And she proceeded to keep right on yelling as Kelly’s smile faded and the customer lines parted to form a congregation around Marjorie’s pulpit.
THIS TODD
This Todd was going to be different because he didn’t insist that he was okay with his condition. He seethed, unapologetically, and he liked telling me how much he missed his legs, after a movie, before I climbed onto or off his lap, whenever I saw him slumped in his chair and the mood was ripe for melancholy. He didn’t do any of that Pollyanna-before-the-fall stuff; he was Pollyanna right after the fall, and I liked that. He liked talking to me about it; he needed me to listen. My head filled the crook of his shoulder like a plinth for the Venus de Milo.
• • •
The first Todd’s name was Brian, and I met him at the mechanic’s. I sat in one of those polyvinyl chairs waiting for these men, who pretended they weren’t talking down to me, to fix whatever was wrong with my car and to change my oil, because a good way to make them think you know something about cars is to get your oil changed. The waiting area smelled of rubber and stale coffee, and to avoid the lady across from me who complained—to me and the television—about the president’s stance on women’s healthcare, I stared at the calves to my left. A purple rash interrupted their smooth brown and wrapped itself around the man’s Achilles tendons—maybe lower, but I couldn’t see below the socks or sneakers—and then ended, like a farmer’s tan, right at the place where his shorts were hemmed.
He used a cherrywood cane with an ebony fritz, beautiful materials. I hate those offensive people who’re all, “How did you become handicapped?” or, “What’s wrong with you?” so I decided to make some small talk that might encourage him to voluntarily tell me about his condition. I still don’t know what to call any of these guys—“differently abled,” “disabled,” “gimps,” with an emphasis on reappropriating the term for good—so I just call all three of them Todds because that makes sense to me. Even now that their likenesses and eccentricities have formed a frieze around the upper walls of my mind, I still find them nearly interchangeable, except for this Todd.
The first Todd, Brian, laughed when I told him his cane looked really expensive and asked if I could touch it. “What kind of icebreaker is that?” he said. Then he told me his name and that I had “no game.” That he would respond to a girl clearly out of his league with such confidence, to assume she was the one hitting on him, surprised me.
We talked until his car was ready. I liked the sinewy veins in his legs above the purple and the way his jaw clenched when he seemed to be thinking. His taupe eyes were rimmed with hazel. “I’ll call you,” he said, and I said, “Right,” in my incredulous but still-flirtatious voice. When he stood and applied pressure to the cane, I saw that he walked off balance, his torso rocking from side to side like the eyes on one of those Felix the Cat clocks. I prayed his phone would die and somehow lose my number, but when he called, sounding so confident, so casual, I remembered why I had given it to him.
• • •
When I picture this Todd—not Brian, but this Todd, the third—I see his neckline, edged up so neatly you would think someone used a straight razor instead of clippers; he is always seated with his back to me, a slight cock to his neck, like he is looking upward, toward something better.
• • •
Dating a Todd wasn’t that weird. Initially, it took a lot of adjusting on my part. I hesitated before introducing the first Todd to my friends, in case they did something to make him feel alienated or special. My friends aren’t always as sensitive as I am. I considered arriving really early to everything so that Brian would already be seated and no one would see him hobble in, just to avoid the awkwardness, not because I was embarrassed. I resolved that there would be no dancing. Yes, his pants would cover the contusions, and he could probably make the sway look like swag if he stood in one spot. But at the time I worried about the stigma of the cane. Unless “Big Pimpin’ ” came on at the club—and why would it?—the cane would be a dead giveaway.
