Chapter Three

A PIRATE'S TREASURE

I crouched on the edge of the pool platform, preparing to dive. The smell of the pool was deep and dark, not unlike the smell of the room where Communion vestments were kept at church. When I pulled out the small, cloth-covered box full of wine and wafers that Dad used to take Communion to older parishioners—we called them "shut-ins"—who could not make the journey to Sunday services, it felt like encountering some dusty secret; the bottom of each thimble-size wine goblet was tinted red and smelled vaguely of vinegar. These odors and stains suggested that the shadow of something holy remained, some crucial remnant had been left behind for the next user to divine and ingest, linking all the communicants to one another.

On that day of my first dive, there was something secret about the water, although it was clear and emitted the scrubbed-clean smell of bleach and chlorine. I had seen many people dive off this same ledge, and today it was my turn. Without my glasses, the black lane markers were blurry; they looked like slow-moving caterpillars under the rocking motion of the water as people getting in and out of the pool disrupted it. My private swimming teacher, Ann, stood at my side, coaching me.

I tipped back and forth on my right leg until I could balance in a crouched position; the blue flipper on my right foot squeaked against the wet tiles. I looked up and noticed people staring at me in my blue one-piece swimsuit, with my stump hanging stiffly next to my body like a kickstand. I looked back at the water and took a deep breath.

"Hold the stump close to your side," Ann said. "Put your arms over your head. That's right. You've got it."

I wanted to dive to a specific point in the water, to the middle of one of the black caterpillar lines, as if there were something special there for me to find. I steadied myself, hunched over, and finally dived into the water. My head went under first, then the cool water closed over my back, my butt, and finally my right leg and my stump. I felt as slippery and slick as the tiny rainbow trout Dad taught me to throw back into the river after we brought them up, wriggling, from the ends of our fishing rods. I felt absorbed, taken under, and enveloped; the water was a cool hand guiding me forward. My body felt light and remarkably even, its asymmetry balanced and supported by the softness of the water.

When I came up for air, I heard Ann clapping. The applause echoed against the pool walls, and I hoped that all the people who had been staring at me were listening to this praise. I began to swim, first freestyle and then the breaststroke; I had been practicing both moves all summer. The fin on my right foot made me feel like a fish cutting gracefully through the water, headed to the other side of the pool. When I flipped over to my back, I heard the tide of my breath in my head, powerful and rhythmic as a wave; my single foot was strong enough to move me through the water. The stump didn't do much, merely bobbed and floated like a buoy. The right leg took over on its behalf, compensating, kicking, and shearing the blue water. I was dividing a space with my body versus being di­vided: by a surgeon, by a prosthetist, by a wooden leg that was removed each night and lay by my bed until morning.

After reaching the other side of the pool, I lifted my head, triumphant. I hoisted myself onto the ledge. A little girl who was walking past stopped abruptly. Water dripped from the ends of her hair as she stood staring at me until a woman steered her away by her wet shoulders.

"Great," Ann said, putting her warm hand on my back. "You did great."

I loved to dive. I progressed steadily in ability until I could do jumps off the springboard, hopping up the first step and then crawling out to crouch carefully at the edge of the board, maintaining my balance. Just once I would plummet off the high board, letting every person in the pool have their moment to stare at me, the one-legged girl descending in a smooth arc into the water. I felt powerful, and I thought about my body in a new way, although the high dive itself had absolutely terrified me and I never did it again. Later, I would understand that learning to dive was my first experience of my body as capable of powerful, fluid, and beautiful motion. In those moments when I rounded my back, tucked my chin, and tipped gracefully into the smooth, accepting water, I was aware of the song that a body creates when it is released for just a few moments from its regular rules and restrictions and from the expectations of the person who lives with it. I felt the beauty of movement when the person who inhabits his or her unique form is perfectly content to do so, as if it were unimaginable being any other way.

At that time, a photo was taken of me with another amputee who was in her early thirties. We stood against a tile wall in the locker room, smiling, sharing just two full legs between us. I was thrilled to meet someone who was like me. She had long brown hair, soft-looking skin, and a bright smile. After Ann took our picture, the two of us put on our wooden legs. Mine was newer and shinier than hers, but they were similar models. Both had metal hinges on the outside of the wood; both were suspended from our bodies by a cloth strap that buckled just above the pelvis on the left side of the body.

