than I, whose head rolled back every time she tried to jerk it forward. Claw-like, her right hand waved in the air while she smiled a crooked smile, uttering guttural sounds at her nurse. She reminded me of Mabby, who went to our church at home. Every Sunday Mabby’s parents pushed her up to communion in a wheelchair. Sometimes she slobbered as she chewed the wafer. On the way out of Mass, Mabby often tried to talk to me, while her parents beamed. My father always said a friendly hello and tipped his hat to her, but I mumbled Hi and edged away toward the heavy wooden church door. Somehow I felt she would sting me, so I backed off, fearful that we were, in some way, the same—strange, different. Here in Lourdes I bent my head down and looked at my feet, grateful that the wagon wheels creaked by, taking that spastic girl with them. Eddie, my twin brother, crackled the Herald Tribune, hunting for baseball scores. Leaning down, my mother put her hand on his smooth arm, pushed her head into the open paper, and asked about their beloved Phillies. He told her the Phils just beat the Dodgers in a double-header. Then he grinned up at her. They were the athletes in the family. I could hear her silk shirt shimmy while she hunted for the National League stats. My father read his train timetable. Maybe he’d figure how to get us out of town earlier, away from this fearful place where, if I didn’t keep my guard up and my eyes down, I might see other people with skin diseases. Eddie whipped his itinerary out of his back pocket, unfolded the legal sized paper, and showed me the typewritten schedule. “Tuesday, July 9th, 1957,” he read. “Arrive Lourdes 7:43am. Leave Lourdes 7:53 pm.” He folded it again, jammed it into his pocket. “Twelve hours, ten minutes in toto.” We’d moved up near the rocky ridge that holds the Basilica church. I scanned the cool seams of rock and wondered if the massive stone building seemed heavy to the granite shoulder. The rock looked wet and really I wanted to lick it, but didn’t dare. Why hadn’t my father brought his rosary? He said it every night at home, though that seemed odd. It wasn’t a very lawyer-like thing to do. He often went to bed earlier than the rest of us. When I’d go into their bedroom to kiss him goodnight, he’d be in his pajama tops with the sheet pulled up. He generally made it through half the prayers. Then he seemed to give up. “We’ll let the angels say the rest,” he’d say, arching his thick eyebrows. We both knew the angels didn’t bother with his rosary. He’d wink at me and clatter the beads on the mahogany night table. In this endless line at Lourdes, saying the rosary would seem an obvious thing to do. A lot of the Italian women dangled theirs. Maybe my father felt embarrassed to say his rosary in public. I’d never seen him do it. But why did we come here, all this way on the sleeper? We weren’t on a pilgrimage. Not the sort parishes go on. We weren’t that kind of Catholics. We’d only be here twelve hours and ten minutes. As I tiptoed along the tarmac, the sun seemed to stab through my pink dotted Swiss dress. Fanning gingerly, trying to look as if I didn’t need to cool myself, I tried not to think about getting cured—or not getting cured. I told myself my skin felt familiar. It had never been any different since the day I was born after all. Last night on the train, my mother had murmured, “We’ll ask the Blessed Virgin for help.” But she didn’t spell out any details. We were getting nearer to the rocky cavern where the Virgin had appeared to St. Bernadette. I could see the blue sash on the Holy Mother’s statue. What would happen here? A Journal of Creative Nonfiction
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