Everyone loved Brian, though, and I thought I did, too. We talked about regular grad school things, his interests in anthropology and autoethnography. He understood my sculptures and my latest montage, and I pretended to listen when he talked about normative whiteness and invisibility and cultural insensitivity. There was no paralysis to overcome. We parked easily when we carpooled to campus and enjoyed accelerated access to rides at Disneyland before they stopped letting people do that—because believe it or not, some people will fake a handicap to get advantages. People actually hired their own Todds to move through the lines. I got used to his wheelchair, which he used on extended trips, and was soon comfortable operating it, leading him, pushing him with ease. I liked watching him struggle to pull on the compression socks he wore to bed. I liked the way the “flesh color” of the heavy fabric contrasted against the shades of brown of his skin, mottled as it was from the bruising and swelling, as if someone had stroked and wrenched and twisted the legs and squeezed the dark meat of them into pale casings. I tried to imagine rendering the image in sculpture, but could never settle on the right materials.
• • •
OF COURSE THERE were problems with Brian. I tried to make myself available for him as much as possible, not just sexually, but emotionally. But he could never balance his optimism about himself with his need for help. He was always like, “Kim, I really don’t need any help.” “Kim, my legs don’t define me.” “Please don’t introduce me that way, Kimmy.” “Kim, it’s like some kind of fetish for you.” “No, Kim, I don’t want to play candy striper. No, you can’t remove the bandages.”
When he broke up with me, Brian said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re too clingy. I like a girl who has her own thing going on.”
I could do so much better than him, so I told him to get to stepping. I felt justified by the slight wince in his brow.
I knew two weeks ago that this Todd was planning to leave me. I’m not one of those women who would pleasepleasebabydon’tgo. I am too valuable for all that. There’s this saying I say: “Hit them where it hurts.”
• • •
The second Todd I met on the bus, and he’s a little crazy, so I’ll call him Jamal to protect my identity. And for full disclosure, I didn’t exactly need to ride the bus, because my car was fine by then, but I wanted to, occasionally, just to see who was on it. I sat in the front, near the handicap seats. I noticed his arms first, dark and ripped, contrasting against his green tank top. Then I noticed the walk. He had sort of limped onto the bus, and you could tell it wasn’t an injury sort of limp, but more like a stiff gait, like he dragged his legs behind him, like Igor upright. His legs seemed especially thin, even in the jeans, child’s limbs playing dress-up in a man’s pants. He wore oversize headphones and insisted on standing the entire ride, even when I motioned that he could take the empty seat next to me. I thought that maybe he liked forcing himself to stand to build his leg strength, but I learned later that he just wanted to show off his arms by keeping them flexed as he gripped the bus handle. He nodded his acknowledgment of me in between bobbing his head to a beat, and I tried not to stare at the too-big jeans or overcompensating arms. I imagined under those jeans a stump, prosthetics, skeletal, underdeveloped legs with burns so bad the skin had turned to bark that would flake off with rubbing. But Jamal’s legs were like nothing I’d ever seen before. Like Slim Jim jerky sticks on a wide torso, a GI Joe action figure ripped apart and scrunched onto Barbie’s pins.
• • •
This Todd, not Brian, not Jamal, but the most recent Todd, the one I envision looking upward, also had overdeveloped arms, and when he was in a playful mood, he could lift me at least two inches off his lap with one hand.
• • •
“This is becoming, like, a thing for you,” Chelsea said the night after she met Jamal.
“What is?”
“Don’t play. These guys.” She flicked her outdated side-swooped bangs awa
y from her eye.
“It’s not a thing,” I said.
“At least they’ve been hot so far.”
“What else would they be?”
She rolled the eye I could see. “But it’s kinda weird, girl. You know it is, like it’s becoming your thing.”
Chelsea worked as a nurse and had improved her figure in the past two years, but she continued to date a string of fake thugs, all of them rehearsed just enough to seem ghetto but thoroughly unfrightening, all of them spending their questionable income on cell phones and sneakers instead of down payments for homes. “Who’s talking?” I said. “And it’s not a thing.”
“You’re not fooling anybody. If you’ve got a thing, you’ve got a thing. Just admit it. You always like to be the one in control.”
“That’s bull. Shut up,” I said.
• • •
I BROKE UP with Jamal the day he looked like he was going to put his hands on me. We had argued at his place over his unwillingness to use his wheelchair all the time. “But don’t you feel self-conscious, always limping so slowly behind me?” I asked as gently as I could.
