Recently, my bank was bought by another bank. This would not be a notable fact except that I have been banking there since shortly after I was born. Before that, my parents banked there, and in the very early days of the institution, my aunt worked there as a teller. I modeled as a child, and I would endorse the checks from my earnings while lying on the bank floor, whose green carpeting hasn’t changed in more than thirty years. When the bank relocated down the street, everything remained the same. I still know all the tellers and the personal bankers, the vice president, the president, Rodney, who works in the basement, reconciling transactions, I swear, with a red pencil. Any of them could look at my account and see that a collection agency had been debiting money on the twenty-fifth of the month, and had been doing so for almost ten years.
But the routing numbers changed with the acquisition, and so I called the collection agency to find out what had to be done. Perhaps I could give them a new routing number over the phone. Perhaps I would have to send them a canceled check. The company had offices in Iowa and Illinois, but the number was from Iowa, where I had been hospitalized. For years, upon seeing an Iowa number flash on my screen, I didn’t pick up, just sent the calls to voicemail: my Iowa landlord, my friends, old coworkers, bosses, professors, and once, admission to graduate school. Now, dialing the number felt strange.
The woman on the other end of the phone explained that the call may be recorded, that she was a debt collector and was attempting to collect a debt, the phrasing of federal law. Her voice was Iowa, flat vowels of the Upper Midwest. “You know you’ve been paying this debt for a long time,” she said.
“I know,” I said. The conversation usually went something like this. So long, so much money. Usually debt collectors have to harass people on the phone, but not me, not anymore. I had fallen into line, paid the minimum every month on autopay. Twenty-five dollars a month times how many years equaled a bed on a monitoring floor.
“It’s beyond the statute of limitations.”
“Excuse me?” I was sitting at my father’s desk. My husband and I had bought a house nearby, and we had begun to inherit all the stuff of aging parents. I had the new checks in my hand, the new checkbook. I rubbed my thumb on its pleather case. My chest felt full of the sterile strips we used to pack wounds: yards and yards of knit-cotton ribbon crammed into the cavity left by a lanced boil or pustule. The silence pooled larger and larger. I said nothing.
“If you were to stop paying it, nobody would be able to go after you, and it wouldn’t show on your credit report.”
I waited. “So I can stop paying it?” I asked.
“I’ll remove your autopay information from my computer. Have a great weekend,” she said, and hung up.
And then I did, too. I held the phone in my hand. It couldn’t be right: they would call back in five minutes, or ten, or next week, or next month, when the payment was due, but nobody did.
These days, I work far away from patients, writing up results of clinical trials or else abstracts for scientific congresses. The patients appear to me as raw data, depersonalized ID numbers, or in graphs that depict the efficacy of a particular drug, or as a way to explain value: one drug may cost more than another drug, but it is more useful, or requires fewer doses. The patients are further away—an idea, an endgame, a target hard to reach. All the work I do—the abstracts, the manuscripts, the slide decks—is in support of one drug, the next blockbuster, they call it. We are expensive, us medical writers. When I freelance for an agency, I bill by the quarter hour—like attorneys, or psychiatrists—and I think of Helene, her voice in my head. I try only to use what is necessary. But what, exactly, is necessary?
GREG MARSHALL
If I Only Had a Leg
FROM Electric Literature
Up with Kids started as an unofficial offshoot of Up with People, the 1970s show choir now notorious for its ties to an evangelical cult, the Nixon administration, and Halliburton. Our director Bonnie’s salad days had been spent touring with the group, which she referred to simply as People. It took a real insider to drop two prepositions. So much projecting over the years had left her vocal cords frayed and full of benign polyps. Now in her forties, an up with kids T-shirt plunging from her chest and a wad of nicotine gum in one cheek, she suffered from a permanent case of laryngitis, the kind only characters on Nick at Nite got with any regularity and only then for the better part of an episode.
Looking back, it was probably just the fact that she had been a smoker, but as Bonnie reenacted long-lost Super Bowl halftime shows in the Presbyterian church where we rehearsed, squeezing out notes like the debarked corgi on our block, it was like music itself had worn her out. I couldn’t imagine a better life.
