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| The English Bike By Jewel Beth Davis |
Peter wasn't at our house that particular day, but he’d left his bike. A shiny, black, English
three-speed bike leaned up against the back wall of our gray-shingled garage at 10
Hamilton Avenue in Quincy. That was my deus ex machina in reverse. Peter Kerstein, my
brother Buzzy's best friend, had left it there. No one knows why.
Peter lived in Squantum, a chic section of Quincy that was a beautiful and bleak island
covered with a craggy shoreline and inlets and salt-soaked old New England homes,
linked to the mainland by a short bridge. He often rode his bike the four or so miles back
and forth from Squantum to our house in Montclair. That day, his bike sat there, leaning
seductively against the gray textured shingles. What nine-year-old would be able to resist
that?
On that Sunday in early autumn, I was in the backyard playing under the mammoth pine
trees that served as my playhouse with my best friend, Karen. My brothers were out
somewhere. My parents, Fran and Bernie, were in the kitchen and the bathroom
respectively.
Hidden under the giant evergreens, I luxuriated among the natural cushions. “Mmmn,” I
sighed, “Can you smell the pines?”
“Of course I can, dodo. We’re only lying on about eighty zillion needles,” Karen teased.
“I meant, don’t you love that smell? Couldn’t you just stay here forever?”
“It’s okay, but I’m bored.”
Karen was the swarthy-complected child of a Scots/Irish father and Italian mother with
coarse, brown wavy hair. She had unremarkable, almost boyish facial features and a
good laugh. She laughed at everything I said, which I thought a good quality in a friend.
We’d become friends because we were both devotees of “The Swamp Fox” on Disney and
a certain tall crabapple tree we climbed daily in the field across from my house. We’d sit
up in the highest branches of the tree that at certain times of the year showered
crabapples onto anyone who passed beneath, looking down at a world that was both
vaster and smaller than it had been when we were on the ground. We’d call to each other
across the dangerous spaces of air and sometimes sit silent, feeling as though we ruled
the world. At those times, we were happy.
I didn’t have many friends in Montclair. We were one of three Jewish families and anti-
Semitism affected my ability to make friends. Karen came from a strictly religious Catholic
family and attended parochial school. I could sense her parents didn’t like me. Both
always eyed me disapprovingly as though just waiting for me to do something so
inappropriate that they could guiltlessly end our friendship. It seemed as though I didn’t
belong to any group in my neighborhood. I felt left out, unwanted, isolated, just like my
mother seemed to be.
Karen and I emerged from under the perfume sweet pines. “Hey, Kar,” I said hopefully,
“You wanna’ see my garden? Mom bought seeds and I planted them.” I had a 2x1-foot
garden of straggly pansies and petunias. I led her over to the tiny patch of unyielding soil
directly behind the back wall of the garage. This was precisely the spot where Peter's
three-speed Raleigh, a beacon of light and curves, leaned enticingly against the wall.
Unlocked, of course. Nobody locked in those days; not bikes, not doors, not cars.
What is it about a bike that’s so seductive? They are slim, sleek and shiny, or at least they
start out that way. They are complex pieces of both art and function, their mechanisms
shrouded in mystery. They are the best mode of transportation a child has access to and
because of that, they translate into power and control, two things that children have very
little of. Best of all, when you’re flying down a hill on a bike, your hair loose in the wind,
your face flaming, there is no greater sense of freedom for we who are earth bound. That
must be what I sensed that day when I looked at Peter’s bike.
Karen looked down at the listless flowers in the small plot of earth. “They’re okay,” she
said. She looked around our big backyard. “What do you feel like doing now? You want to
play Swamp Fox?”
I had to come up with something. I was afraid Karen would leave. “Hey!” I cried
enthusiastically, “I've got a scathingly brilliant idea!” I’d just watched a Hayley Mills movie,
“The Trouble With Angels,” in which the two main characters, Hayley and her buddy,
repeat that phrase ad nauseam whenever they’re about to terrorize the nuns and
students in their parochial school. After seeing the film, I’d find any excuse to make that
comment.