Years later, when I looked at that photograph, I felt horror at my body and particularly at the woman's. By that time, I was used to seeing models in fashion magazines and judging my own appearance by the ways in which it compared with—and fell short of—theirs. Who would ever want this woman? I found myself thinking, and by want I meant love, as if these two expressions of desire were interchangeable. In the photograph, both of us were beaming. What does she have to be so happy about? I wondered bitterly, although arguably she and I shared a similar fate. I looked over at my younger self, who was wearing a similar genuine smile, who would grow up to be a similar disabled woman. Although I destroyed the photograph, I often thought about the woman standing next to me and wondered what had happened to her: Did she marry, did she have children, did she love her life, did somebody love her?

Two and half years earlier, in January 1979, I had finally received my first wooden leg. For my first fitting, I stood barefoot on the dirty floor of the changing room while the prosthetist took measurements of my stump. The stink of the healing wounds was finally gone; the limb was clean. Now that the left foot had been removed, or "disarticulated"—the sharp sound of the word matching the rough nature of the action itself—I had my natural heel at the end of the short leg.

For two months before the fitting, I wore a walking cast that looked like a pirate's peg leg; it began at my hip and narrowed to a cone of hollow plaster that extended past the end of my stump. It looked like an ice-covered tree limb and was fitted at the bottom with a rubber knob.

"For traction," Dr. Elliot told me, pointing at the knob as he helped me put on the cast in the examination room.

"So you don't slip and fall," Mom said. I leaned my weight on the cast and took a few stiff-legged steps.

Dr. Elliot saluted me and said in his best "pirate" voice, "Harrr . . . who goes there, missy?"

"Harrr," I replied, and bared my teeth in a piratelike grin.

He and I laughed. Mom looked pale.

As we walked through the hospital corridor on our way to the parking lot, I asked Mom if I could get an eye patch to complete my pirate outfit. She refused. "You are not a pirate," she said. The tone of her voice warned me not to push it.

Dr. Elliot's pirate image stayed with me long after I stopped using the cast and began walking with a wooden leg. I envisioned myself as the solo sea-weary girl preparing to embark on a grand adventure. I wanted to battle foes and fight for the underdog; I would be a combination of guts and glam, beauty and strength, with my unique body—like a one-of-a-kind sailing ship designed to withstand dangerous waters—propelling me into the unknown world.

Rinehart Schmidt, my first prosthetist, had an office on a busy street in Denver near the Capitol building. It was next door to a bar and grill; the changing rooms, which were brown and windowless, always smelled of French fries and frying hamburgers. The bathroom was in the corner of the back room, where limbs-in-progress and other prosthetic parts—feet, calves, hands—were kept propped up on plaster pedestals or leaning against walls. Saws, hammers, screwdrivers, and other metal objects were scattered over two long worktables that ran the length of the room. A dusty transistor radio atop an old refrigerator was always tuned to a country music station. The toilet seat in the closet-size bathroom was bumpy and uneven, as dried plaster had been spilled on it and never cleaned up; there was no mirror on the wall and no soap for your hands on the sink. Often I had to yell through the door and ask Schmidt to bring me a roll of toilet paper that always smelled like cigarette smoke after he cracked open the door and tossed it through to where I waited on "the John," as he called it. Through the bathroom wall, I heard the clink of dishes being washed at the restaurant next door.

Schmidt was a short, wrinkled man nearing retirement. While he was making adjustments to the leg, he often smoked cigars or cigarettes, letting one or the other dangle from his mouth. When Mom asked me what I thought of him, I replied, "He's older than God."

Schmidt's bald head sweated constantly. A single piece of white hair swept over the dome of his freckled head. Sweat dripped from the end of his hair onto his cheek or rolled off his long nose and landed, trembling, on the edge of his lip. The handkerchief kept in his lab coat was covered in yellow and black stains and clumps of dried plaster, but he wiped his sweaty forehead with it anyway. The first time I met Schmidt, he cuffed me lightly on the shoulder and said, "Who's looking pretty today?" He had fat fingers, and his palms were wide and rough feeling, with deep, painful-looking cracks, as if he'd been rubbing them with sandpaper.

