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  Golem Girl is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2020 by Riva Lehrer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Lehrer, Riva, author.

  Title: Golem girl : a memoir / Riva Lehrer.

  Description: First edition. | New York : One World, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012800 (print) | LCCN 2020012801 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984820303 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984820310 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lehrer, Riva, 1958—Health. | Spina bifida—Patients—United States—Biography. | Artists with disabilities—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC RJ496.S74 L44 2020 (print) | LCC RJ496.S74 (ebook) | DDC 617.4/82092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012800

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012801

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover art: Riva Lehrer

  oneworldlit.com

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Carole’s Story: It’s Alive!

  Chapter 2: Cauda Equina

  Chapter 3: Carole’s Story: Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman

  Chapter 4: Carole’s Story: The Girl with All the Gifts

  Chapter 5: Leprechaun

  Chapter 6: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

  Chapter 7: The Island of Dr. Moreau

  Chapter 8: Heidi

  Chapter 9: Aerobicide

  Chapter 10: House of Wax

  Chapter 11: Have Fun Storming the Castle

  Chapter 12: Gooble Gobble

  Chapter 13: Body Parts

  Chapter 14: The Cabin in the Woods

  Chapter 15: Carole’s Story: The Winter Walk

  Chapter 16: The Abominable Dr. Phibes

  Chapter 17: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

  Chapter 18: Vampire’s Kiss

  Chapter 19: The Changeling

  Chapter 20: A Sweetness in the Blood

  Chapter 21: Cissy Inventing the Pantheon

  Chapter 22: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

  Chapter 23: Curse of the Spider Woman

  Chapter 24: Face/Off

  Chapter 25: The Red Shoes

  Chapter 26: There Will Be Blood

  Chapter 27: There Will Be (More) Blood

  Chapter 28: Friday the 13th

  Chapter 29: Armageddon

  Part Two

  Chapter 30: The Birds

  Chapter 31: Art School Confidential

  Chapter 32: The Man Who Fell to Earth

  Chapter 33: What Music They Make

  Chapter 34: Shrek

  Chapter 35: Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal

  Chapter 36: The Haunting of Hill House

  Chapter 37: Suspiria

  Chapter 38: Gone Girl

  Chapter 39: Graveyard Shift

  Chapter 40: The Bride of Frankenstein

  Chapter 41: The Tell-Tale Heart

  Chapter 42: Picnic at Hanging Rock

  Chapter 43: Nerve Endings

  Chapter 44: The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Chapter 45: One of Us

  Chapter 46: Night Gallery

  Chapter 47: The Woods

  Chapter 48: I Know What You Did Last Summer

  Chapter 49: Theater of Blood

  Chapter 50: Phantom of the Opera

  Chapter 51: Cat People

  Chapter 52: American Horror Story

  Chapter 53: The Pit and the Pendulum

  Chapter 54: The Fall of the House of Usher

  Chapter 55: The Invisible Man

  Chapter 56: The Company of Wolves

  Chapter 57: I See Dead People

  Chapter 58: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

  Chapter 59: Freaks

  Chapter 60: The Skin We Live In

  Chapter 61: Gollum

  Golem I

  Golem II

  Epilogue(s)

  The Portraits

  List of Illustrations

  Resources

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Blue Veronika

  1999

  PROLOGUE

  The Latin roots of “monster” are monere, meaning “to warn,” and monstrum, an omen, or a supernatural being that indicates the will of a god. “Monster” shares its etymological root with “premonition” and “demonstrate.”

  My first monster story was Frankenstein.

  Though this first Creature was more James Whale than Mary Shelley. When we were little, my brothers and I would abandon the great outdoors and race inside in time for the Saturday monster movie matinee. Two hours of ecstatic dread. Of delicious nightmares in chiaroscuro black-and-white.

  Every few weeks, it would be his turn. I waited for his graceless body, his halting gait and cinder-block shoes. I could recognize the operating room where he was born. I knew he was real, because we were the same—everything that made him a monster made me one, too. We had more in common than scars and shoes. Frankenstein is the story of a disabled child and its parent. It is also the story of a Golem.

  Humans have told stories of magically animated creatures for thousands of years. Ancient religions from Babylonia and Sumer, to Mexico, Africa, and China, all assert that gods formed the first human beings out of clay. Enki and Prometheus are but two creators who formed a being and gave it life. These days, we have Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, but long before them, the Jews had Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and his Golem.*

  Golem (goylem in Yiddish) is Hebrew for “shapeless mass” and first appears in Psalm 139 of the Hebrew Bible, in which Adam is referred to as a golmi. Adam is brought to life by the breath—the word—of God, transformed from inert matter into vibrant life: the first Golem. The difference is that Adam becomes fully human, while Golems of legend never do.

