Free Stuffed by Patricia Volk Page B

wheel her upstairs.
    “It could be worse,” people said. “At least she isn’t in an iron lung.”
    The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis gave out “Polio Pointers” at school:
    DO wash hands carefully before eating and always after using the toilet.
    DON’T play with new people.
    What we didn’t know was that polio was a fecally transmitted disease. Ironically, improved sanitation helped it spread. Indoor plumbing shielded babies from early contact with the virus. When they were exposed to it later, they were more susceptible. The purer water got, the more difficult it was to build up immunity.
    Before 1955 and the Salk vaccine, parents panicked. They sent their kids out of the city during the summer, hoping fresh air would protect them. There were cucheleins in the Catskills if you didn’t have a lot of money and family compounds by the ocean if you did. And in between, there were sleep-away camps in piney places. Public school ended on June 30, and that night Grand Central Terminal teemed with kids in camp caps and regulation shorts clutching turkey sandwiches and the newest Archie comics. Camp Red Wing met under the west balcony on the north side. The air was filled with the screams of girls who hadn’t seen their camp best friend in ten months. We’d board the sleeper in hot Manhattan, and when we opened our eyes, we were in the Adirondacks. Parents, who might have been exposed to polio in the city, were forbidden to kiss or touch us when they came up for visiting day.
    Sleep-away camp was fine with me, but only if Mattie mailed her hash. I didn’t want to live two months without it. I took a stand. Mom said it was impossible to mail hash.
    “Keep my thermos and mail it in that,” I said. Then I got to camp and loved the food. Willie and Frances, married French chefs from the city, made Poulet au Sauce Supreme, Boeuf en Daube, and Fried Fillet of Sole with capers, tarragon, and sieved egg in the Sauce Tartare. Toast was brushed with clarified butter, then baked in the oven. Royal icing dotted the Galettes Sablées. On visiting days my father would make a formal inspection of the camp kitchen, endearing himself to Willie and Frances, who then gave me extra marzipan roses on my birthday cake—the ultimate bargaining power at Camp Red Wing.
    Watching Mattie, I learned the two most important rules of cooking: Patience and Clean as You Go. I also learned that because of my place in our family, I got a full-size bathtub while she got a New York maid’s-room half. I got a big bedroom, while hers was smaller than my mother’s dressing room. The leitmotif of childhood was an ever-burning fury that I had more than Mattie. Accompanying Mom to Ohrbach’s for a new handbag, I grieved to see it cost twenty dollars more than Mattie made a week. Mothers talked about salaries while they sat on the benches in the playground. They kept on eye on their kids in the sandbox and an eye on the mother who might pay a housekeeper more than the going rate. It was made clear that if you got a new housekeeper, you would pay what everybody else was paying or less. That way, no beloved housekeeper would leave you for a better-paying job. It was salary-fixing. A common refrain was, “Don’t ruin it for us.”
    I was crazed by the injustice. If Mattie made forty-five dollars a week and she worked five and a half days and she got up at seven and went to bed at eleven, that was fifty-one cents an hour, and when she took the subway to Queens, it was a quarter each way, which meant she had to work an hour just to make enough money to get to and from the beauty parlor. If she bought me peanuts from the machine in the subway, that was ten cents, eleven minutes of hard labor. My mother said Mattie
chose
to wait in the car on road trips when we ate at Howard Johnson’s. When Mattie asked for one Saturday night off a month so she could see her “steady fellow,” my mother, who went out Saturday nights, said, “That would be quite