Habit Read Free Page A

miscarriages.
    â€” But you didn’t. I couldn’t understand why you were being so stubborn.
    By my birthday in 1959, the doctors were attempting a few new tricks. Since my mother’s blood and its lethal antibodies would enter my system during delivery and kill me, they swept me away within hours of my birth for two complete transfusions and stuck me in an incubator for almost a week. I can still make out little scars between my fingers and toes from their incisions. I’m a miracle of science.
    â€”Actually, I had already guessed you were Special because of my veins.
    Ma had been a smoker for years, through all the other pregnancies and births. I guess no doctor in the 1940s or 1950s knew enough to point out that everyone involved might be better off if she’d quit. Still, just after Ma knew she was pregnant with me, she says, when she took a drag of a cigarette the veins on the backs of her hands immediately hurt like the dickens . So she stopped cold turkey. Her theory is that Someone was looking out for us, because I was Special .

    Philadelphia, 1960
    According to my mother, it was important for me in particular to survive this antibody thing. I’ve never been entirely clear as to why she thinks I was chosen to make it in 1959, or if such a thing is even possible—this someone’s supposed plan is taking time to reveal itself. There’s one thing we know for sure: My other siblings aren’t geographically, physically, or emotionally available right now to drive Ma to the ER for a matter of Life and Death.
    I went along with Ma’s Special Susie theory for a spell. My Montessori school was seen by her as her finest discovery to date as a parent, following years of disappointment in the early education options for my older siblings. My brother and sisters saw the delight she took in my resulting supposed brilliance as favoritism. There was a four-year gap between my next oldest sibling and me; I was the prized, irritating baby who sucked up all the attention, and none of them could hide their disgust at seeing me trundled out to recite Shakespeare or sing “The First Noel” for the dinner guests at age three.
    It didn’t occur to me not to accept the petting and praise until the treatment began to rankle as a teenager. That’s when I figured out that distance was optimal. Till then, along with all the religious conversions there had been an awful lot of school switches for one reason or another—not all of them, in fairness, due to my mother’s whim—nine moves in total. By a twist of luck, I was shipped out to a Rhode Island boarding school in eleventh grade, followed by college in the Berkshires.
    I felt liberated once I was away from home, but not quite liberated enough. My parents separated temporarily after I left, due to intense disagreements, which could have otherwise led to mass casualties (he thought she spent too much, she thought he drank too much—they were both right). I discovered the theatre, and they would each take turns coming to see me perform. Daddy would drive up with one change of underwear and a couple of bottles of vodka stashed in the trunk of his VW beetle. He was pretty self-sufficient, but Ma had a knack for picking the most academically stressful weekend possible and making peculiar demands:
    â€”My bus arrives at eleven tonight.
    â€”I have a ninety-page paper due in the morning.
    â€”That’s all right. You can meet me at the bus and help me carry my suitcases to your dorm.
    â€”But that’s completely across campus! Why do you want to come to my dorm at eleven at night anyway? Can’t you go to the hotel and meet me for breakfast?
    â€”I can’t afford a hotel because of your father. Find me a room in your dorm.
    â€”Ma. There’s only one empty room in my whole dorm. It’s empty because the last person who slept there had a breakdown. They found him in the closet with a dry