Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (6 page)

Mom had an even more puzzling relationship with her obstetrician. Dr. U. never nagged her about birth control. She used the rhythm method, and after the near-fatal delivery of her eleventh child, Dr. U would finally tell her she ovulated
twice
a month.

“Why did he wait until you had eleven kids to tell you that?” I asked as an adult. And Mom said, “The man was a genius!”

“Does Dr. U happen to be Jewish?”

“Catholic,” she would say. “I think. But he was
very smart
, I-lean.” Mom emphasized the first syllable of my name when she was either peeved or giving me what she considered important information. I never liked the sound of those two syllables together, especially as others mimicked her. Eventually I figured out that a bad joke had been embedded into my name. At some point I turned it around in my head and heard “I-lean” selectively, as if to silently turn the joke back on my mother. As for Mom’s ideas about doctors, she wasn’t worrying about the irony contained within her theories. Except on matters of birth control, Mom usually followed Dr. Epstein’s advice. At his suggestion, she enrolled me in a Montessori program held in a woman’s basement. There the Montessori teacher allowed me to kick off my metal braces. When Mom complained, the teacher said, “But crawling is a sign of genius!”

Mom rolled her eyes at this, although later, with a hint of pride, she repeated this “hippie” philosophy to her friends. The women from our neighborhood looked doubtful, while Mom’s oldest friends nodded their approval. My parents had grown up on the more liberal east side. Their childhood friends lived on tree-lined streets with hills and older homes with “character.” Eastside folks would never abdicate to the flatlands, with its checkerboard lots and homogenous homes, but as our family had expanded in size so had our parents’ conservatism. Like the other mothers in our neighborhood, Mom saw preschool as something akin to a mother’s greatest sin, evidence of shirking child-rearing responsibilities. But what could she do? I’d been tackling her daily, screeching the whole time that I had to go to school, “Right now!” Mom understood that I wanted to be with my siblings, but she didn’t realize that I was terrified of being turned away from school. Aside from that, I was bored.

Mom was tenacious about my prosthetics despite questionable support from the medical community. One surgeon, a family acquaintance, wanted to construct a foot to attach to my knee; if Mom had followed his advice, I would have been three and a half feet tall. She instantly discarded that idea. An orthopedic textbook I would study twenty years later stated emphatically that no one could possibly ambulate on two prostheses
.
”Oh, really?” I said to myself, and silently I thanked Mom for pushing me into a pair of legs.

As clients of The Hanger, we would have to pay the price in time: time for fittings, time for orthopedic consultations, and time for physical therapy. In the end it would amount to dozens of appointments, and all without any guarantee of success.

Now, we were on our way back to The Hanger, another week, another drive across town. There was a red light ahead, and Mom gunned the accelerator. “I’m a nervous wreck,” she said, slamming on the brakes. “What is this? Our sixth time?” Six, seven, what did I know? I only knew that we went to a place where a man’s leg was hanging in the window, which I thought was the reason it was called The Hanger. Still, sitting at the light, I wished we could be here for any reason other than the leg man. We were in the rundown part of Walnut Hills, not far from the mansion at DeSales Corner where Mom had lived until her grandfather died.

We turned into a square. The oldest parts of Cincinnati have always had squares, some bounded by fancy shops and outdoor cafés, and others like this one: cars staggered diagonally by meters at the hub of businesses that people needed but wished they didn’t. Here were appliance repair shops, funeral parlors, and everything medical. Mom was edgy because she couldn’t find a parking place. “Used to be you
wanted
to live in Walnut Hills,” she muttered. She yanked the wheel so hard that something squealed as she circled the hub.

I looked up from my window at turrets and spires jutting from third stories, my eyes sweeping down patterned brickwork to the picture windows at street level. They showcased wheelchairs, caskets, and Alka-Seltzer. Mom glided her gold square-backed Volkswagen into a metered spot. In the rearview mirror, she checked her makeup for smudges and ran a finger over her Liz Taylor eyebrows.

Below the dangling leg in the window was a March of Dimes poster. I secretly dreamed of replacing this poster child, a boy leaning into crutches as if to struggle for every step. He wore a suit and tie, his hair slicked back. I imitated the way he set his jaw, so determined. This was a boy everyone loved. If I were the March of Dimes girl, people would love me just as much. They would stand in line for a chance to lug me around. If all I had to do was dangle my own wooden leg in that window to be discovered, then I would do it.