I can’t say for sure if he would have hit me, but I sensed his hand reaching for my neck. I could have taken a lesson from Wynonna Judd and pushed him and his wheelchair off the porch and said, “Come and git me, then, gimpy boy.” Or I could have done a Burning Bed kind of thing and burned his bed, or gone all Misery on him and hacked away until he had no working limbs to ever try to lay on me again. But instead, I ran to my car, broke up with him over the phone later that night, told him his marionette legs disgusted me, and blocked his number.
• • •
This Todd was Chelsea’s “special friend” when we were in undergrad, and I don’t want to say she’s a gold digger, but he bought her a lot of nice handbags and shoes and took her to the Ivy, and drove a Beamer even after it was too small to accommodate his wheelchair, yet she didn’t call him her man. I’d known him before his tour in Afghanistan and never thought twice about him, although I regarded him as kind and not unattractive. He came back sullen and a little mouthy. He told Chelsea he wasn’t into material things anymore, that disability checks were earned, that he needed someone who could understand that, whatever it meant.
He looked so bronzed and stately that evening we double-dated for dinner, before he broke up with Chelsea, before Jamal broke up with me. I’m not talking FDR in his chair, but London Paralympics, golden man, erect. My own personal Jimmy Brooks, my own Lieutenant Dan. He wore jeans with the legs hemmed to cover the nubs of his knees, his body bulky, even with the missing parts.
I was wrong to imagine clean cuts, the skin on the stumps like French-polished walnut. It looked more like the thread of a baseball caked with clay and burnished dark, textured.
• • •
I’m trying to put this together the best way I can. The thing is, if this Todd could have just gotten used to things, learned to see the world in a slightly different way, seen a counselor to help him deal with his condition, we’d have been fine. If he’d actually applied for those grad programs in disability studies, if he’d had more to do than think about our relationship, we would have made it.
Todd got really mad at me, completely overreacted one day at Venice Beach, and it was the beginning of the end. A few weeks before, he said he didn’t think we should move in together, yet. I noticed the wide space between “together” and “yet.”
He hadn’t been to Venice since before his second tour, and it was one of those days when the beach is so cold, all you want to do is sit close to someone and build a bonfire and make your own humidity.
When he was a kid, Todd’s dad would take him to Venice a couple of times a month to watch the street performers and ride the Ferris wheel. Todd grew up near Huntington Beach, but his dad preferred Venice, “where all the color is.” They’d get hot dogs with extra onions and mustard and eat them while they walked along the shore.
I’d wanted to surprise him, make him feel better after the problems we’d been having, but before we even reached the exit on the 10, he guessed where we were going.
“Babe, what are you doing?” He placed his palm over my knuckles as I shifted gears and merged right.
“We’ll just have a nice day, walk around.” I stifled the urge to correct myself. None of the Todds liked when I did that.
“I don’t want to have to push against a big crowd today,” he said, and I could tell he was in one of those moods, the kind where you couldn’t reason with him much or he’d just shut down.
I already had to practically beg him to let me take him anywhere. “I’ll clear all the people out of the way for you by making a beeping sound like a truck backing out,” I said.
“And I’ll be sure to run over your foot.”
“Come on. We’re here now. We can get some gelato and frozen lemonade, maybe a hot dog. I’ll let you buy me a fake Chanel purse.”
He smiled with one corner of his mouth. I snagged a sweet handicap space between the best side of the pier and the Ferris wheel.
• • •
THE WEEK BEFORE the beach, when I stayed over at his place, he’d asked, out of the blue, “Can you stop doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Staring at them.”
I had rested my head on his stomach, examining the cracks in the scar where one of his legs used to be, but I played dumb when he called me out. “What?”
He sat up and wriggled my head away from him. “Would you even date me if things were reversed?”
I sighed, dramatically, because I didn’t want to get analytical. “You mean if I had no legs—” I tried to invert the image of us—me hunched in a wheelchair with ebony trim, like a defeated Blanche Hudson, only black and young and more beautiful, him hovering over me, studying the striations of the wounds.
