Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (9 page)

I put it on thick back then: black eyeliner, shiny pale pink lip gloss, I did it all. It was all to look the part of a cool, confident chick. I thought,
Okay, so I don’t have a whole body. But every other part of me has to be perfect
. My clothes had to be perfect. My body had to be well groomed. Along with feeling pretty, striving for perfection gave me a sense of control. Other aspects of my life had a life of their own—like the abrasions and my anxiety. But clothes, makeup, and hair were mine to master.

When I was in college, Robert Clergerie platform shoes were hot.
Finally,
I could wear trendy shoes. That summer, I wore pants with them every day, and felt fashionable. A friend—in a miniskirt, which was also the look of the summer—and I stood at a bar one night, waiting for the bartender to take our drink order. She fanned herself, and then pointed at my pants and asked, “Aren’t you hot in those?”

I thought,
If someone asks me if I’m hot one more time, I’m going to freak.

“I’m fine,” I’d say.

I saw a look flicker across her face then, as she remembered,
Oh, yeah. Leg
.

The bartender arrived at the nick of time. “What are you drinking?” I asked my friend, always moving the conversation to safer ground.

Friends forget about my leg fairly often, actually. We’d go shopping, they’d pull a tiny skirt or pair of shorts off a rack and say, “You’d look so great in these. With your long le—” Then their eyes would go wide, and they’d sputter an apology. As weird as the moment was, it confirmed that I’d done my job. I’d made them forget.

•  •  •

Nowadays, I wear whatever I like. I prefer opaque tights, not necessarily to cover up, but because they’re more fashionable than sheer. When patterned tights were hot, I wore them without problem. No matter what, I try to always look as well put together as I can, even when I’m just running errands (another trait I inherited from my mom). When I feel good in my clothes, I feel good in my head. That has nothing to do with my prosthesis. I believe in doing whatever you can to feel strong, beautiful, and happy. Physical imperfections shouldn’t stop anyone from feeling pretty. Ever. In fact, it is the imperfections
that are often the most beautiful. It took me until my late thirties to realize that.

In season five of
The Real Housewives of New York City
, I appeared on national TV in a bikini, my leg visible for the entire world to see (the world that watches
The Real Housewives of New York City,
anyway), a clear sign that I, and the aesthetics of my prosthesis, have come a long, long way since summer camp. It took until I was forty years old to fully accept myself. With the cameras rolling, I knew there was no turning back now. My days of passing for “normal” were over. I would never be able to go anywhere again without people knowing about the prosthesis. The leg was out of the closet. And it was a huge relief to wade into the water one inch at a time, just like everyone else.

W
hen I was in tenth grade, shortly after we came back from India, my mother started drinking again. She’d never been a morning person—Dad was the early riser who had breakfast with me and would make me drink his freshly squeezed orange juice. When she was sober, she’d get up to kiss me good-bye and say, “Have a great day. I love you,” before I went to school. When she was drinking, though, she stayed in bed.

In the evenings, she wandered aimlessly from room to room. Dad watched TV in the den. Mom would drift in. She sat down for a minute or two, not talking or paying attention to the show. Then she drifted out. She came into my room, said a few slurred words, and seemed fuzzy. Then she walked out. Sober Mom was purposeful, clear, and reliable. I could count on her. Drunk Mom was a muddled, blurry outline of a person. A dotted line of her movements around the house would look like the flight of a bumblebee, swirling and backtracking.

I came to understand that her patterns weren’t as random as I thought. When she drifted out of the den or our rooms, she headed straight for the kitchen to sneak wine. One time, I found her guzzling a bottle while standing at the sink. I grabbed it from her and threw it on the floor. Green glass and red wine went everywhere.

She looked me in the eye and said, “I wasn’t drinking it.”

Her denial couldn’t be shattered, even with the evidence of it on the floor around us.

•  •  •

By seventeen, I was ready to get out of New York. I had lived in Manhattan for my entire life. Like all high school seniors, I needed to put some distance between my family and myself. I didn’t want to move hundreds of miles away, just far enough to avoid a casual parental drive-by. My high school grades and scores were solid. For my college application essay, I wrote about Sai Baba. For good measure, I threw in a tape of me playing Chopin’s “Fantasy in D minor” on the piano. I was accepted to Vassar, a small liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, my top choice. It was only eighty-five miles away from Manhattan. If I had to, I could be back home in less than two hours.

