Poster Child (15 page)

"It can't be that bad," Andy said in a not unkind voice.

"Shut up!" I wailed, and Dad shot him a warning look.

Mom kept her arm around me, saying, "Oh, honey, don't cry." But crying seemed the only sensible response. "It's not your fault," she said. It didn't matter whose fault it was. I was deeply, deeply embarrassed, as if a piece of humanity had been scratched off of me—or had it been denied me? And I was angry, so angry that I had to let some of it out or I felt I would not be able to breathe; the rest of it I kept bricked up inside.

For years, I tried to remember the warm and steady pressure of that man's chest against my arm and my shoulder and how it felt when his chin bumped against the top of my head. I held to that moment, afraid that he might be the last man who would ever touch me.

As a child, I committed countless biblical verses to memory. I spoke them aloud, feeling the ancient words roll and bounce in my mouth. As I learned them, adding a construction paper link to each verse I memorized until they circled my room like a ring of dull lights, they were simple word reels I unwound in moments of distress, as known to me as the patterns of my own breath, and equally calming. In my mind, I saw the words with the small chapter and verse mark between them. So I knew the line well enough from Ecclesiastes:
What is crooked cannot be made straight.

Before this incident, I had only felt disabled during my routine checkups at the hospital, when I felt that I had stumbled into another girl's life, and she was not lucky or intelligent or "super" as I was, but had a body with a corresponding chart documenting precisely what was wrong and what had been done to try to correct these deficiencies.

I knew my medical records were thick and heavy—a massive accordion file of write-ups and prognoses. Numerous X-rays with slick, curling edges. Itemized bills and carefully recorded dates of contact with the insurance company. Pictures. Nurses' notes from specific surgeries documenting when IVs were inserted, when wounds were checked, when bowels moved. Notes Dr. Elliot had scribbled to himself that nobody else could decipher.

Each time I went in for an X-ray, I had to remind the technician to tape a lead shield over my lower abdomen so that the radiation wouldn't harm my reproductive organs. This was a task Dad delegated to me when I was thirteen, after he explained how important it was. "They'll forget unless you remind them," he warned me.

Once, when I had requested the lead, I said, "For when I have babies," just making conversation. The technician—a woman—said to me, "Oh, sweetie, I don't think you'll be having any babies." Another male technician laughed. I insisted on the lead anyway, telling myself that they were just kidding around with me.

When the X-rays came back, I saw my bottom half, from the belly button down, asymmetrical and lit up on the board. There was the dark gap in the screen—the space a normal leg would have filled; there was the shadow of a heart over my uterus and ovaries as if it had been drawn there as a joke, dark and arbitrary as graffiti. Sometimes the heart would be askew, the edges of the tape that held it to my lower belly visible as railroad tracks on the X-ray board. There it was: my body lit from the inside out and exposed for the mess, for the complicated accident, for the
trouble,
that it truly was.

In this moment, with my body exposed in front of not a doctor or an X-ray technician or a family member, but a stranger, the loss of my leg and its implications for the rest of my life fully registered for the first time. I would never be made right or restored to true wholeness—not ever. A missing leg suddenly made all the difference in the world, poster child or expert skier or student manager or pretty girl or not. It was the deciding—perhaps eliminating—factor.

I missed Hal terribly. I understood him now better than I ever had. Although I had not lost my leg at war, I knew now how it felt to think of a life full of possibilities—any that your imagination might conjure up—and then have those notions destroyed. I knew now what it felt like to wake up to a body that changed your future and your options. And what could you do about it? Nothing.

Now I understood why the vets had told me their stories in careful, whispered tones—the only way to partially redeem the loss was to remember it, although even this retelling brought with it its own wretchedness. My loss was never more clear to me than on that day I was carried home in a strange man's arms. Complete and irretrievable loss was just that: permanent.

The body has a remarkable ability to displace pain. First it's in the abstract, then it's in your skin as a feeling, before it moves into your mind as a story, but sooner or later the pain ends up in your heart. And that's where it stays. Words spoken aloud in your moonlit bed—crippled, deformed, unlovable—find their own darkness and then come back for you.