He interrupted, “I mean if you had no legs, and I always reminded you of it, or if you had, like, really bad skin, and I always stared at it, pretending I’m looking at something else.”
“I don’t do that,” I said. “If anything, I remind you of how special you are, not special-special, you know, but, like, great-special.”
“You don’t get it,” he said.
“Get what?”
“It’s—it’s like you always expect me to be grateful, like you’re doing me a favor.”
Later, I thought, wasn’t that what he did when he bought Chelsea and all the girls before me all those expensive things? At the time, I said, “Grateful for what?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said, and rolled over with his back to me. A cold stump bumped against my calf under the covers.
• • •
HE BOBBED HIS head and threw a fiver at three break-dancing kids, and I knew we would have a good time. He fit awkwardly into most of the shops, even with ramps, but the foot traffic on the pier parted easily for us, anticipating the space of the wheelchair, making a clearing. People smiled directly at us. I wished Todd had worn his uniform, but he never wore it anymore.
The gasp of a little girl disrupted my bargaining with a street vendor who swore her carvings were made of real balsam. The little girl wore pink barrettes and took her finger out of her mouth to point at Todd’s legs, or the lack of them. “Look,” she said. Her mother nodded without acknowledging Todd. “Look,” the girl repeated, now tugging her mother’s sweater.
Todd said nothing. He could be passive in public.
I intervened. “Look,” I mocked. “Look. What a funny-looking girl. You should really teach your kid how to behave,” I said to the mother. “He’s a real person.”
The mother smacked her lips and got up in my face, but I didn’t hear what she said because Todd grabbed my arm so hard that I almost fell into his lap.
“She’s fine,” he said to the mother. “Sorry about this.”
“Why are you apologizing to her?” I started to get a little loud, but this was justifiable anger. The mother made unintelligible sounds as
people stared.
“We’re fine. Excuse me, everyone.” Todd wheeled away. I had no choice but to follow.
We plowed on silently then, the crowd sluggish, blocking the path.
“Can we still get a hot dog?” I asked after a while, bending to look into his face.
Todd pinched his lips together so tightly it looked like his teeth were gone, too.
“Please, it’s all I wanted for the day.”
We ordered two hot dogs with mustard and onions from a man who played Turkish or Kurdish or maybe Indian music from an old stereo.
“Let’s sit by the water.” I beckoned my hand toward the shore, which rippled about one hundred yards away from the concrete path.
“You know I can’t wheel over there.”
A family of four looked both ways and crossed over the bike path. They paused at the line demarcating the sand to take off their shoes before sinking their feet in soft heavy steps.
“One day we’ll get you one of those special all-terrain chairs,” I said.
He made a noncommittal sound, not unlike a grunt, and said, “It’s too overcast.”
• • •
TODD DIDN’T LOOK at me once during the ride home. “Chelsea told me this wasn’t going to work,” he said quietly, as we approached the elevator to his apartment.
“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” I said.
• • •
For the next two weeks, I worked on something to make this Todd get it. Relying on my memory and intuition, I guesstimated the dimensions of his legs, the length and girth. I bought the wood—and with more money I hoped to buy a fancy set of sockets and connectors. I carved and sanded and massaged the wood and plied and buffed and blew off the dust and buffed again. I engraved the soles of the feet with my signature and distinctive paraph.
But the legs were so heavy, far too heavy for Todd to ever use them. I couldn’t sand the insides down smooth enough to keep them from splintering and poking his skin. And it was too hard to line the sockets of the thigh with foam to cushion his bone prominences, so I focused most on the outside of the legs. Since Brian, I had criticized companies that didn’t make tights or foundation to match dark skin and instead copped out by settling on light, dark, and medium, but I understood then. It isn’t just white normativity, which is a concept Brian taught me. I tried so hard to match Todd’s subtle skin tones, scumbled the legs with sepia and umber and chestnut. But even after a decade of studio work, I couldn’t get it right. I can only hope that in a few years I can build a better model with a 3-D printer.
Heads of the Colored People Page 14