Poster Child (12 page)

"That's not right," Mom said after what would be the last session with Schmidt. "You
still
look like you're stepping into a hole with the left foot. It's ridiculous. We're going to Elliot."

We assumed that Dr. Elliot had recommended Schmidt because he was the most reputable prosthetist available in the Denver area. To our surprise, when Mom asked him if there were others we might try, he handed her a slip of paper with a new name, number, and address.

"Larry Gibbons is a great guy," he said. Mom looked at the name and then at Dr. Elliot.

"Has he been at the orthopedic clinics before?" A group of prosthetists gathered each week at the Children's Hospital.

"Sure," he said, standing. "Is there anything else?"

"Wow," Mom said. The relief in her voice was infectious.

"That's it," I said brightly.
Problem solved!
I thought.

As we were leaving the hospital, Mom said, "I could just string Dr. Elliot up from his toes for not telling us about this new guy sooner." She smiled as she said this, sounding as giddy as I felt.

For all of my elation at the prospect of finally being able to walk comfortably again, I felt guilty and uneasy about leaving Schmidt. He had done so much for me; he had even convinced my parents that I would be successful in the dance class I had been desperate to join. He called me Ms. Ballerina Bo Bina and made a leg that enabled me to twirl and spin and leap; I still could not move as beautifully and straight-backed as the other students in my class, but I could fling myself across the floor in routines choreographed to tunes from the
Fame
sound track. I felt a deep loyalty to Schmidt. Our relationship was odd—transactional yet tender. Because he had made a part of my body, the care of his hands was with me; his mark was on me. He'd taken the leg to the back room again and again, trying to get it right. At the end of our relationship, I saw desperation in his old, wrinkled face.

What would happen to Schmidt? Would all his patients desert him as I had? I imagined him sitting in the back room in his filthy, plaster-flecked apron surrounded by legs and tools and full ashtrays, listening to the lonely drone of his melodramatic music and the dull roar of slurred conversation made by the midafternoon drunks next door: As the neighborhood had slowly deteriorated, the hamburger joint became a noisy dive bar. You could hear clinking glasses and arguments on the other side of the saw room wall where the repaired legs were lined up. Would Schmidt join those rowdy drunks? Would he chain-smoke himself to death in one of the ugly office chairs? For months, whenever I thought of his bushy eyebrows, his smelly, hardworking hands, his bald head covered in brown age spots, I felt like crying.

I told nobody about my fears or sadness. Instead, I expressed excitement at leaving Schmidt. Only secretly did I feel disloyal. We had shared something. He had been the maker of my first leg, the creator of a part of the body that I would have, in slightly different shapes and forms, for the rest of my life. I was also grateful to him, a fact I admitted to nobody, because I felt it bound me to him in a way that made me nervous. He had not only provided me with a means of moving, but the intimacy of the act was unique. Schmidt had enabled me in a significant way. His handiwork was part of my every footfall, my every move. It was strange to imagine someone else touching me in those same places again.

I developed a similar attachment to anyone who touched my body or saw it in its most vulnerable, legless state: friends and in particular, as I got older, lovers. Once I had revealed my deformity to them, exposing myself in a physical way, I was afraid to let them go. Much later, this thinking would become paramount and destructive in my intimate relationships with men.

But for now, at age ten, what I knew for sure was that I would have a new prosthetist, a new maker. There would be no more trips to Schmidt's office. How, I wondered, would this new man be different?

At first, Larry Gibbons seemed like a dream come true. I couldn't stand one more day of being forced to interrupt my activities to unbuckle the waist strap, slip out of the too heavy socket, peel off the stinking, sometimes bloody stump sock, and minister to the sores. I had begun to feel that my disability was slowly taking over my life. I just wanted to
walk,
to
run.
I didn't want to be bogged down with these cumbersome details and time-consuming inconveniences. Larry made a prosthesis that fit well. I never asked him how he made it, I was only relieved to begin sixth grade with a new leg that worked and felt right, that indefinable feeling when it feels less like an external tool and more like a fundamental, even natural part of your body.