“Let's pedal backwards!” I suggested, gesturing towards Peter’s bike. Everyone knew that
pedaling backwards on a stationary bike was one of the best things about an English bike
that wasn’t possible on an American bike. You couldn’t pedal backwards on an American
bike because that was the way you braked. Try that once and as you sail over the
handlebars, you know you'll never do that again.
“Whose bike is it?” Karen asked.
“It's Peter’s, Buzzy's friend.”
“Don't you think your brother's friend will mind?” In those days, ownership and “asking”
was a big deal.
“Nah, he's my really good friend.”
“You wish!” Karen sneered. But she agreed to go along with my plan anyway.
Karen was right, of course. I did wish he were my friend. Peter was handsome and
talented but at four years my senior, he was out of my league.
As I pedaled backwards on Peter's bike, I could hear the lovely whirring sound and gentle
feel of the vibrations. I dismounted and gave Karen a chance. She climbed on athletically
and was soon pedaling madly, going nowhere.
Now, in order to explain my subsequent actions, you must place yourself in a certain state
of mind. You know the satisfying feeling you get when you run your hand over a picket
fence, from one picket to another? Thump, thump, thump. For no good reason I can come
up with, it’s fun. Perhaps it ties in with the regularity of the beat of our hearts. That was
what I wanted to feel when I knelt down in front of the rear wheel. I put the index finger of
my left hand on the bike chain that spun wildly as Karen pedaled. For several seconds, it
was exactly as I'd imagined, satisfying. Then, life flew into cyclonic action, very fast and
slow motion at the same time. I see the next moments as still photographs. There’s me,
squatting on the ground with my finger on the chain, smiling and humming. The next thing
I knew, the centrifugal force pulled my finger into that vortex where the chain meets the
metal and my small safe world went helter-skelter. There’s me, my left hand flying around
and around the shiny sprocket. My finger emerged from the sprocket resembling a
partially eaten pomegranate. There’s me again, staring horrified at the profusion of blood
pouring from my finger, soaking my pants and the ground. Such red blood, scarlet. I felt
lightheaded. There the stills end and the action picks back up.
I flew in appalled panic around the side of the garage beside Mrs. Purdy’s white picket
fence and into the side door of my house, screaming and confused.
“Mommy!” I shrieked as I careened, bleeding copiously, into the kitchen where my mother
stood at the sink.
When she saw me, bloody finger dripping all over her clean floor, Ma-Fran's face turned
green. But my mother was a trooper; she would have been great in battle or anywhere
else one needs to keep a cool head. She grabbed a dishtowel and wrapped my finger
tightly, pressing hard to slow the flow of blood. At the same time, she bellowed for my
father, “Oh my God! Bernie! Bernie! Get in here NOW!”
I remember the sound of the toilet flushing and the rustle of newspapers as the bathroom
door slammed open.
“Bernie!” Ma-Fran bleated again.
“What? What is it, for God's sakes?”
My father, nearly bounding the last few steps from living room into kitchen, suddenly came
to a dead stop. Now, my father was a big man, 6' 2 ½ " and all of two hundred and fifty
pounds, mainly in the bay window area. He took one look at me and all color drained from
his face. A sheen of sweat broke out on his ashen face, leaving it a greasy gray.
Everything seemed to slow way down as this giant of a man began to melt to the ground,
his bones appearing to turn to Jell-O.
My mother wasn't having any of that. “Bernie!” She rushed to him. “Bernie, you can't
faint,” she cried, vigorously slapping his beefy face. “You're the only one who can drive!”
“The bike!” I sobbed. “Karen was on Peter’s bike and...!”
Bracing my Dad up, Ma-Fran bellowed, “Bernie, get the car keys and get Julie into the
car. I’m going out back to search for…” She stopped and looked at me before continuing,
“It!”
“Daddy,” I sobbed. My big father gathered me up and carried me into the car, placing me
into the back seat. He had the engine racing when Ma-Fran returned to jump quickly into
the backseat. She mumbled something to Bernie as the big blue boat of an Oldsmobile
squealed backwards out of the driveway and shifted into Drive with gears grinding, but I
didn’t hear what she said.
