Molly McCully Brown - Places Ive Taken My Body

Contents

PLACES IVE TAKEN MY BODY

ESSAYS

MOLLY MCCULLY BROWN

For my family, in all its iterations,
And for Susannah, who made this feel possible.

CONTENTS

PLACES IVE TAKEN MY BODY

F or the last six months or so, whenever Ive moved suddenlystood up out of a chair, bent down to get my laundry from the machine, sneezed too hard in line at the convenience store up the block from my apartmentmy back has spasmed, as if someones making a quick, hard fist around my spine and squeezing. At first, it was just a twinge, enough to startle me. These days, it knocks me off balance if I dont brace for it first. And so I stretch more, and I stand and count to three before I step, or carry my coffee cup away from the table, or crouch down to put the dishes in the cabinet. I turn off the fan in the bedroom while I sleep, though its May in Mississippi and already eighty degrees. Better to wake up sweating than knotted and tremoring from some little chill.

Theyre tiny, these adaptations. I suspect it took me months to notice I was making them. My life is built to flex unconsciously around new pain. I couldnt even tell you what I used to do with the small space the spasms fill. This version of my life erases the last one, like a tape someones recorded over. Already, my memories begin reworking themselves to admit the spasms brief delay: two seconds tacked on to the end of everything, a touch more hurt.

I havent been to see a doctor because the change has so far been manageable. Because another dose of ibuprofen, a little less energy, and a slightly stronger ache to cope with isnt going to hurt me, really. I havent been to see a doctor because Im finishing graduate school and caught in the bureaucracy of going: no permanent address, shifting health insurance, too much in flux, and way too much to do.

I havent seen a doctor because I havent had a steady orthopedist since I outgrew the pediatric one I saw until I was eighteen. They treat cerebral palsy aggressively when youre young, your brain and body at the height of their plasticity. Theres money to be spent on research and the promise of real progress to be made. They split your nerves, lengthen your tendons, splint your legs and map your changing gait with digital sensors that form points of light on the computer screen to indicate your muscles and your joints. This little constellation-self staggers the same blank orbit each year, getting taller. And then your body and brain have been reshaped as radically as medicine will currently allow, and youre just who you are and there are the ensuing years to manage on your own.

I havent seen a doctor because my body has been mostly this version of itself for more than a decade now, and theyve been mostly good years; I know the map of who I am and how I move by instinct, like home. I havent seen a doctor because theyll want to alter something major, or theyll tell me that theres nothing to be done, that this is just my bodys slow erosion asserting itself beyond ignoring, and either way therell be a new geography to reckon with. I havent seen a doctor because I am afraid. I havent seen a doctor because theres too much to be said for feeling familiar to yourself. This is all the truth.

Another truth: before I knew this body, I knew another, nimbler one.

My very first body, the one untouched by major surgical intervention, exists only before my memory. For all intents and purposes, I wake into the world at the moment of its refashioning. My first clear recollection at four years old: somebodys hand hovering over my face, the weird cage of the gas mask, a dense, false butterscotch mingled with the drug. No memory, of course, of what they did while I was under; they give you something to induce forgetting. But the body I woke up with, I know it served me well for years.

I know the surgeons clipped select nerves in my spinal cord, and thereby cut off at the pass the bulk of my brains bad commands to my muscles to contract beyond functionality or comfort. I know enough to know that I was born again then, in a looser shape, the one I first recognized as mine.

*

And its in that body that I spent my childhood. I moved stutteringly around my grade-school classrooms. I wore opaque, plastic leg braces that stopped at my calves and sneakers two sizes too big for my real feet that made me look like a girl playing dress-up as a circus clown. I never played tag or kickball. But I could slowly climb the stairs to the splintering wooden castle and go down the slide. I could haul myself up to the monkey bars and swing along them just long enough to fall and split my lip like children do. The cut there bled a bright and normal red that made my mother woozy while they stitched it up. There isnt any scar.

And once, I could hop. I remember, because when I finally learned in the basement of the Baptist hospitalstraining to reach a tennis ball the physical therapist held on a stick above my headmy father bought an ice-cream cake from Dairy Queen, all chemical soft-serve sweet, and we had a little party in the brightness of our farmhouse kitchen. I did it on command: two inches, maybe, off the ground. I know it happened, but that little space below my feet feels like a fiction now, held up against the relentless fact of gravity.

My family took a trip to Europe when I was nine years old. My parents, on sabbatical from college teaching jobs, swapped houses with a Spanish novelist and his wife, and for months we walked on the beaches of the Mediterranean and through the rocky outcrops to the north where Spain borders France. I remember flashes of those months with wild specificity: the garden of blooming cacti outside our little terracotta villa; playing rummy with my sister in the heat, on the flat roof, while someone blared a bizarre pop song about a cockroach from the bad speakers of the radio next door. I can see the winding maze of the nighttime street markets, full of Pokmon knockoffs and hand-painted bowls, humming with twinkle-lights and half-drunk bodies; the huge, cool steps of all the old churches turned into hotels; the wooden rollercoaster edging out toward the cliff face; that strange, spindly castle that wound up and up and up until you climbed its stairs and passed right through the clouds and to the other side.

In pictures, Im standing at the top of the castle landing, in the shadow of the cathedral doors, on the wide, white wash of some uninterrupted beach. I walked and climbed through cities centuries too old for elevators, and across streets paved in big, uneven cobblestones. I threaded myself through a little monastery door and up a flight of improvised stone stairs into a walled garden, wrapped up in green. I cant remember getting there: not crossing the hill to the church grounds, not standing waiting for the door to give, not moving through the airy halls or up the stairs. If I try to picture it now, I can only envision myself up to the threshold. My memory of myself pauses and waits, but there isnt enough left of that balance or energy even for the purposes of recollection. I can imagine myself walking up through the monastery only in the same sense I can imagine that I flew.

You never recall what you do by instinct and, while my parents paused at every turn to say remember this, they meant the huge embroidered tapestries, the deep ring of the chapel bell, the way the air smelled hot but also dense with moss that wasnt there. No one knew enough to warn me that the body I had then would go to myth in my mind much faster than any of the rest of it.