Ugly

by Robert Hoge

Most of the time at home I didn’t wear my artificial legs. They were like big, uncomfortable shoes, and every chance I got, I took them off. I could crawl around okay without them on and I was more comfortable. Plus, I had a lot more physical freedom when I had my artificial legs off. I could jump off couches, and jump up and down stairs and crawl around the backyard. I was pretty quick too. But there were plenty of things my siblings could do that I couldn’t, like riding a bike. I’d see my brothers ride their bikes up and down the street, carrying each other on the back—sometimes even on the handlebars in front.

  I wanted to ride a bike so much, I thought I’d burst into flames if I didn’t.

  One day Catherine, Paula, and Gary were playing outside. I asked Gary if I could try riding his bike.

  “Sure,” he said. “But you’ll need your legs on.”

  When I was wearing my artificial legs they helped me interact better with the big, wide world. I was taller when I had them on, and could walk around like other kids. But that didn’t come without a cost. My prosthetics were cumbersome and heavy, and wearing them often made my real legs hot and sore. Imagine wearing a big boot that goes all the way up to your knee, and you’ll get a sense of what it’s like.

  As I was growing, they’d get uncomfortable even faster, because I grew quickly and they didn’t fit perfectly for long. I could get around with my legs off—either by crawling or lifting myself up on my arms and swinging the rest of my body underneath me. So almost every chance I could get—especially at home—I took them off.

  But riding a bike was worth having my artificial legs on, so I rushed upstairs and put them on.

  “Ready,” I said when I came back down.

  We were in the front yard. There was the fence and a small avocado tree on one side and the house on the other. About fifteen feet away downhill was the fence to the neighbor’s house. In front of it was a lovingly manicured bush grown to chest height. It flowered almost year-round and as far as I could tell, most of the local bee population seemed to live there. I avoided it as much as possible. I’d already been stung by bees a few times and knew how much it hurt.

  Gary and Catherine held the bike while Paula helped me climb on.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Well, you’re already facing downhill, so you won’t have to pedal much,” Paula said.

  This was good, because while I could manage to put the foot of my right leg on the pedal, it was impossible to get my left leg sitting comfortably, so it just hung by the side and I tried to keep it out of the way.

  “Just steer,” Gary said.

  “Just steer,” Catherine repeated.

  “Steer and keep clear of anything, then start pedaling and keep going,” Gary said.

  Steer and pedal, I thought. Simple.

  I gripped the handlebars of the big green bike and leaned forward, head down, built for speed. I imagined gathering speed, pedaling faster and faster, feeling the wind in my hair, going so fast.

  “Ready?” Gary said.

  I nodded.

  And with one mighty shove, I was off.

  The first few seconds were sheer terror. I almost fell off as the bike wobbled from one side to another. Then there was a moment of exhilaration. The bike picked up enough speed to go straight for a little bit. I hadn’t fallen off, I hadn’t gotten my legs caught in the wheel or the chain, and I hadn’t crashed into the side of the house. The wind was in my hair. I was riding a bike!

  From behind me, I heard someone shout.

  I ignored it at first. The feeling of riding the bike was too much fun.

  “Turn!”

  “Turn the bike, Robert!”

  “Turn!”

  Suddenly I was headed straight for the rough branches of the bush on our side of the fence. Turn? They hadn’t taught me how to turn, but I turned the handlebars hard to the right and just missed running into the bushes. Or so I thought.

  The momentum I’d built going downhill was too strong. While the bike was now traveling parallel to the bushes, I wasn’t. I was heading toward them. Or, more precisely, into them. I toppled off the bike and fell straight into the bushes. I immediately started screaming to scare off the bees.

  Paula, Catherine, and Gary came racing down the yard to pull me free. I had a few scratches but had avoided any bee stings.

  “You didn’t turn soon enough,” Gary said.

  “Not soon enough at all,” Paula said.

  I scowled at them and started putting myself back together. My bike-riding career had started and finished all in one go.

  • • •

  Another time, Mom and Dad called us all into the living room. This was a rare-enough event, because we were normally scattered—Michael and Gary playing together or getting into fights with their sworn enemies from the house at the top of the street, and Catherine and Paula taking themselves off into their room and doing whatever girls did when they had a secret meeting, which was just talking to each other, as far as I could tell.

  We were lined up in the living room from oldest to youngest. Michael, ten years older than me, was tall, almost a mini Dad. He and Gary were similar in looks, with broad faces, big ears, and light-brown hair. They were always exploring, going places I couldn’t go and getting there in ways I couldn’t—on their bikes, or running. Paula was tall, like Dad, with long dark-brown hair. She talked fast, and lots, and always seemed like the sibling go-between, more patient and willing to play with me than my older brothers. Catherine was closest to me in age, so we played—and fought—together the most. She had red hair and was always being counseled by Mom to stay out of the sun. Like Mom, she was short, but everyone seemed like a giant to me most of the time, especially when I had my artificial legs off.

  And I had them off when Mom called us in. I was sitting on the carpet, but everyone else was standing straight. Something was up.

  Chocolates had been taken, Mom informed us, from the box on top of the fridge.