Chapter Nine

FASHION PLATE

Melissa's red Mustang was parked in the lot at the Gas N' Shop. I sat in the backseat of the car. Through the windshield, I saw my two friends—Melissa and Ashley—inside the store, buying candy and sodas. I looked at my two legs—the right one real, the left one artificial—in the rearview mirror. Melissa tapped on the glass window of the store and waved at me. I lifted my hand and forced a smile as my eyes found my legs once again in the mirror.

Bared in a black miniskirt, my white leg was very white and tinged with blue from the neon sign and the fluorescent parking lot lights. The wooden leg glistened; it was almost as reflective as the smooth side of a spoon. I tried to pull the black, slinky skirt farther down to hide my legs, but it slid between my hands and slithered up far above my knees, leaving the glossy metal hinges of my prosthesis exposed.

I had agreed to wear this skirt because it was the summer of 1990: the summer I agreed to do things I didn't want to do and laughed at jokes that weren't funny. I had just turned sixteen, and what I wanted more than anything else in life was to be beautiful. I didn't care about being smart, successful, or good. In fact, I believed that beauty was the prerequisite for achieving any of these other qualities.

I was wearing a miniskirt because I thought, somehow, that if I dressed like these girls, I would become like them—sleek and pretty, with lithe, tanned legs. Popular. Self-confident. Desired. I thought I could simply will myself into this type of being, into a different, magical life.

I had lied to my mother. I told her that my friends and I were going shopping, then to the movies, and then back to Melissa's to celebrate her entry into the adult world: She could now legally drive, having just passed her driver's license test that morning. In reality, Melissa and I hung out in her room gossiping all day, and now she was driving our group to a small town to the east, where there was a college fraternity kegger in a cornfield.

Earlier that day, Melissa had stolen a six-pack of Schlitz beer from her parents' pantry. "Nobody can stop us from going," she said, "and I don't want to go empty-handed. This is a night for
drinking.
What if the keg is drained when we get there?"

I didn't know what a keg was, but I said as emphatically as possible, "That would suck."

Melissa smiled. "Totally. Anyway, they buy this shitty beer when they have really big parties, and they only drink it after everyone is super drunk." I loved Melissa's disrespect for the rules. Her bright, confident voice made every idea sound delicious and worth doing.

"Let's get schlitzed," she said, giggling.

"Let's," I said, giggling, too, although I wasn't completely sure what she meant.

Through the store's big windows, I watched Melissa walk down the candy aisle with a smooth dancer's glide. Her head tipped back slightly in laughter as she watched Ashley, in the opposite aisle, shaking her blond, perm-perfect curls in an animated way that meant she was telling a joke.

I stared down at my legs again, then up at their reflection in the rearview mirror, grimacing, becoming more and more agitated. Down and up, down and up. My right leg was white-on-white aspen white. As a redhead, I could not aspire even to the gray brown winter color of girls' legs in Nebraska before the summer, when, bikini clad, they lounged on lawns and sloped roofs, tanning their legs and the rest of their bodies to a rich, oily brown color. They called this quintessential summer activity "laying out," as if they were arranging themselves on a surface to be examined or offered up for sale.

I looked out the window at the moon and wished to be in Laramie. I missed the ease of those days and the comfort I took in the fact that everybody knew the story of my disability. I had never known that such a thing could be a comfort until I no longer had it. I never had to worry about wearing short skirts or shorts in Wyoming, either, because even in the summer, the temperature rarely topped eighty degrees. This was my second summer in Nebraska. I hated it.

My family had moved from Wyoming to Nebraska in the middle of my eighth-grade year. During that first summer, the heat and humidity had been intolerable. My leg was unbearably hot, but I refused to wear shorts, preferring instead to sweat profusely in long pants or jeans. I watched soap operas and ate my dinner at four-thirty in the afternoon, bored. I discovered aerobics and calorie counting; it provided structure and meaning to my days, a controlled rhythm. I often cried myself to sleep at night. Once, Dad sat on the other side of my locked bedroom door and cried, too. I was quite melodramatically inconsolable. I could not imagine not being lonely, not being strange.