The ride to the hospital was a blur. I heard later that there was nothing for my mother to
find, no finger, no nail, no skin, and no Karen. Just a little blood on the chain. Believe it or
not, I couldn't feel the finger at all. You would think the pain would have been agonizing
but I felt nothing. I didn’t feel anything until I reached the hospital. Then the shock wore off
and the pain hit like a hurricane, a roller coaster off the rails. My surgeon, Dr. Schwartz,
later told me that the tip of the finger has more nerve endings than almost anywhere else
on the body.
Okay, putting my finger on a rotating bicycle chain was unbelievably stupid but the reality
is, if you're honest with yourself, that you have done things that dumb and it's only by the
grace of God that you haven't met with a similarly horrific outcome. And were that not true,
a chainsaw would not have the following warning on it: “Do not try to stop with your
hands.” It's in the manual.”
Soon, I lay on a gurney in a hallway near surgery for two hours wailing in agony while
hospital personnel searched for the plastic surgeon, Dr. Schwartz, and then waited for him
to arrive. It turns out he was out on his motorboat in Quincy Bay with his son. The interns
refused to give me any painkiller. Then Dr. Schwartz arrived and I was off to surgery,
screaming backwards to my mother and father, my arms outstretched, as orderlies
wheeled me away.
I awoke terrified in the middle of the night to a pitch-black, unknown hospital ward,
begging for my parents. It was completely dark, cavernous and unfamiliar and I was in
pain. The nurse refused to call my parents. “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll strap you down to
the bed,” this faceless figure with a white cap hovering over me threatened. I was
paralyzed with fear and cried even harder. So the nurse restrained me, tying me with
leather straps to the bed, which only pushed me deeper into hysteria.
“Please, please,” I begged ceaselessly, “Call my mommy and daddy. I want to see them!
Please,” I said, feeling waves of panic crash in my chest. She punched a needle of
something unceremoniously into my arm.
She was probably just trying to keep me from re-injuring my finger after surgery but why
didn’t she understand how frightened I was, a nine-year-old that hadn’t seen anyone
familiar since being wheeled into surgery hours before. The darkness was viscous on that
big ward and I felt imprisoned by it. Eventually, I cried myself into an exhausted sleep.
My parents were at my bedside very early the next morning, concern reflected in the lines
and shadows on their faces.
“Mommy,” I cried out when I saw her, “You came. I thought I’d never see you again. I was
so afraid last night in the dark. I begged them to call you.” I was sobbing now. “They tied
me down.”
“How dare you do that to a little girl! Why didn’t you call us?” Fran, my mother, raged at
the nurse. “That’s just cruel! You’re no Florence Nightingale, that’s for sure.”
“I did what I thought was right,” the nurse said brusquely.
“Fine but don’t let it happen again or I’ll strap you down and see how you like it,” my father
said. The nurse gave a short gasp. Then Bern added, “If she wants us, you call, ya’ hear?”
“Alright,” the nurse said, “but just to let you know, it’s not hospital policy.”
“I don’t give a…” my father suddenly roared. We all snapped our heads to Bern and
waited. “Phony two dollar bill about hospital policy!” He finished the sentence more quietly.
“You call us.”
The nurse let out her breath in a whoosh and huffed off to assist the reasonable parents
of reasonable children.
As it turned out, Dr. Schwartz was worth waiting for as he was a miracle man. No one can
explain how he saved my nail when my finger had been amputated below the nail. He told
my parents that his son had lost two fingers in a water skiing accident off the back of their
boat. This knowledge seemed to comfort them.
Later, my brothers came to visit me in the hospital, looking sad and worried. But no Karen.
Where was she?
“Great way to get out of doing your chores,” my brother Mike joked lamely.
“Jeez!” said Buzz. “Shut up, you jerk.”
“I was only kidding,” Mike said, and they went off to search out the vending machines.
I waited for Karen every day but she never came. I looked for her for three weeks. No dice.
Then I returned home from the hospital. After that, there were months of home visits from
a private nurse who soaked my finger for long sessions in a briny solution and re-
bandaged it. I watched fascinated and was surprisingly unsqueamish as the old skin
turned green and fell off.
