Poster Child (11 page)

"I'm sorry I called you that," he said. "I think you're great." But in the picture I didn't have glasses or a wooden leg or big, unwieldy buckteeth. I was a perfect little girl. He'd even drawn me with blue eyes, which I was desperate to have. I thought Brian and God were mocking me.

Mom looked at me. "What do you think?" Her eyes looked sad. I knew what I was supposed to do; I'd been taught to be polite.

"Thanks," I mumbled.

"I didn't mean it," Brian said to the floor. Mrs. Tanner nudged him. "Honest," he said, looking up at me. "I'm sorry."

I looked at the image of myself in the drawing: perfect, whole, beautiful. I wished he'd never given it to me.

"Anyway, you were right," I said. "I do have a wooden leg." In that moment, it felt compulsory to say this. Before the shame of the statement registered in me I felt a strange power, like a shock wave, moving through my whole body.

They all looked at me. "Yes, you do," Mom said. "And you are great."

"Uh, sorry," Brian said, although he sounded unsure about what he was apologizing for. All I'd done was told the truth.

Mom squeezed my shoulder. "What do you say, honey? Brian said he was sorry."

"It's okay," I told him. "Uh, yeah, it's all right."

Mom held out my hand and grabbed Brian's hand as if we were appliances and she was plugging us in. We shook hands.

"There now," she said as Brian and his mother walked away. When Mom touched me, I shook her off and walked away.

Dad used to take me to the nursery and let me play, alone, while he counseled people. I'd peek out the door and watch another disturbed soul come up the stairs of the narthex and shake the snow off their boots before stepping into his office. This was the place I went now, for solace. I wanted to get lost in the sea of babies who always needed my help and didn't care how my body looked, as long as I changed their dirty diapers and played with them.

Growing up, I was considered special and different because I was the pastor's child. In this, Andy and I were finally equal, as the attention had nothing to do with my leg or being the poster child. At church, both of us received identical treatment. We got along best while we were shaking hands in the receiving line, trussed up in our Sunday best, the two cute pastor's kids, doing their best to act like adults. We stood up straight, shook hands with each person as they moved through the line, and said, "Merry Christmas," or, "Happy Easter," followed by a few seconds of idle holiday conversation.

I especially liked joining Dad in the receiving line at the end of the service during these two holidays, when the church was guaranteed to be packed with strangers. As they left the sanctuary, people bent down to say hello to me, people who had come for this one service and would probably never come again. I loved these visitors because I could easily fool them. My act worked perfectly. They would go home remembering me as the smiling, redheaded minister's daughter who would grow up to be beautiful and smart (or this was what I imagined). All of those people, literally hundreds of them on Christmas Eve and Easter morning, would be duped. None of them would know my secret, and I considered this a serious triumph. I could talk to any of those people in line, even longer than Dad or Mom could.

I had special, beautiful dresses for holidays: for Christmas, dresses with black velvet bodices, green-and-red-plaid silk skirts, and black patent-leather shoes; for Easter, pale yellow dresses with layers of white lace cascading down the front, a white straw hat with small plastic daisies nestled in the crown, and a white patent-leather purse in which to carry my offering. My long hair was always decorated with bows and ribbons that matched my dress. From the way I stood, nobody knew I had an artificial leg, and I relished this easy deception. It was intoxicating to pretend to be something you were not if you knew you could never be the way you truly wanted to be. I looked forward to those hand-shaking sessions; I felt they proved that I was strong enough to do the impossible, with or without God's help.

Chapter Seven

MEET YOUR MAKER

Instead of a line drawn on the kitchen wall that shows my growth over the years, I have more than half a dozen wooden legs that not only document the inches grown since my foot was amputated at four years old, but also reflect the progressive developments in prosthetic parts and equipment. At first, most feet were made exclusively for men; then prosthetic companies began to make more slender and aesthetic-looking feet for women with delicate toes and less ropy, more feminine veins. Eventually, in my twenties, I received a foot with an adjustable heel height and wore my first pair of heels at the age of twenty-six. For a while when it was first released on the market, I wore a man's Seattle foot, complete with bulgy, lifelike veins and thick, wide toes.

