I didn’t expect it to hurt so much. Or that I would miss it. The pain in my shoulder had hardened so gradually, almost imperceptibly, for months. Just a little pinch when reaching up, an ache holding my daughter, a stiffness in my neck. I worked around it. Gobbled Advil. Switched arms. It would pass, like everything else. But it didn’t. By Christmas, it had become a persistent companion, holding my right arm and shoulder in a hostile grip. By April, I could no longer reach for a wine glass without wincing. When picking up Claire made me lightheaded with pain, I finally saw my doctor in Massapequa, who sent me to an orthopedist in Wantagh, who told me to raise both arms. I managed one. Had I injured myself? Did I play sports?
“Toddler Olympics,” I smiled.
“Are you an athlete?” he asked, not getting it.
“Just a mom.”
“Let’s take some x-rays and see what we find.”
It was a strange kind of doctor’s office. The waiting room was crowded with people of all ages and injuries. The hallway outside the exam room was a busy thoroughfare of doctors and nurses in mint green scrubs leading limping patients from room to room. Almost as tense and buzzy as the IVF center at New York Hospital. There the pain was all about anxiety and failure. Here it was all muscles and joints. Doctor, it hurts when I….
“Frozen shoulder,” he declared, looking at a weather-chart of my bones and sinews in black and white on the monitor. I leaned in, pretending to comprehend. He clicked his pen. The images seem to disappoint him, too: no injuries, nothing to see.
“Why, though?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It just happens sometimes.” With physical therapy I should have my movement back in about two years. “Or less,” he added encouragingly.
“No such thing,” Neil declared that evening as he tied on his running shoes. I hovered over Claire who was sitting in her highchair, ignoring her mac and cheese, threatening starvation, and my worth as a mother.
“No such thing as what?”
“Frozen shoulder,” he said.
“Except I have one.”
“Nothing in the x-ray, right?”
“You’re a doctor now.” I really hated him sometimes.
“Spontaneous condition. No cause? It’s in your head.” He stood up and pulled on a day-glow hoodie.
“Head and shoulders,” I corrected him.
“When I get back, she’s all mine,” he smiled stroking Claire’s angel hair.
Go fuck yourself, I smiled back.
There are different ways to become invisible. Turn forty as a woman, for a start. Moving from Park Slope to Lindenhurst provided countless opportunities to blend in, to disappear into a sea of moms with suspended careers, Baby-On-Board SUVs, and homes as varied and weird as their precious children. It was so easy to focus on Claire, to watch and worry and obsess. Every day was so big – every step, every word, every little fart – I was surprised how I centered my world so quickly and completely on keeping this little fucker alive. No, that’s not right. Motherhood is a joy, a mystery, a gift. Those little hands. So many familiar faces in her eyes. It’s also tedious, beyond exhausting, life-narrowing. I know this is not an original thought: every mother everywhere throughout all time, etc. It’s what I signed up for: human life. Love without choice. But thank God for Pre-K. I dropped Claire off at Montessori in Copiague and drove west, resenting that I would have to waste any of my daily three-hour respite in physical therapy.
Dr. Schwartzberg’s Sports Performance Medicine was another place to feel out of place. Part medical office, part sports bar: large screens with ESPN blaring; signed jerseys framed on the walls. After a brief exam (“Raise your arms”) confirmed the pen clicker’s diagnosis, I was led into a large room with exam tables spaced apart like hospital beds. Racks of balls and weights. High-tech treadmills. A full gymnasium stretched out beyond a wall of netting. At the center was a set of chairs besides bulky machines. A young man in scrubs sat me down. He was muscular with loose shoulder-length hair.
“Have you ever had stim before?” he asked before reaching down my blouse and placing sticky EKG-like wires to my shoulder front and back.
“No.”
He draped a hot towel on my shoulder. “Tell me when it hurts.”
I felt tiny pinpricks, like an electric current growing steadily more insistent. It didn’t really hurt. Or did it? The boy kept hitting a button, raising the level or whatever and the sensation, the little staticky teeth bit harder and harder…
“OK, stop!”
“Ten minutes,” he said and walked away. The tiny shocks came and went in waves radiating around my collarbone, neck, and shoulder blade, rising in intensity, then fading, then rising again. What the hell was happening? Why didn’t anyone explain anything around here? I looked around the room. There were a handful of patients on tables or lifting weights. Athletes. A fit blonde teen removed a knee brace while a therapist raised and bent her leg. She winced bravely.
