Authors: Sandra Novack
I have
questions:
Of all the things my father might have given, why did he leave me his leg? We were never close. He has not spoken to either me or my mother in years, and mostly only then in a few letters, letters in which he tries to explain his sense of
shame
. After my father died, who packaged the leg? A friend? A lover? Did this person think that I, too, am lumbering along, missing a vital part of myself, hence the decision to label this leg a “priority”? When this person packaged the leg, did he or she regard it, note how severe-looking it seemed, how maniacal? And did this stranger wonder who I am? This girl named Anna Lee, age twenty-seven, a girl in cowboy boots and skirts, a girl who never visited her father for well over twenty years? Could this stranger guess how many times I’ve wished my father dead, a wish that, now that he is actually dead, is a horrible thought to admit? If my father spoke of me, was he nostalgic? Bitter? If bitter, did his bitterness mask regret? Love?
Leg, I say. What say you?
The leg’s attitude is appallingly cavalier. Only a perfectly round hole in the leg gapes at me, like a great gorging mouth. The hole is cut mid-calf and reminds me of a birdhouse opening. I peer into it and look for something, say, a canary, but inside the leg there is only more leg, there is only the hollowness of the leg, the grain of wood lapsing into uneven circles.
I didn’t expect to end up with my father’s leg. This is exactly what I say when I phone my mother.
She seems surprised. In over twenty years, my mother has never received anything from my father, not even his ashes. She says, Something is better than nothing. She sighs and then the moment reduces itself to a bewildered, stony silence. Tall, still slender, and always well-dressed, my mother was once the beauty queen of her hometown in Rhode Island. There is a photograph I have of my mother and father, taken on the night she received her crown. Before his accident, my father was a strikingly handsome man with chiseled cheeks and sleek hair. In the photo, my mother wears a tiara. She holds roses in her hands; her pinned hair rests in ringlet curls that hug her neck. My father stands behind her, grinning, his arms looped around her waist. On the back of the photograph my mother penned the following thought: “Together, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t accomplish.”
Her soul, to this day, is shot with narcissism.
Growing up, I can recall many of my mother’s subsequent lovers, those men who paraded in and out of our home. There were doctors and lawyers, poets and painters, businessmen who wooed her with shopping trips in the city. Over the years, my mother has received many proposals. She tells me sometimes, in a vague way, that she would have only married my father, that it was a long-ago war that separated them. They had only dated a few months before he went overseas and, by then, my mother was pregnant with me.
You always say you hate him, I remind her now. You hated him for leaving.
I say a lot of things that are entirely different from how I feel.
I hate what
happened
to him, she tells me. He was so different when he came home, and he was missing his
leg
, Anna. I never got over seeing him like that.
Does it have to be about you? I ask. There is a
leg
on my coffee table, Mother. I remind her: What we are talking about here isn’t so much a man, as a
leg
.
A
FTER WORK
the next day, Jimmy #3 comes over to my apartment. It is a lovely apartment with large, domed windows, walls the color of burnished brass, and vaulted ceilings. When I walk, my cowboy boots clap against the wooden floor and Jimmy #3 stares at my legs. I go to the kitchen and fetch him crackers and brie, but he takes my offerings and says, Can’t you give the boots a rest? Who do you think you are, John Wayne? Sit a spell, will you?
Listen, Pilgrim, I say. These boots are made for walking.
Jimmy #3 doesn’t laugh, of course. He eats a cracker instead. Then he takes off his lab jacket and sits down on the couch. He works at the pharmacy on Randolph, pushing pills to the public for exorbitant fees. It’s when I tell him this—that he is part of a grand system designed to screw the American people, that everyone knows insurance companies and doctors are swift bed partners and pharmacists are their dope pushers—that he finally laughs and takes me on the couch, even though, to my mind, I’ve said nothing funny. Despite this, I relent. My paisley skirt bunches around my waist. Off comes one cowboy boot, then the other. My legs wrap around him, my calloused feet dig into his back.
Yee-ha, I say.
Afterward, Jimmy sweeps a tuft of hair from his eyes, gets up, and goes to the bathroom—the click of the door, the subsequent quiet, a relief.