Nobody was happy in Nebraska. Mom worked as the nurse at a factory, a job with horrible hours and even worse pay. Andy worked long shifts stacking watermelons and grapefruit in the produce section of a supermarket to compensate for his lack of a social life. Although Dad was happy with his new position as assistant to the synodical bishop, he was distressed that everyone else was miserable. After school started, I made a list of all the activities I was involved in—I played the flute in band, took private voice lessons, and was active in the church youth group—to see if this made me feel better. It didn't. Dad assured me that things
would
get better. "This too shall pass!" he exclaimed optimistically. I did not believe him. "Have some faith," he said, but I didn't. All I did was talk about Wyoming and how much I missed it, which only made everyone feel worse.

We lived on a street lined with two-story houses, just off a busy highway and near a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. That first summer, the three girls my age who lived on my street did not invite me to do things with them. I often heard them in the backyard of the house next door, giggling and laughing. So when the school year began and I was asked to join their car pool, I was initially grateful.

Christine was one of the girls who lived in the neighborhood; she also sang in the school choir with me. One day, after the first few weeks of school, she leaned over to me in the car. Her look was conspiratorial, and I stiffened with expectation. If she told me a secret, it meant we were friends, that things were changing and maybe Dad had been right. Christine whispered in my ear, "You know that nobody likes you, don't you?" I did. I had simply assumed. Her words only confirmed my fears. She smiled at me and then stared out the window as we drove the rest of the way to school.

Every morning became torture. Christine usually found a way to sit next to me, even when I tried to avoid it, knowing what was coming. As soon as the car pulled out of the driveway, she whispered in my ear, "What's your problem?" or, "You look weird." She always spoke softly and with such a smile on her face that the driver would never suspect anything from where he or she sat, chatting with the girl sitting up front, who was never me. Even my own father didn't catch on when it was his turn to drive the group to school, and I never told him. He would wink at me in the rearview mirror as if to say, "See? You're making friends." I always smiled back as if his look had told the truth about the situation; I was too ashamed to admit otherwise.

My reaction to Christine's cruelty was to do nothing. My days of fighting back against insults were over; I kept silent. I accepted her statements, while at the same time feeling absolutely determined to prove them wrong. By the time we reached school, I was practically trembling with terror and rage that I hid behind a shy smile. Although Christine was a part of the cool gang, Melissa was the leader. Although Christine wanted little to do with me, Melissa had taken a liking to me, and there was nothing Christine could do—at least within earshot of the other girls—without risking her own exile from the group.

Eventually I figured out that Christine was jealous of me. At first, I found this discovery unbelievable—who would possibly envy a girl with one leg?—even though it filled me with a sweet, secret pride. She had always been the star voice in the high school choir. Now that I had come along with my trained singing voice and increasing skill at hitting operatic high notes, I threatened her top-dog status. I knew this, and so did everybody else, although I would have gladly shared the spotlight with her. I would have traded any solo in any choral piece just to be her friend. Still, I knew jealousy well enough to hear it in her voice, but I knew it was nothing to fear. I was jealous of everyone; it was a sick, spinning feeling animated by a swelling desire: for that hair, for that body, for wholeness . . . The list went on, but I had never felt that I deserved it or had made myself perfect enough to be envied at all. I firmly believed that envy needed to be earned.

Christine and I both took voice lessons from Mrs. Barry, an energetic older woman who had once been a star soprano. Now her high notes were a bit weaker, her scales more strained. Shortly before a scheduled performance, she asked her students to perform arias from the small landing between the two floors of her home, which she referred to as "the balcony stage."

