Not a Poster Child

by Francine Falk-Allen

  This seemed like such a grown-up question and I wasn’t sure how to answer, since we actually didn’t know yet.

  “The doctor said it was,” I told her, “but it’s going to be three months before we know for sure.”

  The cast removal was a hopeful event. Prior to the operation, we had been told that wearing the cast would only last three months, which was why we’d scheduled the surgery for summer. Just one summer lost, I’d thought. I loved summers for being the only magic, lazy time of the year other than Christmas. As a kid, this seemed a pretty big sacrifice.

  We drove down to Sacramento to Dr. Mearns’s office and waited in the cool lab room, me shivering in a hospital gown.

  When Dr. Mearns came in, he said, “Are you ready to get this thing off?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but how do you do that?”

  “I’m going to cut it off with a special saw.” He took from a drawer a little cord-powered, drill-like device with a small round blade at the end.

  “A saw?” I said with alarm. “But what if you cut my leg?!”

  “This only goes through plaster,” he assured me. “If it hits anything else, it stops.”

  I was still apprehensive, but he began to cut with the high-pitched, screaming saw, first down one side of the cast and then the other, while I sat rigid with fear. When I didn’t get cut right away, I relaxed a little.

  As the cast opened up, a horrible, sickly sweet, rotten odor began to emit from it—and what was inside was as disgusting-looking as it was smelly. I had not expected the stench and the pale look of soft, dead skin. Thick pieces were peeling off my foot, especially, and up my leg—less so near the top, where it had had more air.

  “Eeewww,” I said with dismay.

  “That’s normal after the skin has not been exposed to air for three months,” Dr. Mearns said. “It will recover.”

  I was no longer in pain or swollen, though I had not put weight on the foot yet, and I’d thought this was it: I was moving on to walking again. However, we weren’t done.

  “It’s healing well,” Dr. Mearns said. “I’m pleased with the progress. But because of the poor circulation in your leg, you’ll need to keep wearing a cast for another couple of months.”

  A couple more months? I was deflated and disheartened by the unexpected extension.

  When the second cast came off in early winter, I still needed to use the crutches.

  “Okay,” Dr. Mearns said, “it’s going to be sore, but you can start putting weight on it and then practice walking.”

  I slipped off the examining table in his lab room, standing on my strong leg and tentatively putting my little foot down. But as soon as I actually put weight on it, a searing, sharp pain shot through my foot.

  “Owwww!” I cried out. “I can’t do it!”

  “I know it hurts,” said the gentle doctor. “But see how your ankle is straight now and doesn’t roll in? That’s exactly what we wanted. It won’t get better and stop hurting unless you walk on it. You don’t have to do it all at once. Just walk on it, with your crutches, a little every day.”

  I did start trying to walk at home, but it hurt so much that I often broke down crying. My little foot was too sore to even put a shoe on it, so I wore a soft cotton knee sock over a supportive Ace bandage, which I had to learn to wrap. Even donning the sock was painful at first. I felt as if I’d never walk again without crutches or pain, and thus would never walk independently again at all. I was going on fourteen and felt as if my life as I had known it was pretty much over. Here was the upset about a dim future I hadn’t had the maturity to experience when I was three.

  I didn’t put weight on my foot at school; when I was standing still, I kept all my weight on my strong leg, my hands, and crutches. A couple of weeks into the process, once I was less in pain, I tried to walk without the crutches at home, and my foot was so weak that my knee buckled and I stumbled. My leg seemed to have lost body memory of how it felt to walk!

  I sobbed deeply and frequently throughout this sojourn. I lost my balance easily because my foot, ankle, and gimpy little leg had dramatically weakened further from lack of use.

  But in a little over a month I was off the crutches entirely. Six months on crutches and another month or two of physical therapy had meant no swimming in the over-100-degree weather with a hot, itchy cast and missing lots of school events. I had continued to sing in the girls’ chorus, however, and was even able to attend the vocal competitions in Chico, far enough north that we traveled in buses. I participated in those regionals for two or three years with my school, even on crutches. And now I had a stable ankle, even though I still had a drop foot.

  I continued to limp badly and would forever, but I no longer rolled my ankle toward the floor, which made it somewhat easier to walk. I could now walk perhaps a half-mile to a mile, in fact—with fatigue, of course, but that was better than staying home while the other kids went wherever it was that we just had to go as young teenagers.

  The year before all this, Daralyn had turned fifteen and gotten her much lighter ten-speed purple bike. I was getting too heavy for a back bumper anyway. Our best bet now was to use the little bus that shuttled back and forth between Marysville and Yuba City. It only went east and west, so all neighborhoods located to the north and south became accessible to me only if I could get my mother, or someone else’s, to take me by car.

  In another kind of transporting, I discovered Motown R&B around this time, which inspired me to want to dance and get out and about. I was blooming, morphing from the homely, uncertain girl I’d been into someone who at least emulated loveliness, with my light pink lipstick and soft, shoulder-length hair.

  15

  —

  high hopes for high school

  A year later, I went into high school expecting a lot of dating, parties, and making new friends. Only part of that ensued.

