Thumb

You all may remember the book by Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, I think it was, a story about a girl with impossibly large thumbs that made her a really good hitchhiker. She could get rides like anything. When I read the book in the summer of 1981 it reminded me of a man I saw when I was a child, a man with a hideously disfigured hand.

I was walking home with my siblings and neighbors from the parochial, grammar school my parents scrimped and saved to send us to in the late spring of 1963. It was hot, broiling hot under the swollen Central Valley sun. A man in a car pulled up. It was two-tone green and might have been a Rambler from the late-fifties. He called across the street to us asking if anyone knew where Helm Street was. That was a simple request as he was only a block or so from there. I pointed to the intersection ahead of us. Go to the stop sign, I told him. Turn that way and it’s the next street. He called back a thank you and drove off in the direction I had indicated. I turned my attention back to my companions and to the drudgery of walking in pain.

We walked along crowding the shade of the few friendly trees someone had remembered to irrigate. We always walked home in a little disheveled group on the west side of the street where any available shade could be exploited. By April the walk which was two-miles long, had transmogrified into a hot, sweaty endurance test. Occasionally, someone would be wasting water by sprinkling their lawns and flowerbeds during the heat of the day. Sometimes the hot, dry wind would blow a little mist toward us, but the best was when the sprinklers watered the sidewalk. Then we could dance and twirl and wet our hot, tired bodies and if we were really lucky we could turn up our sweaty, smudged little faces and the chill water from deep in the granite Sierras would rain down on our grateful little bodies. But, usually there was nothing to dispel the physical agony I suffered on these daily forced marches.

The agony was caused both by my generalized pain which was chronic and by the shoes which my parents bought for me. These shoes were the "shoes from hell." They were oxfords in an ox-blood color. My parents bought them because they were assured by the shoe salesman that I would not be able to wear them out before I outgrew them, as I had worn out all of my other shoes. The salesman didn’t lie. These shoes, the spawn of Satan, were indestructible as well as ugly. They were made of hard, hard materials. They were so ungiving that during recess the fattest children on the playground were solicited by my class mates to stand on the toes of my oxfords in an attempt to crush them. Even Helen Hesh couldn’t dent the toe of the shoe so it touched the top of my white-socked foot.
The soles didn’t bend when I walked. When I tried them on in the shoe store they hurt my feet and I, never one to withhold opinion, complained that they really hurt my heels. I was told they would break in and then they would stop hurting. They never stopped hurting. Because the soles were inflexible, the heels of the shoes rode up and down on my heels with every step, those shoes not only never stopped hurting, but they broke in my feet instead of my feet breaking them in. The pain was unbearable. Frequently, I walked home barefoot on the blazing streets and sidewalks, because the pain of the burning was more tolerable than the pain of those oxfords from hell. Thirty-five years later I still can’t bear the pressure of shoes on my heels.

This day was not much different than any other. Our group straggled its way down Willow Avenue, first past the trim lawns and custom homes of the upper-middle class, then among the more modest homes of the lower-middle class where my family lived. These were the suburban “little boxes” Malvina Reynolds wrote of in her song of the same name about the houses lining the hills of Daly City. Most were cocoa brown, some were pale green and a few were the color of butter. More than a few were pink. The layout of our house was a mirror of the layout of other houses in this particular Weathermaker tract of homes; there was a four-bedroom version and its mirror image, too, though the seven of us lived in a three-bedroom house.

As I crossed the street at the corner, a block before the main intersection at Willow and Olive, the might-have-been Rambler pulled up directly in my path. The driver’s-side window was rolled down and the driver nodded courteously at me as I began to cross the street. I expected him to roll on but he sat patiently, apparently waiting for me to approach his car. As I neared, I could see he wore a tweed jacket, which looked hot and uncomfortable on him. Sweat beaded his brow, and he appeared unwell. Please, he asked me, tell me again how to get to Helm Street. So once more I indicated the intersection at the next light. I took a step closer to the man in the car. I could see sweat darkening the collar of the dress shirt he wore under the jacket. Beads of perspiration began to dot his upper lip. Are you all right, I enquired while I wondered why I had not yet seen his hands. I could tell a lot about people by their hands. It was an ability which served me well, years later, as I hitch hiked back and forth across California.

It struck me as odd that I had not seen his hands, but I recognized that we were all not equally physically blessed. My best friend’s mother had polio while she was pregnant with her third child, Donald. It had devastated her upper body and left her lower body untouched. Despite a dozen surgeries and several muscle transplants she had lost the ability to use her arms for anything which required as much strength as steering a car. Her station wagon had foot controls for steering, accelerating, braking, signaling and other tasks.

