To the Boy Who Broke My Clavicle

Dina Elenbogen

You must have forgotten.

I became a broken-winged bird. That May afternoon, I was likely dreaming out the window of Bnai Emunah Synagogue, while our elderly Hebrew teacher wrote in the holy tongue, vowels or biblical phrases on the green chalk board. I loved English words, the kind that allowed me to make poems. No one knew I was good at that, at anything besides flying above the other runners in the school yard.

You had heard that I was the fastest girl in the fifty-yard dash at Sharp Corner Elementary School. You were the fastest boy at Highland, near where the wealthier families lived. Kids from both schools gathered together for Hebrew. We’d never spoken before, but when word got out that my time matched yours, you challenged me to a race in the Hebrew school parking lot.

There were still a lot of people around, waiting for their parents to pick them up, when we stood together at the imaginary start line. I doubt I’d worn my gym shoes to Hebrew school but when you ordered me to race you, I didn’t think twice, even if I was wearing leather loafers. You were taller and more popular. Girls had crushes on you, your freckles and hearty laugh, your blue eyes, wavy light brown hair that glistened in the sun. I was shy and had crushes on different boys, the gentler ones with darker curls, but was honored that you paid enough attention to me to ask me to race. You carried more weight, were already muscular. The weekend before at a sleepover, my friends had affectionately named me the undernourished court jester when my red-checkered pajamas hung off my tiny frame. I was light as air which contributed to my speed, my fragility.

I don’t remember if we’d assigned someone to blow a whistle to begin our race. I only remember nearing the finish line, a few feet ahead, when you grabbed my shoulders, pushed me into the cement, to end what would have been my victory.

Someone must have lifted me up. Someone must have given me a ride home.

On a warm spring evening, I would have chosen to walk the few blocks to my house if I hadn’t felt the bone sticking out, my broken wing.

After the orthopedic surgeon put me in a cast that held my arms in the position of a bird about to take flight, we returned home to you and your parents at our front door. A teacher had informed them of the incident, and they brought you over to apologize. I don't remember your eyes that day because they were looking at your Keds, but I’ll never forget your smirk, the way you wouldn’t say you were sorry but nodded your head when your mother asked if you’d meant to push me into the cement. When your mother, embarrassed, offered to pay the medical bills, my father refused, assuring them our insurance would take care of it.

I stayed home the rest of the school year, my mother at my side. Sometimes a friend would stop by on their way home with homework, but mostly I was alone. I missed fifth grade graduation. Looking back I wonder why no one encouraged me to attend this important milestone, even with my arms stuck in an awkward position, making it impossible for me to eat or do much of anything without help. Was my mother being overprotective by keeping me at home or had my shyness taken over and I lost the desire to be in public? Maybe it was the ethos of the late sixties and early seventies and of our family to hide things, particularly our frailties. Earlier that year, my mother hid for two days the death of my Russian grandmother, Ida, who lived with us and had been in the hospital for a week. She waited until the night before the funeral, when she called me into our darkened living room to tell me why the rabbi was coming over, to learn about my grandmother’s life. Had I still been in mourning for her during the spring of our race? That November we had sat the requisite seven days of shiva but never talked, as a family, about how we felt about this loss. I wrote poems about her in my diary and sometimes imagined that she’d just gotten lost and would soon return to our home.

As the summer began, my friends were busy with overnight camp and summer activities like swimming and climbing—things I could no longer do. I wasn’t comfortable sitting on the sidelines and had refused invitations until people stopped reaching out. My self-worth diminished along with my thin frame. You never checked to see how I was doing. I swallowed the humiliation and the hurt. When my body healed by the end of the summer, I didn’t think much about running. I thought more about loneliness. You must have forgotten that summer.

Yet I began sixth grade with my clavicle intact and no residue of my injury. I was excited about attending Old Orchard Junior High with kids from Sharp Corner, Highland, and Devonshire schools. There were new kids to meet and I was no longer the injured bird but someone who excelled at gymnastics and hung out with the popular girls from Devonshire and Highland, who wore beautiful knit ponchos to school and, at least for a short time, welcomed me into their circle. I still felt shy and aware that I couldn’t keep up with my friends’ wardrobes but hid it by acting silly in class and sometimes mouthing off to our new young teacher, Mr. Olson. Did I feel like I needed to prove my toughness by reacting to his vulnerability? Had you needed to prove something to me in the parking lot of Bnai Emunah by pushing me into the cement?

During the rare occasions when I’d pass you in the hallway of our large school, I’d look away. I felt I had no right to act as though anything had happened—as though you had not caused me any harm, as though I had not been a faster runner than you. Although we were technically in the same extended friend group that numbered in the forties, I don’t remember our paths ever crossing at social events.

I dropped out of Hebrew school in seventh grade so there was now one less place to bump into you. Although at least consciously, my leaving didn’t have anything to do with you. Especially after a long day of school, I found Hebrew school dull and meaningless. I didn’t want to begin the process of preparing for my bat mitzvah, standing in front of all those people mumbling words that didn’t yet mean anything to me. I hated being the center of attention and I was still self-conscious about my birdlike body, and then later my frizzy hair and sometimes pimply skin. I had already been inexplicably alienated from the popular group I’d been brought into in sixth grade. I remember Betsy, originally from Highland, who had been my best friend the year before, pointing to my skinny legs as she and another girl passed me in the hall and whispered “gross.”