  Being the crippled girl had not mattered much in grammar school, and also not too much in middle school—but it did begin to matter when we were all going to dances and choosing people to date who had the potential of being our life partners, a reality that I did not see coming as I entered ninth grade. I was one of three or four handicapped girls in our school; at least three of us were polio survivors, and two of us had similarly obvious limps and paralysis. With two thousand kids in our school, we comprised a pretty small subset.

  In high school, the boys I’d known all my life were friendly to me, always—except if they thought I was flirting with them or interested in going out with them. This was something I had not bargained for, me with my romantic and slightly grasping heart and maybe too-flirtatious or clingy demeanor. My memories may be different than the boys’ are; I imagine they were more concerned with seeming to be cool and getting up the courage to ask girls out. Maybe some were interested in me and I was not friendly enough to them, aspiring as I was for some handsome preppy guy at first. Still, most boys were looking at girls who didn’t limp.

  One summer day, just prior to the start of our freshman year, I was lounging and chatting with a few girlfriends on the athletic field behind the high school.

  “My older brother told me you have to be really careful with sex—that even if a boy gets his penis near you and doesn’t put it inside, you could still get pregnant,” Theresa said.

  “Eewww!” I said. “Why would anyone let a boy put his penis near you?” The films I had seen in middle school had never explicitly illustrated or explained sex between men and women. They’d used pictures of bulls and cows, but they’d never came out and said that women willingly allowed human penises into their vaginas. I thought only dirty-minded people did that, and most women wouldn’t consent to it.

  “Pregnancy is caused by God when two people love each other and get married,” I said.

  The other three girls started laughing uncontrollably.

  “Francine!” Mary said when she caught her breath. “You think that?”

  “Yes. Only animals do that.”


  “No, people do that. You can’t get pregnant unless the sperm get into your vagina. And my sister said it feels really good when a boy touches you between your legs, and it’s hard to say no.”

  My face colored. “Oh. But my parents . . . ? Oh.” I was so embarrassed to have been so naïve.

  Another thing that was a big surprise was that the older girls just hated us. I had expected that the sophomores would be adoptive big sisters, taking us under their wings. I was sad to learn that this was not to be—that, in fact, they thought we were competition and therefore scorned us. In gym, the sophomore girls treated us like the people who had come to take over their rightful job— which was apparently to dominate the attention of the sophomore, junior, and senior boys. Freshmen girls were basically the new pickings. Some girls in my class saw this and took advantage of it, but I did not see myself as someone with any kind of advantage.

  The junior and senior girls thought the same of us, but were more confident in their ability to attract boys and keep them around, hoping by senior year to be on the verge of getting an engagement ring.

  Hold it! An engagement ring at eighteen? you may be thinking. Isn’t that a little young?

  Yes, it’s incredibly young—but we didn’t know that. We thought we needed to land a fiancé by then or we’d end up out there in the nowhere land of college, far from home, looking for someone no one knew, who might not fit into our valley town society. (From an evolutionary standpoint, this would have been a good thing.) There was status in finding a boy who was a few years older and going to high school or college somewhere other than Yuba City, but the primary goal was getting a boyfriend.

  Our church had a feature they referred to as “visiting teachers,” and they came to our home once a month for an hour. I was never totally clear what they were actually teaching, because, God knows, we clearly got a great deal of instruction at church. They always sent a woman to our house—probably because Mother was a widow, and they deemed it inappropriate to send a man around to visit her alone.

  On one of these occasions, the three of us were discussing my lukewarm attitude toward attending high school student seminary classes, which were held at 7:30 a.m., before school, Monday through Friday. I’d gone for the first year of high school, and really didn’t want to continue.

  Mrs. Bishop peered at me. “You’ll be continuing with seminary classes, won’t you, Carol?” (They still called me Carol at church; I’d never corrected them.)

  “Well, I have to get up too early, by six, after I’m up late studying the night before, so I’m not going to go this year.” Not many kids, and certainly none of the church kids I knew, were in the advanced academic classes I was taking. Those who were not in the “double x” program or did not have a child enrolled in them could not possibly have understood the amount and intensity of homework—at a minimum, five hours each night and another day’s worth on the weekends, for all of high school. Plus, of course, I would never miss a teen dance (every Saturday night), a party if I were invited, or an occasional movie, if Mom would pay for it.

  “Why do you need to get up so early?” Mrs. Bishop asked. “Surely you could get up at seven and get there on time; you live so close.”

  Half an hour? I was already thinking this was getting a little invasive; the polite thing would have been to leave it at my first excuse. The church, however, was quite concerned that its teenagers were going to “fall away” from it (and in my case, they had reason to be concerned).

  Mrs. Bishop didn’t know that I had to stop and rest after each of the three blocks I walked to school, or how it fatigued me to carry a pile of books. (No book bags or backpacks in those days.) Many days, Mother took me in the car, but even then, there was the issue of her always being late as well. To our church lady, though, it was a walk of only a couple of minutes.

