails are simply clear coated. I realize this looks weird, but it’s not like I’ll be wearing any open-toed shoes any time soon. The red nail polish acts like a big red flag, like my diamond ring, and it helps me notice my left foot. And when I find it, I can then pull and tug and wriggle my sock onto it with my right hand.

I also wear mismatched socks. Same logic as the Hoochie Mama nail polish. My therapists are trying to make the left side of everything, including the left side of me, as interesting and as noticeable as possible. So my right sock is usually a standard white ankle sock, and the left is rainbow-striped or polka-dotted or argyle. Today it is green and covered with reindeers. I wish they were all Rudolphs, and the noses lit up.

I’ve got my right foot already through the right pant leg, and I’m bent over, resting my chest on my bare thighs, clutching the open waist of my jeans with my right hand, ready to pounce on my left foot should I see it, like I’m stalking a rare butterfly with a net. The problem is I can’t seem to do two things at once. I can see the reindeer sock, or I can use my right hand. If I see the sock, then as soon as I try to capture it using my right hand, it’s gone. I’ve got the reindeer sock in sight again and decide I’m going to go for it full-out. I hold my breath and try lassoing my pants onto my foot with every ounce of determination I’ve got. But I miss the sock, and all those ounces of determination tip my sense of balance, and I start to topple over, out of the wheel-chair. As I’m pitching forward, and I realize that I can’t stop myself, I also realize that there’s no time to throw my hands out to break my fall. My right hand is still devoted to the left pant leg project, and who knows where my left hand is?

My mother screams and catches me before I bash my head on the dingy linoleum floor. Thank God. The last thing I need is another head injury. From putting on my pants.

My mother props me up against the back of the chair, grabs my left foot, and lifts it up like I’m her rag doll.

“Ow, I’m not that flexible,” I say.

“Sorry. Try it sitting back.”

“You’re not supposed to help me.”

“If I didn’t help you, you’d be lying on the floor.”

Good point.

“Fine, but not so high. Hold it there, I can see it there.”

I finally thread my reindeer foot and the leg attached to it through my pant leg. I’m sweating and really want to take a break, but I see me in the mirror—jeans pulled up to my knees and naked from the waist up. I have to keep going.

My mother then helps me lift my bottom into the seat of the pants. This takes several minutes. Then she tugs at the front of my waist.

“These pants don’t fit,” she says.

“I know. Just zipper them.”

She tries again and grunts to show me how hard she’s trying.

“I can’t,” she says, looking at me like I’m an overpacked suitcase that won’t close.

“Try now,” I say.

I take a huge, deep breath in, trying to pin my belly button to my spine.

“You need bigger pants,” says my mother, giving up.

“I don’t need bigger pants. I need to lose weight.”

“You want to add a diet to the list of things you need to do here? That’s crazy. Let me buy you a bigger size.”

I feel her checking for the tag, her cold fingers on the small of my back.

“Stop it.”

“Sarah, you should accept yourself the way you are.”

“This is the way I am. This is my size. I’m not going bigger.”

“But you are bigger.”

I suck my breath in again and pull on the zipper to no effect.

“You need to start accepting your situation.”

“Huh. Are we talking about my jeans now or something else?”

She of all people can’t possibly think she’s going to lecture me about accepting the situation. When did she ever accept her situation? When did she ever accept me? I’m suddenly and surprisingly flooded with hot emotion, like every complicated feeling I’d ever had about my mother had been lying unexamined and undisturbed, a thick film of dust on a table in the attic, untouched for thirty years, and she just blew a puff of air across the surface, throwing every particle of hurt into turbulent motion.

“Just your pants,” she says, sensing my agitation and backing down.

“I’m not wearing a bigger size,” I say, shaking with fight or flight, flight not being a plausible option.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

I stare at my mother’s reflection in the mirror, an emotional tornado still gathering energy inside me, and I wonder how long we can sit in the same room and not talk about all the things we never talk about. She hands me my black Merrell mules, my only rubber-soled, flat shoes with no laces and no buckles, and with the help of the mirror and the holiday sock, I jam each mule onto each foot, without any help from her. There. Bottom half done. Reindeer socks, mules, and my unzipped, unbuttoned skinny jeans.

However competent I am at dressing the bottom half of me (for a preschooler), I completely fall apart on the top half. Barring a complete recovery, I can’t fathom the day when I’ll be able to figure out how to independently maneuver my way into my bra, like I used to, every day since I was thirteen. The left arm through the left loop, the left boob into the left cup. Never mind the clasp in the back. My poor injured brain gets all twisted up like some circus contortionist even trying to imagine how this procedure would work. I’m supposed to at least try every step of getting dressed on my own, but when it comes to the bra, I no longer bother. My mother just does it for me, and we don’t tell the therapists.

She holds up one of my white Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bras. I close my eyes, shutting out the humiliating image of my mother manhandling my boobs. But even with my eyes closed, I can feel her cold fingers against my bare skin, and as I can’t help but picture what she’s doing, humiliation saunters right in, takes a seat, and puts its feet up. Like it does every day now.

Once that’s over with, next comes my shirt. Today it’s my white, oversized, button-down boyfriend shirt. I get my right arm into the right sleeve with relative ease, but then I give myself over to my mother for the left sleeve. I can’t describe with any level of justice the impossibility of finding my left shirtsleeve with my left hand. I end up flinging my left hand way up in the air, like I’m in a classroom and I have a question, completely overshooting the sleeve hole. Or I find and grab onto the left sleeve with my right hand, but when I try to wrangle the sleeve onto my left arm, I somehow end up pulling the whole shirt up and over my head. Even the suggestion of “left hand into left sleeve” sends my brain spiraling in circles, making me a little dizzy. It’s pure madness.