I lie on my belly, drag the leg out from under the couch, and pick off lint that has attached to it. I close one eye and look the leg right in the canary hole. When I was five, my mother first took me to the building where my father lived, and I breathed the stale air of his apartment. My father sat in a tattered chair, his hair disheveled, three-day stubble on his face. He sized up my legs and toes and frowned. Then he bent down and rolled up his pant leg, and it was then that I saw the wooden leg. When I ran from him and hid behind my mother, my father coaxed me to him, saying, Come look in my leg, Anna. Come see the canary that hides there.
I peeked in the hole but saw nothing. My father explained that the canary had flown away, that the canary was a magical bird, one that disappeared just as you tried to find it. Imagine, he said. Weird, I told him. On the second visit with my father, my mother dragged me down the narrow, corridor. Thick with scotch and painkillers, thick, as my mother said, with
shame
, my father threw a bottle at the door and yelled at us to leave. My mother’s hands trembled. She walked briskly, dragging me behind her, back out into the winter day. Never again, she said. Never.
Look, I say to the leg. I’d like to think there’s a reason you’ve suddenly appeared in my life, in however stunted a fashion.
Back from the bathroom, Jimmy #3 says, Christ, what is that, Anna?
Hello
. I knock on the mahogany, and practice my mother’s too-nonchalant sigh. A
leg
, silly.
I see
that
, he says, waiting for more. He stands in front of
me naked, and I admire his lean stomach, the rivulets of blond hair that he continuously sweeps from his eyes. He says, finally: So you want to tell me what you’re doing with a wooden leg?
It’s my father’s leg, I tell him, as if this explains everything.
I’ll bite, he says. So where’s the rest of him?
Soaring to the heights of the unknown, I guess. Then, when Jimmy appears bumfuzzled, I say, Dead. Just dead, okay?
He throws me a quizzical look, the kind of look that says, Are you from this planet? That is Jimmy #3 for you. He has that look down pat, that look that makes me feel displaced, even in my own apartment. He asks: Are you okay?
It’s not exactly easy to mourn over what I don’t know, I explain.
He says, That’s a narrow view. It’s still your father’s leg.
I ignore this. I say, Some relationships are defined by what they aren’t and have never been. Some histories are built upon the void of not-knowing. Would you at least agree with that?
Absolutely, Jimmy says. Mostly. Like now, for instance, with you. I’m thinking we have sex, but I hardly know you, right? I mean here you are, sitting with your dead father’s leg. What am I supposed to think about that? He collects his pants from the floor and rummages through his pockets until he finds his bottle of antidepressants. He slides two green-and-white pills from the bottle, replaces the cap, and goes back to the bathroom for water. When he comes back, he says, How about next time instead of just having sex, we go out to dinner?
If you need a pretense, then sure, I say. I lean back against the stiff pillows and stretch. After all, I add, a girl has got to eat.
Seriously, Anna. I think we should at least try to get to know each other better. Then he adds: You can even bring the leg.
Ha, ha. Very funny, I tell him. I cross my arms. I am in no mood for acerbities.
A
FEW WEEKS AGO
, the same day, in fact, that I read my father’s obituary, I met Jimmy #3 at the CD store. He was rummaging through the Beatles section, sweeping his hair back with delicate fingers. He looked up at me and winked. I am not trying to castigate him or say that Jimmy #3 cares little for Lennon or McCartney, or even the oft overlooked and always difficult to classify Ringo, nor am I saying that he uses the Beatles to garner sex from girls who work in the store, who wear silk skirts and cowboy boots every day, good-looking girls, mind you, girls who just found out their absent-anyway father had finally bought that one-way ticket to the
spirit in the sky
. But when I met him later that night for drinks, he put “Norwegian Wood” on continuous play and sang to me, “I once had a girl”—
girl
, as in a generic, nondescript, any sort of girl—which I think says a lot about Jimmy #3’s initial intentions.
Of course I slept with him. I happen to be
that kind of girl
, the kind of girl who sleeps with men on the first date, that kind of
incredibly easy
girl.