An alarm sounded and the biting stopped. The tech removed the padding and electrodes. A tall woman in blue scrubs approached me.
“Lizzy?” She smiled. “I’m Darcy.”
Sparks did not fly. If I’m honest, I don’t think I really saw her at that moment, or anyone really, overwhelmed as I was with the newness of it all. OK, maybe the boy who reached down my shirt. Billy Something. He was cute. But I was in foreign territory, alert to threats and making little eye contact. The thin lady in front of me – her name flew in and out of my short-term memory as quickly as she said it – consulted a laptop. She wore the same sexless scrubs as everyone else.
“Frozen shoulder,” she said.
“That’s me,” I smiled.
Someone else – it was hard to keep track – took me through a series of exercises. Lift these hand weights twenty times. Like this. Now pull on these rubber bands. Arms out. Arms down. Now, face this corner, arms high so it really hurts and lean into the pain. Twenty times. Twenty was the magic, medically approved number, for every move. I kept losing count. No one checked. I completed a task and stood there, helpless, waiting for instructions.
Finally, she reappeared – her name, Darcy Zitelli DPT, was stitched into her blouse – and led me to an exam table. I lay on my back, and she took my right arm in her hands. Bending it at the elbow, she placed her warm palm on mine and pushed my hand backward toward my shoulder, quickly finding its limit. I sucked in my breath. Darcy released the pressure and wiggled the arm slightly.
“Relax,” she said.
She pressed again. I pulled in air and held it.
“Breathe.”
I exhaled as Darcy leaned her body closer and pushed my arm back a little further, into the sharpness of its resistance. She paused and then pressed again.
“One more.”
I breathed and breathed, trying to submit. It felt like my elbow was breaking. Darcy then stretched the arm out straight, forward, up, and back against my shoulder, reaching up beyond where I could for months. I arched my back. My whole body was now an angry knot of bone and muscle screaming in protest. So, this was therapy. My job was to take it. Endure it. Show no weakness. Darcy brought the arm forward and then back again, learning her body against it this time, harder, closer and I felt a sharp stab of pain course through me until I cried: “Ow!”
Darcy let go and I sat up, holding my arm. I could feel the eyes of the athletes on me from around the room: silly middle-aged woman can’t take it. Fuck you. I had a baby. This was nothing. But Jesus…
“Good,” said Darcy, smiling. Was she mocking me?
I was led back to the center of the room and my shoulder, which hurt like hell, was wrapped in a heavy foam pad filled with cold water. No one looked at me. Darcy was now bending the blonde’s knee. Screw you, Darcy, I thought.
The plan was to return on Friday. Twice a week PT. I counted down the days in dread. My shoulder was no better; it probably hurt more. I thought about the strange intimacy of Darcy leaning her body against me, and me submitting to her. I swore in the moment that I would never go back, but Friday came, and I dropped off Claire and turned west on the Sunrise Highway to that awful place where my imagined pain – so Neil insisted – was turned real, at fifty dollars a co-pay. Something else, though, was triggered by this: a kind of sadness seemed to have leaked out of my shoulder and wrapped around my body like a windbreaker. It wasn’t a depression – been there, done that – but the promise of one, a presence.
After the stim, I was directed again to different stations to pull on elastic bands, raise two-pound weights and face the corner, arms on the wall. I always worried that I wasn’t doing it right. No one really watched or counted or cared. Darcy never seemed to see me until I was lying on my back and my arm was in her hands. I watched her eyes and wondered about her, until the agony she caused me obliterated all thought.
It wasn’t torture, of course. But it came as close as I will ever experience. It was excruciating and endless. I was powerless as she pushed my body where it didn’t want to go, bent it to near breaking while every fiber within me rebelled. And the weight upon my body was this woman, my healer. We were in this together. But she was in charge. Relax. Submit. Cry all you want. No one cares. And then it would be over with a rush of relief, followed by an emptiness that almost craved more.
Darcy was both pretty and plain. A beanpole with long brown hair, which was always in a ponytail. Maybe thirty. Flat chested. Her face was somewhere between Irish and Italian – brown eyes with tiny freckles in her high cheekbones. She didn’t talk much, but when she did, her accent had the slightly flattened vowels of Long Island. She grew up here (like me, but I lost my accent in a hurry in college). She was one of those people who never left where she came from, which bothered me – I wanted more for Darcy. Her ringless hands said she was unmarried, unengaged. She was friendly with her co-workers – she had some seniority in the hierarchy of the Schwartzberg staff; she wore their respect easily. She spent her days nursing people from pain to performance. She hurt and healed people. She touched for a living.
