earthbound tomboy
By Heidi Johnson-Wright
About a week before the end of the
fifth grade school year, I was hit by a car.
It was a rainy afternoon when the school
day ended. I had ridden my banana seat bike to school and would now have to
ride home in the rain without a jacket. I would also have to negotiate a line
of backed-up traffic. In our bedroom community, nearly every mom was of the
stay-at-home variety. Now a legion of them was swarming the school to pick up
their kids. To let kids walk home in the rain meant they were in the same “bad
mother” category as women who used Hamburger Helper as a crutch instead of
making home-made meatloaf.
As I came out of the building my mom
was there, with my raincoat in hand. I whined that I wanted her to put my bike
in the trunk and drive me home. She insisted I would be fine on my bike, that I
needed the exercise and could negotiate the half dozen blocks on my own. She
was right, but something made me uneasy. I put on my coat and headed for the
bike rack.
One second I was leaning over to unlock
my bike, the next I was lying on pavement surrounded by a group of kneeling
adults. My eyes slowly began to focus on the faces of my third grade teacher,
my fifth grade teacher and my mom. I could hear people crying and sirens
wailing. My mind was equally split between panic and “what the hell?”
A mother had jumped the curb with her
car and mowed through the school yard. Had she wanted to inflict maximum
damage, she couldn’t have picked a better spot: right through a crowd of kids
at the bike rack. I had gotten a glancing blow that fractured my leg. When I
fell, my head hit the pavement and I received a concussion and the retrograde
amnesia that went with it. I was the second worst casualty; another little girl
had actually been run over and was in critical condition.
Had I been an average kid, I would have
been sent home with a simple cast and crutches and told to use my arms and
other leg to get around. But the arthritis's damage to my wrists meant I
couldn’t use standard crutches. Nor could my one good leg bear the weight of
two. Instead, I went home with a long leg cast with a rubber heel on the bottom
and a platform walker without wheels that was so heavy and primitive, it would
have been better suited to Herman Munster.
The first two weeks after the accident
were a non-stop procession of my parents’ friends dropping by to offer
condolences and nights on the couch in agony as my tibia began to knit. By week
three, the pain eased and I traded out the long cast for a below-the-knee
model. It was then that I began to enjoy my new-found status as a local
celebrity.
In my town, the mere possibility of a
McDonald’s opening – the only chain fast food joint besides a Dairy Queen --
was cause for controversy and excitement. So it’s not hard to imagine how just
being one of those girls that got hit by that car at the school upped my
suburban Q score considerably. But this time my notoriety had nothing to do
with my arthritis and everything to do with fame earned by mere happenstance. I
was "famous" for being famous. Kind of like being a Kardashian.
Friends dropped by my house daily:
close friends, casual friends, even long-lost ones. Often they had a card or a
small gift, and a story or joke to share. Naturally, they wanted to hear my
version of The Accident. Did I see the car flying toward me or hear the engine
rev? (No and no.) Did I remember being hit? (No, but I had nightmares about
menacing cars.) What was it like to ride in the ambulance? (Claustrophobic.)
Did my leg itch inside the cast? (Often.)
An older sister of one of my friends
worked as a summer parks employee, teaching arts and crafts to kids. Several
times she brought me goodie bags loaded with supplies and trinkets from her
class. Though I couldn’t get out of the house to catch butterflies, I enjoyed
the treasures she brought. On hot afternoons, I sipped my mom’s sweet tea while
I taught myself to make lanyards and drew pastel sketches of fuchsia plants in
hanging pots.
My leg healed fine by the end of July,
but the weight of the cast and my struggle to walk with it had put a lot of
strain on my knee. It swelled to soft ball size and hurt like hell. I lived in
daily fear that I would need to have it aspirated, a procedure in which a large
needle is inserted deep into the joint and fluid is withdrawn.
I was starting junior high in the fall.
Grades six through nine were housed in a building bigger than my old school,
which meant a lot more walking between classes. The school was too far away to
walk to it, so I’d have to depend on a bus that was supposed to change its
route and stop in front of my house. I was nervous about meeting new teachers
and kids, brand new people to whom I’d have to explain why I limped or why I
sometimes struggled to get up out of a chair.
The
richly-symbolic menacing cars and the increasing awareness of my precarious
health were always with me, in the back of my mind, as I drifted into sleep on
late summer nights while the crickets chirped and the cicadas sang.