I never asked my parents how they paid for this leg. I assumed they would find the money for what I needed, and they did. They never complained, and I never thanked them. I forgot all about Schmidt after a while. Larry was my new prosthetist, and without any further doubts or questioning, I put my absolute trust in him.

Larry saw clients in a run-down brick building behind a used-car lot in downtown Denver. The painted sign hanging above the lot read, "Lemons: 2 Rent or 2 Own," and featured a lemon traveling on wheels and wearing a toothy, painted-on grin; a cloud of exhaust rose from its back end. When the wind was blowing, which it frequently was, the sign swung back and forth from a metal chain. In the winter, the lemon's face was often covered in ice.

As we made our way down the small driveway that led to the parking lot at Larry's, the car salesmen stood near their office, which faced the door of Larry's building, and watched us. I felt their eyes on me as I stepped out of the car. At this point, Dad and I would become extremely chatty with each other, trying to defuse the tension we both felt but would never name. We watched the salesmen group up together at the edge of their lot, staring and smoking. I waved at them and smiled, knowing somehow that it was important to acknowledge them in their cheap suits with their cigarettes pinched between their fingers. Perhaps they were entertained by the amputees driving through on their way for a tune-up. I may have been the only girl they saw passing by on the way to Larry's. Gawking appeared to be the only activity they ever did, as we never saw any customers waiting to buy one of the sad-looking cars: huge, dented Buicks, old Fords, a few beat-up Camaros in strange shades of yellow and green.

As we drove past the "lot o' lemons," Dad always hummed to himself. Sometimes he lifted his index finger off the wheel in a subdued salute; this was a method of greeting farmers on gravel roads that he'd learned as a boy in Illinois. Requiring little effort, it was an expression of obligatory friendliness. In light of the way I felt about the "car-men," as we referred to them, the insincerity I detected in his gesture pleased me.

I never saw another female amputee in Larry's waiting room. The majority of his patients were friendly older men—mostly war veterans—who smoked cigarettes in the waiting room and flirted with Tanya, the office receptionist, who wore bright coral lipstick and had tightly permed blond hair held away from her face with small hair combs.

Thin sheets on shower rods served as examination room partitions. Every once in a while, a patient opened the wrong curtain and found me sitting on a bench in my underwear. This did not bother me. I usually waved and said hello as, visibly flustered and embarrassed, he closed the curtain and walked away to another room.

The veterans I encountered in Larry's stifling, dirty rooms had lost a leg or an arm in combat or from combat-related injuries in Vietnam or World War II. Some of the men could recall the moment of loss in precise detail. Their stories were full of war.

I envied the veterans in a strange way. They were intimately familiar with the sources of their own pain: land mines, shrapnel, or bullets. Nameable, knowable agents of destruction. They had medals and uniforms that explained the shape of their bodies. It was the fault of war, not an accident of nature. Plus, they were heroes. They had survived. They trusted me with the gory details of the truth; they told the story of their limb loss as well as they remembered it.

Eagerly I listened, fascinated by the way many of the men could recall the exact moment the leg was taken from them. They remembered a slant of light through trees or a particular gust of soft wind; someone shouting in the distance; sometimes such a stunning, obliterating noise that it rendered the world temporarily silent. In return, I told them stories about school and skiing and whatever else was on my mind that day. I was never made to feel anything but equal to them and valued.

Still, I felt that my story paled in comparison. It didn't seem dramatic or memorable, but more than anything else, it was vague. I remembered the surgeries, but I certainly wasn't awake when the foot was disarticulated, that fancy word. I had clear memories of pain and of being in the hospital, but the moment of the loss itself wasn't etched clearly into my memory as the veterans' stories were—the "story of the lost leg" was not a clear tale or a distinct narrative; instead, it was a reality I lived on a day-to-day basis. Could it be that I didn't remember the pain of the operations but just confused it with the pain the wooden leg sometimes caused me now? If that were true, what did it mean about the knowledge of my own body? And if I didn't have all of the critical information, how would the body ever truly feel as if it belonged to me?

