Poster Child (17 page)

These friends—Melissa and Ashley and others—asked mostly simple cause-and-effect questions: When did I lose my leg? Was it cancer? Did it hurt when it was cut off? Dressed in my pajamas and sitting on the floor, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and cans of soda, I told my story to their scrubbed faces, to the mound of warm, skinny bodies dressed in flannel and satin and piled up like puppies on the bed. I liked telling my story—I'd throw in a few jokes or embellish a few parts and feel delighted with the brief moments of concentrated attention. Laughter was the currency I accepted for the telling of my story. Make someone laugh about your faults, I had learned, and they almost always accepted you.

None of the girls wanted to hear about the logistics of prosthetics: where they were made, who made them, the pain of walking with an outdated wooden limb. They didn't want to hear the macabre facts of my life. And I did not want to tell them.

Another song came on: "Sweet Child O' Mine." The girls sang as the car sped past tall, skinny trees and rows of raggedy cornstalks.

This time I sang along, too, but inside I panicked. Everything but the leg felt borrowed. I looked out at the Nebraska sky—so pressed down and changeless, so unlike the sky in Wyoming that opened up like a big dome, with clouds at one end of the horizon and blue sky at the other. I knew I'd never be able to compete in the strange, secret world I was about to enter with these girls. I would never be able to play by the same rules. Maybe I would always be running from boys instead of sauntering up to them with naive confidence tinged with nervousness as my friends did. I knew, as we sped through the abandoned gas stations and warehouses on the edges of town, that someday someone was going to want to see this leg, with a miniskirt, without any skirt, with the leg
off.
I felt a horrible, hollow feeling deep in my chest. It was as if someone had set a bell in the middle of my stomach and started ringing it. The ringing would never stop. The warm air rushed in through the open windows, and the whole car reverberated with my friends' singing voices, the notes spinning out into the hot night.

Melissa revved the engine and turned onto a gravel road that led to a clearing. She put her hand out the window and pretended to lasso the air to the tune of Ashley's hollers and shouts and Axel Rose's final, glorious guitar riff.

I thought again about my jeans in the backseat. They were my out. I watched Ashley's tanned, smooth, stick-thin legs move as she bounced in her seat. We were almost there, and I would be forced to get out of this car. I needed those jeans. Now.

There was a pile of sweaters in the backseat in the unlikely event that we got cold later on. Ashley had winked at me as we were putting the sweaters in the car. "Really, they're just so we have something to sit on when we make out with boys," she said. Over my legs I stretched the sweater that matched this skirt; it was also Melissa's, also from Spiegel, but it was softer than any sweater I had ever owned. "Cashmere," she'd said. Although it made me feel even more uncomfortably warm, the sweater felt unbelievably soft on my leg; the wonderful fabric moved quickly over the slick surface of my prosthesis.

Thick columns of smoke were visible in the distance. The bonfire at last! Melissa and Ashley squealed in their blissed-out way as we pulled onto a gravel road. The cornstalks crinkled like rustling paper. I heard snippets of laughter and words.

"There better be so much beer left in that fucking keg," Melissa said. "I only took that Schlitz so I wouldn't come here empty fucking handed."

"Fucking right," Ashley said. "Aren't you
excited,
Em?" she asked, reaching over the backseat to squeeze the top of my arm. She smelled like Exclamation perfume.

"Yeah," I said, my stomach roiling. "Uh-huh."

We took another right down a small dirt road, and there was the bonfire: a tall tower of sticks leaning into one another and burning.

People's shadows jumped in the intermittent flames of the fire, making their bodies look short one moment and tall the next. With the flames spitting and leaping behind them, their shapes changed rapidly and strangely. Their movements were animated and precise, almost tender in the flickering light, like the delicate movements of shadow puppets. Sometimes the figures looked headless or armless, and that's how I did what I did next. I didn't even have to try very hard. I imagined myself suddenly legless, forced to hop into that mass of whole bodies with the scarred-up end of the left leg, stinking and red from being shoved inside the socket all day during the heat of summer. Everyone would stare. Everyone would see. Everyone would know the horrible truth about me, about my body, because what was a person without the body? Even more important, what was a
girl
without her body? With the image of my legless self in my mind, exposed to everyone, including these girls—my only friends—I moved the sweater off my legs and threw up in my lap.

