Poster Child (20 page)

I felt desperate during that spring semester. St. Olaf felt like a cage full of happy couples from which I could not escape. I envied them but scowled at them behind their backs. I drowned myself in my studies, which I fully enjoyed, all the while feeling that I was a social failure, which made me care less about my academic success.

"Every good thing you have is already inside you," Dad told me when I slumped around during school breaks, mumbling about how I was worthless and would never find a man with my hideous body. "You don't have to work at it. You don't have to earn it. That's the meaning of grace, and it's for everyone."

Mom nodded her agreement. "A boyfriend is not going to make your life perfect," she said. "You've got so much going for you. Concentrate on that."

"You're not the one walking around as a cripple," I told them.

"Neither are you," Dad replied.

"Don't use that word," Mom said.

"Whatever," I said. Dad's theory seemed naive. It wasn't realistic; it wasn't enough. And Mom? She was kidding herself. "What do either of you know about it?" I'd say. "You try this crap for one day!" They'd look at me with sad eyes as I huffed out of the room.

I didn't want to be an outcast on the edge of society and the known world, the way the blind, crippled, and lame had lived in biblical times. I knew those stories well: the paralyzed man who is lowered to Jesus through the roof to be healed; the woman who is made well merely by touching Christ's clothes in a crowd, her salvation accomplished with a flick of the Messiah's wrist; the woman with the crippled spirit and bent back whom Jesus sets free from her mysterious ailment. I had tried to seek this healing myself, years ago, on the day of my first Communion.

I had learned from my college religion courses that disabled people in the ancient world had made their money begging, waiting for others to offer help and pity They had no social currency, no standing in society. Instead, they were lessons. If you fell from grace, your punishment might include blindness or deformity, or you might inherit your ancestors' sins. The disabled body was a sign of sinfulness: a symbol of what was degenerate and unholy. I wanted to live and thrive, only what kind of life was I really having now, willingly trapped in outdated social mores and my own self-hatred? How could I make it a good one? How could I be a good person with all this rage inside me? I agonized over this.

The task of making choices that would lead to a good and right life versus an immoral or unsatisfying one—what I began to think of as a "crippled" life—drove me to declare a religion major that year. As an early reader of the Bible and a lover of its stories, I gravitated to these old—what we called "classical"—texts. Perhaps there were more elements of truth in those time-honored books, those ancient words, and maybe I would find some answers there. Eventually I did, although not the ones I had expected.

That summer, my feminist theology professor sent me
The
Disabled
God,
a book by the theologian Nancy Eiesland, who lives with a disability. At first I couldn't bear to read it, for I immediately recognized my own experiences reflected there. After a few pages, I thought,
Not now,
and would read several novels before I read two more paragraphs of the book, and then I'd put it away again.
Later,
I promised. But the book called to me in an irresistible way. There were lessons for my life in there, and I knew it.

I finally read the book from cover to cover on a pleasant summer afternoon in Colorado. I was sitting on the back patio with our border collie, Fred, at my feet; he was waiting for me to finish reading and throw his Frisbee. I had the day off from my summer job, and Mom and Dad were both at work. The sky deepened slowly to its sunset shades of brilliant red and orange and glimmering blue. The smell of dry sagebrush and lilacs hung in the air. I held the book in my hands. I had underlined almost every word of every paragraph and scribbled voraciously in the margins. I threw the book in the grass, sat on the patio, put my face in Fred's neck, and wept. He wagged his tail and licked my face. After a while, he'd had enough. He nudged the Frisbee with his nose, and I finally threw it, watching him chase it quickly and gracefully across the lawn.

I felt elated and terrified. In the book were detailed analyses of biblical texts and sociological studies explaining the emotional impact of feeling on the edge of the world or being viewed as a lesser person because of the shape and limits of your body. I read bleak statistics and stories of hope. Eiesland envisions God as disabled, as the body that is broken at each Eucharistic celebration. Her "bones and braces" embodiment challenges the notion that there is one normative standard for correct bodies and focuses instead on the "mixed blessing" of the unconventional—or crippled—body. "The disabled God makes possible a renewal of hope for people with disabilities and others who care. This symbol points not to a Utopian vision of hope as the erasure of all human contingency, historically or eternally, for that would be to erase our bodies, our lives. Rather, it is a liberatory realism that maintains a clear recognition of the limits of our bodies and an acceptance of the truth of being human." These words made a "difficult but ordinary" life possible and permissible; a life that required no healing touch, no miraculous transformation, in order to be complete or worthwhile.

