DAREDEVIL

Don’t think because my pediatrician said I wouldn’t have survived infancy without antibiotics that I was a sickly child. Throughout my elementary school years I was physically active, robust enough to chase lizards and butterflies with my father and brother and play all the sports and games the neighborhood kids did. In a modern dance recital one spring, I was chosen, despite my pigeon toes, to be the queen in our class’s performance of The Emperor’s New Clothes, while my friend Mary, the tallest of all of us, played the emperor and Margie, the shortest, played the little girl who broadcast to the world that the emperor was naked. I was even a bit of a daredevil.

But I was subject to bouts of tonsillitis and strep throat, when my temperature would soar to 104 degrees and I would become delirious. One of the sensations I experienced when I was running a high fever was of some nameless force at a remove from me building relentlessly, gathering heft, until it exploded suddenly, streaming thin and sharp, skewering me like spear, only to recede and begin gathering force again. The antidote was an injection of penicillin in my bottom.

Even the summer after sixth grade I was still chasing reptiles—in the heat of Death Valley—and swimming—in the ocean in San Diego. When I found out that my three closest friends were going to Camp Fire Girls camp together, as I’ve said, I agreed to go with Doug and my dad on a cross-country trip to La Jolla in California. He’d been invited to teach that summer at U. C. San Diego, swapping places with a professor there and residences as well. But if I thought a change of scene would ease my unhappiness, I was wrong.

I’d always been sensitive about killing other creatures and had only gone along with “stunning” the butterflies we caught—by pinching their thorax—because my dad expected it of me. Even when we were surrounded by huge yellow and gold sulphurs after crossing the border into Mexico, beautiful butterflies we’d never seen before, I silently rebelled against catching them, though I was too intimidated by my father to admit how I was feeling. As for chasing reptiles in the desert, I remember being so hellishly hot—despite the jug of sour limeade my dad always kept in the car—that I wished I was anywhere else. (I’m reminded that a few years earlier a friend of Dad’s, who was along on one of our outings, told my mother that our father’s indifference to our childish needs and limitations amounted to abuse.) While years later my father would tell me that this summer with Doug and me provided closure for him after the divorce, I only remember being deeply depressed the whole time. I didn’t make any friends in La Jolla until my last few days there, and found nothing better to do during those ten tedious weeks than read all the movie magazines I came across in a drawer in my teenage counterpart’s bedroom.

One harrowing incident from that summer stands out in my mind: Somewhere in the southwest on a searingly hot day, while my dad and brother stayed indoors in the air-conditioned motel room, I tied a bandana around my feet and jumped into the motel pool to see if I could swim without using my legs. Immediately I started to panic—and to drown. Luckily the thrashing around I did loosened the knot in the bandana, which freed my legs as I went under a second time.

 When I look back on this crazy stunt, I’m reminded of my cousin Michael—and it occurs to me that children in emotional straits are liable to engage in risky behavior, courting disaster, as though (in my case, paradoxically) they had an unconscious death wish. Michael was often beaten by my uncle, and he’d climbed back into the sewer trench even though the workmen had warned him it was dangerous and to stay away.