"I could tell you my adventures-beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly: "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." -Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland At least twice a week, I used to find myself in a periwinkle-blue poufy dress with a white pinafore. My stockings were striped and my hair was held firmly by a headband that dug into my head behind my ears. My breasts, still tender and growing, were painfully flattened by a tensor bandage. It was a dream that I frequently found myself in, where nothing anyone around me said made any sense and it was all hostile: hostile towards my common sense, hostile towards my youth, hostile towards my growing up. I knew I didn't want to be a child; I wanted to be a queen but I didn't want to be left alone, or tested, or made fun of or to do all the things that seemed to be necessary to become a queen. I would follow corkscrew paths. I had to run in order to stay in the same place. People would scream in pain before they were hurt. There was a mint in my mouth for good luck. I wanted to kill myself. Sometimes when I woke from this dream, I remembered that I was, in fact, wearing a rose-coloured dress and not a blue one. Sometimes I corrected my subconscious. Most of the time, though, I woke up incapable of differentiating the portrait of myself from the iconic John Tenniel illustrations, coloured in modern reprints. I wonder if Alice Liddell had had the same problem. The real Alice was a sullen-looking child with dark hair and eyes. In one of the photographs that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took of her, "The Beggar Maid," she looks alarmingly sexual, taunting him, challenging him to want more. At least that's how I viewed the photograph when I was a young teenager. As I look at the same photograph now, as a grown woman, I wonder what instructions the adult taking the photograph gave to her to produce such an alarming effect. In the books and movies that were consumed by millions, though, Alice is golden and fair, WASPy beyond measure, and exudes innocence. The books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, have passed through children's hands for over a century now, cloaked in this deceptive costume. Ever since I can remember, these books inspired a terror and an exasperation in me. Every one of Alice's attempts to make sense of her new, irrational world, to find anything approximating normalcy, or to simply get home is thwarted by mean-spirited creatures with their own irrational systems of logic. Despite my father's love of these books, I never, as a young child, wanted to hear them read at bedtime. They left me exhausted, haunted by a kind of relentless uncertainty. I feared that if I took any time to live inside these stories, the walls and ceiling of my childhood bedroom might soon collapse into dust and be replaced by kooky angles of drywall. As an adult, I experience this same aversion to movies that remind me of the Alice books or that mirror this same quality of someone constantly trying to get somewhere and failing. Movies like After Hours make we want to scream. They make me feel nauseous and aggravated and goosepimply. I hate stories in which people can't get to where they're going. As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag . . . "But I'm not a serpent, I tell you!" said Alice. "I'm a-I'm a-" "Well! What are you?" said the Pigeon. "I can see you're trying to invent something!" "I-I'm a little girl," said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. -Alice's Adventures in Wonderland When I was fifteen years old I got caught through the looking glass in a pink dress, in a crisp white pinafore, with my breasts bound, playing younger than I was. My spine had by then bent-perhaps, I thought then, under the weight of grief-to a forty-five-degree angle, so along with the tensor bandages pulled tightly across my chest, the pink dress itself was lined with various strategically placed pads to make my shoulders, my back, and my waist appear symmetrical. Even then, it took effort to appear straight. On two-show days I would begin to sag sideways, the tips of my left hand's fingers almost touching the side of my left knee. One of my left ribs, just under my breasts, protruded so much that it created a noticeable lump right in the middle of my torso, causing the right rib to slough out of view. I knew I had to wear a hard plastic brace sixteen hours a day to make my body grow straighter, but I didn't, so every few months I, and others, noticed that I twisted and bent a little more. By this point I knew I was close to needing major surgery to correct the curve, but that was to be my choice too, having no parent to oversee such choices. The surgery terrified me, not only the idea of being cut into and operated on for ten hours, having my spine stretched out, fused, and a pound of metal attached to it, but also I couldn't think who would take care of me while I recovered. I had stopped going to regular follow-ups at the hospital a long time before, had stopped wearing the brace around my body sixteen hours a day as prescribed, had stopped thinking about what the consequences of my negligence could be. I knew that I was free to keep twisting and curving and sloping and that nothing, ever, would stop me. There was no adult who could force me straight. But I wondered, now, at fifteen years old, if the thing I had feared the most, the prospect of this major spinal surgery, could liberate me from something I found myself fearing even more: walking even one more time onto a stage at the Stratford Festival. I had been diagnosed with scoliosis four years earlier during a routine insurance medical for the television series Road to Avonlea. The doctor asked me to touch my toes, and then spent a while tracing the protrusion of my spine with his fingers. When I stood up straight again and looked at him, his brow was furrowed. It somehow made sense to me to be told that I wasn't straight, that my spine was curving nonsensically to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom. My world had started curving out of shape the previous year, and my own body curving alongside it gave things a logical symmetry. It also made sense of a few things that had been mysterious to me about my ever-changing body, chiefly (and most important to my eleven-year-old self) the noticeably lopsided breasts that had begun to emerge, the left one growing large and ripe while the other one remained almost nonexistent. I was alone in the examining room with the doctor when he made the discovery, and when he said the word scoliosis, it