We go to farms in Mexico for fall harvest, we ĕll ourselves with
homemade tamales. Food is love. When our kids bring home good
report cards, we take them for a banana split at the soda fountain
behind our house.
When Audrey is nine, she tries out for a year-round swimming
team and becomes a competitive swimmer. By the time she is in high
school, she will be training six hours a day, as I used to do in
gymnastics and ballet. When Marianne is thirteen, we build an
addition to our house, adding a master suite so that Marianne and
Audrey and Johnny have their own rooms. We buy a piano. Marianne
and Audrey both take lessons, we host chamber music concerts like
my parents did when I was a girl, we have bridge parties. Béla and I
join a book club hosted by Molly Shapiro, well known in El Paso for
her salons, where she brings artists and intellectuals together. I take an
ESL class at the University of Texas. My English ĕnally improves
enough that in 1959 I feel I can enroll as an undergraduate student.
It’s long been my dream to continue my education—another dream
deferred, but this one now seems possible. I take my ĕrst psychology
class, sit in a row of basketball players, take notes in Hungarian, ask for
Béla’s help writing every paper. I am thirty-two years old. We are
happy on the outside, on the inside often too.
* * *But there is the way Béla looks at our son. He wanted a son, but he
didn’t expect this son. Johnny had athetoid cerebral palsy, probably
caused by encephalitis before birth, and this affected his motor control.
He struggled to do things Marianne and Audrey had learned to do
with little fuss—dress himself, talk, use a fork or a spoon to feed
himself. He looked different from them too. His eyes drooped. He
drooled. Béla was critical of Johnny, impatient with his struggles. I
remembered the ridicule I had faced for being cross-eyed, and I ached