My reaction to the book was emotionally complex: I felt anger at my body for being disabled, for forcing me to experience shame and loss of control. I felt gratitude for Eiesland for having the courage to write this book, drawing from her own experiences and also intelligently reinterpreting old myths and stories I had internalized and used as beacons to guide my interior life and self-image. In the Gospel of Mark, the blind Bartimaeus sits at the roadside, begging and shouting at Jesus, "Son of David! Have mercy on me!" When Bartimaeus asks for the return of his sight, Jesus says, "Go. Your faith has healed you." I remembered my wish for healing at the Communion rail; how I had blamed the lack of a godlike response on my weak faith, my inability to pray with the right amount of strength and conviction. I knew the story of the man born blind in John—the man born deficient, as I was. When the people ask, "Why was he born like this?" Jesus tells them that it is not the fault of sin, but so that God's works might be revealed in him. Injesus's reply I located a source of my desire to overachieve, to be the poster child for strength and determination, as if I could somehow be a revelation of God's works; as if my deeds could compensate for the deficiencies present at birth. In Matthew, great crowds brought "the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them." I had daydreams about being carried in my father's arms to an old, dusty temple, one hand up to shield my face from the bright Jerusalem sun. I was laid at Jesus's feet; he touched me lightly and then I was lifted into the sky in front of the gathered crowd of believers as a healed girl, a whole girl. At an early age, I took from these stories an understanding that disability was something that needed to be fixed: by faith, by Jesus, or by God's mercy. And you had to ask for it, pray for it, and, above all, believe that such a transformation could occur. As I read Eiesland's reinterpretations, it was like discovering these stories for the first time, for in her book Jesus, the holiest one, is disabled: broken, wounded, and real. And he is God. The image of God as disabled—and worthy because of this and not in spite of it—freed me, in part, from the guilt of having a deformed body. It was a guilt that ran so deep, it took the words of this author to coax it out and make me aware of it.

As I read stories of what other people with disabilities had endured, I felt a different kind of guilt that was linked to privilege: I could walk and do aerobics, I could sing and see and move and work; I was getting a first-class education, my parents loved and provided for me, and our relationships had evolved into complex—if often volatile—friendships as I became an adult; I was encouraged and emotionally sustained by my professors and my friends. Sometimes I had the extraordinary feeling that the whole world was open to me the way I'd imagined it was when I was the poster child, only this book suggested that I might have to find a new way of imagining myself as an adult. Who could I possibly be if I wasn't Supergirl? These questions made me anxious, and I tucked them away. I had my whole life to worry about them, I thought. There was plenty of time to come up with a response to
The Disabled God:
an answer back. In any case, I had more exciting things to think about.

I was going to Dublin for my junior year as a visiting student at Trinity College. I had chosen Trinity because it was one of the few programs that would take me away for an entire year. I was desperate to travel on my own and experience life in a new place. I shared this reasoning with Mom and Dad, but the other motivation I kept secret: I hadn't had any luck finding a man at Olaf, but I might have better luck with Irish men.

In the weeks leading up to my departure for Ireland, I abandoned
The Disabled God,
deliberately getting lost in a flurry of preparations. At my farewell parties, friends and family commended me, once again, for being the super, fantastic woman about to be set loose to awe and amaze the world, as if I were some kind of goddess: "What an incredible young woman you are; how brave and adventurous!" I lapped up the attention and convinced myself that although Eiesland's book had been instructive, her words and theories did not apply to me. I thought I was different from those other disabled people, and this year abroad was an opportunity to prove it.

When I arrived in Dublin, I immediately realized I had packed all of the old fantasies that had defined my life in my baggage: A handsome man would fall in love with me and in so doing make my life perfect. I wanted to be possessed, remade. Just as many men had tried to fix my body with their hands, why couldn't a man fix my life with his love?