"Let's see what we have here," he said. Standing on one leg, I leaned against the examination table. Schmidt sat on a low stool with wheels and examined my stump, gently tracing my new scars with the callused pads of his fingers. The scars on my hip were bumpy and sometimes slightly tender. What did we have here? I wondered, and felt nervous. I stared at the top of Schmidt's head; I watched to see if his eyebrows raised at all, trying to track an expression. "Hmmm," he said, and looked up at me, grinning. I smiled back, hoping this exchange was a sign that things were okay, that what we had here was good.

Schmidt cupped the bottom of the stump in his palm and pushed lightly, then harder, watching me, then harder still until he saw me wince. "Good for weight bearing," he said, and stood up. "We've got this little bone on the edge here," he said, running his thumb over my original ankle bone—it looked like a little marble embedded in the skin. "That will be tricky. Could cause problems."

"What kinds of problems?" Dad asked. He stood next to me with his arms crossed.

"We just make sure there's no pressure there—we hollow out that part of the socket. Otherwise"—he rubbed his hands together—"there's friction, then sores and pain. Can't have that." Schmidt ran his hands once more along the length of my stump and then rolled on his stool to the cabinet in the corner, leaving the odor of stale smoke in his wake. "It's a good one," he announced while rummaging through a drawer. He nodded over his shoulder at me and then at Dad, who said, "Okay!" in a bright voice. I nodded, too, relieved, although I wondered what a bad stump would look like. Was it possible to move easily from bad to good? If so, how could I make sure that my stump stayed on the good side of things?

Schmidt rolled back over with measuring tape. Dad and I watched as he wrapped the tape around the stump in five different places: at the fattest point near my hip; then in the middle, where it narrowed slightly; then at the lowest point where it tapered to the heel. As he worked his way down, he recorded each measurement on a piece of paper folded over his knee. Leaning over to get a closer look, I saw a light pencil outline of a stump with blank spaces next to it for the numbers. His touch was light and quick. After he measured the circumference of my right thigh, I hopped up on the examination table and waited. The backs of my legs stuck to the table, as the rooms were always too warm and badly ventilated—not a window or a fan in sight. I was reminded of summer cross-country trips in our station wagon with its sticky vinyl seats.

Schmidt disappeared from the room for several minutes and returned with a bucket in one hand. Rolls of white plaster of paris were wrapped around both his arms, from the wrists to the elbows. He sloshed water all over the floor as he moved to set the bucket on the plastic sheet. He shook the rolls of plaster from his arms. I stood still, awaiting instructions.

"Now we'll make the mold," he said, and dunked one roll of plaster into the bucket, where it quickly softened and expanded in the water.

Before Schmidt could make the main part of the leg—called the socket—he first needed to make a cast. After the stump was covered with a thin, soft cloth called the cast sock, it was encased in long strips of wet plaster. When the cast was complete, the prosthetist's hands would be white up to his elbows, the grainy plaster embedded beneath his fingernails.

Schmidt brought out the rolls, dripping wet. Seated on the table, I held the cast sock up in front and back. He wrapped the warm, wet strips around and around my stump, all the way down to the rounded end. After wrapping the heel a few more times, he gave it a pat, which tickled a bit. He smoothed the plaster around the small ankle bone as if he were molding clay or Silly Putty. As he worked, I sometimes felt stabs of pain, especially as the wet strips became heavier and heavier, but I said nothing. While in the hospital, I was constantly commended for being brave, for not crying. I wasn't about to upset that trend now. The prospect of this cast did not upset me; it would be removed in twenty minutes instead of six or eight weeks, and there would be no crutches, no walkers, no tank, no scooter, and no Ace bandages.

"Now hold the stump away from your body to let it dry," Schmidt said. He left the room while the warm plaster cooled. I leaned back against the table, and Dad and I stared down at the mummified stump, not saying a word. We listened to Schmidt bellowing the words to a country song in the other room. The plaster finally set, and the cast was stiff enough to remove.

"A-ha!" Schmidt exclaimed as he twisted the cast off gently. It resembled a snakeskin newly shed. Using a pencil, Schmidt made several marks on the outside of the mold. "This is the house for the residual limb," he said, tapping it with his index finger. He looked up at me. "Like a little house."