“Oooooh,” I said to Nurse Judy, thrilled, as I watched debrided pieces of finger float in the
murky salt water, “Wicked cool!” Nurse Judy laughed. The bandage was four times the
size of my finger.
I was quite a celebrity when I returned to school. I had a unique looking finger since the
accident but I rather liked it. I had a story to tell and a bandage the size of a small
mummy's head. Everyone knew about the accidental amputation and was quite
impressed. My status grew as I fielded questions for months. “When it happened, did it
feel like you were grinding hamburger?” Richie Colorusso asked.
Shari Kiley stepped in, “Shut up, Richie. That’s gross. How would she know? How often do
you think she grinds hamburger?”
“I was just asking, for cry-eye.”
My fifth grade teacher at Montclair Elementary, Mr. Kelly, his oily scalp shining between
his remaining sparse brown strands, tried to force me to write with my right hand instead
of my left. True to my nature, I adamantly refused. Being a leftie felt like an essential part
of me so I persevered, writing with my left hand with my mega-blob bandage and all. I did
fine, which seemed to really annoy Mr. Kelly.
I thought about Karen often and wondered why she never came to visit me in the hospital
or called when I came home, but I was afraid to open that conversation with my mother.
Without Ma-Fran’s saying a word about it, I had the strong sense that she didn’t want to
talk about it. She never brought the subject up, so I didn’t either. I always felt I had to
protect my mother from speaking about things that might upset her. I was just grateful she
hadn’t yelled at me for cutting off my finger as I expected she would.
Why hadn’t I heard from Karen? Didn’t she like me anymore? Was she mad at me? Did
she think I thought it was her fault? I thought and thought about it, worrying the questions
over and over in my mind. Maybe her parents were afraid my mother and father held
Karen responsible for the accident. If my parents did, I never heard them say so and
believe me, they would have.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I blurted, “Uhh, Ma, why didn’t Karen come visit me
in the hospital? Didn’t she want to?”
Ma-Fran responded, “She wanted to but she’s been really busy at school.”
“But Ma, I was in the hospital and she’s my best friend,” I protested.
“I know, Julie, I know. What do you want me to do?” she said exasperated.
There was something she wasn’t telling me; that was clear. I wondered if my parents had
kept Karen from visiting. Still, I accepted my mother’s bogus explanation, which was
unusual for me. Why didn’t I insist on a better answer? I was afraid I would hear that Karen
didn’t like me anymore or that her parents were keeping her away. Since she hadn’t come
or called, I knew she didn’t want to be my friend anymore, I just didn’t know why. I felt
sadder that I’d lost Karen’s friendship than that I’d lost part of my finger but I never said so
to anyone. I tried to pretend it wasn’t important to me but it was. I pretended about it for
years. Until now. Now that I tell you this story, this story that is about losing my finger and
isn’t. It’s about losing. And never being able to say goodbye.
I think about Karen now and realize how frightening that experience must have been for
her then. Whether or not our parents caused the demise of our friendship, she must have
felt that she was to blame in some way. What a crushing burden that was to carry. It never
occurred to me until now but she may have felt I hated her for causing the accident and
that I didn’t want to see her again. Of course, she didn’t cause it. I know that now and I
knew it then. I only blamed myself for lacking in common sense. But how could she know?
When the bandages came off, my mother inspected my finger and said, “Julie, if you want,
when you’re older, you can have plastic surgery to make it look better.”
I stared at my left index finger. It was about three-quarters of an inch shorter than the one
on my right hand. The tip of it sloped down at a sharp angle from left to right. It had a nail
that grew curved over, not flat, and never past a certain length. It never separated from
the skin and so there was no white at the end like my other nails. It by no means looked
like an ordinary finger. “Thanks, Ma,” I said, “But no, I don’t think so. It looks fine to me.”
And I meant it.
So I moved forward into the future and never once, since that day, have I wished for the
return of the top of my finger, not once felt diminished because of a disfiguring accident
but rather that, in certain ways, I was more than I had been.
