La Benjamine

When I went home for Thanksgiving my mom asked me if I would share a bed with my little sister, Jenna. Jenna is the fifth child in our family, born eight years after the fourth. I held her as a newborn at the hospital when I was ten years old, thrilled that the baby I was holding was ours to keep. I whispered over and over in her ear I love you so much.

Mom asked me the question in a way that left little space for a no. Sure mom, I said, that is fine with me. And so, I found myself curled on my side on the right edge of Jenna’s bed, sleeping next to my littlest sister. I don’t always know what to say to her. It is not the kind of knowing that I have with my other sisters. It is strange to sleep with Jenna. I am very aware of the distance of the years between us.

The year Jenna was born was also the year I was fitted for a back brace. My diagnosis was scoliosis, a crooked spine that made my shoulders different heights. At my first appointment at the spine specialist in Minneapolis I stripped down to my underwear and a thin tank top. The physical therapists dipped long strips of fabric covered in plaster in warm water and pasted them around my waist. They started at my hips, wrapping a strip around and then smoothing it out with their hands, smearing the plaster smoothly across the surface so that you could no longer see the grain of the cheese cloth. The plaster cocoon was warm and thick. They worked their way up my torso, placing, smoothing, pressing. I had to stand in a stance with my legs spread apart so that when they put pressure on me I didn’t lose my balance. It felt like that game when you stand in front of a friend and slap each other’s hands to make the other person fall over. The plaster got colder as it started to dry. Once the therapists got up to my armpits they stopped. Then I stood and waited until the plaster dried. When the plaster hardened, they cut a slit down the back, from the space between my shoulder blades to the top of the crack in my butt. They pulled apart the two sides and slid it off me without breaking it. After it was off it folded back into its position, a plaster mold of my ten-year-old torso.

Jenna was born when I was ten. I have always appreciated the simple math of being able to calculate our ages in multiples of ten. I used to like playing the game with her “when you are ten, I will be twenty!” 

Jenna is shorter than I am. She has dark eyes like the rest of us but her hair is a shade lighter, thick and straight. It’s the color and texture I imagine when heroines in books are described as having hair like wheat. Ten years after I was fitted for a brace Jenna was fitted for one too. In that decade, medicine had advanced enough to give her a brace that only covered the lower half of her torso. She wore it at night, and hers was a light and dark pink leopard pattern.

The French word for the youngest in the family is la benjamine, like the Benjamin in the Bible. The book of Genesis tells the story of Joseph, the youngest of the twelve brothers of a father who loved one mother the most. In jealousy his older brothers sold him into slavery to Egypt. Years later when a famine struck their homeland, the brothers went to Egypt to get grain. Though they did not know it, they came face to face with their brother Joseph. Joseph set a trap for them, demanding that they bring their youngest brother, Benjamin, son of Rachel, to Egypt so that he could meet him. When they came, he threw them a grand party. When they left, Joseph planted a royal cup in Benjamin’s bag of grain. Joseph told the brothers that Benjamin would be thrown in prison for his crime. The brothers wept and fell apart, begging Joseph to take them in the place of their brother. This was always my favorite part of the story. The brothers that once sold their brother into slavery were ready to take the place of a different brother, willing to take on his suffering so he wouldn’t have to feel it. Jenna is our benjamine. We would sell ourselves into slavery, put ourselves in jail in her place so that she wouldn’t have to suffer. She is a light, a beloved, but I don’t know how to be kind to her. 

The summer after my mother graduated from college she broke her back. She was at the auto mechanic shop, lying on her back underneath her suspended baby blue Volkswagen Beetle. The lifts broke and the Beetle fell on her. As a kid, playing the game, don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back, I would skip across sidewalks and think my mother already broke her back. She spent that summer suspended in a body cast on her parent’s couch. My grandmother took care of her, helping her wash, eat and move around. 

When I was fifteen, around the time that I knew I would be getting out of my brace soon, my mom asked me if I wanted a picture in my brace. I said no. In response, my mom told me that when she broke her back, her mom convinced her to take a picture. My mom said that she was happy she had a picture from that time in her life. I still said no. My brace was a personal embarrassment, compressing and reshaping my breasts and stomach.

I named my brace Mabel. When I was getting fitted for the brace, I got to choose what kind of plastic I wanted it to be made out of. I was going for a light blue when my mom said “Really? Don’t you want something a bit more fun?” So, I chose my favorite color, purple, with different shades of purple butterflies all over it. The plastic on the outside was smooth. The texture of the inside had a weave to it, a grid. It had foam padding in certain places, like my collarbone and my hips. There was a large hole cut out of the front of my torso, room for my breasts and chest, about two inches above my belly button. Like a window for my body to say hello. It had three Velcro straps on the back, with a line marked on them in sharpie that the orthopedic doctor had put on it to show how tight I was supposed to bind it. 

I am surprised by how much my brace looked like my mom’s, how it does the same thing, wrapping the torso and bringing a body into strict alignment with an imaginary plumb line. My mom’s brace also had a hole cut out of the front, though it was much smaller. I am also struck by how much my body looks like hers. Small breasts, thick thighs, a similar way that our shoulders attach to our torsos, a similar stature, a similar posture.

I have a soft scar of skin on my left side, where my rib cage meets the fleshy thickness of my waist. It was where the brace always rubbed. It didn’t leave toughened skin. In fact, it is the softest spot of skin on me. The constant wear left a patch of skin the papery softness of an old person’s hands, like my mother’s hands. The scar is half an inch thick and two inches long. The edges of the scar that meet the rest of my skin are wrinkled and crimped in a tender seam that has been carefully pieced, like a quilt, into my side. 

Across the table from me last night my mom said, in an announcement to my dad and siblings, that out of all of her five children, I was the one she wasn’t sure about. She didn’t know if I liked her. She declared, “I know all of my kids like me, but Catelyn, do you like me?” “Sometimes,” I said.  And sometimes I do.

Excerpt from “Love Hours”, 2018