I didn't know what residual meant, but I understood that my stump would live in that house made of plaster and that's how I would walk. It was another type of brick house, but unlike the other one that had imprisoned me, this one, made of wood and metal, would set me free. The mold reminded me of a gingerbread house, the way you'd put the wet pieces of cake together and wait for them to dry into something solid, something real, something that could be called by name.

"Now we can make the leg," Schmidt said.

"Using that as a model?" Dad asked, clarifying.

"Yes, for the socket." Schmidt looked at me. "The little house. Now, the metal hinges at the sides of the socket will mimic the motion of a knee." He moved his hand back and forth through the air. "It's a simple motion, simple system." He stood up and opened and shut the door of the exam room with his plaster-covered hands, leaving two white handprints on the door. "The knee is like a hinge," he said. "Just like a door hinge."

After Schmidt left the room, Dad pushed the door back and forth. "That makes sense," he said.

While we were making another appointment for the next week in the "reception area," which was a tiny front room with a smelly old couch, a few chairs, and a pile of outdated Time magazines stacked on a dusty table, the bell on the door rang. For a few moments, the open door let the sounds of traffic rush in. As Schmidt flipped through the waterlogged appointment book, I turned around and saw a man who was very tall and looked older than Dad, but not as old as Schmidt. His dark, wavy hair was streaked with silver, and his leathery skin made him look like the ranchers who attended Dad's church. He wore khaki shorts; his right leg was shiny and wooden with bright metal hinges where a normal person's knee would be. When he walked, his foot swung out to the side. It was an odd, awkward movement, as though the fake leg might fly off his body at any moment. The leg made noises like a squeaky door as the man came closer. Was I going to look and sound like that when I walked?

I looked up at Dad and saw that all the color had drained from his face. His eyes looked wide behind his glasses; one of the lenses was smudged with a bit of white plaster. The hinges of the man's leg made a scraping sound as he crouched in front of me. I thought he looked like a robot, and not a very modern one. I knew it was rude to stare, so I looked at his face, my mouth partly open. His face and neck were sweating. "High-five, little lady," he said, and held out his tanned, perfect hand. When he smiled his teeth were white and even. I slapped his warm hand and giggled.

"Good luck!" he called to us as we left the building.

Driving back from Denver to Laramie, a three-hour drive, I asked Dad, "What did Schmidt mean by a good one?"

"He meant that your stump is healthy and looks strong."

"Really?"

"Yes. It all healed perfectly."

Healthy and strong was good. I felt proud, as if I had had something to do with how well I had healed. It meant that I wouldn't walk like that nice man I'd met on the way out of the office. I felt better, although I hadn't realized until that moment how unsettled I'd felt.

"What does 'residull' mean?"

"You mean 'residual'?" Dad was silent for a moment. "It means what's left after something is taken, goes away. What's left over."

"Like leftovers?"

"I guess so."

Residual. What's left when something's taken away. This strange word that I had never heard before and didn't completely understand made me sad. I looked out the window and watched as a truck barreled past us on a steep hill. As we passed Abe Lincoln's monument on I-80,1 stared into his bronze, deeply lined face until our car was too far away for me to see him. As soon as I had the leg, I was going to walk right up to that monument. No walkers or scooters or casts or crutches. Just me and my good and healthy stump.

I would remember this experience later. The words themselves, "residual limb," implied lack and also—to my mind—held within them a kind of mythic power. They were labels for the body, albeit ones I didn't initially or immediately understand. Even so, in that moment in the car, I had already resolved to overcome those labels—to prove even the words wrong.

A few weeks later, Dad and I returned to Schmidt's office. "Ready to get rid of those?" Dad asked, pointing at my crutches. I nodded.

"There she is," Schmidt said as we walked in the door. He stood in the reception area with the leg in his arms and a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Leaning forward to balance my weight on the crutches, I took the leg and held it in my hands. I felt inside the molded plastic socket—it was perfectly smooth. I ran my fingers over the orange, toeless foot. The wooden calf looked solid and flawless. The buckle on the canvas waist strap was silver and shiny. There was a barely visible line where the foot met the ankle. The metal hinges on each side looked sleek and mechanical. The leg was made especially for me. It was mine. Now I could walk like other kids; I could have adventures, no longer bound by any cast. "I want to wear it," I said. Schmidt carried the leg into the changing room, and Dad and I followed.

