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backseat of the car feeling worse all the time, and my father drove fast, then faster, back toward Tupelo. By the time they got to a hospital, my mother could no longer walk. She was diagnosed immediately—she remembered the doctor taking one look at her and saying, “This woman has polio,” and then she was put into an isolation room. When her breathing failed the next day, she was transferred to a larger facility and put into an iron lung. I heard this story several times, and I remember asking once if it wasn’t frightening, being put into that contraption. “It was a relief,” she said. “It was like being pulled out of a pool where I’d been drowning. I could breathe again. You have no idea what a relief that was. I remember telling myself,
I’m alive. I won’t think about anything else now; I’ll think about that tomorrow.
Just like Scarlett. I thought that every day for three years until I got to come home.”
    “You don’t think it anymore, though, do you?” I asked her.
    She smiled at me.
    “Do you?”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t think that anymore.” But she was lying. Denial was not a bad thing, in her mind. And I have to say, I think it served her well.
    She talked very little about the time she spent in the lung. Over the years, I’d learned bits and pieces of information: that there were many iron lungs, all in one large room, and the only privacy was curtains that were sometimes drawn between them. That her iron lung was a mustard-yellow color and her neighbor’s a muddy green. That one Christmas Eve, the patients had sung—with difficulty, of course—“O Holy Night,” and it had made the staff cry. That the sound the bellows made with their rhythmic squeaks and thunks reminded my mother of windshield wipers. That when someone died, the patients’ overhead mirrors would be turned so that they couldn’t see the now silent iron lung being pushed past them. That my mother read three books at a time from her overhead rack so that the page turner wouldn’t be needed so often. That the women patients wore their hair in topknots, necessary because of lying flat in the iron lung, and the style was called a “polio poodle.” That a psychiatrist once asked my mother, “How does it feel to realize your daughter will never know your touch?” (To which my mother responded, “How does it feel to be an incompetent asshole?”) That a patient once complained of feeling cold and his caregiver put a blanket over the lung rather than him. That the patients who couldn’t talk made giddyup sounds to call for help, or clicked their teeth together, or made a popping sound with their lips. That there was a ward newspaper to which my mother contributed poems and short stories. She learned, in occupational therapy, to write with a pen held in her mouth; it took an hour and forty-five minutes for her to write one page.
    I asked once if people ever cried, and she hesitated, then said yes. “Did you?” I asked, and she said yes, but rarely. And only once had she cried hard and for a long time. It happened after she overheard a conversation between a doctor and a patient a few lungs down from her. The patient, whose name was Sam, asked, “So when will I go home, Doc? I want to drive my new car. Got a new convertible two days before I came in here.”
    The doctor asked for a chair and pulled it up so Sam could see him, eye to eye. Then he said, “I’m sorry. But I have to tell you that you won’t be able to walk again. Or even breathe on your own.”
    There was a long silence, and then Sam said, “What do you mean?”
    The doctor told him again, saying that the time for recovery had passed.
    Sam said, “Well, you’re wrong. I’ll drive to your house. And when I get there, I’ll take you out for a ride so fast it’ll blow the hair off your head.”
    “I hope you will,” the doctor said. “But Sam, I want you to start thinking about what it will mean if you can’t.”
    It was the night after