Every summer my family took a trip with Up with Kids and patiently watched me scream “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” into a microphone on the boardwalk outside Universal Studios or snap and twirl through a Beach Boys medley, a plastic lei flying around my ears. Outside a tank of honking sea lions, we beamed that Sea World (not the more traditional choice, Disneyland) was the happiest place in the U.S.A., and at an America Sings Summit in Washington, D.C., my preemie sister Chelsea and I didn’t worry that we weren’t good enough for anyone else to hear we just sang, sang a song, like the Carpenters.
Dragged to all of our cheesy performances, my older brother Danny called Up with Kids the Special Olympics of acting, which was fine with me. Sparkling in a loose-fitting gold lamé shirt while my little sister was trapped in a puckering leotard of the same material, I was the actor among social rejects. Bonnie’s daughter, for one, had Down syndrome. Most of us Kids were damaged in more minor but no less noticeable ways: chronic pinkeye, deforming acne, facial hair. One girl with the last name Wood insisted we call her Holly Wood even though her real name was something like Sarah. Another boy pushed a walker around stage.
It goes without saying I have mild cerebral palsy, though my family downplayed the condition in my childhood by telling people I had “tight tendons.” In Up with Kids I found not just a fun after-school activity but also a place where dragging my right foot and having my right arm frozen at my side were not necessarily to my detriment. It would be an overstatement to say I used my limp to get plum roles, just that, in retrospect, they all fell into a certain pattern. I sat on thrones or made pronouncements from center stage, blowing kisses and doing small claps. No one could stand quite like I could. Pelvis thrust forward, my right foot dangled off my slender ankle so that my legs, in princely tights, formed a jaunty lowercase k.
By far my best role with Up with Kids was also, fittingly, my last. In the fifth grade, Bonnie cast me as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. It was my best role, I should say, because I had always loved Oz. This was my excuse, with the help of the hobby shop in the basement of Cottonwood Mall, to essentially live over the rainbow. Before I’d even highlighted my lines, the merch began pouring in: an Emerald City snow globe, an accent pillow of Scarecrow’s face, a Toto stuffed animal. While my brother bought the latest Beckett in the card shop upstairs, tracking the value of his Shaq and Michael Jordan rookie cards like they were blue-chip stocks, I hauled out to the parking lot a life-sized cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard, and Tin Man and propped it at the foot of my bed to block out the sports wallpaper. Dolls of what I referred to as the Big Four danced on chunks of yellow brick on my windowsill, blotting out the sun.
For a kid with a limp, it was easy to see Dorothy’s plight as orthopedic. Skipping as best I could, I’d struck out on the replica of the Yellow Brick Road at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Waiting in line for the Great Movie Ride in Orlando, I’d saluted Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which shimmered in a glass case, by trying to click my own battered sneakers. Through my toddler years, I’d preferred, like Dorothy, never to take off my shoes, even when I slept. It felt better to keep my feet encased in a little magic. (This magic did not extend to the ankle-foot orthosis shoved into my shoe, but with socks on I could survive the rubbing.) Following surgeries on my
tight Achilles tendon and hamstrings in the third grade, I made sure my cast was as close to emerald green as fiberglass could get, like it could have been sticking up from a field of poppies or out from under a house. Even the braces on my teeth at that age were green.
Sure, I knew that if Glinda could have popped onto the pilled carpet of Cottonwood Presbyterian she would have told me, in her airheaded way, I needed look no further than my own two feet. This had never stopped me from daydreaming. Tin Man needed a heart, Cowardly Lion needed some nerve, and I needed a new leg, one that wasn’t short and small in circumference around the calf and ankle; one that wasn’t zipped up the back with scars; one that didn’t need to be taught how to skip.
Whether in a cast or not, I never stopped thinking about my leg. Part of my brain was always sending stray signals to the tips of my toes, making me feel mildly electrocuted. What I loved about the stage was that self-consciousness was a given and it was against the rules to walk and talk at the same time, which I can’t do anyway. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting about how my knee pointed inward or my right heel floated off the ground. It was about all of us feeling awkward together.
