Free The Virtues of Oxygen by Susan Schoenberger Page B

the day.”
    The misplaced anger I felt at that moment would have taken my breath away if the iron lung didn’t force my re spiration.
    “You can’t possibly understand,” I said, yelling loud enough now to bring my father on the run. “I am trapped in this goddamned machine forever. How could you let this happen to me? Why didn’t you keep me inside that summer? I was only six. I didn’t even know what p olio was.”
    My father stepped into the room just as I said th ose words.
    “That’s enough, Vivian,” he said in a tone I had never heard him use with me before. “That is more tha n enough.”
    He came and put an arm around my mother, who was trembling and crying in the chair next to my iron lung. I knew it was wrong, but I thought I would explode if I couldn’t blame someone for my misery, and my parents were the easiest targets. I began to turn my head rapidly from side to side, which was one of the few ways I could release frustration. When I had exhausted myself, my mother rose from her chair and put her hands on either side of my head, squeezing just a little too hard.
    “You are not done yet,” she said through clenched teeth. “I won’t let you be done . . . Just tell me what you want, and if it’s in my power, I will try my best to get it for you.”
    “That’s the problem,” I said, turning my head away, out of her grasp. “It’s not in your powe r at all.”

    After graduation, I sank into a depression that seemed to have no bottom. I spent many of my waking hours trying to figure out how to sabotage my own medical care. I couldn’t hold my breath, because the lung forced me to breathe. I couldn’t choke on food, because someone was always there to clear my airway. I began to fantasize about death and about how it would release me from Shakespeare’s “mortal coil,” which I pictured literally as a giant metal spring wrapped around my inert body inside the machine.
    I knew that if I stopped eating altogether the doctors would insert a feeding tube in my abdomen, so I saw only one path. I would eat less and less until I wasted away. I thought if I did it gradually enough, it might be too late for anyone to intervene.
    Naturally, my mother noticed almost immediately, but instead of coaxing me to eat my peas like a toddler, she tried a different approach. She brought in Professor Harold Margolis from the community college in Albany, which I looked down on because my grades would have qualified me to go to a much better school. The professor knew that. He knew so much about me that I suspected my mother had been badgering him f or months.
    “So Vivian,” he said, “I’ve been asking your mother if she would consider loaning you out to us on an occasion al basis.”
    “Spare parts for your heatin g system?”
    Professor Margolis laughed and looked at me with either appreciation or bemusement—I couldn’t te ll which.
    “Not exactly,” he said. “We’re developing a computer program, and we need good minds to help us see the patterns—connect the dots, as it were. You’d visit us once a month to work in the computer lab, and in exchange we’d offer you some classes at home. You could get your associate’s degree, and it won’t cost your parent s a dime.”
    I’m embarrassed to say that I thought too highly of myself—even as I wallowed in depression—to want an associate’s degree from Albany Community College, but I was intrigued by the idea of working in a computer lab, even just se eing one.
    “Who would teach me?” I asked him.
    “That depends on what courses you’d like to take.”
    On the spot, it occurred to me that I wanted to learn about business. I had always been a math whiz, probably because I couldn’t use a slide rule, or even a pencil and paper, and had to do all my calculations in my head. I loved listening to news reports about the economy and about the new businesses cropping up as the world remade itself into a modern and interconnec ted