Artificial limbs have changed enormously from the iron legs of medieval times and the crude peg legs of the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth century, wooden legs with metal joints were common and featured flexible leather sockets before the important advent of acrylics and silicone. Most were fastened to the wearer's body with leather lacings and sturdy cloth belts, not unlike the canvas waist strap on my early limbs.

Each of the legs stacked in my closet has a set of metal hinges on either side of the socket (on the first two, the hinges are on the outside; later, they are covered with wood) and a waist strap as the method of suspension. Each has layers of added length at the ankle—like flesh-colored bricks that have been glued together—which indicate how much I grew each year and in what increments. The shank of each leg is made of wood; the socket is painted to resemble wood but is made of molded plastic—a material perfected to meet the prosthetic needs of new amputees returning from World War II.

Limb technology has been continuously advanced by two historical factors: the industrialization of America (which led to accidents in mills or factories) and the needs of limbless soldiers returning from wars. In many cases, these prostheses were fitted to adult bodies that would change little. A person might wear the same leg from the time he acquired his disability until the end of his life. But for amputee children, "one limb for a lifetime" is clearly not sufficient; their unpredictable growth spurts pose a unique functional and financial dilemma. This was certainly the case with me.

In 1984, at the end of my fourth-grade year, I grew out of the prosthesis I had just been fitted with in the fall. The socket was too tight and made my stump throb with pain. I developed pressure sores that itched so badly, I would scratch them until they bled, trying to get to the source of the discomfort, which felt as deep and hidden as the bone. The leg was too short. When I walked, I felt as if I were stepping into a hole with my left foot. At the end of each day, my lower back ached and I was dead tired from the energy it took to move.

My parents hadn't yet paid off the leg I was wearing and didn't have the thousands of dollars for a new one. I had grown too fast.

"Aren't legs supposed to last longer?" Dad asked. He had taken an extra job as a bus driver to cover my prosthetic expenses, which were only partially covered by his insurance. Each morning he got up at five A.M. and worked a school bus route in Laramie before going to work. Sometimes he honked and waved as his bus passed me on the short walk to school. This embarrassed me. I didn't want anyone to know that he drove a bus because of me. It seemed like a menial job, even though many of the kids I went to school with lived on ranches and came from working-class families; there weren't that many rich kids in Laramie.

"It's a growth spurt," Mom said. "What can we do?"

As soon as school was out, Dad and I drove to Denver to see if Schmidt could make my leg fit until the money for a new one was found.

In the center of Schmidt's office, Dad and I stood on the prosthetic "runway"—the familiar stretch of dirty linoleum lined with two balancing bars. That day it was about one hundred degrees in the room. Dust particles made lit columns in the thick air. Everything in the office, from the brown floor tiles to the ceiling-to-floor windows to the cheap, smelly couches to the outdated magazines in the waiting room, was covered with a thin layer of the pale brown dust, fine as snow, which spun off the special blade as it made adjustments to wooden legs in the back room. Each time Schmidt took the leg to the "saw room" in the back of the office, Dad and I sat in plastic chairs on the runway, listening to the fuzzy whine of the leg saw spinning its magic.

I used to hop around in the back room where the limbs were made. I listened to the country music playing on the radio and to Schmidt's exasperated swearing over my leg's current problem. Sometimes he and I had talked about school or the weather as I leaned, legless and in my underwear, against the table with my elbows in the saw dirt—the remnants from people's plastic sockets and wooden calves. These chats would routinely be interrupted by his exclamations of "Shit!" or "Goddammit son of a bitch!" I fell silent while he continued cursing under his breath and grinding out the prosthesis with differently shaped sanding cones to accommodate weight gain or other changes in my body. When the moment passed, he'd ask me something like "So, what's your favorite subject at school?" in a cheery voice—this was my cue to renew the conversation.