"Oh,
my God!" Ashley screamed, turning around to look at me. "Gross
out!"

Just when I thought I had ruined everything, Melissa took a quick turn and stopped the car near a row of corn. "Shut
up,
Ashley!" she said. "Not another word."

Openmouthed, Ashley looked at Melissa. Melissa stared at her. Ashley shut her mouth, stepped out of the car, and slid into the backseat with me. She looked up at Melissa and then scooped up the puke with Melissa's expensive sweater. I felt as though I had won some unnamed battle, that this round in the invisible fight was mine. Although it had seemed impossible, I had found a way to hide.

"Don't worry, Emmm," Melissa said, stretching those last sounds into both a purr and a warning for Ashley, who patted my arm sheepishly, her eyes on Melissa.

"Sorry," Ashley whispered. "Sorry I had a cow and freaked out."

"It's okay," I said, holding the soiled sweater in my lap—it was a warm, stinking ball.

"The jeans!" Melissa said, as if it had just occurred to her. I nodded. "Get them, Ashley," Melissa ordered, and then looked over her shoulder. "Don't worry," she said. "All clear."

Ashley quickly got out of the car, opened the trunk, grabbed the plastic bag, and handed me the jeans. Melissa sat beside me and rubbed my back. I thought I might start to cry—not with embarrassment, as they all assumed, but with relief. No way would I be forced to enter a party with the school's most popular girls while wearing a skirt covered in barf. Ashley stood watch facing the bonfire in case anyone strayed over and tried to see what was going on. I pulled the jeans on under the skirt and then carefully wiggled the soiled skirt over my legs and handed it to Melissa.

"Sorry about your clothes," I said, and I was, but I was also strangely, deliriously happy. "I'll wash them or replace them."

"Don't worry about it," she said. She put the sweater and the skirt in the bag and tossed it far into the field. "Now I know what barf bag really means." She laughed. "Plus," she said, "I have another sweater and skirt just like it. Duplicate Christmas presents."

I didn't know if she was lying or not, but at that moment I felt a sudden surge of hope mix with the hot air and the smell of dried corn and the stink of my blue Slurpee vomit. Maybe these girls really were my friends—maybe someday I could tell them the truth about the leg, talk about it with them. Just as quickly, I realized that this would never be possible. I would never be able to do it.

"Thanks," I said, getting out of the car.

Melissa fluffed my ponytail with her fingers. "C'mon," she said. "Let's go." We all left our Slurpee cups on the floor of the car, per Melissa's instructions. "We go in with only the Schlitz," she explained. "And hopefully we will not be forced to drink it."

Ashley handed me a stick of gum. "Good thing I have this, cutie," she said, and squeezed my arm, steering me toward the bonfire.

At the party, I sat in one place the whole time, holding a plastic cup full of beer that I pretended to drink; every once in a while I forced down a few small sips. I saw my first drunk person, stumbling as he walked, spitting into the fire. I met my first college fraternity guys, all of whom wore the same uniform: a Nebraska Cornhuskers ball cap, a Cornhuskers T-shirt, denim cutoff shorts, and flip-flops. Those boys looked huge and monstrous to me. They drank and drank without stopping; I'd never seen anything like it. With all the smoke from the campfire and the wet dirt kicked up by dancing, drunken feet, the slight odor of vomit coming from my leg was just a low smell lurking beneath the air's surface. I was probably the only one who noticed.

Melissa drank until she began slurring her words. Ashley flirted with Jonas, the most popular guy in our grade, crossing and uncrossing her legs as they sat together on the ground. I didn't talk to many people; I just smiled a lot and sipped the horrible keg beer. Ryan did bring a date, but I didn't care. I was happy looking normal in my jeans and sitting in the same spot on the ground, just watching the action from a distance. With the leg mercifully hidden, I was protected.