Once we did our vocal warm-ups and tongue twisters, I’d sink into my role, feeling almost ecclesiastical, a golden angel observing some sacred rite. I couldn’t walk a straight line, but ask me to shoot bolts of electricity out my fingertips and my hands would tremble with the effort. At the end of each rehearsal, I’d squash Chelsea’s Munchkin costume under her coat as we waited beside the glowing Jesus marquee for Mom to pick us up. Come celebrate His life, it said, or Feeling sad?
As our first show neared, Bonnie crowded the stage with as many farmhands, crows, talking trees, flying monkeys, Winkies, and Munchkins as there were cleared checks. She threw emerald smocks over the denizens of Oz and a gold tiara on the busty blond giant playing Glinda. Our Toto had rheumatoid arthritis and, though she yelped in pain, we only thought to bring her kneepads once we also thought to make her wear a migraine-inducing headband with floppy ears and draw whiskers on her cheeks. Chelsea and the other Munchkins wore ruffled sleeves and scrunchies that even I had to admit were pretty cute. Being a Munchkin was perfect for my little sister. She leapt around the stage like a replaceable idiot while I carried the show with my natural stage presence.
The same show business philosophy that led Bonnie to book our summer stock at amusement parks led her to schedule our final Oz performance in a homeless shelter in downtown Salt Lake City, Bonnie’s philosophy being that a captive audience is better than one composed exclusively of parents and relatives. Only those too sick or stoned stayed for the duration, their faces dirty and drawn, a bunch of Aunt Ems and Uncle Henrys doing their best to ignore the spectacle of Bonnie crouched in the center aisle, mouthing along to the action onstage, fleeing an invisible twister.
Sweat rolled down the back of my neck and dripped under my gold lamé as soon as the overture to “If I Only Had a Brain” blasted through the shoddy sound system and I hobbled to my mark, a masking tape X. My leg wouldn’t stop shaking as I swung it around. Nerves were a good thing, Mom said. They meant you gave a shit. I was a natural singer. I sang, naturally, all over the house. Sounding good in front of a crowd was an order of magnitude beyond me. And dancing, how to put this? Dancing was, if not my secret power, my secret joy. I wasn’t silly enough to think I was actually good at it, but it sure did get a rise out of people. I was only a little worried about what my brother would say.
Since I couldn’t hide my chicken leg, no matter how large my quilted poncho from the Costume Closet or how high I pulled my socks, I tried to turn it into part of the act, jerking around like a real-life man of straw, wincing animatedly when my jean shorts rubbed against the incision scar on my tight right hamstring. Seesawing into scenery, my clumsy right foot mashed crows’ feet and sent plastic apples spiraling into the first row mere seconds after bitchy trees lobbed them at us. There were genuine gasps when I fell and genuine applause when I got up again. Stuck for ages with a pole up my back, I was finally free to dance.
It wasn’t until this last curtain call, when Bonnie presented me, Chelsea, and every other cast member with hollow plastic Oscar statues, that she revealed the big surprise: we were going to meet one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. It must have been a chore to track down Margaret Pellegrini in those dial-up days of the internet, and I’m not sure how my acting teacher did it. In any case, this chance encounter had the ring of fate as it represented the next logical step in my progression as an actor. I was about to be discovered. Margaret would know agents and producers. All I had to do was sing for her and I’d have it made.
“But I’m a Munchkin,” Chelsea said.
“No, you’re a weirdo in a gold leotard,” Danny said. “Just kidding!”
Margaret is on-screen a lot if you know what to look for, a flyspecked grain of color lost in some patty-cake choreography—as gape-mouthed and adorable as Chelsea had been in the same role. There she is on a footbridge, a flowerpot tipped on her head, as Judy Garland begins to sing “It Really Was No Miracle.” Later, as the chorus cheeps, “Wake up you sleepy head,” Margaret stretches from an egg in a pink nightgown and bonnet. When I paused the tape we’d rented from Video Vern’s, Chelsea squealed and kissed the screen, flying back when a branch of static shocked her.
“You idiot,” my sister Tiffany said from the couch.
Mom came over from the kitchen, drying her hands. “Look at that little thing rub her eyes. That woman really knows how to wake up.”