Having left home and traveled thousands of miles to a new country, I saw that I had never lost the need to be and feel defined by someone outside myself. It never occurred to me that I might be my own guardian. I expected someone to fill that role, which my parents had begun and which my surgeon and prosthetists had continued by keeping me mobile and active in the world, aligning and adjusting the body with their various tools and expertise. My one lurking fear was this: Now that sex was part of the package, would anyone want the job?

Chapter Eleven

DIRTY OLD TOWN

Luke walked into my bedroom carrying two steaming cups of instant coffee. Just before he shut the door with his bare foot, I saw my flatmate Elodie; she waved and blew me a pinky kiss—the signature gesture we had adopted in the seven months we'd been living together in our second-floor flat along Usher's Quay in Dublin. I heard her giggle; Claire, my other flatmate, shushed her. I couldn't be sure that they didn't have their ears pressed against the door, although it occurred to me that this did not seem like a very French thing to do. Elodie had told me how deeply privacy was prized in France. "You Americans are so free," she liked to say.

"Here you go," Luke said. Carefully, he sat on the edge of the bed and handed me the cup. He wrapped his arm around me, and I settled my bare back against his bare chest, sipping the coffee. Trucks rattled by on the quays below the open balcony windows. The curtains fluttered in the late morning breeze. Sunshine sparked off the Liffey River and made the room look and feel bright.

"How do you feel?" Luke asked, squeezing my shoulder.

I looked up at him and smiled. My body hurt in new places, and my stump itched terribly from being trapped inside the silicone socket all night long. "Brilliant," I said, and it was true.

After Luke showered and left the flat with promises to call later, Elodie and Claire tumbled in, eager for the details of how I'd lost my virginity. They brought a bottle of cheap champagne and three glasses with them to toast my successful deflowering. "When did you get this?" I asked, taking the bottle. "I wasn't sure it would happen!"

"Stop that," Elodie said, and put her fingers to my lips.

I opened the bottle, and Claire filled each of our glasses. "Drink your champagne," she said.

We made a toast. "Welcome to being a woman," said Elodie. I had put henna in her short dark hair a few days before, and the light in the room caught the reddish strands and made them glow. Between sips of champagne, I told them everything.

The girls knew that I had met Luke in the bakery section of Dunne's Stores in Blackrock, a southern suburb, where I had been living with them at an international student dorm. Soon after, the three of us moved out and rented a flat along the Liffey River that was impossibly cheap and made even cheaper by the fact that Elodie and I shared the bed in the bigger room, while Claire kept the tinier room to herself. The flat was new and had been hastily constructed. The furniture was horrible, the wallpaper was pink and already peeling, and the kitchen was ridiculously small. But from the small wrought-iron balcony off the main room, you could look out over the Liffey and the streets of the Northside. It was fantastic.

On the nights when Luke picked me up for dinner in his black BMW with its fragrant leather seats, I felt my knees go weak, as they had that first moment I'd spotted him holding a loaf of soda bread. At night, the city looked as if it had been lit on fire; it zipped and hummed with the pulse of noise, laughter, and music. Dublin was as far away from a small Minnesota town as you could imagine.

On our dates, Luke and I split one or two bottles of wine with dinner, and afterward we usually met up with Claire and Elodie at Merchant O'Shea's pub or the Brazen Head. Luke always ordered four pints just before last call at eleven o'clock—two for him and two for me—and on many nights I found myself bent over the stone walls lining the Liffey, puking into the dark, polluted water.

The constant and overzealous consumption of alcohol seemed as much a part of Irish student culture as anything else. Drinking was not the moral issue it had been at St. Olaf (where "good girls" avoided it) but instead felt like a social requirement.

The more Luke and I drank, the more comfortable I felt when we went back to his swanky duplex and he leaned over me on the couch, his eyes glittering. I was thrilled but tense. "Relax," he said on the night of our first make-out session, and I laughed. I was thinking about the one and only time I'd kissed a guy in college, in his car. He'd taken off his glasses, and I was so anxious that I'd nearly hyperventilated, steaming up all the windows. I remembered the boy's lips were tight and strange, possibly as inexperienced as mine. Luke's lips were soft and supple; they moved well. It was kissing as I had never known it. I felt both released from and nudged more deeply inside my body—a potent, addictive feeling.