  “I need time to take a shower, eat breakfast, and do my hair and makeup,” I told her, thinking, and put on the prosthesis I wear with double stockings over it so my leg can try to masquerade as normal. This was similar to but more than the process every other high school girl was putting herself through each morning, for heaven’s sake.

  “Oh, Carol, I think you’re trying to look too nice,” Mrs. Bishop said.

  Internally, I closed my eyes and shook my head to process her comment. It was at that time beyond my understanding that anyone, ever, could look too nice.

  “I have something to make up for, so I like to look my best,” I told her. I thought it should be obvious that a handicapped kid—a handicapped girl in particular—would have to make a greater effort. How else would the boys overlook her ugly ungainly limp, missing arm, or whatever she did not have that all the other potential girlfriends did? In my mind, even being the smartest or funniest girl would not make up for a physical defect in the highly competitive world of seeking the attention of innocently clueless high school boys.

  By this point I had begun to question much of what they were telling us at church. As a child, I had believed that there was a God—a nice male spirit, perhaps a bit strict—and that Jesus Christ was his son, and that Jesus had been born of an earthly virgin mother and his heavenly father, God. Knowing nothing about sex as a child, and thinking my mother was a virgin too, this story was not at all a stretch for me. I accepted the Bible, and the Book of Mormon, as literally true.

  As I matured, I had begun to ask Mother questions like, “But how could God create the earth in only six days?” The trees in our backyard, after all, had taken years to mature.

  Mother was surprisingly broad-minded about a narrow range of religious tenets, given her solid belief in her religion. Her answer was that the six days were simply symbolic. To God, she said, thousands of years were like a day, because He was eternal.

  This made sense to me, and because I had been thus prepped that Adam and Eve might be just symbols for the beginning of humanity and not two actual people named Adam and Eve who literally lived in a garden, I had no conflict when I was taught evolution in school . . . though it’s possible that Mother still believed that part of the Bible was literal. She was a little complicated in that regard, which may have contributed to her angst about whether she might not go to heaven (she smoked and drank coffee, which were seen as detrimental to the gift of the body and something a Mormon was not supposed to do).

  I didn’t like having questions about the church. I was torn because, among other things, I knew nice people who smoked. I also began to know some Buddhists, and Jewish people, and other folks who did not go to church, and I just couldn’t believe that God was not going to accept all these folks into heaven. It just didn’t seem very . . . Christian to me. Also, if everyone who died was going to have to wait in something like Purgatory until every single person on earth died and accepted Jesus as their Lord . . . well that just seemed like an unrealistic, inefficient plan. Especially when I learned that the population of the earth was expanding, keeping Judgment Day farther and farther away. What are we all going to do up there while we’re waiting for everybody else to die? I wondered. I had a strong hunch that God was not going to have movies or other entertainment available, and no one in my 1950s circle had been talking about an afterlife of eternal bliss.

  The older I got, the more questions I had.

  The foam calf prosthesis I wore was a big deal, by the way.

  It was made by taking a casting of my left, strong calf, and then reversing it to make a pretend right calf out of soft, flesh-colored foam. A casting was taken of my smaller leg so the inside of the fake calf fit quite snugly, though in the winter, when my leg shrank, it tended to slide down, and I’d have to slip into the girls’ room or sit in the back of class to pull or shimmy the thing back up in place.

  For the first one I had, I was called in to the prosthetic place in Sacramento to try it on and get advice about it.

  When we got there, the orthotist handed it to me with pride.

  “This is wrong,” I said right away. “It’s another left calf, not a right.
”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “put it on, you’ll see.”

  I held it next to my left leg—two left legs side by side—and looked at him.

  “Please, try it on,” he implored. “Okay, but I’m not going to wear it.”

  I put it on. I was indisputably right. I stood there in front of him and my mother and just glared at them, as if to say, “Look!”

  They saw it; it looked like I had two left legs. (This brings to mind the film Best in Show, wherein Eugene Levy plays a dog owner with two actual left feet. It’s noticeable, and made a great gag for the film.) I was miffed that I hadn’t been believed in the first place.

  “Oh, I see,” the orthotist said. “Well, we can make you another one. But meanwhile, you can wear this one; I’m sure no one will notice.”

  “No one will look,” my mother chimed in. “It will be fine.”

  “I’m not going to wear it,” I said. “I’m not walking around with two left calves. People will look. Everyone will think it looks worse than my leg the way it is. It looks stupid!”

  I was fourteen. I was starting high school, the beginning of my adulthood. I cared more than the vainest teenage girls about looking good. They re-made a prosthesis correctly, and this time they mailed it to me.

  The first iteration, and also the revamp, zipped up the back, with a foam tab that was supposed to fit down into the heel of my shoes but didn’t—it just bunched above the shoe. The slit in the foam was pretty obvious back there, too; it didn’t close completely.

  The orthotist and also my mother said encouragingly, “You know, that’s where the seam in your stockings goes anyway.”

  Which decade are you living in? I thought. Seams up the back were quickly giving way to modern, stretchy nylons.

  I asked them to make the next one with the seam up the inside of my leg, where you couldn’t see it so well. This idea had to come from a teenager who’d never seen one of these before. (Not too many women in the orthotics field, even now.)