At this time, all the touching in my life now was the tiny hands, fat feet, and plump bottom of little Claire. Her body was wrapped around me most of the day and night, it seemed. I loved all of it. I nursed her until she was two and Neil began asking, jokingly, but really not, “When am I going to get those back?” Meaning, my breasts. But I didn’t really want to give my body back to him. The first time we had sex after she was born, Neil said my body had changed. Of course, it did, you idiot. He seemed disappointed and increasingly less interested. And so was I, to be honest. Neil and I didn’t talk about it, but our sexual life could be categorized as BC (Before Claire) – OK, normal, with a diminishing menu but healthy, I thought, for five years married – and AD (After Diapers) – infrequent, a little rushed. More for him than for me. My friend Sally called it: PMS – Preventative Maintenance Sex. Just enough to call it a male/female relationship. It wasn’t until Darcy, that I realized how much I missed being touched. Maybe that was the blue shell I’d been wearing.
I found her on Facebook. What a thrill! She hadn’t posted in three years, but there was her smile: Darcy in a peach dress. Darcy and her parents. Darcy and her (looked like) siblings. Young, proud Darcy in cap and gown. Sexy Darcy. I scrolled with a stalker’s delight, searching for clues. But what? Something we had in common, something I could talk to her about. Something dark. But I couldn’t find anything. Even factoring in the inevitable my-life-is-perfect social media filter, it was quite possible that, up to three years ago at least, Darcy Zitelli was essentially a happy person (that’s what my profile said about me, no doubt, and that was basically true, and bullshit at the same time). But where was Darcy’s boyfriend or husband? Or girlfriend? Who touched Darcy? I couldn’t tell. Her pronouns were: she, her.
I hesitated, then clicked friend request.
It took a few weeks, but I began to feel a slight improvement in my shoulder. A few precious inches of movement gained; a little less working around my symptoms. It was slow, but I was fine with that. I learned to take Tylenol before leaving the house to numb the pain just a little, to give Darcy a little more to work with. To show her I was capable. To make her smile.
Twice-a-week: heat, stim, weights, stretch – waiting, waiting – and then it was me and Darcy, on the table, in her hands. Once, as she bent my forearm toward her, the back of my hand pressed into her breast, a charge that partially off-set the bone-snapping pain. I wondered if it was on purpose, or a sign that she was relaxed with me, closer, less worried about formality, more focused on our work together. I hoped it would happen again, which it did, once or twice. Afterwards as my shoulder cooled, I watched her move around the room, aching.
Physical therapy was now part of my routine. I usually woke up to Claire’s little face beside me – no matter where we went to sleep, all three of us usually ended up in a different bed by morning. If Neil wasn’t in the shower, he was on his morning run. I loved those precious moments cuddling my daughter before she began her day of demands. Transcendence to tedium. On rare occasions, we would all wake up together. I’d open my eyes to see my baby girl cradled against her father, chattering to herself as she touched her fingertips together. Neil and I would watch her in that quiet, shared astonishment that parenthood sometimes allows. And I’d take his hand and interlace our fingers and think, this is my family. Then it would be back on the treadmill: Breakfast. Sponge Bob. Then to Montessori. Then a precious few hours to possibly consider my stalled graphic design career. Then pick her up. Then lunch and more Sponge Bob. Then negotiations for nap time. Then confront the chaos of the house. The impossibility of dinner. Two dinners. Bath time. Neil’s long days at work – he was an accountant on a Wall Street trading floor – were conveniently stretched by his daily workouts. Didn’t I remember he was training for the Fuck My Wife’s Needs Marathon? The Selfish Prick 5-K? I could never keep track. His body grew tighter, tauter, younger while mine was melting into middle age.
“How’s the shoulder today?” Darcy asked brightly on a Monday morning, sidling up to me. I was on my back raising an aluminum walking cane over my head with two hands, losing count.
“Good,” I said. “How was your weekend?”
Her eyes flashed a second. “Busy.” She took the cane from me.
“Me, too,” I smiled. “Claire had two birthday parties, so it was nonstop.”
