We have ritual and we have remembrance and sometimes the these two things converge to create our history. My story begins with a song. My mother is singing “Sweet Baby James” to us in the car. We were driving northbound on the Taconic and we were coming up on the Berkshires and that was what she always did when we reached that part of the road. But the Berkshires weren’t dusted with snow on this particular day. It was May, Memorial day weekend of 1973, and we were headed to my Grandpa Max’s 75th birthday celebration. And my belly hurt.

My favorite photograph of myself as a child was taken at that party. I was siting on my Uncle Walter’s lap. He was my favorite Uncle, the one who pulled quarters out of my ears and gave me gifts of cheap costume jewelry from his store and called them diamonds, and told the same impossible wonderful stories over and over. He was my magical uncle. In this photograph I wore my purple and black fancy dress, the same one I would wear for school photographs the following fall. My long brown hair was pulled back into braids with matching ribbons on the ends. I leaned easily against Uncle Walter’s broad chest, and his head was tilted to my ear as he whispered to me one of his tall tales, and my tiny face is all caught up in quiet rapt attention, with a drunken, glazed smile parting my lips, showing tiny little teeth like pearls. Uncle Walter talked the best stories, and I was hanging on every word. I have always loved this picture, this vision of myself at six, this moment when the shutter clicked and I was caught all involved in the innocent glory of childhood. Braids and my party dress. My flustered face, reddened from chasing my cousins around a room crowded with relatives. A moment of quiet, with a safe lap to land on and a story so bold and tall that I know it cannot possible be true, but I so deeply believe in, told only to me. A thick glass filled with coca-cola, a forbidden treat, that my hands grasp possessively, my tiny fingers touching textured glass. This photograph would be featured prominently in the rooms of my life from that point on. It would move with me from the doll strewn bedroom bookcase, be lopsidedly thumb tacked to the cork board that shuttled between my dorm rooms and the early dusty apartments of my twenties, until it finally landed in a pretty silver frame purchased in a spree of home improvement in Pier One on a lazy Saturday afternoon shortly before my thirty-forth birthday. I love this picture, where I am six, and small, and loved, and safe and well, and my world is still a place of early innocence and a body built on sturdy health. I love this picture, because it captures the moment before it all changed.
We lived in Queens then, and it was a two and a half hour drive back. I fell ill in the car, and climbed into the tiny back space in the Bug that I could curl up perfectly in with my yellow blanket. I rocked gently with the steady vibration of the car as my Father sped along home, curled up with both my small hands clasped over the rounded slope of my lower belly, steadily growing with a dull, throbbing pain. It was full dark by the time we reached the Taconic, so we weren’t able to play any of our ritual car games, games that had grown out of memorizing each rise and fall of the road until even little Josh knew when to call out, “I’m making a gas station”, or “Horse farm” several hundred feet before the landmark appeared. Instead, my brothers dozed, and my parents murmured to each other quietly, so quietly that I only caught bits and pieces of their conversation over the low volume of the radio.
“….Something she ate maybe?”
“….Stomach flu going around in school..”
“…..Watch out…deer.”
Before they reached the city, my father had to pull the car over twice so that I could climb out and throw up.
At my pediatrician’s the next morning he did not poke or prod where I said I hurt. He glanced me over rather absently and said, “A touch of the flu,” and then his eyes landed on my younger brother, two years old with round cerulean eyes and curling blond hair that fell to his shoulders and said, “Or a touch of jealousy over that one. Do you need a little attention?”
He put on that dumbed down voice that an adult will sometimes use when speaking to a child.
“It hurts,” I said in a small voice, unsure of what else to say. I was six. I was small and in pain. The doctor did not believe me and my world had suddenly become a place colored red, too warm and closed in. My Mother, frustrated and frightened and young herself, at 29 she still wore her hair in braids too, took me home and and tried to feed me clear juices and Jell-O but I turned my head away and refused. By evening, I was crying over the pain, and pointing to the area just below my navel. My Mother put me on the toilet and told me,
“Try to go.”
But I couldn’t.
My Mother called the doctor back.
“She says the pain is in her lower belly and I think she’s constipated.” My Mother’s voice went quick and breathy over the phone. She was scared.
“She’s weak. She won’t eat or drink and I’m afraid she’s becoming dehydrated.”
The doctor didn’t like his holiday weekend being disturbed.
“How would you know if she were dehydrated?” He challenged. “Give her fluids.”
But I would not take them. I just lay there slack with a growing yellow tint to my eyes and skin and wouldn’t let even my Mother touch me. I shrank away from her hand. My Mother sat with me on the couch and watched me all night, she watched me shift and moan and grasp at my belly and cry under my yellow blanket. Towards dawn she telephoned her own OB-GYN, the doctor who delivered me, and with a rising panic in her voice, described my symptoms. He said without a beat,
“Bring her to Lenox Hill. I’ll meet you there.”
I don’t remember much more of it. I was lifted off the couch and wrapped firmly in my yellow blanket and carried to the car and placed gently in the back seat of the Bug. It was dawn, and I could see sideways pink clouds as the car pulled and shifted and climbed onto the onramp to the highway. I can clearly remember the trees we passed, and the cool and crinkly feel of the leather seat beneath my cheek, and the dull feeling of relief that help was waiting at the other end. I was six. I was small, wrapped in pain and fear, with my world now a place faded a dim yellow, a Pink Floyd song, my parents voices drawn out and echoing, the sky floating past outside the windows. Not comfortable, but definitely numb.
And then, that is all I remember.
My parents always picked up the story from there, a story that they repeated to me so often over the years, that like the story of my birth, it seemed over time that I did remember it, as if I had been there in some participatory way, and not just as a semi conscious child wrapped in a yellow blanket. It had been arranged for the head of pediatrics at Lenox Hill Hospital to meet them, and he stood waiting at some prearranged side door, and when the car pulled up, he reached into the backseat of the bug and scooped me up and carried me into the hospital himself. As a grown woman, I imagine how it might have been. The day is so early that the light is still fresh and clean. The sun is just beginning to peek through the tall buildings of Manhattan as my father drove off to look for a parking space. There would have been early morning sounds too, garbage trucks and commuter buses, everything just getting going in the May morning, men and women walking quick, with coffee and briefcases on their way to work. The doctor, a little disheveled, having been woken before dawn, carried me through corridors that were empty and echoed. His sleeves were unbuttoned. His tie was sloppy. My Mother kept pace with him, watching my little feet hanging over the crook of his arm with her eye all puffy from a lack of sleep and extreme worry. I was brought to an exam room and placed on a table. The doctor palpitated my belly and in an urgent tone said,
“There is a large mass in her lower abdomen.”
And then quickly, there was a sudden rush of activity as nurses spun into play and my yellow blanket is cast aside as I am plied with IV’s and fluids and then, and then, I am saved.