Chapter 12 #3
Every few afternoons, Shaded Acres had a visiting volunteer, meaning a woman from the board or the Ladies’ Auxiliary who came to give us a lesson on something.
Before the volunteer showed up, we’d help the nurses push the table in the dining room against the wall, and we’d bring in extra folding chairs from the kitchen.
Attendance at these lessons was mandatory for everyone except one girl, Carol, who was blind, and well out of high school.
Carol would usually come downstairs with the rest of us, one hand on the railing, her other hand on another girl’s shoulder.
She had a white-tipped cane that one of us would carry down, and once she was off the stairs, she could get around with just the cane.
Whenever there was a volunteer, she would come in and sit in the dining room for the first few minutes and decide if she wanted to stay.
If she didn’t, she’d have one of the nurses help her back up the stairs, or, if the weather was warm enough, she’d go out back and smoke.
I felt bad for Carol, being blind and all, and as pregnant as the rest of us.
But I envied her freedom of choice regarding the lessons.
One volunteer gave tips on personal hygiene that I found insulting.
A few days after that, I sat through an hour of another volunteer explaining grammar rules that I was sure I’d learned in sixth grade.
But some of the lessons were on things I didn’t know much about, like classical music and Impressionist paintings, and I liked that I was at least learning something.
Another volunteer was a former ballerina.
She was old, maybe in her seventies, but you could tell she’d been a dancer by the way she held herself, and she had us all stand up and put our shoulders back.
She said to pretend we were holding butterfly wings we didn’t want to tear between our thumbs and fingers, and she said nothing about our situations, our swollen bellies and faces.
She moved around us, pulling back some of our shoulders, and she said we were all naturally graceful, and that whenever a person wasn’t feeling confident and wanted to slump was exactly when she had to stand tall.
But I think everyone’s favorite volunteer, at least while I was there, was this big woman with two chins and a deep voice who knew how to do all kinds of things with makeup.
She started out telling us we didn’t need much, or any at all, as we were all pretty young things.
She put a little blush on this new girl, and you could barely see any difference.
This volunteer said that was the point. “Just a bit of color,” she told us, “and maybe a dash of mascara in the evening. You don’t want to overdo it.
” But she kept looking at a girl named Beth who had a long, thin scar on her cheek, and when it was time for this volunteer to go she instead got out a bigger makeup case and told Beth that she could come on up and get her whole face done if she wanted.
Beth went right up, and she kept her back to us while this volunteer went to work, layering on the foundation and powder, drawing back to squint before smudging skin with her thumb.
When the volunteer said Beth could turn around, we saw that both of her cheeks had turned pale and smooth, at least from a few feet away.
It was so impressive we applauded. By then we’d seen all the bright lipsticks and eyeshadows in the volunteer’s bigger case, and I guess she felt bad for us, because she stayed there almost until dinner and made each of us up with whatever colors we asked for.
One of the nurses said that the last thing we girls needed was to learn how to look like painted harlots, but another nurse asked if she could have a turn.
The volunteer put red lipstick on her and gave her smoky eyes, and it made her look like a starlet.
I still think about that, how happy that volunteer made us that day.
And really, whenever someone would come in and treat us like we were still worth anything, and talk to us about something aside from what we’d done wrong or what we were in for, it lifted all of us up in a way that didn’t feel bad when we came back down. Or that’s how it was for me.
The same was true of the nicer nurses, and one of the doctors, too.
He was an old man, and he would make small talk with me during exams—he’d ask me if I thought it was going to snow soon, and if I’d ever been sledding, that kind of thing, and I knew, even then, he was doing this because he understood that putting my feet in the stirrups felt to me like punishment, so by the time any doctor came in I was usually trembling with cold and fear.
I imagine it was the same for a lot of the girls there, because none of the doctors who came in seemed surprised to find me crying, or trying not to.
But the one doctor, the old one, was kind to me, and though that didn’t fix everything or even anything, I do remember it, even now.