I often slept over at Luke's on weekend nights, and although I'd wake up the next day with itching sores on my stump from having confined it inside the silicone socket all night, it was worth it. After he fell asleep, I would stare at Luke's soft skin and the curls at the nape of his neck. I'd touch his broad chest lightly with my fingertips and listen to his deep, even breathing. A naked man in bed with me: an experience I thought my disabled body had rendered off limits and impossible. Melodramatically, I wrote in my journal: "It's a fucking revelation, and it's about goddamn time."

I finally decided that I wanted to have sex with Luke. I invited him over for dinner and told my flatmates to go out. They happily obliged. "You go, girl," Elodie said, using her favorite American expression.

Luke and I downed some wine, then started our usual "heavy petting" on the couch, and I told him what I wanted to do, which I thought was totally obvious since I'd answered the door—my heart pounding—wearing the turquoise silk robe I'd purchased at the lingerie store where I worked during the summers. And nothing else. He asked me if I was sure, and I said yes, and that was the truth. I trusted Luke, and our care and respect for each other was genuine and mutual. But I wasn't in love with him. I had decided that this was a prerequisite for having sex with a man, because if I really loved him, true intimacy might be overwhelming, too risky; part of me still expected every man to reject me on the basis of my body Although this initially surprised me—hadn't I been waiting for someone to cloak with my affections, no matter who it was?— the longer I thought about it, the more sense it made. If you were in love, rejection would be that much more painful.

Of course, I didn't tell my friends this. I told them I was horny and wanted to do it.

"And that was that," I said, sipping my champagne.

I told Elodie and Claire about the way Luke and I had kissed (duration, intensity, and technique), about the way we'd fondled each other, totally desperate to get it on. There were other elements of the story I did not share with my flatmates. I had learned early on that discussions about my artificial leg were out of the question.

The first night Elodie and I had shared a bed, she was acting strangely. "You all right?" I asked.

"I'm just. . . what if I freak out about seeing your leg? I mean, what if I think it's disgusting?" She looked at me, waiting for me to put her at ease, waiting for me to make it right.

Those words.
Disgusting. Gross.
I even knew the slang term in French:
dégueulasse.
"Freak out": that expression I'd taught her. I'd already disassembled myself quickly while she was in the bathroom and secured the leg in the space between the bed and the wall, tucking my stump under the covers so that she wouldn't have to see it, as if I needed to protect her from the gruesome sight of my body. Now I knew that this decision was the right one. It wasn't going to be the way it had been with Liz; I would need to adjust.

"What do you mean?" I asked. I was angry and hurt, but I smiled and kept my voice light.

"It's just that disabled people don't go out in France," she said.

Later, she apologized. "I'm sorry I said that," she said. "I'm sure it's not true." And then, "You're not Cindy Crawford, but you're pretty."

This was a compliment from Elodie, who was a terrific flirt and always had Irish boys begging to take her to pubs or to their cheap, unheated flats on North Circular Road; she had related these conquests to me in great detail.

I adored Elodie and Claire, but I understood the deal. My status as their friend was precipitated by what they thought was my quintessentially American enthusiasm, friendliness, and "good mood," as they called it. Talking about real issues of the body—with my different body—was not possible. That was fine with me. I was through talking about it; I was too busy living, and now I had crossed the final threshold to womanhood.

So when I told them about my "first night," as they referred to it, I didn't mention what I'd done with my leg or how I'd agonized over what to do with it. How would it work? If I left the leg on, would it hurt Luke, would the rubber that held the cosmetic hose on my thighs rub against his legs and give him a rash? Would I be able to easily manipulate the leg, or would the knee lock out at embarrassing moments and inhibit my movements? Not once did I seriously consider taking the leg off, even after I phoned Samantha and she told me that was exactly what I should do. "It feels so much better," she said.

I appreciated her advice, but to remove the leg in front of a man was unthinkable; the very thought of it sickened me. I had no sense of myself as a desirable, sexual woman as an amputee. The only activities I did habitually without the leg were skiing, showering, and sleeping—and even these were tinged with shame. The person I wanted others to see—the person I wanted to be—had two legs. The only way for me to have sex—this whole body experience—and remain psychologically safe was with the leg on. When it was attached, I felt like a complete person; when it was removed, I felt monstrous and deformed.