I have, in fact, slept with many men. If Jimmy #3 would search my apartment he would find that aside from this leg with its gaping canary hole, I have built something of a shrine to past lovers and/or sexual exchanges: There are Jimmy #1’s shirt buttons, which I scissored off one deviant night; Roger’s gold cuff links with the pearl inlay lying on my bedroom dresser; Gary’s lighter; Jeff’s dental floss; Jimmy #2’s photograph of Butcher, his golden retriever; Brad’s
Dark Side of the Moon
CD; Joe’s thong; Troy’s Chapstick, kept in a candy bowl; Leroy’s guitar strings
and pick; Harold’s superball; Lenny’s copy of Strunk and White; Guy’s metaphysical quartz, lying in the crevices of the couch cushions,
etc
.
The list depresses me.
I sometimes think: What would my father say about all this whoredom, if he knew?
To say I am
easy
is one thing, but the truth—the truth as I see it, as it might be—is that, in the absence of my father, I have thrown myself freely into the void of the Jimmys and Johns, the Williams and Guys. I have searched, in every crevice of every naked body, for that gossamer love, that pure, unfettered desire, that kind of soul-filled
wanting
. So, yes, I am
easy
… I am exceedingly easy. That is true. And when I have come up empty-handed, as empty as pockets or wooden legs, I have pilfered small trinkets; I have proclaimed love’s trickery through dental floss and pens, cuff links and buttons, which is also to say that love has made me something of a
thief
.
T
HE NEXT DAY
I walk twenty-five blocks to the tenement house where my father lived when he was not frequenting the veterans hospital. It is one of those community living places, the kind of place that is loosely monitored. My legs take me there without so much as a cramp or stumble, over potholes and under the moving trains hoisted up on metal girders, past the river and out into the western side of the city. Though I have never confessed this to anyone, I have often walked here, to this place where my father once lived. I have walked past the broken-down houses, the ghostly shops with spray-painted windows and iron gates shut tightly to the world. I have seen women linger by traffic lights and alleys, waiting to open themselves to
strangers. I have stopped and stared at the rows of dirty windows. I have stared at the chipped, white trim of the building, the brick side choked with ferocious ivy. I have stood under my father’s window—the third window from the left—and wondered about him. I have imagined in that moment I closed my eyes that my father happened to look out, that he saw my upturned face.
Once there was a plant in my father’s window, but now it’s gone. The curtains have been taken down. The window appears lifeless and empty. In a week or two or maybe three, someone new will come and fill the empty rooms. Someone new will come and go. And that’s the way things are, I suppose. Full of comings and goings.
O
N SATURDAY AFTERNOON
, my mother stops by unannounced. She bends forward slightly, plants a dry kiss on my cheek, and then glides past me, her legs, her rock-hard calves, covered in silk stockings. She wears a black summer dress that shows off her back. Her perfume—deep, floral—lingers and drifts. My mother of the perfect smile, the collagen implants, her only flaw (besides her vanity) is that she self-cannibalizes constantly, biting at her nails, working her way to the flesh of her cuticles.
So at the risk of sounding barbaric, she begins, I was wondering if I might see the leg. I’ve been thinking so much about it—about
him
, she confesses. She enunciates perfectly, with the precision of an aging beauty queen. When I retrieve the leg from the chair, she reaches for it as she might reach for a lover if she weren’t
beyond that stage
. She stares at the leg, at the gaping hole. She
beholds
it in a sad, almost sweet way. She says, If only
your father didn’t stay that extra year, after all but a few soldiers came home. He volunteered to stay longer; he had a nihilistic spirit of volunteerism, you know. She shakes her head. Men and their sense of duty, Anna; I honestly don’t understand it.
It occurs to me that my mother holds a small, persistent grudge against my father: When he could have come home to her, he
volunteered
to stay. He lingered in the jungle and lost his leg in an explosion; he put his duty before her, ranked his order of importance.
My mother puts her finger to her lips and gives a nibble that seems so achingly private. I go to the kitchen to dry the already air-dried dishes. I put each away and watch her, noting the way she touches the leg, the way she smiles and conjures something I do not share. And then I feel
hungry
, so hungry I grab crackers from the cabinet. When I pass by her on the way to my bedroom she says, I’m not a shallow woman, Anna. I just knew when I saw him like that that nothing between us would work.