  “I’m sure whoever took them thought we wouldn’t notice,” Mom said, walking up and down in front of us.

  “I’m sure whoever took them thought, ‘Oh, Mom and Dad won’t know if one or two are missing.’ Unfortunately, there are more than one or two missing. And we did notice that.”

  She continued walking back and forth in front of us. Dad just stood there, hands behind his back, menacingly tall.

  “So,” Mom said, “we’re going to ask who took the chocolates. We’re going to look you in the eye and ask you, and you’d better come clean or there’ll be real trouble.”

  She marched up to one end of the line and looked at Michael. She stared at him for a few seconds.

  “Michael, did you take any chocolates?” Mom asked.

  I leaned forward slightly so I could get a view of something other than Catherine’s knees.

  “No,” Michael said, looking straight ahead, and then turned toward Gary. Aha, I thought. The culprit. Mom took a step to her right and faced Gary.

  “Gary, did you take the chocolates?”

  “Nope,” Gary said. He turned to look at Paula, next in line.

  A look of dread came over Paula’s face as Mom stood in front of her. Dad was now moving along the line as well, towering over Mom’s shoulder but saying nothing.

  “Paula, did you take the chocolates?”

  My sister paused for a second and a look of panic flashed briefly across her face.

  Surely this meant she was the guilty party, I thought.

  But no, Paula regained her composure, turned to look at Catherine first and then back at Mom.

  “No, I didn’t take any chocolates,” Paula said. “It wasn’t me.”

  Mom stared at her a few seconds longer before moving on to Catherine.

  The game was up! I knew I hadn’t taken the chocolates, and if Michael, Gary, and Paula hadn’t taken them ei
ther, then it must have been Catherine! I felt bad for Catherine, but I was happy it wasn’t me.

  “So, Catherine,” Mom said, “did you take any chocolates from the box on top of the fridge?”

  Catherine looked like she was going to cry. Here it comes, I thought.

  Silence for a few more seconds. Her lips trembled slightly. Here it comes!

  Then, ever so slowly, like it had been planned this way all along, Catherine turned to look at me. Me!

  Wait . . . what? I thought. That wasn’t fair. I hadn’t done it.

  “I didn’t take any chocolates,” Catherine said, shaking her head. She stared at me the whole time.

  I looked to my left and realized there was no one there for me to look at. Not even Sally, our dog.

  I started crying before Mom got to me. One by one the others turned to look at me. Dad glared ominously over Mom’s shoulder and I tried to say, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.” But everything was lost to my sobbing and I got the blame.

  I still don’t know who took those chocolates.

  9

  Names People Play

  The first nickname I got at school came not from my classmates but from Catherine.

  One day in grade one, Mom arrived to pick us up after school. When I reached the car I was frowning and grumpy. I was carrying my gray jumper rolled up and at arm’s length in front of me. Mom was on the case right away. “What happened?” she asked as Catherine and I hopped into the car.

  I told her the story. We were in class singing and one of the other boys, who must not have been feeling at all well, vomited on me. I was upset because it had smelled bad and I was worried that Mom would be cranky because my school clothes were messy.

  Catherine laughed.

  “Ha, ha,” she said. “Spewed-on! Spewed-on! Spewed-on!”

  I scrunched my face up and almost started to cry.

  “Stop it,” I shouted at her. “Stop it!” It didn’t work.

  Mom intervened, but it was too late.

  I had been spewed on at school, and now I was “Spewed-on” at home too.

  It didn’t last long, and luckily, didn’t go much further than my family. Plus, our school jumper was pretty ugly to start with.

  • • •

  Have you ever sat on the beach and watched the tide come in? You might not notice the water rising as one wave follows another, but if you wait half an hour, the dry patch you were sitting on is in danger of being overtaken by water. That’s what it was like for me at school. The change was gradual, but by the time I was seven, I had started to notice a difference in the way some of my classmates treated me. It’s not far from the first gentle wave of genuine interest and curiosity to a crashing tide of teasing and meanness.

  The first incident that sticks in my mind was a playground fall. The grounds of our elementary school were quite small. We had plenty of shade under one of the old wooden buildings to eat lunch, but there were no grassy areas for kids to play on during lunch. Each lunchtime, though, a few hundred screaming kids would brave their knees and elbows against the asphalt. Most of the time I’d play in the dirt surrounding the trees that had pushed their way through the hard surface of the playground. I’d play with Matchbox cars or the occasional marble that I’d brought from home.

  One day, however, I was running around madly with the other kids. While I couldn’t keep up with them for long, I could manage, after a fashion. And what I lacked in speed and maneuverability, I made up for in enthusiasm.

  We were playing the schoolyard game of brandy—tag with a tennis ball. It involved throwing the ball as hard as you could at one of the other players, hopefully leaving a lush red mark on some painful but visible part of their body. I was up and had the tennis ball gripped tightly in one hand. A group of other boys were staying just out of range, knowing they could outrun me if they needed to. But that didn’t stop me.