The air was so thick with dust and dirt, you could practically chew it. The saws and routers didn't scare me. I knew these instruments could cut into the wood-flesh of legs, into the plastic sockets, but there was never any blood, never any gore. Schmidt was like a sculptor, manipulating body parts beneath his hands. I was fascinated by the clinical, artistic nature of this process, for I knew that it differed greatly from other activities involving flesh and bone.

Each year during hunting season, people in our congregation gave us deer meat. Although Mom didn't like the taste, she felt guilty throwing it out, so the square sections wrapped in white paper ended up in the garage freezer together with ice-cream bars and flavored ices.

I had seen several deerskins hanging in parishioners' homes, and I asked one of the hunters how he skinned the animal and retrieved the meat. How did those lifeless chunks—frozen solid in our freezer—become separated from the soft skin hanging on the wall? "It's a messy business," he told me. The pieces of flesh had to be cleaned from the hide, bit by bit—the shoulder, ribs, loins, and legs—and these bits were called fleshings. When I looked it up in the dictionary, I found that it also meant "flesh-colored stockings" and was listed just under the definition for flesh and blood. I would think of fleshings again, that strange word, when I received my first hydraulic prosthesis and routinely ordered packs of expensive flesh-colored nylons to cover the leg.

Everything Schmidt did to the body parts that amputees entrusted to him was sketched out beforehand on small grids with light, careful drawings and meticulous notes: maps of the body that served as the prosthetist's guide. Everything Schmidt did to my artificial leg was bloodless and clean, although as I watched him I often thought of those skinned hides hanging on the walls of ranchers' homes or spread out like rugs on the floor.

Near the main worktable in the back room, the casts of people's stumps stood around like strange papier-mâché objects. They were long and short, fat and skinny, and they lay on the table, on the floor, and stacked up on shelves against the wall. Legs that were ready to be returned to their owners following repair were stored in clear plastic bags and lined up against one wall. Attached to the top of each was a little tag that read "Allen" or "Briggs" or "Rapp" to identify the source and owner of the bloodless body part inside. The bags looked like collected elements from a crime scene, visible to all for scrutiny. Later, when the prosthesis was tucked inside blue, opaque bags, I called them "body bags"—another crime scene image—and when I opened them, a strange antiseptic smell shot out.

During this trip, I was too tired and frustrated to chat with Schmidt while he worked, so Dad and I sat on the runway, waiting. All around us, wooden prosthetic limbs and rubber feet hung from the ceiling on frayed cotton straps. They looked like misplaced limbs severed neatly from their bodies. Estranged and neglected, they were objects without purpose or use, waiting to be inhabited again or claimed by the person who would pull them off the strap and give them a reason to exist.

I liked to imagine the people who belonged with those lonely objects. It made me feel less vulnerable and less alone as I sat there, separated from my own leg, waiting in a dirty, dust-filled room. I knew that those other legless people were out there somewhere, hopping around with one pant leg that filled with air as they moved—kids and old men and mothers and teenagers, people who got up in the morning and put on their leg straight away—people like me.

I felt amputees everywhere when I was at Schmidt's, like a community of people with similar bodies who lived only here and entirely in the abstract. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to see these parts of others' bodies hanging from the sky. Dad and I sat in silence, watching the limbs sway in the slight breeze from the single ceiling fan.

"He'll figure it out," Dad said, more to himself than to me.

Schmidt returned to the runway and slid a slim plank of wood beneath my artificial foot. He placed his hands on my pelvic bones to be sure my hips were even. When I grew, the foot was twisted off (it was attached with a thick screw) and a piece of wood was secured to the ankle. This would help for a while, but after so much length was added, the leg became unstable and it looked strange, too. The additions were never exactly the same color as the rest of the prosthesis or each other, and they were never lined up precisely, creating bumps and creases at the ankle. These reminded me of the ceramic animals with uneven hooves and lumpy ears that I created in art class and which Mom displayed in the living room.