sounded like death. My mother had died just months before, and my experience of diseases was that they didn't hold back. They took you and maimed you and ended you. So when I heard the diagnosis of something with a -sis on the end of it, I assumed that my days were numbered. He referred me to the orthopaedics department at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and that is where I found myself a month later, in a waiting room with similarly crooked kids, all of us waiting to hear how badly we'd been bent out of shape. After a trip to the X-ray machine it was determined that I had a thirty-eight-degree curvature in my thoracic spine. I stared, transfixed, at the X-ray. It was strange to see that my own spine, lit from behind by the light board, had been hiding secrets from me. For years it had been surreptitiously bending itself into the ugly beginnings of a coil. It seemed impossible that I could be so deformed. Impossibly scary, and impossibly lucky. The feeling of being lucky was one I kept to myself. There had been a part of me that, while my mother was dying, had relished having a parent with cancer. Cancer was a powerful word, one you could throw around with immediate results. It seemed to inspire a focus from people. They looked at you with what was supposed to be sympathy but felt, in fact, like a kind of exaltation. When my mother had cancer, I felt as though I was suddenly transformed into a sallow child of tragedy, imbued with a kind of magic that only children close to grim events can be. I was comfortable in this role, and delighted to help move the play forward, saying the word cancer in a hushed tone with an accomplished look of dread, reporting on my mother's latest surgery or round of chemotherapy with my eyes downcast and bashful in the face of the enormous attention it garnered. It helped that I never once really believed my mother was going to die. It allowed me the space to focus on other people's reactions and to delight in the special place I had earned in their hearts. I knew I was exaggerating, making it up. Deep inside, I believed that my mother had something very innocuous dressed up with a scary word, and I was just using the drama of this disease to get attention. I believed this until her actual death, which, for a long time, some part of me felt I was responsible for. By playing the part of the child with the dying mother so convincingly, I believed I had summoned a bad ending. But I had missed the word cancer these last months. And now part of me was glad to have one to take its place. I found out early on in my appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children that scoliosis wouldn't kill me. This was good news and bad. Good, because I'm pretty sure I didn't want to die at that point in time. Bad, because it limited my ability to create that same kind of wonder in adults that a dying mother had. "How did I get it?" I asked the doctor. She told me it was genetic. Since no one else in my family had scoliosis, I decided that it must be grief, the sadness I couldn't yet feel about my mother's death, bearing down on me until my spine bent, forcing me to feel it any way it could. There were a couple of ways to treat scoliosis, according to my doctor. The first option, for the less severe cases, was to wear a tight plastic brace, which wrapped around the torso, for sixteen hours a day in the hopes that it would alter the course of the curving spine as the pubescent body continued to grow. The more severe cases had to be operated on. The spine would be stretched out, fused with graft from the hip bone, and two steel rods would be placed on either side of the spine to keep it in place as the graft took hold and hardened. The rods would be attached with many hooks and nuts and bolts, adding up to about a pound of metal in the back. I was on the cusp of these grim options. I was fitted within the month for a total-contact thoraco-lumbar-sacral orthosis (TLSO) brace. This was a relief in itself, as the other brace option, which was horrifically detailed in Deenie, a Judy Blume book I had read, was the Milwaukee brace, which included a Frankenstein-esque ring of metal around the neck. The one I was being fitted for, the TLSO brace, came up to just below my chest in the front, though in the back it came up to just below the neck. It was hard plastic, with two thick Velcro straps that ran across the front, attached to the brace by eight little metal discs, giving it a robotic look. Most humiliating, the brace had been made from a cast of my body, so there was the actual shape of my body right there in front of me and anyone who saw the brace, hips just forming, rib cage uneven, a body in progress. Firm pads were strategically placed on the right side, where my upper and middle back fit into the brace, to help push my spine as it grew into something approximating straightness. There was also a hard pad in between these two, on the left side, to try to push the bottom part of the S into straightness. When they first strapped me into it in the hospital, I felt like I couldn't breathe. I was told I would get used to it, though the hard pads digging into my spine would likely give me welts for the first while. I was shown how to put it on, though not given a practice run putting it on by myself there at the hospital. It turned out that getting it on at home alone was almost impossible. Pulling clothes up over it required some doing. Living in a body that changed suddenly and unpredictably with puberty required some doing, even without being strapped into a hard plastic brace. It was recommended that I sleep all night in the brace, to cover at least half of the sixteen hours I was required to wear it, especially since I had to work on the television show Road to Avonlea during the days, and it would be hard to be as physical as I needed to be in certain scenes while wearing it. The first night, I struggled to pull the straps to the markings they had made with a pen at the hospital to show me when it was pulled tight enough. After a long struggle, I cried out that I couldn't do it. My dad ended up pulling me into the brace. I hated having him close me into that contraption. I was red with rage. He didn't deserve my anger, but he was the only parent in sight and no eleven-year-old girl wants her dad manipulating her body. After that first night, I pulled the straps away from my body with every bit of strength and frustration I had, hurting my arms and hands and crying with the effort, but managing, crucially, to avoid needing my dad's assistance. Excerpted from Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