And Peter’s bike? Peter's bike was gone when I got home from the hospital. As if I’d
imagined the whole thing. An empty space where once had stood the shiny instrument of
my digit's separation.
three-speed bike leaned up against the back wall of our gray-shingled garage at 10
Hamilton Avenue in Quincy. That was my deus ex machina in reverse. Peter Kerstein, my
brother Buzzy's best friend, had left it there. No one knows why.
Peter lived in Squantum, a chic section of Quincy that was a beautiful and bleak island
covered with a craggy shoreline and inlets and salt-soaked old New England homes,
linked to the mainland by a short bridge. He often rode his bike the four or so miles back
and forth from Squantum to our house in Montclair. That day, his bike sat there, leaning
seductively against the gray textured shingles. What nine-year-old would be able to resist
that?
On that Sunday in early autumn, I was in the backyard playing under the mammoth pine
trees that served as my playhouse with my best friend, Karen. My brothers were out
somewhere. My parents, Fran and Bernie, were in the kitchen and the bathroom
respectively.
Hidden under the giant evergreens, I luxuriated among the natural cushions. “Mmmn,” I
sighed, “Can you smell the pines?”
“Of course I can, dodo. We’re only lying on about eighty zillion needles,” Karen teased.
“I meant, don’t you love that smell? Couldn’t you just stay here forever?”
“It’s okay, but I’m bored.”
Karen was the swarthy-complected child of a Scots/Irish father and Italian mother with
coarse, brown wavy hair. She had unremarkable, almost boyish facial features and a
good laugh. She laughed at everything I said, which I thought a good quality in a friend.
We’d become friends because we were both devotees of “The Swamp Fox” on Disney and
a certain tall crabapple tree we climbed daily in the field across from my house. We’d sit
up in the highest branches of the tree that at certain times of the year showered
crabapples onto anyone who passed beneath, looking down at a world that was both
vaster and smaller than it had been when we were on the ground. We’d call to each other
across the dangerous spaces of air and sometimes sit silent, feeling as though we ruled
the world. At those times, we were happy.
I didn’t have many friends in Montclair. We were one of three Jewish families and anti-
Semitism affected my ability to make friends. Karen came from a strictly religious Catholic
family and attended parochial school. I could sense her parents didn’t like me. Both
always eyed me disapprovingly as though just waiting for me to do something so
inappropriate that they could guiltlessly end our friendship. It seemed as though I didn’t
belong to any group in my neighborhood. I felt left out, unwanted, isolated, just like my
mother seemed to be.
Karen and I emerged from under the perfume sweet pines. “Hey, Kar,” I said hopefully,
“You wanna’ see my garden? Mom bought seeds and I planted them.” I had a 2x1-foot
garden of straggly pansies and petunias. I led her over to the tiny patch of unyielding soil
directly behind the back wall of the garage. This was precisely the spot where Peter's
three-speed Raleigh, a beacon of light and curves, leaned enticingly against the wall.
Unlocked, of course. Nobody locked in those days; not bikes, not doors, not cars.
What is it about a bike that’s so seductive? They are slim, sleek and shiny, or at least they
start out that way. They are complex pieces of both art and function, their mechanisms
shrouded in mystery. They are the best mode of transportation a child has access to and
because of that, they translate into power and control, two things that children have very
little of. Best of all, when you’re flying down a hill on a bike, your hair loose in the wind,
your face flaming, there is no greater sense of freedom for we who are earth bound. That
must be what I sensed that day when I looked at Peter’s bike.
Karen looked down at the listless flowers in the small plot of earth. “They’re okay,” she
said. She looked around our big backyard. “What do you feel like doing now? You want to
play Swamp Fox?”
I had to come up with something. I was afraid Karen would leave. “Hey!” I cried
enthusiastically, “I've got a scathingly brilliant idea!” I’d just watched a Hayley Mills movie,
“The Trouble With Angels,” in which the two main characters, Hayley and her buddy,
repeat that phrase ad nauseam whenever they’re about to terrorize the nuns and
students in their parochial school. After seeing the film, I’d find any excuse to make that
comment.