Later that night, Ashley drove us home. "Don't worry," she said. "I only had a few." Melissa was passed out in the backseat and needed to sleep some of it off, she said, before she walked through her front door for eleven o'clock curfew. "See ya," Ashley said as she dropped me off. She sped away before I was inside the house.

I opened the door quietly and went upstairs. My throat felt chalky from the sugary Slurpee and the "accident" in the car. I knew the fact that I had just made myself sick with thoughts about my own body was linked to cute boys and hiding or running from them, although the connection was unclear and would be for some time. I did know that I would never allow anyone to see my artificial leg up close or free of my body, not ever. I resolved that nobody—especially a boy—would see my real body, even if it meant wearing jeans during the summer and not wearing the latest fashions and never going on a date. I wasn't going to tell stories about the leg anymore or talk about it one bit.

I resolved—as I had so many times before—to be as normal as possible, only this time the resolution felt more desperate and urgent. I would go on a real diet, the punishing kind that made you sick with hunger. Mom had been on several of those restrictive plans before; I had a vivid memory of her pulling out a plastic bag filled with only five thin crackers and eating them slowly and carefully, one at a time, as she drove through the Dairy Queen drive-through window to get me a chocolate sundae. I would do that if I had to. I would work harder; nobody would be able to match my control, my discipline, my drive. If there was going to be pain in my life, I would be the one to inflict it.

I promised myself that I would make the one leg I had perfect; I would contain my body and control it. I would punish it for not being the way I desperately wanted it to be. I felt strangely empowered. If Schmidt, Larry, or Vince couldn't do it with prosthetics; if God—my first Creator—had refused to do it in response to my prayers, then I would remake the body myself. I would have vigilance over this process and make myself new. I knew such control and self-denial would be challenging, but in all my youthful ambition and narcissism, I believed there would be a payoff, eventually, if I gave myself over in full to what I saw as this necessary task. In joining the trend of girls' obsessions with their bodies and adopting pathologies around food, I was in fact making myself more normal than I'd ever been before.

I tiptoed into my parents' bedroom to announce that I was home safely. Mom shifted under the quilt.

"How was it?" she asked groggily.

"Fun," I lied. She nodded, looked at the clock on her nightstand, which read 11:15, and smiled at me before closing her eyes again. Dad was a loudly snoring mound beside her.

I changed into my pajamas, went to the bathroom, and wiped down the leg with a few drops of Mom's lemon-scented body splash, which masked most of the vomit smell. I dabbed some of the splash on the hinges because they felt sticky and smelled like wet, rusted metal. I gave the entire leg a final once-over with silky Avon bath powder.

I felt both protective and resentful of my leg that night. I felt that we had weathered some trial together, and through that experience it had become more than just an object, more than an expensive, human-made artificial device designed to make me appear whole. But even if my disability experience made me strong, as my parents told me; and courageous, as so many had claimed; and special, as the March of Dimes had led me to believe, how could I ever truly accept that it wouldn't be better to have a naturally whole, normal body and simply avoid all of this?

I propped the leg against my vanity table and crawled into bed. A bright moon hung in the window. The houses in the neighborhood were quiet, boxy shadows with a few windows full of light. A dog barked twice and then was quiet. In the distance, tires squealed around some unseen corner.

I felt restless as I lay there, conscious of wanting the leg back, even as I longed for it to disappear and play no more part in my life. It looked exposed, naked, and separated from me, just as I felt vulnerable without it, even in the privacy of my own room.

My reflection over the top of the leg looked old, and finally I rolled over to face the wall. For weeks, when I looked in the mirror I saw myself in that hot Nebraska field, limping along at the edges of a party. I saw myself holding a cup full of beer, wearing jeans, and smelling vaguely of my own vomit. That girl was trying to tell me something, but whatever she had to say, I didn't want to hear it.