For the next hour, I tried to walk, but the socket still felt too tight—despite the many times Schmidt ground it out—and when he removed the leg and touched my stump to check for signs of friction and heat, the skin was bright red and hot to the touch. "Shit damn," he mumbled. Sweat was draining from his bald head as he went to the back room again and again. He tried wooden planks of different thicknesses at the ankle. He toed the foot in and out. He ground out the socket again and again. He attached a thicker waist strap that covered more of my hips and would hopefully alleviate some of the leg's drag. He smoked an entire pack of Lucky Strikes, filling the room with smoke. Dad and I were sweating, too, and my right knee was bruised and dirty from falling down.

"We'll get it," Schmidt said. "But you must learn to balance." I took a step and fell again. Now the socket was too loose and felt insecure around my stump, but it was still terribly heavy. The new strap felt like a harness. It was upsetting to walk in a limb that had once fit so well and now felt foreign. What had once felt like part of my body now felt like an instrument of torture. Each step was more like a stumble.

"I can't do it," I said. "It's not right. It hurts."

"You can't fix it?" Dad asked Schmidt, his hand on my arm.

"I can fix it for now, until we get the new one ready."

"It's hurting her," Dad said. "Can't you fix that?"

The frustration and sadness in Dad's voice made me cringe. That morning, he'd been helping me put on my left shoe, which required a shoehorn and some serious pushing, and had finally given up. "Dammit!" he'd said, and he'd thrown the clunky shoe across the room. At that time, limb companies made artificial feet for men and sometimes for children, but not specifically for women or girls. I had a Seattle foot, which I had wanted because it had anatomically correct toes instead of just a smooth, toeless surface, but it was much wider than my right foot. Not until the early 1990s would I have an artificial foot that was small enough to match my own size seven foot. My parents became accustomed to buying two pairs of shoes to accommodate the difference in the size of my feet, and sometimes even the larger shoe was a struggle to fit over the Seattle foot. We frequented shoe stores that would give us a discount on two pairs. Particularly beloved store managers often threw in a pair for free.

Dad had looked at me and apologized. He'd sat on the floor, breathing hard and wiping his eyes. "Sorry, I'm sorry," he'd said. I'd picked up the shoe on the other side of the room and then sat next to him on the living room floor, ashamed. It was my fault that he was so tired, and now he had gotten angry.

"I can do it," I said now, stepping out onto the runway. "I'll do it."

"Don't walk on it if it hurts," Dad said.

"I can do it," I said. "It's fine."

"Try again," Schmidt said. I looked at Dad. He gave me the thumbs-up. I let go of the bars.

That day, I learned to walk with the extra height added to the ankle, but I knew it wasn't going to work for very long. "Well, I'm glad that's worked out," Dad said as we drove away from Schmidt's office. The relief in his voice was palpable, and I said nothing.

Despite Schmidt's efforts, by the end of the summer before fifth grade, the troubles with the leg had worsened and intensified. I was limping more, and at night I'd show Mom the sores and calluses that were developing. On my right big toe was a callus so big and unfeeling, it could be cut off with a kitchen knife almost every two weeks. I got blisters on the bottom of my stump that swelled and popped, leaking a clear, nasty liquid.

The leg felt nearly twice as heavy as the others. It was like a painting that has been altered too many times, making the canvas heavy and thick with layers of corrective paint. The alignment always felt off, and my gait was awkward. No matter how much Schmidt altered the foot, no matter how many times he adjusted the hinges for correct alignment, walking didn't feel natural. When the knee swung through, it made a louder than usual cracking sound and I felt pressure and vibrations through my stump and hip. Schmidt simply could not get it right, although he certainly tried. Dad and I were at his office nearly every other day that summer.