  * * *

  —

  Iterations of this legend date from as far back as the eleventh century, but the most famous version dates from sixteenth-century Prague. The Golem of Prague tells the story of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (an actual historical figure, known as the Maharal) and his creation of a living being made of clay. Golems wend through our stories, from Pygmalion’s statue to the Bride of Frankenstein to Mr. Data and Seven of Nine; from the Cylons to C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chucky the
doll. And, of course, to Gollum himself.

  While these are not all Golems, exactly, every creature is made of inanimate material that is shaped and awakened by the will of a master (and nearly every story is of a master—not a mater—a male who attempts to attain the generative power of the female body).

  Golems are built in order to serve a specific purpose. Adam, it is said, was built for the glory of God. The Golem of Prague was built to save the Jews from a pogrom. Frankenstein’s monster was built for the glory of his maker, and for the glory of science itself. These Golems were not created for their own sake. None given purposes of their own, or futures under their control. Golems are permitted to exist only if they conform to the wishes of their masters. When a Golem determines its own purpose—let’s call it hubris—it is almost always destroyed. The Golem must stay unconscious of its own existence in order to remain a receptacle of divine will.

  Yet every tale tells us: it is in the nature of a Golem to wake up. To search for the path from being an It to an I.

  * * *

  —

  In Golem stories, the monster is often disabled. Speechless and somnambulistic, a marionette acting on dreams and animal instinct. In Yiddish, one meaning of goylem is “lummox”; to quote the scholar Michael Chemers, from God’s perspective, all humans are disabled.

  The day I was born I was a mass, a body with irregular borders. The shape of my body was pared away according to normal outlines, but this normalcy didn’t last very long. My body insisted on aberrance. I was denied the autonomy that is the birthright of normality. Doctors foretold that I would be a “vegetable,” a thing without volition or self-awareness. Children like me were saved without purpose, at least not any purpose we could call our own.

  I am a Golem. My body was built by human hands.

  And yet—

  If I once was monere, I’m turning myself into monstrare: one who unveils.

  * Many scholars believe that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was aware of and influenced by this centuries-old legend, including Paul Root Wolpe of Emory University: medium.com/​neodotlife/​frankenstein-at-200-the-golem-and-biotechnology-accb33dac3be.

  PART ONE

  In the beginning

  CHAPTER 1

  Carole’s Story: It’s Alive!

  She told me my story when she was proud of me. (Look how you turned out!) She told me my story when I annoyed her so much that she folded her arms across her breasts and tilted her eyebrows at me like notched arrows. (Have you forgotten what I went through for you?) She told my story when we had company. (Look how she turned out!) She told my story to every new doctor and nurse who crossed our path.

  * * *

  —

  My mother’s stories run through my head like a piece of silver nitrate film.

  April 1958

  Carole froze, hands in the air, caught in the act of tugging her blouse over her head. Not this—not again, she’d been so careful. Months on bed rest, moving through the apartment like an overfull balloon, afraid to so much as bump the furniture in case it pricked her skin and spilled her contents out onto the floor.

  They were spilling now. Hot liquid spiraled down her legs.

  She shuffled into the bathroom and waited for the expected release of mangled tissue. For another baby-that-could-have-been to slide out of her on a torrent of red. She looked down at the floor and, oh God, it wasn’t blood—she was standing in a puddle of viscous pink water. Invisible hands twisted her like wet laundry. What a strange thing it is when pain means hope.

  Jerry heard her shriek and ran through the bedroom, slid into the bathroom. She yelled, Honey, I’m in labor, he shouted, Where is the suitcase? What do I pack?—the suitcase that would’ve been packed and ready to go if things had been happening according to schedule. This day was precisely one month before the due date she’d been given in the obstetrician’s office. Jerry drove like he’d never heard of traffic laws. Carole sat doubled over on every towel they owned.

  It was all so unfair. She had the kind of sturdy, wide-hipped, large-breasted body celebrated in fertility sculptures since the dawn of time. At twenty-four, she looked able to birth a clan, a tribe, a city-state, while striding through fields with arms loaded with harvest. Instead, there had been three miscarriages in less than two years, followed by eight months of paranoid restraint.