Mom wasn’t being sarcastic. She saw genuine talent in the Munchkin Pellegrini. Like the pope, a Munchkin didn’t have to do anything special to win Mom’s affection. She just had to be. “I bet she taught Judy a thing or two.”
“Look at what she’s wearing,” Tiffany objected. “A pink nightgown? In the afternoon? And she doesn’t even know the steps.”
Protest as my siblings might, when the time came we all piled into the Suburban to meet Margaret’s plane. Danny sang his version of “The Lollipop Guild,” a finger thrumming his small Adam’s apple, and Mom kept cackling “I’ll get you, my pretty” as I mugged in the mirror up front, practicing my toniest smile for little Margaret. “Brains? I don’t have any brains.”
“Brains? ” Mom repeated, emoting to the nth degree. “I don’t have any brains. Only straw.”
“Only straw,” I screamed back.
“This better be the smile I see at the airport,” Mom said, leveling a finger at me. “I’m telling you. I want you to be this obnoxious. Ham it up for her, Greg. Ham it up!”
Airport security was considerably more lax in those days and children’s musical theater companies could storm the terminal, shouting renditions of “The Munchkinland Song.” As I glided along the moving walkway, too tense to bend my spastic knee, Tiffany speed-walked beside me. Even in her baggy pants she moved better than I did. “Don’t worry, Googers. You’re going to do great.”
If I was anxious about our melodic assault, trying not to scratch at the straw stuffed into my jeans, Munchkin Chelsea was downright gleeful, dancing around the terminal with a Tinker Bell wand balled in her fist. Not unlike Bonnie, she had the habit of saying the move she was doing. Leaping and then sashaying over to the gate, she sang, “Leap. Sashay.” Once there, she screeched at every stout woman lugging a suitcase. “Is that the Munchkin? Is that the Munchkin?” There’s nothing inherently wrong with the term “Munchkin,” but like “midget” and “dwarf,” it’s the kind of word you don’t want to say too loudly in an airport.
More than fifty years after the release of the film, a Munchkin’s visit was still a big enough deal to attract local news crews and a reporter or two. Passengers began wearily filing out, picking their noses and searching for signs to baggage claim. My mom pulled Chelsea and me to the front of the crowd, beeping, “Scarecrow, coming through,” and gave me an encouraging swat on the ass. “You can outsing these spazzes. Make her think you’re the only one
in the room.”
When Margaret stepped off the plane, our ensemble devolved into a rancid cult of celebrity. “The Munchkin!” Chelsea cried. “Munchkin lady!”
We gave Margaret the kind of at-the-gate welcome usually reserved for boys returning from Mormon missions. Kids shook autograph books, snapped pictures, and shook cutesy posters. I DON’T THINK YOU’RE IN KANSAS ANYMORE!!! In their minds, Margaret hadn’t flown coach; she’d fallen from a star. Bonnie’s hands flew into motion and we began dinging and donging, singing high and singing low to let Margaret know the Wicked Witch was dead.
Even before our song petered out, I noticed how strange Margaret looked, like she really had come from Munchkinland. Her hands were spotted like Tostitos. Her dress was trimmed with feathers where it shouldn’t have been and so long she couldn’t walk without tripping on it. She’d given up on the war with peach fuzz and the hair on her head looked like it had been dyed with whatever they use to turn cotton candy pink. Parted in the middle, it sat in two fluffy mounds on either side of a very small hat.
“Is she wearing a costume?” I asked as we followed Margaret to the escalator.
“She probably can’t find stuff that fits,” Tiffany said.
“Not that you can, either, skater girl,” Danny said.
“Honestly, you kids,” Mom said. “I couldn’t even hear you back there and now you won’t shut up.”
At the luggage carousel, Chelsea weaseled her way to the front of the seething crowd of gold lamé and handed Margaret her Tinker Bell wand. Instead of calling security, Margaret began casting spells. The whole time we pressed around her, and at the talk she gave at a local high school later that day, striding around the apron of the auditorium stage, the microphone Paul Bunyan–sized in her spotted hands, Margaret humored requests to rub her eyes and sing “Wake up you sleepy head.” She posed for photos, signed people’s crap, and told every child she was beautiful. The word “star” was used liberally. “Maybe you’ll be a big star one day, or a little one like me.”
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 14