She nodded and took my forearm and elbow into her soft, firm hands. I wondered if I had ever told her who Claire was. “My daughter. She’s four. So, you know, every kid in Montessori has to invite every kid in class to every birthday and sometimes it’s like, please, not another goddamned toddler birthday. Until it’s your kid’s birthday and you think, you little shits all better show up with big bags of presents….” The more I explained it, the more stupid and privileged and petty I sounded. She had no idea what I was talking about. I was an advertisement for someone she didn’t even want to think about becoming, but probably would: a middle-aged cautionary tale. “But definitely improvement in the arm, for sure,” I assured her.
“Good,” she bent my hand back as I took in a deep breath.
It was a crush, of course. I knew that. I watched myself descend into it: the daydreaming, the imagined conversations. That sweet mix of joy and nervousness in her presence. I didn’t want to fuck her. I wanted to know her. How did this bright, talented young woman become a professional healer? Why didn’t she become a real doctor? Why did she never leave Long Island? Was she in love? Was she happy? It was early June when I checked her Facebook page and saw a new post. My heart jumped. A photograph of a smiling old man: In Memoriam, Bruno Zitelli, 1946-2022. It was her father. There were dozens of condolence messages. I considered adding one, then stopped myself. There would be a memorial mass in Rockville Center on Saturday.
Poor Darcy.
The thought, once planted, would not go away. To see Darcy in civilian clothes, to see her among family and friends, her face in sadness, tear-strewn; maybe a brave smile as she greeted well-wishers, stripped of her professional mask. I wouldn’t talk to her, just observe. Even if she saw me, I would keep a distance. I’d show her my respect by not intruding on such a sad occasion. I’d look OK – I’d comb my hair and wear my navy shirtdress. A little makeup. Heals. Of course, it was ridiculous. A total intrusion. How could I attend a funeral for a man I did not know, whose daughter had yet to even friend me? I put the thought down, then picked it up, turned it over, and put it down again. When I asked Neil what his plans were for Saturday, he looked almost hurt. “I’ve got an Iron Man in Quogue, remember?” No, I didn’t remember.
That settled it. No babysitter, no funeral. Boundaries are good.
“Mommy, where are we going?” Claire asked as I carried her up the stone steps. She had never been to a church before. I hoped the newness of it would entertain her for a bit. I made sure we arrived late, so we could slip into the back unnoticed. But what did I know about Catholic funerals? When I opened the huge door and slipped into the vestibule, I found the whole Zitelli clan, in black, standing around a cloth-draped coffin on wheels. A heavyset priest in pale vestments stood facing the altar, holding a long staff with a golden cross on top.
“Mommy, what’s that?” asked Claire pointing, turning heads. I stepped quickly to the right to make my way down the far aisle.
“Lizzy?”
I turned. Darcy looked elegant in black. Beautiful, even. I caught my breath.
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered, stepping back.
And although she smiled politely, her eyes seemed to go from confusion to concern, then narrowed further to: what the fuck are you doing here? She may have shaken her head slightly as she turned back to her family. I’m not sure – I was too flushed with embarrassment as I hurried into the church and took a seat in the back pew. The organ blared, the congregants stood, and the procession began – priest, coffin, and family marched somberly down the aisle. I watched Darcy’s sad profile, watched her sit stiffly in the front pew as the mass began.
“What’s he doing?” Claire asked. “What’s happening?”
Monday morning, I checked in, paid my copay, and sat anxiously in the waiting room. Around me, the flatscreens blared. The framed photographs of the handsome Dr. Schwartzberg with grateful, muscular – and presumably famous – patients, smiled proudly. Billy fetched me as usual, and I sat for my heat-pad and stim. It was a busy morning with patients on about half the tables doing exercises or being attended to by the now familiar staff. But no Darcy. I did my weights and bands and stretches, practicing my apology as I counted – or miscounted. Finally, I was assigned a table and handed a cane to raise. Any moment now, she would appear. Three, four. My apology could not be too earnest. Six, seven, eight. It needed to be casual, reassuring. Nine, ten, eleven. I’m not obsessed with you, my eyes would say, I’m not in love with you. Twelve, thirteen. But I’m so sorry if I overstepped… I was just curious, that’s all. You are such an impressive woman… Fifteen… wait, where was I?
“Lizzy?” a man asked. Above me was the unmistakable face of Dr. Schwartzberg himself. Startled, I sat up. He had on the same blue scrubs as everyone else. There were touches of grey in his sharp-razored sideburns. “I’m Bob Schwartzberg.” For a moment, I thought he was here to reprimand me. He consulted a laptop on a stand beside him. “How’s the shoulder today?”
