My Life in Brain Injuries

Mom decorated cakes – not just little birthday cakes, although she made those too. She took great pride in making wedding cakes that served over 400 people. After she died, we found an album she had compiled of newspaper clippings – pictures of “her” brides and grooms smiling from behind their giant, frosting-rose-adorned cakes, ready to cut the first piece and begin their lives together.

Mom made those humongous works of art in our tiny home kitchen, often working through the night when summer heat threatened to melt the frosting. I recount this because every time I think of the living room rug and furniture in our home, I think of Mom’s cakes because she could – and would – tell you just how many cakes it took to purchase each item. The blue and green nubby area rug represented a lot of cakes. I thought it was beautiful AND getting it meant I no longer had to hand buff the hardwood floor after Mom waxed it. I loved that rug.

One Saturday my sisters rolled up the rug and put it in the spare room, the room that would become our brother’s when he was born in about a year.  They pushed the furniture to the periphery of the living room and set up the wooden card table in front of the unlit fireplace. That table was considered priceless because it was the first piece of furniture Mom & Dad acquired after their wedding in 1937 – well before Mom started her cake making venture.

Atop the card table sat the phonograph, set to 45 rpm. My sisters’ classmates started arriving, ready for a dance party. I stood against the wall dressed in a plaid dress with lace-trimmed collar, a dress Mom had made for one of my sisters years before, when one of them had been close to my seven year old size. I kept quiet, wanting to to keep myself from being banished from the unfolding excitement.

The Big Kids had been doing their homework, watching American Bandstand and learning all the steps. They were cool – as cool as mid-twentieth century mill town high schoolers could be. Rick D., a football player, a big Big Kid wore his hair slicked back. (Brylcreem! If a little dab’ll do ya, then why not a lot more?) He carefully placed the needle in the groove of the record and, as the music started, swung around to take his dance partner’s hand. Instead, the back of his hand hit me right in the mouth and my head bounced against the plaster wall.

There is a thin triangular piece of flesh that joins the area above the front teeth to the inside of the upper lip – you can touch it with your tongue. The superior maxillary frenum. Rick D’s contact with my face had enough force to tear that triangle of flesh out, breaching a dam that had kept my blood circulating in my body. In my memory, blood sprayed everywhere. At least I didn’t stain the rug.