Photo by Joyce McCown on Unsplash
The same doctor. And my mother. And a nurse. And the brace fitter. Four sets of eyes. Eight arms. Eight legs. Countless words designed to distract. I am the reason we are here, the most important and also the least.
I stand, my eleven-year-old body on full display, all elbows and knobby knees, adorned only by plain cotton underpants, and a young child’s undershirt. This is California. No one wears undershirts, and certainly not eleven-year-olds. I suddenly realize that something is starting. I blink, breathe, pause and recognize my personal catastrophe. I stand, erect. My right hip protrudes aggressively. My left rib cage curves out, and then abruptly cuts back in. My shoulder blades are jutting, shifting wings. My torso tilts forward at an angle so severe, it creates a noticeable sway in my lumbar spine. I am a listing, damaged ship.
“Krista, step right over here please. Let’s get started.”
I walk towards center stage at the brace fitter’s call. I am barely clothed, fully exposed and inexplicably ashamed. My body has betrayed me, and I am mortified. I wish my mother weren’t here, and I cannot possibly survive this without her. She bears witness, and now, a mother myself, I understand that my anguish, this horror was also hers. She looks at me, eyes overly bright with tears unshed. I am untethered, and I deliberately look away. Later, I will recognize that I have a habit of looking through people, around them, frequently blurring my own vision to see the world through a gauze of my own choosing. I hide.
“Can you please lift your arms?” the brace fitter asks, as if this is a choice, and not a fundamental, immovable line that I must cross. This moment marks another line, before and after. It demands my compliance, my acceptance, my submission. It is a first, one more piece of this beginning. I remain mute and lift my arms. I am a parody, a monster. All eyes crawl over me, and I can feel their weight, loaded; each bearing a different question. Time is thick, ponderous. I can barely move.
The brace fitter bends and kneels in front of me. He holds the brace, my brace in an awkward hug. It faces him, and he wraps his arms around to reach the two vertical bars that are the brace’s back side. He holds one bar in each hand. He has unscrewed the neck’s metal collar and stretches the plastic girdle wide. A white, kidney shaped pad dangles loose from its strap. Obscene. He faces me, and holds the brace open, a dreadful invitation, this caricature of an embrace.
“Okay, Krista. Now I want you to step forward. I am going to hold the brace open, and you can walk right into it. You might feel a little discomfort, but we will adjust it until it feels right.” My naiveté allows for this sham, this deception. I am ferociously ill, but I grip my silence tightly, and walk on my own. I step forward.
The brace locks around me, plastic girdle circling my slight hips; simultaneously, the cool unforgiving plastic of the chin cup forces my neck to extend. My head is pulled up and pushed back. The collar closes around my throat with a thunk that vibrates in my center. The brace fitter leans close, his arms circle me industriously. His fingers lift my heavy hair and I try to recoil but it is too late, an assault. He is already twisting the screw to secure the metal collar. Almost immediately I am jolted to one side, and I hear a violent tearing as the brace fitter pulls the Velcro away from the left-hand side of the brace. His arms slide down around my waist to hold my body in place as he threads the same Velcro strap through the ring on the right rear of the brace. He presses it down, and I smell the starch in his shirt, and what he had for lunch. He cinches the strap tight, and my breath whooshes out. Reflexively, I try to lean back, to jerk my body away, but the front of the brace is a single vertical steel bar that divides my body in two. The brace fitter grips that bar, my center, holding me in place. His calming words are dissonance. My body crumples forward, and then snaps back, microscopic movements. I choke and gasp; the plastic chin cup presses into my throat, unforgiving.
I am captive, entirely restrained. I can feel my free will, my very self begin to wither. I cannot bend. I cannot turn. I cannot move my head. I cannot see my feet. I am frozen, imprisoned, almost insensible. Panic rips through my body, from the inside out. My vision is so crisp, it sparkles. I am instantly claustrophobic, suffocating. I want to scream and thrash and claw my way out of this body. I. Can. Not. Move. I am without words, without voice, and nearly without thought, but I feel deeply: the bars, the plastic, the weight of eight eyes is inescapable, unbearable. I am trapped. Finally, with gratitude, I feel myself begin to diminish. I am small, and then smaller, until I vanish, a speck of bright, hot light.
“You can put your arms down now,” the brace fitter says.
Krista Jackman is an emerging writer who, following the departures of their two, newly professional, mostly adult children, lives in a small Maine town with her husband and dogs. She is a faculty member in the English Department at the University of New Hampshire.