Mom plucked me out of the passenger seat and kicked the door closed. She steadied me on top of her pregnant belly as she struggled to find change for the meter. I slipped down and shimmied up onto her baby-belly as a kitten might cling to a basketball; below us shards of glass littered the curb.

Mom twisted and wriggled to dig through her giant purse. That’s when it occurred to me that aside from getting me into legs so that I could go to school, Mom wanted to fling me from a rapidly disappearing hip so she wouldn’t have to carry me anymore.

I decided to quit. I would not be a part of this experiment. Even the doctors weren’t sure I would walk. Why should I try? Instead, I could sit back and let Mom lug me around for life. “I’m not doing it. I’m not going in there.”

Mom wasn’t in the mood for my fuss. I dug my fingers into her chest and shoved away from her. She had to lift her leg higher to keep from spilling her purse while she locked me in place. She was hopping around on one leg so we wouldn’t go down in a sprawl over that broken bottle. “Stop it!” she snapped. I was enjoying it, though, as we dipped and twirled, the glass pointing back at us from this angle and that—until I lost my nerve.

We both froze.

Mom’s bag slid down past her knee, almost out of reach. “Damn it, Eileen.” She gripped me to her chest and at the same time shifted to catch the handle of her purse. “Don’t you know I have a roast in the oven? I’ve got three kids to pick up after this. Baseball, pimple doctor, fat doctor. All I do is run you kids around.”

“But why do we have to come
here
?” I pulled away and waited for her to blast me. Instead she leveled her handbag and held me tightly. For moments such as this, Mom summoned composure from a secret source. She looked into my eyes and said, “I honestly don’t know, Eileen. We’re here because it’s the next step. I have no idea where it’s leading, but we’re going to take it.”

Her eyes watered. She was pleading, and I did what I always did when I wanted to bring her back. I touched the skin on her cheek and put my own cheek to hers. It was warm and moist and we melted into one.

She went back to digging in her purse, found a nickel, and shoved it into the meter. “Got it,” she said with pride. Resigned, I nestled into the place below her chin and against her neck.

Mom had to lean us both into the door to open it.

The waiting room was a hodgepodge of vinyl chairs with thin, oily cushions. Tattered magazines spilled from end tables, prayers were mounted on the walls. I couldn’t read but I knew about folded hands with glowing auras over words. Mom set me down on a chair and I smelled talcum powder, sawdust, and burning metal. The sound of industrial-strength machinery blasted through walls from the back room.

Another person waited that day, a man as old as Grandpa. He had one empty pant leg, and I was wondering how he’d lost that leg. I tried not to stare. Under his cold gaze I found someone who looked as if he’d just been socked in the jaw. Our eyes met and his face softened from a wince to a pity-filled look. I curled up in my chair so I would disappear and thought, “He pities me?”

The Hanger prosthetists all seemed to be missing a limb. They were the only amputees we knew. (No one in my family ever called me an amputee, except for Rosa and Liz, who had made up an “amputee camp” called “Wa-heel-la.” Around the dinner table they crooned its anthem: “Sing around the campfire; throw your wooden leg in! Sing wa-heel-la. Sing wa-heel-la. Work. Whittle. Squiddle!” Our parents could not fight the grin on that one. They’d laugh out loud, then Dad would say, “Stop it. That’s awful.”)

As Mom and I waited, prosthetists would stagger past, toting a leg or an arm with a hook. I drew back. Mom clutched her purse to her lap as her shield.

One redeeming feature of these visits to The Hanger was that I got to have Mom to myself. Here I could forget where we were and plant myself in her childhood—no, her teens. I could grow into someone else, someone Mom equated with pure joy, her best friend from the days when she had Dad on the run. I wanted to be a part of that life.

I would say, “I saw you and Fran at the Pogue’s Arcade yesterday.”

She always knew I was talking about the fourteen-year-old Joy and Fran. She’d respond, “What were we doing?”

“You each had a dish of ice cream at the counter in the coffee shop.”

She’d arch her back—good posture ranking among Mom’s highest values—and smile. “That sounds about right.”

“You had vanilla. And it only cost a nickel.” I knew this from our talks about the Depression. Everything tasted better in the Depression.

“A nickel was a lot back then. Graeter’s was better, though. Back then it stuck to the roof of your mouth, it was
that rich
! For a dime you could suck on a scoop of Graeter’s all afternoon.”