Betsy’s mother was a poet, and Betsy had brought me along to Kroch’s and Brentanos at our local mall the year before to buy her mom Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass because she knew that I too loved poetry. She was one of the first to recognize that writing poems was something I was good at. But suddenly Betsy and the others stopped inviting me over and returning my calls. Was it because they’d been over to my house on a Friday afternoon where my mother was cleaning for the Sabbath like Ida had once done and our family seemed too green, our house too small? Was it because we didn’t yet have a color TV like my other friends? Was it because I’d not yet tried cigarettes or kissed boys like some of the others had? Had they been able to sense my vulnerability, my broken wing that I had thought was intact? You were still a card-carrying member of that group with your brown wavy hair that hadn’t started to frizz, bluer eyes, arrogant smirk, and impressive speed.

In my seventh grade English class, Mrs. Rosen posted poems all over the walls. One poem was in the shape of a tear drop and must have been about something sad. I memorized them and continued to dream out the window, so much so that my teacher conferred with my parents to see if anything was wrong. They never asked me directly but said I was fine, just needed to keep my attention in the room.

Sometimes I wish I could look out that window with the young girl to see what had captured her attention. Could she have still been imagining Grandma Ida walking back from the dead or mourning her friends, wondering why she lost them? Had she also been lamenting the fact that she lost that sense of security she once had, before that day in the parking lot?

That year I started keeping a notebook of other people’s poems including my favorite, Langston Hughes’s “Hold Fast to Dreams / for when dreams die / life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” I once gave my notebook to Mrs. Rosen to read and weeks later she gave it back without saying much of anything, to my utter disappointment.

I had a new group of friends, some of whom I’d known since Sharp Corner and many who also loved poems, but books were my most trusted companions, particularly empty notebooks with intricate designs where I began to collect my own words.

I mostly forgot about you as the years passed, but never tired of telling our story. I never again tried to compete as a runner, but occasionally as a poet. Writing the better poem would never cause physical harm. Although my clavicle was long healed besides the occasional ache on a rainy day, I still carried a certain brokenness that only the blank pages of my notebook understood.

Decades later at a bat mitzvah for our family friend, I’m the mother of a daughter and son who will become cross-country stars at their respective schools. They are thin but muscular, raised with dreams and solid wings. My son scored second place at the annual Ricky Birdsong race for youth. He runs faster than the wind. He would never hurt a girl or a fly. My daughter will become the captain of the girls’ cross-country team at Evanston Township High School.

We are looking for our names on the place cards at the bat mitzvah luncheon when I see your name on the card next to ours: Mr. and Mrs. William Winer. I show this to my husband and children, laughing, saying it can’t be you. You’ve become a legend in our family, the bad boy who couldn’t tolerate a faster runner—a girl at that—whom you had to physically harm to save your ego. Everyone in my family knows your name.

As my husband Steve and I move into the party room, he notices a tall woman in the distance and says, “That must be my cousin, Mara.” Mara, a distant cousin, Steve reminds me, is six-foot-four, a onetime volleyball star with a pure soul. We remember how she’d had trouble finding a man her height or taller, but we heard that she’d finally married that year. As we approach her, she greets us excitedly, introduces us to her short, balding new husband. “This is my cousin Steve and his wife, Dina. And this is my husband, William Winer,” she says, innocently. You reach out your hand to shake mine with “nice to meet you.” As if I’d been waiting decades to say it out loud, I shake your hand back with, “We’ve met before, I’m Dina Elenbogen. You broke my clavicle bone in fifth grade.” Nothing appears on your face. No guilt. No confusion. No acknowledgment. After a brief silence, others take our place and congratulate you and Mara on your recent marriage. We work our way through the crowd to our table, on the other side of the room from yours, the encounter swirling around in my head. I am no longer a young woman with a broken wing but suddenly, as it would on a rainy day, I feel that ache, a quiver in my bones. We tell our friends at the table about this amazing coincidence, laughing, as if that were my only emotion. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t have to see you again, that as the years passed and we’d occasionally be at an event with Mara, and soon your young children, you’d be at home, we’d be told, likely watching sports on TV. Is that your escape? Through the years, during dark times, I have continued to be led by words, healed by writing and by reading the words of others. Poetry has remained a true gift.

Our encounter that day could have been a gift to both of us. A moment of truth. I still would have loved an apology. A recognition. A sign that you’d grown up and realized the harm you may have once caused. But you had no words. It didn’t matter anymore; I now had enough words of my own.

Dina Elenbogen is author of the poetry collections Apples of the Earth (Spuyten Duyvil, NY) and Shore (Glass Lyre Press) and the memoir, Drawn from Water: An American Poet, an Ethiopian Family, an Israeli Story (BkMkPress, University of Missouri). She has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Fury: Women’s Lived Experience During the Trump Era (Pact Press), City of the Big Shoulders (University of Iowa Press), Beyond Lament (Northwestern University Press), Lit Hub, Bellevue Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, december, Woven Tale Press, The Examined Life Journal, Patterson Literary Review, New City Chicago and many other venues. Her essay “Another Country” was a 2021 notable in Best American Essays.

“To the Boy Who Broke My Clavicle” is part of her essay collection, Eating and Drinking with Sages, which is in circulation.

She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago Writer’s Studio. You can find her at www.dinaelenbogen.com.