I pushed aside these lurking questions as I wondered at these men who had walked out of war and survived—not entirely intact, but alive nonetheless. They didn't want to constantly talk about the pain of having a fake leg; they didn't want pity, and neither did I. It seemed to me that they just wanted to live—not as extraordinary or magnificent, but as men. They wanted to feel whole and normal and powerful as they once had. To me, they were regal and honorable: kinglike.

I felt united with them as they flipped nervously through thin magazines in uncomfortable, unpadded chairs, chain-smoking and waiting for Larry to summon them wordlessly with a nod of his chin or a wave of his hand to one of the crappy examination rooms. Once there they would be asked to disrobe and then be scrutinized, measured, and informed about the limits and shapes of their own bodies in a tiny cubicle surrounded by a sheet with a half inch of black dirt along the bottom edge. Half the time I wanted to go with them, as if they needed protection from Larry's monotone voice and his damp, measuring fingers.

Imagining those men wounded and exposed, with the details of their trauma palpably apparent to them each day they woke up and put their legs on, made my chest ache. It wasn't fair that people's bodies could be so easily and permanently destroyed. At the same time, I convinced myself that I was nothing like the vets. As much as I wanted to feel a part of them when it suited me, I used the veterans as a way to gauge my own luck.
At least that didn't happen to
me,
I'd think, which was precisely what some people, no doubt, felt about me. It made me feel superior and allowed me to pity them without implicating myself in these thoughts.

I took up the vets' time with my constant chatter and continuous demands for their attention. I stood in the middle of the room on one leg and hopped around, singing until someone joined me in song, or I asked one of the vets to time me as I hop-raced around the room; they never refused me. I often referred to them as my "leg friends."

Still wearing their legs, the guys chased me, exclaiming, "You're just too fast on that one good leg!" I giggled and hopped in circles around them until my right foot was black with dirt from the floor.

One of the veterans, Hal, was a particular favorite of mine. With virtually no stump at all, he was the most one-legged person I had ever seen and one of the few who, when I asked him to, didn't seem embarrassed about taking his leg off in the waiting room, in full view of Tanya and the other patients. His stump resembled a square flap of skin attached to his body.

"Kind of like a bed skirt," he said.

"Or a curtain for a little window," I chimed in.

"Like a little dog door," he said, chuckling. "Now you, you've got yourself a bat there; a good solid piece."

Together, we checked out my stump. It was long and steady and bore my entire body weight without much trouble. It looked crafted and strangely complete. It had an even, clean-looking surface. The scars were like light etchings pointing down to the rounded heel and the small ankle bone; the even stitches reminded me of the delicate veins of leaves that ran from the stem to the tip, crisp but soft looking.

"It's like a hammer," I said, moving the stump up and down. "A gun." I grasped an imaginary trigger.

"A gun!" he said. "What's a pretty girl like you gonna do with a gun?"

I blushed. This was an obvious lie requiring a substantial stretch of the imagination. My huge glasses got thicker and heavier every year. I wore headgear with my braces at night and woke up with a face full of dried slobber. I was hopelessly scrawny and pale and never got a tan, just millions of light brown freckles. My long red hair was, to my great dismay, stick straight.

Hal had a broad chest and a scar near his eye where a bullet had grazed him and left an indent the size of my fist. He had muscular, hairy arms, and his fingers were so fat, I watched carefully as he removed his limb, surprised that he could maneuver the straps and buckles with his enormous, awkward-looking hands. Even more unsettling was to imagine him shooting a gun with those hands, something I knew he had done.

"How'd you lose it?" I asked when I first met him. It was so nice to be in a room where I could ask this question of other people and not always be the one answering it. At the grocery store, at school, or when I met someone for the first time, I was often asked: "What happened to you?" "Are you limping?" "What's the matter?" "Did you hurt yourself?" "What's wrong with you?" At Larry's, for once I was the curious one.