I could taste Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip on the roof of my mouth, but then I’d drop my chin and see grass stains on another of Liz’s hand-me-down sailor collars. I was forever rolling downhill on our front lawn because I loved the tickle of grass against my skin and the way my body fit neatly into a ball if I rolled head-first.

I looked at the old man and his empty pant leg and thought, “What did I do to deserve this?”

Mom covered her nose to avoid inhaling sawdust—dust, fat, and loose hair being among the things that Mom could not abide—and said, “Aw, heck!” She tended to say this when she was really thinking, “We are so screwed.”

I didn’t belong with wounded men; I could see that in her eyes.

They called us back to a fitting room with fiber-wood paneling and a full-length mirror at the end of parallel bars that looked to be about a mile long, although they measured about ten feet. We sat in chairs at the head of the bars.

“They’re gonna put you in your legs today,” said Mom, “and
you
are going to walk between those bars right up to the mirror.”

“Really?” I thought.

The leg man entered, clutching a wooden leg in each hand. To me they looked huge and heavy, but in fact they could have been marionette legs, except that the below-knee leg—the BK as he called it—had a leather corset to fix onto my thigh, attached by metal hinges. Those hinges would bend with my knee. But would they take a chunk of my flesh along the way? The whole contraption seemed barbaric. The above-knee leg was shiny wood from the top of the thigh to the tip of its elfin foot.

The leg man cupped the legs in his hands the way Pete Rose would grip his bat after he swiped it between his thighs. I couldn’t imagine how I would lift them, let alone make them walk. In his own prosthesis, the leg man kneeled inside the parallel bars, right in front of my left leg, to attach the BK to my real body. His hands coated in dried goop from someone else’s thigh, he lifted a lamb’s-wool sock from the pouch on his rubber apron, shook it in my face as if holding a fancy doll, and asked, “Like that?”

I shrugged before remembering to smile.

He slid it onto my real leg, covering the part just below my knee. “How’s it feel?”

“Good,” I said, and strangely enough it wasn’t so bad. I looked down to find his part: a chalky-white line against oiled hair flecked with sawdust and talcum. This man seemed more suited to roll under a car and poke around like a mechanic in a car dealership than to wrap his hands around my thigh. But here was my future: I would look onto the crowns of others as they kneeled before me, my princes, who would not bring glass slippers for my feet.

In her own chair Mom sat with eyes wide, not saying a word, the ash on her cigarette dangerously long. The leg man slid the artificial leg over my sock. He laced up the corset around my thigh, pulling until my leg went numb. My face in the mirror was all knitted brows and pressed lips. Next to me Mom wore a haze of cigarette smoke like a halo. I wanted to tell the leg man about the tightness, but he noted my distress. “You’ll get used to that,” he said. “Now stand up.”

“How?” I felt stupid for asking.

“Well,” Mom said flatly, before she escalated to a shriek, “just like anyone else!” Her arms unraveled into an outward thrust that said, “Isn’t it obvious?” A chunk of ash broke from her cigarette, landing on a floor that I was sure had seen worse.

I looked at her in the mirror: legs crossed, arms stretched out like a saint before execution. She yelled, “Come on!” I would have bet she was playing her whole afternoon out in her head: “Baseball, pimple doctor, fat doctor, roast. And get that Eileen into a pair of legs, damn it!” To this I thought, “Over. My. Dead. Body.” I pushed back into my seat and crossed my arms.

She came forward, right into my face, and whispered, “Whaddaya think you’re doin’?” There was silky black down on Mom’s skin. It was so fine that to me, with my fairer complexion, basset-hound eyes, and hair a mixture of elements—copper, gold, and Midwestern mud—I saw Mom’s down as a mark of pedigree, a symbol of what I had yet to achieve. That is, if I ever grew up. Now, with her eyes bulging and her jaw quivering under the down, I imagined she was sprouting a beard. My mouth went sour as I gave in to tears that I’d been trying to choke off.

Mom froze momentarily.

The fists at her sides relaxed, and she broke. “Oooh, I-lean!” She slammed back into her seat and tossed her head back. “What am I gonna do with you?” She raised a fist to the ceiling. Her jaw jutted, she stressed every syllable, plus a few of her own. “Will-la I e-verrrr win with this chi-old?” And then she cried.