“Let's pedal backwards!” I suggested, gesturing towards Peter’s bike. Everyone knew that
pedaling backwards on a stationary bike was one of the best things about an English bike
that wasn’t possible on an American bike. You couldn’t pedal backwards on an American
bike because that was the way you braked. Try that once and as you sail over the
handlebars, you know you'll never do that again.
“Whose bike is it?” Karen asked.
“It's Peter’s, Buzzy's friend.”
“Don't you think your brother's friend will mind?” In those days, ownership and “asking”
was a big deal.
“Nah, he's my really good friend.”
“You wish!” Karen sneered. But she agreed to go along with my plan anyway.
Karen was right, of course. I did wish he were my friend. Peter was handsome and
talented but at four years my senior, he was out of my league.
As I pedaled backwards on Peter's bike, I could hear the lovely whirring sound and gentle
feel of the vibrations. I dismounted and gave Karen a chance. She climbed on athletically
and was soon pedaling madly, going nowhere.
Now, in order to explain my subsequent actions, you must place yourself in a certain state
of mind. You know the satisfying feeling you get when you run your hand over a picket
fence, from one picket to another? Thump, thump, thump. For no good reason I can come
up with, it’s fun. Perhaps it ties in with the regularity of the beat of our hearts. That was
what I wanted to feel when I knelt down in front of the rear wheel. I put the index finger of
my left hand on the bike chain that spun wildly as Karen pedaled. For several seconds, it
was exactly as I'd imagined, satisfying. Then, life flew into cyclonic action, very fast and
slow motion at the same time. I see the next moments as still photographs. There’s me,
squatting on the ground with my finger on the chain, smiling and humming. The next thing
I knew, the centrifugal force pulled my finger into that vortex where the chain meets the
metal and my small safe world went helter-skelter. There’s me, my left hand flying around
and around the shiny sprocket. My finger emerged from the sprocket resembling a
partially eaten pomegranate. There’s me again, staring horrified at the profusion of blood
pouring from my finger, soaking my pants and the ground. Such red blood, scarlet. I felt
lightheaded. There the stills end and the action picks back up.
I flew in appalled panic around the side of the garage beside Mrs. Purdy’s white picket
fence and into the side door of my house, screaming and confused.
“Mommy!” I shrieked as I careened, bleeding copiously, into the kitchen where my mother
stood at the sink.
When she saw me, bloody finger dripping all over her clean floor, Ma-Fran's face turned
green. But my mother was a trooper; she would have been great in battle or anywhere
else one needs to keep a cool head. She grabbed a dishtowel and wrapped my finger
tightly, pressing hard to slow the flow of blood. At the same time, she bellowed for my
father, “Oh my God! Bernie! Bernie! Get in here NOW!”
I remember the sound of the toilet flushing and the rustle of newspapers as the bathroom
door slammed open.
“Bernie!” Ma-Fran bleated again.
“What? What is it, for God's sakes?”
My father, nearly bounding the last few steps from living room into kitchen, suddenly came
to a dead stop. Now, my father was a big man, 6' 2 ½ " and all of two hundred and fifty
pounds, mainly in the bay window area. He took one look at me and all color drained from
his face. A sheen of sweat broke out on his ashen face, leaving it a greasy gray.
Everything seemed to slow way down as this giant of a man began to melt to the ground,
his bones appearing to turn to Jell-O.
My mother wasn't having any of that. “Bernie!” She rushed to him. “Bernie, you can't
faint,” she cried, vigorously slapping his beefy face. “You're the only one who can drive!”
“The bike!” I sobbed. “Karen was on Peter’s bike and...!”
Bracing my Dad up, Ma-Fran bellowed, “Bernie, get the car keys and get Julie into the
car. I’m going out back to search for…” She stopped and looked at me before continuing,
“It!”
“Daddy,” I sobbed. My big father gathered me up and carried me into the car, placing me
into the back seat. He had the engine racing when Ma-Fran returned to jump quickly into
the backseat. She mumbled something to Bernie as the big blue boat of an Oldsmobile
squealed backwards out of the driveway and shifted into Drive with gears grinding, but I
didn’t hear what she said.
