Read Online A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo - Free Book Online Page B

Italy, I had a dream that was very perfunctory: we could not get on the boat. Something was wrong and we weren’t able to board.
    Toward the end of March my mother and I drove to my grandparents’ farm in Connecticut, where we stayed a few days before continuing on to Boston to say good-bye to the rest of the family. Everyone felt it was the right choice for my mother to live in Rome and an excellent opportunity for me. We had a nice sendoff. My mother was relaxed and in good spirits. After passing a tollbooth on our way back to New York City, I had a vision—there is no other way to put it. I saw in front of us the little gray Renault car we were riding in. I watched us in our car, clear as a bell, driving ahead of ourselves on the highway. The sight gave me a very unsettled feeling, because we looked so small and vulnerable. But after a minute it was gone, and the road in front of me returned to normal.
    It was a long drive from Boston to New York. We had left early in the day in clear weather and now it was heading toward dusk, with a light rain falling. I must have dozed off, and when I woke up I heard a voice saying, Just cut her clothes off. Just cut them.
    Through what seemed like dirty eyeglasses, I could make out someone wearing a mask, peering into my face. I remember thinking that I didn’t really like the pants I was wearing, but I was sorry about the sweater. And then I thought of something my aunt Val had laughingly said to me when I showed her the red satin bra I had bought: You better think about where you are going when you wear that. If you’re in an accident, someone might get the wrong idea. I wasn’t wearing the bra that day.
    We had been heading south on the Hutchinson River Parkway in a lot of traffic with low visibility. A woman driving a big white Cadillac had missed her exit and decided to back up and across four lanes of highway to return to it. She never saw us, in our little gray Renault, and my mother never saw her. Now we were in a hospital in the Bronx lucky to be alive since the Renault was crushed like an accordion. Back then, in 1961, there were no seat belts. My mother’s kneecap had smashed into the steering wheel post and she needed an operation to have her kneecap removed. She had a small crescent-shaped cut on her forehead. I had crashed into the side window of the passenger seat and my right eyelid was lacerated. I couldn’t move my left side and we both had broken ribs and concussions. I later learned that the young doctor in the emergency room that night had stitched the area around my eye together by matching eyebrow hairs.
    I was ready to be sent home after three or four days wearing a neck brace and a bandage over an eye, which I later covered with a black patch. My mother was still in the hospital recovering from the knee operation and in a full leg cast. I went to stay with the Ehrenbergs, family friends who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and my mother eventually moved in with friends who lived a few blocks away.
    Mike Ehrenberg and my mother had met as teenagers in Boston. He was the friend on the sailboat when her first husband drowned. Our families grew up close; their children and my sister and I were part of the red-diaper baby bond that originated in Sunnyside, Queens.
    After many trips to specialists and neurologists, I was told I had suffered severe whiplash, but because I was asleep and my body relaxed at the moment of impact, my spinal cord hadn’t been damaged. I was extremely lucky though I had to wear the neck brace and go to physical therapy. My eye was another matter: the cuts had severed nerves that might or might not grow back, and I could neither open nor close my eye all the way. The thirty stitches across my eyelid and eyebrow would leave a scar that would fade over time, but once again I had been lucky, because my vision was not affected. A half-lidded eye with a jagged scar made me look dangerous in a monster-movie way. And a black eye