“I just don’t want you to be the only boy in your class who can’t skip!” she says on the way across town. “And besides, if there is something wrong with you, it’s better to know now.” Mom nods at herself, seeming to prepare herself for the worst, and then she pushes play on her car stereo tape player.
She’s singing along with Dolly Parton’s song “Apple Jack” and seems happy. She loves singing to country music, and I love hearing her sing along with it. “Apple Jack” is the first song I remember hearing and mom usually plays it when we drive in the car from a tape she recorded off the radio. It’s got Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream,” too, and I insist on singing the Dolly parts, but so does Mom. So we sing to Kenny and he sings back to us. We are just like the Judds.
“I honestly don’t understand how they can have so many handicap spaces here” she wonders, “I mean, where the hell are we supposed to park?”
We pull into Easter Seals. “Can you believe this, Number Two?” As she signs the endless paperwork and writes a donation check, I read a sticky Highlights magazine article about safe woodworking with missing pages and I adjust myself.
Easter Seals is a series of small, white rooms that all smell like hot dogs.
My crotch area is very uncomfortable right now because on the way to Easter Seals, mom stopped at Macy’s to get me Spandex bicycle shorts so that I’d be more comfortable learning proper hand/foot/eye coordination with the Sacramento area’s most courageous amputee war veterans, autistic children, and seniors. The shorts I’m wearing now have neon blue stripes on the side.
“See? Isn’t black slimming!” she had said hours before Easter Seals when she held the shorts up to my face to make sure they matched my eyes. Since they had black shorts with three different varieties of neon colors there was no reason not to get every color to wear with a nice black tank top, especially on a hot day like today when we’re going to Easter Seals. “Just go put the blue ones on in the dressing room and give me the tag,” She commands. “I’ll go pay so you look nice today!”
A very pretty woman in beige Docker pants and a red bob haircut named Peggy tries to get me to walk back and forth between two raised wooden beams in another small tiled room with puffy, dirty faded blue mats. I fall down after three steps, my belly falling out of my spandex shorts each time. I’m clumsy, Peggy observes, probably because my history of middle ear infections. Peggy says I’ll grow out of it. “I’m not so sure.” Mom says. “He also doesn’t seem to like sports,” she says. “I just wonder if he has some kind of, disability.” I agree with mom, on this. I usually do.
On my fifth try on the beams, a group of every kind of Easter Seals patient, a woman on a walker, a very feminine older man in a navy cap, and a boy with no hair and a head brace are gathering near the beams to cheer me on. When I fall, they let out a collective, “OH!” and the boy with cranial braces starts licking my hand. “Excuse me!” mom interrupts and grabs my hand and we walk out. “Keep the donation check. There are people here who need it more than us.” She says loudly and looks around the room giggling and whispering, “I’m not letting some retarded boy lick my baby!” She tells me, but everyone can hear.
“Now, where in the Hell did I park?” she asks. “Well,” she says as she walks to her side of the car, “When you fell down those mats matched your eyes and your new shorts, that’s for sure!”
In the car on the way home, I sink into the seat of her BMW325es embarrassed and itchy. The radio was playing my favorite country song by a male artist, Eddy Rabbitt’s, “I Love a Rainy Night” but I won’t sing. It’s my first memory of being embarrassed by both my body and my clumsiness. “I just can’t believe I kept you there for more than five minutes.” She says. “You’re not retarded at all,” she seemed to realize for the first time. “You’re just uncoordinated. But at least you got a new outfit to wear to school tomorrow, huh?” I look down at my thighs as we get out of the car back in Folsom. At nine years old and 200 pounds, I have visible cellulite racing out of my Spandex thighs, and every time I hit a Tether ball my big love handles crept of my shirt like a Big League Chew gum bubble, and you could see my stretch-marked hips from the front yard.
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