That afternoon, I walked the runway with the prosthesis. I had discovered a treasure: this new body of mine, this new wooden leg.

Dad and Schmidt clapped and cheered as I went back and forth across the thin strip of linoleum that ran the length of the front room. The leg made either a loud thump or a crack each time I swung it through, as if my forward motion—at last!—were special enough to make its own sound.

"How does it feel?" Schmidt asked.

"Weird," I said. He looked at me. "But good." It wasn't like walking with a cast at all. The leg felt like a part of me, like an extension of my flesh-and-blood stump; it was me. It did feel strange at first—and heavy—but soon it felt natural, as if the body filled it exactly the way it should.

"Does it hurt anywhere?"

I shook my head. "Well, it kind of rubs on the side, but it's okay." Don't take it away, I thought. "It's okay," I repeated.

"Show me where it rubs," Schmidt said, and I pointed. "Ah," he said, and marked that area with a red grease pencil. I watched him. "Don't worry, it will rinse off," he said. I unbuckled the strap and slipped off the leg. Schmidt moved his hands over my stump, checking skin temperature as a gauge of irritation. "Come with me," he said, and Dad bent down so I could hop up on his back. I wanted to see where my leg was going.

We walked to the back room, where Schmidt set the leg on a pedestal and used an electrically powered router—like a long arm fitted with a metal tip—to grind out those places where I'd felt pressure on my stump. Dust spun out everywhere as the socket was modified. "Makes good dust!" Schmidt shouted.

Back on the runway, I put on the leg and took a few steps.

"Better?" Schmidt asked. I nodded.

I used the bars along the runway to steady me when my balance faltered. "It will help your limp if you imagine swinging the leg through as smoothly as possible," Schmidt advised. I imagined the pendulum in a grandfather clock swinging gracefully and evenly as it marked each second. I took a few more steps. "Good," he said. "Much better."

I looked at Dad. "Looks great!" he said. "Wow."

Schmidt periodically leapt out in front of me and bent to make an adjustment, asking again about pressure points and turning the left foot in and then out again to match the position of my right foot. "You don't want to look pigeon-toed!" he warned. I thought of a car race I'd seen on television, when a mechanic ran out to fix the cars after an accident to get them up and racing again. I thought of designers nipping a hem or adjusting a belt on a model before a fashion show. I was pleased with both of these associations—divided, as they were, between rugged and lovely—and I was absolutely thrilled with my new leg. After a while, I no longer needed the bars.

"Look at that. Look at her go," said Schmidt. He watched me carefully, clearly admiring his handiwork. I'm going, I thought. Here I go. Dad looked as if he were about to burst into tears or laughter or both at once.

"I want to go faster," I said, looking at Schmidt. "How fast can I go?"

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, "You go as fast as you want to." I hugged him, cigarette and body odor and all. Dad laughed.

After that, I walked everywhere until I was sore and exhausted. I did not allow the leg to be removed from my sight. At night, I slept with my arm slung around it, and if I slipped out of it to watch television at night, I made sure to keep a hand on the foot, the ankle, or the strap. If I hopped off to the bathroom, I instructed Andy to look after it, as if the leg might walk away on its own. Although I later went through periods of being cavalier about my prosthesis—tossing it about or throwing it down the stairs to watch it bend at weird angles like some kind of strange, anatomical Slinky—much of the time I guarded it as fiercely as I did during the days when it first was mine.

Initially, everything about the new leg seemed miraculous. Not only was it much prettier and more interesting then my flesh-and-blood leg, but it had freed me.

The leg slowly revealed itself to be far from perfect. The waist strap chafed against my hips and made my right leg go numb if I sat still for too long. I often dropped the strap into the toilet when I was in a hurry. The metal hinges ripped my clothes. The cheap silver buckle tarnished quickly. I liked the look of the leg's slick wood, but I could not sit in a smooth chair without sliding out of it. The SACH foot soon had its share of grass stains and dirt smudges that looked like bruises; after a while, the initial bounce disappeared, and it felt like walking on a block of wood.