My boyfriend, Mike, and I made the wise decision to break up the summer before I left town. He still had to finish his senior year at Fieldston, and I was starting a new life upstate. “Who knows what’ll happen?” we said tearfully. “We might get back together someday.” I couldn’t have imagined a better, sweeter first love—or a smoother breakup—than I’d had with Mike. I thought all of my future boyfriends would be as kind, loving, and patient with me. I envisioned going from one fantastic guy to the next, always being the one to end things or mutually parting ways, until I found my prince.

Boy, did I have a lot to learn.

Vassar was founded in 1861 as a women’s college, one of the Seven Sisters, for the female siblings of Ivy League brothers. In 1969, Vassar went coed—on paper, anyway. When I arrived twenty years later, it still seemed like male students were theoretical. The ratio was about three to one female to male. The scarce male students themselves were five to one gay to straight. It seemed as though for every straight male, there were four hundred hard-up women. I exaggerate, but not by much. In such dire circumstances, what could a red-blooded American woman do? I lived with two roommates in the dorm called Strong, a.k.a. the lesbian all-girl dorm. The nickname certainly wasn’t
entirely
accurate, judging from my dorm room.

The brochure and tour had charmed me with the brick and ivy-covered buildings. I expected Steinway pianos in each dorm, bookish-yet-stylish
The Group
–type women in smart blazers trotting on horses across the quad. I thought we’d stay up until 3 a.m., debating Camus and Nietzsche in black cashmere turtlenecks while holding lattes in our hands.

Instead, Vassar might as well have been Woodstock. Barefoot hippies tripped around campus with dreads, tie-dye pajama bottoms, and Baja pullovers. Parties centered around pot and “funnels,” a plastic funnel duct-taped onto a long plastic tube. The funneler put the tube end in her mouth and knelt on the floor, while her friends poured beer into the funnel. You didn’t have to be a physics major to understand the effect of gravity on chugging. Beer careened through the teeth, over the tongue, look out stomach, here it comes. I didn’t funnel, but it was entertaining to watch my friends do it. They sure got wasted, which was their goal. Inhaling a carbonated beverage at top speed wasn’t my thing. It seemed reckless and kind of stupid. I wasn’t into drunken girl-on-girl hookups either. And there was no amount of beer on earth that could make Birkenstocks attractive.

Where were the blazers, lattes, and horses?

My leg was a nonissue. Students from Manhattan who knew about it probably told others, but it was not a cause célebrè. Given my dress code of keeping covered, people forgot, didn’t know, and certainly didn’t give a crap. There was a pile of weed to smoke! Who cared about some girl’s fake leg?

The Manhattan students at Vassar hung out together. We were nicknamed, ironically, the “Beautiful People,” or BPs. I was kind of awed to find myself in the circle of BPs, even if the classification was meant as an insult. David Prince was a BP, and legitimately gorgeous. A charismatic New Yorker, he was a born socializer, could work any room, and had already dabbled in party promoting. Even by city standards, he talked, walked, and thought lightning fast. I’d heard about him through friends in the city during high school. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone wanted to know him. He was magnetic. Women and men were drawn to him. He was a force of nature that couldn’t be contained. I managed to grab hold of him freshman year.

Enter boyfriend number two.

David’s best friend was Alex von Furstenberg, son of Diane. One weekend, Alex and his Swedish girlfriend took David and me to Diane’s house in Connecticut. We walked in to find the famous designer cooking dinner in the kitchen in her bare feet. And we sat at stools and talked to her while she chopped vegetables. She looked at me and said in a thick French accent, “Darling, you have a beautifooool baaady.”

I said, “Thank you!” I wasn’t sure if Alex had told her about my leg, or if she noticed anything. I was covered up in jeans, but she was an expert on the female form and might’ve picked up on my thick ankle. Regardless, her compliment seemed genuine. I accepted it wholeheartedly.

Later that weekend, Alex did 360s in the mud in my brand-new
Wrangler Sahara Jeep, with all four of us hanging on for dear life. It got stuck and we had to be towed out. Hey, I didn’t have to funnel to be reckless and stupid. I had my ways. But alcohol would not be one of them. The children of alcoholics tend to become either heavy drinkers themselves or complete teetotalers. With my anxiety and low weight, even a glass of wine at dinner might make me feel disturbingly out of control.

