Contagious

De el ke tuvo y no tiene, adjideate.
Pity the one who once had and no longer has.

—Ladino Proverb

We assembled in the cafeteria on a brilliant day in May 1954, just before Memorial Day weekend. The old public school building steamed in an early, murderous heat, as only New York buildings do, and thin rivulets of water, which she blotted with a folded pink hanky, ran down the sides of my teacher's face. Even the dull-painted, mucous-green walls seemed to sweat with a greasy shine. They had flung open every window, but no matter how I gasped for it no air entered. We stood breathless, row after row of kids, shifting from one foot to the other, trying to avoid each other's body heat by "accidentally" knocking into the girl or boy in front so as to push him away; he then knocked into the kid in front of him, and so on. My thin summer dress stuck like glue to the back of my thighs, and in front of me I saw that Howie's pale blue shirt had turned a darker blue in the middle, pasted with sweat to his back.

A nurse and a doctor sat side by side at the head of the row. The nurse held a huge needle like a gun ready to go off. Before each shot she spurted liquid from the needle into the air. Some crybabies sniffled; I deny being one of them, because a photographer with a camera in front of his face was circling the cafeteria snapping our pictures, and I didn't want to come out like a baby. I loved having my picture taken. We were to be dismissed as soon as we got our injections, so I tried thinking of that as I stood still, melting.

When he got to our row the man taking pictures said, "stick out your arm and smile, like abig, happy cheese!" which we did; then he blinded us with white. I kept on smiling, as if I couldn't wait to get that ten-foot needle jabbed into me. Earlier, before we trekked to the cafeteria, Mrs. Golden announced to the class that we were very very lucky to have been chosen for a "special test" that was going to help children everywhere. She never called it an experiment. This test, she said, would end a terrible contagious disease, and we should be proud of ourselves for taking part in it. We would now be known as "polio pioneers." We had even dressed up for inoculation day.

Some of us may have been lucky. The word luck,mazál in Ladino, was a word I'd hear all too often in the coming months. As they say, mazál no puede fuir dingunos de su destino: no one escapes his destiny. In September, during The Week of the Six Days, a holy week prior to the Jewish New Year, my fate was inscribed in the Book of Life and I came down with that "terrible contagious disease" Mrs. Golden alluded to.

I was the last kid in America to catch polio. Or so my family believed. Teams of research scientists sacrificed over 17,000 rhesus and cynomolgus monkeys, devoted three decades, and spent millions to develop a viable vaccine, but they were too late for me. I and thousands of other povres, luckless souls, caught it during the last, big epidemic of 1954, even as the results of the first successful field trials to test the new vaccine were being evaluated. By 1955, 10,000 fewer cases were diagnosed, and by the end of the 1950s polio was virtually wiped out in this country.

I fell sick soon after Labor Day, so I never made it to third grade. There was little known then about how one actually caught polio, but some doctors thought that I probably had been incubating the virus back in July, when I complained almost daily of aching calf muscles...