  Jerry thought, If this is all there is, just us forever, dayenu. It’s not that he didn’t want children—he did—but he’d almost given up on family life at all. Jerry had married late, at the age of thirty-one, eight years after coming home from the Army. He had been with the 102nd Infantry Division (the Fighting Ozarks)*1 when they landed at Cherbourg, in September 1944. The 102nd fought their way across Belgium until reaching Aachen, which was where Jerry’s foxhole ran out of ammunition. Something possessed him to run across the fields of fire in search of resupply. Miraculously, he made it back unscathed and stayed that way until the next-to-last day of his enlistment. The fleeing German army lobbed mortar shells behind them as they retreated; one blew up and slammed shrapnel into Jerry’s face. The Army traded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for the shattered jaw and the teeth left behind on the battlefield.

  Six months in a hospital in England, then home to Cincinnati with a subtly new face and the determination to squeeze the GI Bill for all it was worth. He racked up a CPA degree and dated a little—but being shot in the face doesn’t leave a fellow feeling attractive. His sister Ruth just happened to have this friend, a sparkling friend who flirted away Jerry’s shyness.

  And then—and then, he was married. To a knockout nine years his junior. In silent, black-and-white footage of their wedding, Jerry is levitating while Carole’s hands fly and flutter like the spread wings of birds.

  January 2, 1955

  But then Carole started losing babies, and sorrow piled up behind her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Jerry nearly drove up on the sidewalk in his haste to reach the emergency room. The man was usually a bundle of worried tics, gasps, and pronouncements, but he tried crooning Don’t worry, honey, don’t worry don’t worry. Silently he told the baby, You show up now, kid, or I’m coming in to get you, as his wife’s gurney disappeared behind the swinging OR doors.

  Labor is labor, hours of pain, but it was a pain Carole welcomed, because every other pregnancy so far had ended with a faster agony and no one to hold. At 6:04 in the morning, the baby was born.

  Then all was confusion. Doctors and nurses ran around the room, calling for equipment, as the baby screamed in a way that surpassed the normal trauma of air and bright light. Carole demanded to see the baby, but they’d taken it to a far table.

  The baby. Boy? Girl? No one could tell. Carole was told that the lower half of its body was encased in adhesions. The amnion—the inner layer of the placental wall—had adhered to the baby’s skin and formed swathes like a mummy’s bandages. These had affixed the baby to Carole’s uterus, as if her body was trying to keep the child inside the maternal fortress. As if preparing dressings for the surgeries that lay ahead. As if knowing that mother and child would never be much good at separation.

  * * *

  —

  A nurse stepped away, and there it was, her genderless, shrieking infant—an infant with a grotesque red sac protruding from its back. Then Carole knew exactly what the obstetrician was about to say: her baby had spina bifida.

  Carole had seen these children for years. Up until this bed-rest pregnancy, she’d been a medical researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where she’d worked for Josef Warkany, an Austrian physician who had established the field of teratology in America (teratology, from the Greek teratos, or “monster,” is the medical term for the study of birth defects). Warkany revolutionized the medical understanding of the origin of impairments. Among these, spina bifida was one of the most common
and the most commonly fatal.*2

  In 1958, no one knew what caused spina bifida, only that it fell within the category of congenital conditions known as neural tube defects. The words spina bifida mean “split spine”: when a fetus is in utero, the bones and casing around the spinal cord are supposed to fuse and create a tube that houses and protects the spinal cord. If these parts fail to fuse, they leave an open fissure—a lesion—somewhere along the length of the spine, anywhere from the skull to the sacrum. A literal hole in the body. As a consequence, any pathogen entering that hole has access to the brain.

  Spina bifida babies are born open to the world.

  * * *

  —

  There are different severities of the condition. The mildest cases, “spina bifida occulta,” are those in which the spine remains closed, with minor malformation of one or more vertebrae. This causes little or no injury; often, from the outside, Carole could scarcely tell that anything was wrong with those children.

  The most affected are those with spina bifida myelomeningocele, a condition in which a loop of spinal cord protrudes all the way outside the body. The cord is typically embedded in a bulging red sac like a gruesome birthday balloon.

  That red sac now protruded from the middle of her newborn’s back.

  Over 90 percent of such children died before they were two years old. Prevailing medical opinion was that surgeons should leave these children alone until they reached the age of two. If they survived that long, they were strong enough for treatment, but otherwise, they were a waste of medical resources. Parents were advised to cherish their babies for the short time they had. Josef Warkany disagreed with this “ethic.”

  Carole had never imagined her own child on Warkany’s examination table.