My original intention at Vassar was to major in drama. Acting and playwriting sounded great. But the major mandatorily included set design and costume-making, which weren’t as appealing. At one of my first theater classes, the teacher pointed at me and said, “You are sitting in Meryl Streep’s chair.” That was the kiss of death. I realized in about five seconds that I was not cut out for drama. So I switched to the next choice on my list: French literature.

During the spring break of my sophomore year, my mother and I went to France, just the two of us. Springtime in Paris with Mom. It was very romantic. We had some fantastic meals and put a few dents in the AmEx. At a store called Chevignon, a salesman came up to offer his help. I was nearly blown off my foot. This guy was a cross between Liam Neeson and Johnny Depp—handsome and
sexy
. His French accent was sublime. Yann was the most devastating man I’d ever met.

He showed me some jackets, and then asked me out. Mom let me have dinner with him one night during the trip. I drooled into my soup du jour just looking at him. But that was it. Nothing happened. I was only twenty, and knew my mother was waiting back at our hotel room. Yann probably thought I was just a cute kid. Also, we had the language barrier. His English was limited to articles of clothing and their prices. My French began and ended with the menu. But we had a wonderful time. I felt very grown up, and deliciously sexy.

The City of Lights turned me on. Paris was splitting its seams with
men like Yann. If I could find one who spoke decent English to have dinner with, I’d be happier than a
porc dans la merde.
By then, David and I were done. I’d walked into his room and found him in bed with a girl named Vanessa and that was that. Also, Vassar’s grunge culture had lost much of its limited charm by then. So I campaigned for my parents to let me move to Paris for the summer.

“I’m a French literature major,” I said. “I need language immersion. It’ll be great for my academic career.”

My parents were all for it. They loved travel, and wanted me to have adventures and be happy. I suspected Mom liked the idea because I’d be one less person in the apartment on the hunt for her stashed wine bottles. The thought gave me a second of misgiving. But then I got over it. I was twenty, and over the moon about living by myself. Compared to the suffocation of Vassar and New York’s tight web of social connections, Paris was wide open. No one knew me, or my history, there.

I rented an apartment in the neighborhood called Le Marais in the Jewish quarter on Place de Thorigny right next door to the Picasso Museum. Le Marais was one of the trendier, artsy arrondissements, known for its galleries, clubs—gay and straight—and restaurants. It was the Greenwich Village of Paris. I felt like I’d found my true home. I loved New York, but Paris was . . .
Paris
! It was heart-stoppingly beautiful. Every street, every building, every woman had untouchable style. The cobblestone streets were a little hard to navigate, but I got used to it. Even the cart food was mouthwatering. No boiled hot dogs and greasy knishes here. The vendors sold falafels with hummus or fresh crepes or
jambon et brie
sandwiches, all delicious. A simple omelet, baguette, and coffee was a transcendent meal at the corner bistro. How did they
do
it? I could not leave at summer’s end. No way.

Vassar had a junior year abroad program. I applied to study literature in Paris for both semesters, and was approved. My Marais rental was up. I had to find a new place to live. My friend Samantha Kluge had a two-bedroom apartment with Eiffel Tower views on Avenue Emile Zola in the 16th arrondissement. It was
really
expensive, but my parents let me take it anyway.

My parents contributed. They had me on a Paris budget. But I had a lot of my own money. When I turned eighteen, I gained access to the settlement paid to me by the Morgans’ insurance company. I called it my blood money. It was a lot, and I spent freely. I do not know how much my parents supported me or how much I supported myself. My father dealt with the finances. I do know that I felt financially very secure.

The French school program was called Via Paris, for Americans to immerse themselves in the language and learn about literature and culture. I took the Metro there and back, roamed around the city, ate and slept on my schedule. No one knew where I was, what I was doing, or whom I was doing it with. I was completely, deliriously anonymous. I took risks that in New York would have triggered panic attacks. I stayed out late, talked to strangers, and walked the streets alone. I went places I didn’t know with people I’d just met. I ate anything, and left my windows open at night. For the first time in my life, I was fearless.