The ride to the hospital was a blur. I heard later that there was nothing for my mother to
find, no finger, no nail, no skin, and no Karen. Just a little blood on the chain. Believe it or
not, I couldn't feel the finger at all. You would think the pain would have been agonizing
but I felt nothing. I didn’t feel anything until I reached the hospital. Then the shock wore off
and the pain hit like a hurricane, a roller coaster off the rails. My surgeon, Dr. Schwartz,
later told me that the tip of the finger has more nerve endings than almost anywhere else
on the body.
Okay, putting my finger on a rotating bicycle chain was unbelievably stupid but the reality
is, if you're honest with yourself, that you have done things that dumb and it's only by the
grace of God that you haven't met with a similarly horrific outcome. And were that not true,
a chainsaw would not have the following warning on it: “Do not try to stop with your
hands.” It's in the manual.”
Soon, I lay on a gurney in a hallway near surgery for two hours wailing in agony while
hospital personnel searched for the plastic surgeon, Dr. Schwartz, and then waited for him
to arrive. It turns out he was out on his motorboat in Quincy Bay with his son. The interns
refused to give me any painkiller. Then Dr. Schwartz arrived and I was off to surgery,
screaming backwards to my mother and father, my arms outstretched, as orderlies
wheeled me away.
I awoke terrified in the middle of the night to a pitch-black, unknown hospital ward,
begging for my parents. It was completely dark, cavernous and unfamiliar and I was in
pain. The nurse refused to call my parents. “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll strap you down to
the bed,” this faceless figure with a white cap hovering over me threatened. I was
paralyzed with fear and cried even harder. So the nurse restrained me, tying me with
leather straps to the bed, which only pushed me deeper into hysteria.
“Please, please,” I begged ceaselessly, “Call my mommy and daddy. I want to see them!
Please,” I said, feeling waves of panic crash in my chest. She punched a needle of
something unceremoniously into my arm.
She was probably just trying to keep me from re-injuring my finger after surgery but why
didn’t she understand how frightened I was, a nine-year-old that hadn’t seen anyone
familiar since being wheeled into surgery hours before. The darkness was viscous on that
big ward and I felt imprisoned by it. Eventually, I cried myself into an exhausted sleep.
My parents were at my bedside very early the next morning, concern reflected in the lines
and shadows on their faces.
“Mommy,” I cried out when I saw her, “You came. I thought I’d never see you again. I was
so afraid last night in the dark. I begged them to call you.” I was sobbing now. “They tied
me down.”
“How dare you do that to a little girl! Why didn’t you call us?” Fran, my mother, raged at
the nurse. “That’s just cruel! You’re no Florence Nightingale, that’s for sure.”
“I did what I thought was right,” the nurse said brusquely.
“Fine but don’t let it happen again or I’ll strap you down and see how you like it,” my father
said. The nurse gave a short gasp. Then Bern added, “If she wants us, you call, ya’ hear?”
“Alright,” the nurse said, “but just to let you know, it’s not hospital policy.”
“I don’t give a…” my father suddenly roared. We all snapped our heads to Bern and
waited. “Phony two dollar bill about hospital policy!” He finished the sentence more quietly.
“You call us.”
The nurse let out her breath in a whoosh and huffed off to assist the reasonable parents
of reasonable children.
As it turned out, Dr. Schwartz was worth waiting for as he was a miracle man. No one can
explain how he saved my nail when my finger had been amputated below the nail. He told
my parents that his son had lost two fingers in a water skiing accident off the back of their
boat. This knowledge seemed to comfort them.
Later, my brothers came to visit me in the hospital, looking sad and worried. But no Karen.
Where was she?
“Great way to get out of doing your chores,” my brother Mike joked lamely.
“Jeez!” said Buzz. “Shut up, you jerk.”
“I was only kidding,” Mike said, and they went off to search out the vending machines.
I waited for Karen every day but she never came. I looked for her for three weeks. No dice.
Then I returned home from the hospital. After that, there were months of home visits from
a private nurse who soaked my finger for long sessions in a briny solution and re-
bandaged it. I watched fascinated and was surprisingly unsqueamish as the old skin
turned green and fell off.