The steering wheel on the floorboard was a steel plate fitted with a shoe which had a stout peg attached to the sole at the ball of the foot. The peg fitted into a corresponding hole in the steering plate. As a result Mrs. J could drive without her hands and if she hadn’t liked to rest her arms on the seat back and the window ledge no one would have ever seen her hands either. So I presumed that given the man’s apparent poor condition he probably couldn’t use his arms and preferred them at his sides. I stepped up to the side of the car, tired, hurting, and hot, but glad for a mystery to dispel the drudgery of marching along in torment. I looked into the car as he mumbled back to me that he just needed to find Helm Street.

At first glance, everything was normal within the might-have-been Rambler. It was neat and clean, the dashboard and seats were in good repair. The bench seats were covered with a typical green plaid of the day, the edges of the seats were piped with green plastic. My gaze found his hands and I realized immediately why I hadn’t seen them; I realized he must be ashamed of them. His left hand, misshapen, irritated, red and severely inflamed was cradled lovingly in his right hand. He was rubbing it as if it were sore. I’m quite sure I started; my eyes widened in horror at what I saw. I was repulsed and revolted, I felt stunned. Immediately, I backed away from the car and hurried on my way, dodging the car and stepping up onto the sidewalk. How horrible, I thought, reflecting on what I had seen. How could he do simple everyday tasks, I wondered. How could he brush his teeth, push a shopping cart or sweep a floor with that hand? Playing baseball must certainly be out, that hand could never grip a bat or field a fly ball. I was sure the pain of the deformity must have been excruciating, given the infected look of his disfigurement.

I don’t remember the rest of the walk home. Horror had replaced pain and fear. Revulsion drove me on. The image of his deformed hand was to haunt me for years. I had seen things like this before in the Maryknoll Missionary booklets I was sent by my godmother, my father’s eldest sister. It was a little book of horrors which came regularly by post. The theme of the magazine was the work the sainted missionary nuns were doing among the poor heathen masses of cocoa-skinned people in Africa. These people all had horrible deformities. Some had been infected by the bite of the minuscule tse-tse fly, with an illness called “elephantitis.” Their legs looked like tree trunks, they were swollen as big as an elephant’s leg, their feet invisible beneath the mass of swollen tissue. Other poor souls pictured within had leprosy, the infection had robbed them of fingers, toes, ears and noses. Children with deadly nutrient deficiencies, marasmus and kwashiorkor, (which literally means “the weaned infant” in Swahili) whose bellies were swollen with fluid which filled the spaces between the organs in their abdomens, stared out at me from the pages of the booklets with haunted, hopeless, malnourished eyes. I could relate to the look in their eyes, they had abandoned hope because to do otherwise would have tormented them even more. They couldn’t waste energy on false hope, they needed it to just keep breathing.

Although I looked at every issue of the twisted little booklet, in my wildest dreams I never expected to see a person so deformed with my own eyes. Africa was made to seem so far away. Yet here, before me, on this perfectly ordinary day under the scorching Valley sun, was someone thus afflicted. Somehow the potential for these horrid conditions had come to my own back yard. I knew that there were other horrible things on the loose here. I already lived in continual pain so severe that by the second grade I had learned to steal aspirin. I found that not many people noticed a few aspirin missing from their bottles.

I had lived through a near deadly bout of chicken pox, too. The sores peppered my body, they were on the insides of my eyelids, on my tongue and in my throat, in my crotch and armpits. I remember feeling stricken, lying motionless on my mother’s bed, naked; she had covered me from head to toe with calamine lotion which dried slowly and sent waves of cool prickling across my body. I had been sick with the three-day and German measles, too. Then there was polio. Plenty of people in my world were constrained by the damage done to their musculature by the crippling disease, leaving them shackled to braces and Huxley ventilators. Now the kind of plague which here-to-fore I had seen only in the booklets was on my block.

I was dumbstruck. I mechanically plodded my way on, my mind racing. I wondered which of the children in my class at school would succumb to the illness first. I wondered if tse-tse flies had somehow arrived in America. I knew that the puncture vines with their seven-spiked seed casing had come from Russia hidden in a delivery of grain. If those horrible things could get here then why not flies? I prayed for the man with the deformed hand for years afterward. Gratefully, no one I knew developed elephantitis and the incident eventually faded into remote memory, filed away under sad and unusual.