"Those feet are not free," Dad reminded me, pointing out the most recent, permanent stain.

"Uh-huh," I said, but I didn't want to be careful while playing outside. I wanted to be active and adventurous.

During the summer, the socket was incredibly hot; the thin fabric stump sock was wet and stinking at the end of the day. I used to dare myself to smell it, amazed that such horrific odor was produced by my body. The metal hinges on either side burned me when I touched them after being out in the sun.

Dad oiled the hinges with WD-40 when they became stiff and creaky in the winter. I hopped up on the thick rope swing that hung from the garage rafters and moved back and forth through the air. My arm muscles strained as I rose higher and higher, leaning back to create more momentum. I felt as though I had two bodies: the one on the swing with its right leg pumping and straightening and the other body that needed the leg to walk and run, the one with the artificial part that was being oiled and tended to as I looked on. I was comfortable with both embodiments. After they were oiled, the leg's hinges leaked frequently, and I left a greasy mark on my clothes, car seats, bedsheets, or the couch—anywhere I sat down.

While visiting my cousins one summer, I left my leg unattended at the public pool for just a moment to show Erica, Sarah, and Beth how well I could dive, and when I resurfaced and found that it had disappeared, I became hysterical. Erica and Beth stayed with me while Sarah shot into action, as was her way. She roamed the pool area and the locker rooms until she tracked down the thief and shook him down. Carrying it carefully in her arms, her steps sure and steady, Sarah returned the leg to me.

I frantically wiped down the socket and the hinges with my beach towel, as if to remove the mark that this foreign handler—this thief—had left on a part of my body. "He does that again," Sarah promised, "and I'll make his nose bleed." I nodded, thankful and vindicated. We never had problems at the pool again, although one of my cousins would always work on her tan in order to stand watch over the leg where it leaned against a plastic pool chair, completely covered by a beach towel. When I was ready to get out, the wrapped prosthesis was brought like an offering to the edge of the pool. I dried the stump as quickly as I could and slipped on the sock, my hands sometimes shaking. I didn't like strangers staring at my body, at my deformity, although I was perfectly comfortable having my leg off around friends and family. I shoved the stump into the sun-warmed socket, buckled the strap, and tied the towel around my waist to cover my lower half. Immediately I felt better, like any another girl having just finished her swim.

At slumber parties, I clung to the leg inside my sleeping bag with both arms wrapped around it as if it were a favorite stuffed animal, a beloved pet, or, much later, a lover; as an adult, on overnight train trips, I zipped it into my coat and used it as an uncomfortable but functional headrest, wrapping both my arms around it to hold it firmly in place. If anyone tried to take my leg—as a joke, as a way of being cruel—he or she would have to take me with it.

Years later, when I began doing research into the history of prosthetics, one of the first images I came across was that of Captain Hook; one of the oldest images of a disabled person, this villain gestures with his hook-hand, his evil eyes narrowed in mischief. How, I wondered, had the idea of being a pirate ever comforted me?

Soon after, I had a vivid dream. I was on a pirate ship, being forced to walk the plank in my first wooden leg, with my blue flipper on my right foot; neither fit me properly, because in the dream I inhabit my adult body. Schmidt was there, too. He stood on deck with a heavy-looking wooden treasure chest balanced in his arms, telling me to come back, that it was dangerous, that he had a special gift for me that he couldn't hold on to much longer, but I hobbled on, dragging my left leg and then the right one in its ill-fitting flipper, unable to stop myself, wanting to feel the freedom of diving in the water. At the very end of the plank, I turned around and held out my hands for help, but it was too late; the heel of the SACH foot had gone over the edge of the plank without my realizing it, and I fell backward. Once in the water, the prosthesis dragged me down, fell off, and disappeared. The flipper came off, too, and I could not kick hard enough with my right foot to move anywhere. I was trapped underwater as the contents of the treasure chest, thrown overboard, emptied around me. Suddenly coins were everywhere; they shot into the water and whizzed past my face. I grabbed at them, and they made a dull clink against my fingertips. As I failed to capture a single one, the coins floated down and away, entirely useless and inaccessible to me, but still holding the promise of riches, gleaming and glittering gold.