“Oooooh,” I said to Nurse Judy, thrilled, as I watched debrided pieces of finger float in the
murky salt water, “Wicked cool!” Nurse Judy laughed. The bandage was four times the
size of my finger.
I was quite a celebrity when I returned to school. I had a unique looking finger since the
accident but I rather liked it. I had a story to tell and a bandage the size of a small
mummy's head. Everyone knew about the accidental amputation and was quite
impressed. My status grew as I fielded questions for months. “When it happened, did it
feel like you were grinding hamburger?” Richie Colorusso asked.
Shari Kiley stepped in, “Shut up, Richie. That’s gross. How would she know? How often do
you think she grinds hamburger?”
“I was just asking, for cry-eye.”
My fifth grade teacher at Montclair Elementary, Mr. Kelly, his oily scalp shining between
his remaining sparse brown strands, tried to force me to write with my right hand instead
of my left. True to my nature, I adamantly refused. Being a leftie felt like an essential part
of me so I persevered, writing with my left hand with my mega-blob bandage and all. I did
fine, which seemed to really annoy Mr. Kelly.
I thought about Karen often and wondered why she never came to visit me in the hospital
or called when I came home, but I was afraid to open that conversation with my mother.
Without Ma-Fran’s saying a word about it, I had the strong sense that she didn’t want to
talk about it. She never brought the subject up, so I didn’t either. I always felt I had to
protect my mother from speaking about things that might upset her. I was just grateful she
hadn’t yelled at me for cutting off my finger as I expected she would.
Why hadn’t I heard from Karen? Didn’t she like me anymore? Was she mad at me? Did
she think I thought it was her fault? I thought and thought about it, worrying the questions
over and over in my mind. Maybe her parents were afraid my mother and father held
Karen responsible for the accident. If my parents did, I never heard them say so and
believe me, they would have.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I blurted, “Uhh, Ma, why didn’t Karen come visit me
in the hospital? Didn’t she want to?”
Ma-Fran responded, “She wanted to but she’s been really busy at school.”
“But Ma, I was in the hospital and she’s my best friend,” I protested.
“I know, Julie, I know. What do you want me to do?” she said exasperated.
There was something she wasn’t telling me; that was clear. I wondered if my parents had
kept Karen from visiting. Still, I accepted my mother’s bogus explanation, which was
unusual for me. Why didn’t I insist on a better answer? I was afraid I would hear that Karen
didn’t like me anymore or that her parents were keeping her away. Since she hadn’t come
or called, I knew she didn’t want to be my friend anymore, I just didn’t know why. I felt
sadder that I’d lost Karen’s friendship than that I’d lost part of my finger but I never said so
to anyone. I tried to pretend it wasn’t important to me but it was. I pretended about it for
years. Until now. Now that I tell you this story, this story that is about losing my finger and
isn’t. It’s about losing. And never being able to say goodbye.
I think about Karen now and realize how frightening that experience must have been for
her then. Whether or not our parents caused the demise of our friendship, she must have
felt that she was to blame in some way. What a crushing burden that was to carry. It never
occurred to me until now but she may have felt I hated her for causing the accident and
that I didn’t want to see her again. Of course, she didn’t cause it. I know that now and I
knew it then. I only blamed myself for lacking in common sense. But how could she know?
When the bandages came off, my mother inspected my finger and said, “Julie, if you want,
when you’re older, you can have plastic surgery to make it look better.”
I stared at my left index finger. It was about three-quarters of an inch shorter than the one
on my right hand. The tip of it sloped down at a sharp angle from left to right. It had a nail
that grew curved over, not flat, and never past a certain length. It never separated from
the skin and so there was no white at the end like my other nails. It by no means looked
like an ordinary finger. “Thanks, Ma,” I said, “But no, I don’t think so. It looks fine to me.”
And I meant it.
So I moved forward into the future and never once, since that day, have I wished for the
return of the top of my finger, not once felt diminished because of a disfiguring accident
but rather that, in certain ways, I was more than I had been.
And Peter’s bike? Peter's bike was gone when I got home from the hospital. As if I’d
imagined the whole thing. An empty space where once had stood the shiny instrument of
my digit's separation.
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