“Fine,” I said. “Is Darcy…?”
“Darcy is off today,” he said. He took the cane from my hand and guided me to lie back. His hands were a man’s hands. Not stronger than Darcy’s, just more forceful, heavier. He bent my elbow against itself. I winced. “Have you been feeling an improvement?”
“Yes, for sure,” I said.
He pressed down on my palm, forcing me to arch my back as the jolt of pain shot up my arm. He relaxed and bent the elbow, testing its limits – this way, that way.
“Frozen shoulders are mysterious,” he said. “They really do come from nowhere, but they hurt more than most sports injuries over time,” he said. “They say it’s like childbirth.”
I looked into his eyes, which were light brown and had thick lashes. He had a dark shadow of beard just under his smooth skin. And I’ll say this – for a brief moment, I felt safer in his hands. No one, not my husband, not the techs, not even Darcy, had ever really acknowledged my pain. They believed it, but they judged it as somehow made up. Then suddenly my arm was over my head, and I bent back again as shoulder and bone met resistance. He moved and pressed and moved and pressed. I had an image of my ball-in-joint shoulder crying out in its usual protest until he found the edges of my ability. I breathed and breathed and endured it as I had so many times on this table. He relaxed my arm and I exhaled – my shoulder having proved its point. He nodded as he took in my body’s information. It was over. Then in one swift movement, my arm was above my head and this man’s weight was closing down on me and before I could catch my breath, I felt a tear in my shoulder and my body convulsed causing me to cry out: “OWW! FUCK!” He let go and I shot up, gripping my arm. I saw green spots and my ears rang as I took in the shock of the assault. Schwartzberg smiled.
“Did you hear the rip?” he asked.
I gave him a look that must have said: therapy is over for today, asshole. He waited. And then the worst possible thing happened. Tears filled my eyes and faster than I could wipe them, dripping down my face and into my lap. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off.
“You’re going to feel much better,” is all he said.
Crying – or crying out – made me radioactive and the staff backed away. I felt them staring, then I felt them turn their backs. Eventually, I climbed down and took my seat for the cool down. When the buzzer sounded, I couldn’t unhook myself fast enough. On the way out, the receptionist let me know I would need another prescription to continue therapy.
If you want to feel invisible, live inside a longing. Wallow in it. Let it take over. Let it blind you to what you have, who you really are. In my twenties, my longings were about the future – future lovers, future careers, future success. I felt I was always dancing on the periphery of my potential – when would I dive in? When would life begin? On the other side of forty, longing tends to look backwards. If I could only be that miserable girl again with nothing but promise, dreaming of my life to come. If I could just talk to her, how much misery could I save us both from?
But when you get right down to it, a longing, a crush, is wanting. A wanting of a person to be someone they are not; to be something to someone who does not want you. It’s so real inside you, but it’s fantasy. And because life doesn’t work that way, people don’t work that way, life eventually slaps your hand, or breaks your heart, or freezes a part of you. Because life wants you back. Relax. Breathe. Submit.
I imagined talking to Darcy sometimes. When I did, I explained what she meant to me. Her beauty and her promise. The power of her touch. I would say it in a matter-of-fact way. She didn’t have to be burdened by it. I only fell in love with her a little bit. But if I followed the logic of it, I couldn’t escape the same conclusion. Darcy did not want to be seen by me. My prying into her life, unbidden, unwelcomed, made her see me as more than a frozen shoulder, a patient in her healing hands. In fact, she saw me pretty clearly, at least a part of me, an ugly, needy me. And that was enough. No thank you, was her silent answer. I was erased. And I deserved it.
After a week of pain and hate and shame and dread, my shoulder healed. I doubted it at first – surely, symptoms would restate themselves, re-limit me – but they didn’t. Somewhere between Darcy’s woman-strong pressure and Schwartzberg’s bone-ripping impatience, my shoulder unfroze. If mugged or arrested, I could raise both hands without hesitation. After avoiding the necessary steps (Massapequa, Wantagh) to return to Dr. Schwartzberg’s Pain Emporium, Claire leapt into my arms outside Montessori one afternoon and I realized that I no longer needed to. It was a bright June day, and I could feel the sun on my skin and the sweet warmth of my daughter. I could hold her without hurting. And then that other cloud lifted. I took off the windbreaker.