With Luke, I had insisted that the lights be off. I wanted my lower half completely covered by blankets, and I stayed partly covered by my robe from the waist up. I'd never been completely naked with a man before and, I thought, one thing at a time. He complied with my wishes.

Luke had never asked me about my artificial leg. We both pretended it didn't exist, that everything was normal. I assumed that, like many people, he didn't know what kinds of questions to ask or what would be rude. At some point, without any prompting from him, I rattled off my story, which was yet another modified version of my poster child speech: It was all bubbly platitudes, happy memories, and stories of learning to ski. I made it sound as if I'd been cutting a swath through my adoring public since the day I learned to walk. I had learned to tell that story multiple times, using the same inflection, the same nod of the head, the same laugh and toss of my long hair.

After Elodie and Claire left for the afternoon and I was getting ready to take a nap, I pulled back the curtain and looked out across the Liffey to the Bargain Town storefront. A man and a woman attempted to drag an orange sofa out the door; they kept laughing and losing their grip. The Guinness brewery just down the road filled the air with the yeasty smell of hops. I watched three skinny boys sitting on the bridge, fishing in the river with rudimentary poles and slapping their heels against the bridge's stones. Drifting off to sleep to the sounds of a man singing a tune as he walked down the quays and the rattle and honk of trucks driving past on the road below my window, I felt exhausted, relieved, and, more than anything else: lucky. I was deformed and damaged, yet I had been fortunate enough to find someone who would sleep with me. Even if I never had sex with anybody else ever again, at least I had done it once; at least I had been sexually attractive to someone. It never occurred to me that the expectations I had about people's perceptions of me might be myths and that other people might have issues with their bodies, too. I believed my deformity trumped everybody else's physical preoccupations. Narcissistically, I thought,
What could possibly be worse than a missing leg?
and organized my expectations around this assumption. That morning, I felt freed from what I had convinced myself would be a lifelong prison of virginity.

I had felt an overwhelming freedom and independence the moment I arrived in Dublin in the fall to be a visiting student at Trinity College. I enrolled in history and theology courses, but I went to lecture when it suited me, which was usually about once a week. When I wasn't drinking with Luke or my flatmates, I read the books listed on the syllabus in pubs and cafes or in Phoenix Park, which was only a twenty-minute walk from my home. I wanted to abandon the person I was before I went abroad and start again, become someone new.

I had never been so cavalier about attendance, but I was learning so much more. There was only one major paper or exam at the end of the year in each course, sometimes a few short ones scattered in between, and I found the writing challenging and enjoyable. I read Joyce's
Dubliners
and
Ulysses;
I read heavy history books about Ireland; I read Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland and any contemporary Irish author's book I could get my hands on. I was learning how to develop my own voice, without the fear of failure or the pressure of a grade.

I walked everywhere in Dublin: I had to get out and wander the streets, discover the neighborhoods, drink the beer, and meet the people. I began to know this new city intimately and to love it. I walked for hours. My leg worked perfectly. I rarely had sores. Nothing went numb. It was like a miracle. The rain was slow and soft. Night fell at four o'clock. All of this suited me. Under the quickly darkening sky, the colors of the city became more pronounced: the bright blues and greens of houses and storefronts, the rough gray stones of the ancient buildings and cathedrals. I walked through the streets at night without a stitch of fear.

Dublin glittered: with history, with people, with an uncomplicated glamour and mess. I felt as though I were absorbing the layers of its stories, its dirt, its nooks and crannies and idiosyncrasies. I watched workers inside the scaffolding outside Trinity as they peeled away layers of soot and grime that had collected over decades, the dirt from the polluted Liffey River having sunk deep into the limestone. Each day, more progress was made: A layer of dirt was removed to reveal a white and gleaming surface. I saw myself as linked to those buildings; I was obsessed with the workers' progress as they made the stones shine again. The more stories and history and life I absorbed, the more I traded the old for the new, the cleaner and happier I became.