  I took off with all the speed I could muster, trying to get as close to them as possible before I threw the ball. I ran across the asphalt, which sloped toward the corner of one of the buildings. As I skidded around the corner, something happened. I felt my right leg slip from beneath me. On my way down I managed to throw the ball in the general direction of the other boys. Luckily I fell forward onto my hands, which still hurt, especially on the hot asphalt, but there was no real damage done.

  When I looked up to see if my throw had hit its target, the group I was chasing was standing there laughing at me. I probably would have done the same thing, but then one of the boys pointed at me.

  “Ha, ha—look at the cripple,” he said.

  I didn’t know exactly what a cripple was, but I was pretty sure, even at that age, that I didn’t like it. Some of the others in the group started up too, like noisy kookaburras at sunset.

  “Cripple, cripple, cripple!” they shouted.

  I picked myself up off the ground and hid from them for the rest of lunch, but when I got back to class, some of the kids were still calling me cripple.

  When I got home I had an afternoon snack and switched on the television. Having attended to these priorities, I turned to Mom.

  “Mom, what does ‘cripple’ mean?”

  “It’s someone whose legs don’t work properly,” she said.

  “Like me?” I asked.

  Mom paused. “Well, yes, sort of like you,” she said. “Why? Was someone calling you names at school?”

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a turning point. It didn’t come with a fanfare of angels blowing trumpets and I didn’t reflect on it right away. It just happened. I decided to protect Mom from the truth.

  Mom asked her question again and I just kind of shrugged and half grinned to hide my embarrassment.

  “No. I just heard someone say it the other day,” I said. “That’s all.”

  I’m sure my parents could guess every now and then, from my mood or from a stray comment by one of my friends, but I never came out and told them about being teased at school. They had enough to deal with. And more than that—being teased made me feel somehow weak, useless. As if it was my fault. As if I deserved it. As if I hadn’t been brave enough to fight it. I couldn’t help how I looked or what had happened to me since I was born, but I sure as hell could control how I dealt with people teasing me about it. And my first response was to hide it all away, bury it.

  • • •

  By the time I was seven, the teasing and name-calling did start me thinking more about exactly why I was the way I was. My parents had never told me why—beyond saying I was “born that way”—so on a drive home one day I asked Mom a few questions about it.

  “Mom, when I was a baby, did you have a disease or something?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Mom said. “Why?”

  “Well, then, why are my legs all broken?”

  Mom explained that it was because of some medicine she was taking when I was in her tummy, before she knew she was going to have another baby. She’d been feeling sad and the medicine was supposed to make her feel better. Instead, it helped unmake parts of me.

  Close to home we passed a gas station that had a small statue out front that looked like a seagull over a fountain. The wishing well of Wynnum.

  “Mom, if I put some coins in there, would my special wish come true?”

  Mom paused. “What would your special wish be?”

  “I’d wish I could buy about sixteen blocks of land and build a kind of Disneyland of my own.”

  10

  Learning to Float

  I’d been banned from swimming while I was having all my operations. My doctors said the risk of getting an infection was too high. On vacation at Caloundra every year I was confined to the shallows, sitting on the sand while the water splashed over my lap. I couldn’t dive, couldn’t let a wave crash over my head, couldn’t be taught to swim. Beached at
the beach.

  By the time I finished grade one, my doctors had relented and told Mom and Dad I could learn, as long as I didn’t do any diving into the pool, since that might force water up my nose.

  In time, swimming would become a physical freedom greater than I could ever have imagined. It was one of the few forms of exercise not entirely ruined by my disability. Swimming brought me closer to the physical level of other children. It gave me, if not the chance to excel, at least the opportunity to compete. Most of all, swimming made me free. First, though, I had to learn how.

  Mom and Dad took me to Hollands Swim School at Cannon Hill. The instructor did a quick assessment and said I should be able to learn to swim just fine. The next day I came back and had my first half-hour lesson. For a while I had two lessons a week before school and Hollands put me through pretty much all the training they’d do with any kid my age.

  While I was learning to use my arms just fine, my legs were more or less useless and couldn’t kick. My left leg was so short, it didn’t even have a working knee. My right leg was short too and didn’t have a foot to help propel me. My arms had to do all the work to pull me along.

  The swim school thought I might do better if I could somehow attach a pair of flippers to my legs. Problem was, no feet to attach them to. Mom bought a set of flippers anyway and modified them so they’d fit—and stay on—my legs. She sewed Velcro to the flippers so they could be fastened higher up my legs and strapped with an elastic band around my waist. They were a big help and let me use my lower limbs to provide some extra momentum, but they would only stay on for a minute or so before starting to slide off. Mom tried numerous methods with little success. Then someone had the bright idea of creating a whole-lower-body flipper that I’d pull up over my legs and wear like shorts. I’m lucky they didn’t turn me into a mermaid. Or merboy.

  The intensive classes were great because they provided one-on-one expertise. I’m sure Dad would have done a fine job teaching me how to swim, just as he had with the other kids, but I was in a hurry to learn, and the extra attention was a big help. Dad and I did end up spending hours swimming at the Manly Baths, the Wynnum Wading Pool, and Caloundra, but most of it was building on the basics I had already learned.