My particular talent was vocal diction. I could pronounce Italian, German, and Latin better than anyone and was always given the most complicated numbers. Although I habitually choked up at contests—Christine regularly received higher marks—when I was alone with Mrs. Barry, staring at the thinning hair on her head and her wildly gesturing hands, I could really let it rip.

I stood on the balcony stage that looked out over the tiny living room littered with records and sheet music, and I let my voice echo against those walls, moving out of my body. I listened to my voice and rejoiced in it. Vivaldi, Mozart, Puccini: I felt the notes leap and move into the air. I imagined those notes going through the wall, moving up all those streets that would never feel like home.

When nobody was around to give me a score or observe me with a critical eye, I expressed that aching quality of the arias moving through me. I felt the freedom of the voice singing the wretched body beautiful, hammering everything I felt was sad about my life into something whole. I saw the real me as that disembodied voice, soaring above my physical form, separate and free.

Even though I felt sick to my stomach every morning before school, I wouldn't admit to anyone that I was picked on. I knew Mom was unhappy in Nebraska; she'd left her dream job as a private school nurse so that Dad could take
his
dream job. I often came home to find her curled up on the couch eating handfuls of M&M's from a giant bag. She had always been a healthy, careful eater concerned with her figure. This sudden change in her behavior alarmed me, and I didn't want to be one more thing to worry her. Also, I assumed that if I could convince Christine to give me a chance, I could get her to like me. I could
make
it happen. In the meantime, I tried to imagine myself as a spirit, as just my voice, unattached from my body, floating above all the fear and anxiety I felt each morning when I stepped out of the house to go to school.

I looked down at my legs in the miniskirt and felt angry with myself. My outfit before this one had been perfectly fine. Good, even. Mom had helped me decide, as she always did, waiting patiently in the hallway as I emerged from my room wearing different combinations of jeans with mock-neck turtlenecks; long skirts with ruffled blouses; patterned leggings paired with baggy shirts in fuchsia or bright green.

We liked fashion, Mom and I, and we shopped together for the best deals that fell within the range of "our budget," which on my parents' salaries was not very flexible. Mom was prudent and generous. Resourceful. She started shopping for birthday presents a year ahead of time. She spent hours with me at the mall, taking willing part in my teenage preoccupation with clothes and brand names, calculating and recalculating so that I might have the items I wanted, so I'd look my best. I trusted her opinion about what was too trendy, what was flattering and classy. Each fall, I made a wish list and she helped me whittle it down by figuring out which pieces would go together and where the sales were. I learned that it was a challenge to look pulled together, to be pretty.

When we came home from a shopping trip, I tried on my new outfits to show Dad. He always said, "Nice, very nice," although he was arguably much more concerned with adding up the prices on the tags that he caught between his thumb and forefinger as I spun around than he was about whether or not I'd successfully duplicated the latest fashion magazine look for half the price.

"Wear something you'll feel good in, something you'll feel comfortable in. Feel like yourself," Mom had said earlier that day before Melissa picked me up. That's how the stretch pants and the shimmering blue top were eliminated. "It's all a little tight," she'd said. The green hat from a vintage store was out, too, because it was too small for my head and had to be secured with a large hat pin. "It's too much," she'd said. I agreed.

We finally decided on my stone-washed Guess jeans and a short-sleeved white top with lace around the neck and sleeves. Mom let me borrow a lipstick and checked to be sure I hadn't lined the insides of my eyes with black eyeliner, which was the fashion. "Gunk in your eyes looks tacky," she said, "and it's bad for your contacts." If I hadn't been so desperate to be liked, I might have wondered what I was doing with girls who caused such an agonizing debate over what to wear and how to look. At the time, I felt lucky to have friends at all. The memory of that long, lonely summer was fresh in my mind. I hated living in a town where people stared at me and my leg more intensely than they had anywhere else. How had Mom dealt with taking me out in public when I was little and in my brace? I wondered, but I never asked her. She and I rarely discussed how members of the community might view my disability. Instead, we were united in the goal of making my life and my appearance as normal as possible. Both of us wanted me to "pass" in able-bodied society; usually, we succeeded.