So now I’m sitting in the wheelchair, dressed from the waist down, my shirt wide open, my bra and my pizza-dough belly exposed, dreading what is next.

Buttoning.

Buttoning the length of my shirt with Left Neglect and one right hand takes the same kind of singular, intricate, held-breath concentration that I imagine someone trying to dismantle a bomb would need to have. I’ve finished three of the five buttons I intend on buttoning, and I’m utterly exhausted. Before I start on the fourth, I notice Heidi in the mirror, and I exhale three buttons’ worth of air and tension. Three’s enough.

“Good job,” says Heidi, sounding impressed.

“Thanks,” I say, genuinely proud of myself.

“But why on earth would you wear that?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Why would you wear a shirt with buttons?”

“Because I should use every opportunity I can to interact with the left?” I ask, quoting Martha, thinking the question is a test.

“Within reason. Let’s be practical, too.”

“So I shouldn’t wear this?”

I ask. “I wouldn’t. I’d pack my button-down shirts away and wear only pullovers.”

I think of my wardrobe full of button-down shirts, the shirts I wear to work.

“For how long?”

“For now.”

I take a mental inventory of the shirts hanging in my closet—Armani, Donna Karan, Grettacole, Ann Taylor— crisp, stylish, expensive, professional, all with buttons. And this doesn’t even include what’s presumably hanging in my closet on the left side. Heidi senses my reluctance to embrace her philosophy.

“It’s like when Ben was born, and he had horrible reflux. For months, I had his spit-up on my shoulders, down my back, down my front. It was gross. I had to stop wearing all my dry-clean-only shirts and sweaters for almost a year. It would’ve cost me a fortune, not to mention all that time driving back and forth to the dry cleaners. I wore all machine-washable cotton instead. It wasn’t forever. It was just for that phase of my life. This isn’t a button-down shirt phase for you.”

We both look at me in the mirror.

“In fact, it’s not a zippered-pants phase either,” she says.

It dawns on me that she’s not only suggesting that I should say good-bye to all my beautiful work shirts and all of my jeans and trousers, but she’s also suggesting that I should get redressed. I should take off my shirt and my jeans, which would also mean taking off my shoes, and start over entirely with some other outfit, and I can’t handle even the possible suggestion. I start to cry.

“It’s okay. Look, your day is hard enough, right?”

I nod and cry.

“Right. So let’s make some simple adjustments where we can. Pullover shirts. Elastic-waistband pants.”

Our eyes sidestep over to my mother, who is wearing black synthetic elastic-waist pants and a shapeless white pullover sweater. I cry a little harder.

“I know. I know you’re used to looking very stylish and put together. But I think we should go for independence over fashion. Vogue is just going to have to wait to do their photo shoot with you.”

Not funny.

“You think I like Crocs?” she says, kicking up one purple rubber foot. “Believe me, I’d much rather be in Jimmy Choos, but they’re way too impractical for what I do here.”

Heidi hands me a tissue.

“But if I’m trying to get back to one hundred percent, don’t I have to practice doing what I was able to do before the accident?”

“Sarah, I hope that happens. I hope you get back to a hundred percent. But you might not. Instead of only focusing on getting better, you might want to also focus on getting better at living with this.”

I’ve gotten used to hearing and ignoring this kind of defeated, negative attitude from Martha, but can’t believe I’m now hearing this from Heidi, my ally, my friend.

“I know that’s a really hard thing to accept, but it’ll help your situation so much if you can.”

There it is again. Accept the situation. Are she and my mother drinking the same Kool-Aid? Accept. Adjust. Those words don’t sing to me at all. In fact, I have a hard time even considering those words without hearing Give up. Lose. Fail. Accept and Adjust. Give up. Lose. Fail.

What about the poster? Attitude. Fist. Fight. I clench my fist and sniffle.

“So are you saying I have to start over?” I ask, referring to what I’m now wearing.

“No, of course not. But for tomorrow, Helen, let’s pick out something simpler, okay?”

“Okay,” says my mother.

“Anything left to do with getting dressed?” asks Heidi.

“My watch.”

My mother hands Heidi my Cartier watch, and Heidi passes it to me. But instead of beginning the long process of putting it on, I compare it to the watch on Heidi’s wrist. Hers is a pink plastic sports watch, digital, with no buckle. It’s shaped like the letter C and appears to simply hook around her wrist like a horseshoe rings around a post. And I have an idea.

“Wanna trade?” I ask, like we’re in elementary school, and I’m offering her my tuna for her PB&J.

“No, Sarah, yours is—”

“Too complicated,” I say.

“Expensive,” she says.

“A daily source of aggravation. I need a degree from MIT to work the clasp.”

“I couldn’t,” she says, but I can tell she’s considering it. “This is like a thirty-dollar watch. Your mother or Bob could order one for you.”

“Yeah, but I want to do this now. What about that speech you just made? Accept and adjust. I think this is a pink plastic watch phase for me.”

A smile sneaks into her eyes.

“Okay, but when you want this back, you just tell me.”

“Deal.”

Heidi replaces my diamond-and-platinum Cartier with her pink plastic watch. I hold the edge of the opening in my right hand, find my diamond ring on my left, and in one lucky try, I slap her watch onto my left wrist. I even read the time. 11:12. My mother claps.

“Wow, Sarah, this is really gorgeous,” Heidi says, admiring her upgrade. “You sure about this?”

I think about all the agonizing minutes I just saved.

Accept and Adjust.

You’re giving up. You’re going to lose. You’re going to fail.

Attitude. Fist. Fight.

“I’m sure. But I don’t care what you say or how hard I have to work, I’m never asking for your Crocs.”

She laughs.

“Deal.”

Don’t worry, I’m not giving up, I tell my conflicted self. Sometimes I’m just too exhausted to fight.