The deformity of the man in the might-have-been Rambler was hard for me to relate to, as evidenced by the revulsion I felt at the sight of it. I maintained a strained relationship with my own body, too. I didn’t particularly like being in my body. It was in continual pain. The Church had taught me that my body was an occasion of sin, so I connected the pain I felt with the badness of my body. Because my body hurt so much I knew it must be very bad. I knew I had to neglect and punish it to make amends to God. I was apparently not to touch myself. I knew particularly that my erogenous zones were off limits, but I was continually being told not to scratch, pick, or rub my skin. The proper girl sat with her hands folded, palms together, at all times they were not needed to serve others. Busy hands are happy hands had a completely different meaning in those pre-Cindi Lauper She Bop days.

Cindy Lauper wasn’t taught by The School Sisters of Notre Dame, tho. I was and the nuns didn’t help me feel at all comfortable with my body, in fact, they caused me to commit my first sexual sin. I committed it before I understood the concept of sexual interaction or pleasure. The good Sisters set me up for it. This was one way they helped children develop a sense of guilt, and this is how they did it to me. One day during the study of religion, Sister introduced us to a new kind of sin and a guilt trip was so well planned that the good sister should have told us to pack a bag.

I was in the fifth grade. I knew about the normal sins I should confess, lying, stealing, cutting in the lunch line, and so forth, but I had never heard of the sin of impure thought. Sister wasn’t explicit, but I guessed that this was a sex-related sin, and involved thinking something or anything, apparently, about sex. The trick of this particular guilt trip rested in a student’s ability to conceptualize the sin. The instant the concept of an impure thought was understood the sin was axiomatic, thus reducing an entire classroom of little children into a den of sexually deviant sinners in one fell swoop. I still remember my sin. I visualized the Virgin Mother Mary standing Rubenesque on a puffy white cloud with her robes, a deeper blue than the sky around her, billowing in the wind. Her hair was the same red-gold color as the stars that comprised her halo. Her hands were folded as if in prayer and her soulful eyes were cast up to the heavens above. She was naked.

My mother didn’t help me understand my body much, either. One day she called me into her bedroom and showed me how to rig a sanitary napkin and belt. She never mentioned that I would bleed and I felt like a fool wearing that getup. Then she told me that when I got married she would tell me about the “Family Act.” I pondered this for a split-second. This was to be my big “facts of life” talk with my mom! I had heard that some girls and mothers had a talk about the birds and the bees although no one was ever candid about reproduction in our house, even though it was at pandemic proportions. The nuns had once showed me an animated film in which sperm wore baseball caps and rode bicycles in their race toward the ovum who, in her cute little pink dress with a full skirt and petticoats, was the center of attention of all the tailed-cyclers . Somehow I never connected this cartoon with reality or with my body.

Now, I thought, I had been admitted to that adult circle of sexual knowledge. I was elated. I finally had found out the name of the secret sexual ritual of adults, my mother, certainly an expert in her own right, had called it “The Family Act.” In an instant I was more confused than before. For some reason, I never connected animal reproduction with human reproduction. This strikes me as odd since I had seen calves, piglets, kittens, and puppies born. I had seen a dozen varieties of egglayers reproduce.

My confusion was complicated by the political nature of the family I born into; my entire family had assiduously supported passage of the Rumford Housing Act, the first civil rights housing action in California. I knew that an “Act” when used in this way meant governmental or legislative action. I never did figure out the relationship between sex and government, in this pre-Clinton era, and my mother’s comments went no further except to explain that before the introduction of sanitary napkins, women used rags, which they laundered. I knew less laundry was a good thing, although I couldn’t figure out what was being washed from the rags, or what the legislature had to do with laundry.

I had found out what “it” was called. I now knew, too, that whatever it was, it was either legislated or voted on. It took me years to discover what sex was; at thirteen I was pretty sure it had something to do with urine but I wasn’t quite sure what that was. Like most of the other girls who attended St. Helen’s I was kept in a peculiar state of perpetual sexual ignorance. The absence of real information made me construct my own idea of sexual sin. Somehow, I knew the worst part of my sin was that it involved another woman and a naked one at that. I had no vocabulary for discussing the sin of my imaginings, further reinforcing the lack of information.

It is a curious thing though, that this ignorance shielded me from hurt and trauma on other fronts. It was my ignorance which shone as the foundation of my immunity against evil. It was ignorance which spared me emotional damage when the might-have-been Rambler rolled to a stop in front of me that sun-baked day in 1962. It was this ignorance which kept me from being molested that day; it kept me from understanding what I had seen.

It was ignorance that made me pray for years for the recovery of the pitifully-pathetic, overheated, lost man with the hideously swollen thumb. In fact, I never put the picture together until I picked up Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Only then, at age thirty did I reprocess the experience and realize what I had seen so many years ago. I still pray for the lost man, but now I know precisely what his disease was.