Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  What am I supposed to do with a wooden leg, a leg that my father apparently decided to will to me after his death? Should I dance with it around my living room? Cast it into a fire? Chew on it for a while, gnaw at it like a bone?

  I think about calling Jimmy #3. In a rapt, seductive tone, I could say: Jimmy, you want a little extra wood tonight? Ha, ha. But Jimmy has no sense of humor, and I am never as funny as I think, so instead of calling him, I pop the bubble wrap around the leg. The cushion of air deflates between my fingertips. The popping sounds festive, like champagne bottles popping at a party. I pretend that getting this leg is like getting a rare and beautiful gift, like getting the Hope diamond without its curse, and not like getting something sorrowful, like getting someone’s wooden leg, which is exactly what I’ve gotten.

  Via priority mail.

  I hate to dwell on my father, and yet here, in this moment, I have no choice. I unpack the leg from its defeated wrapper and run my hands over burnished mahogany that smells dusty with time and age. The leg has a fake foot, a shallow etching of toes. I stand the leg up on the coffee table. It wobbles but stands on its own. It is its own leg, festooned with straps meant for strapping over the nub of my father’s knee. It is heavy as years, hard as my father, and more durable in the end than a body or a heart.

  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.

  AFTER 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 o
ver 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.

  THE 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.

  ON 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.

  Did you ever even try to love him? I ask. After he came home, when he needed you?

  My mother looks offended. Of course, she says. I frightened myself, loving him. You have no idea how love can wreck you, Anna, how love can wreck everything about you.

  I leave her to the leg. In my room, I listen to Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” on 45 and revel in the old-fashioned crackling of the needle as the vinyl spins. I love that airy sound, and that sound covers my mother’s tears. I eat crackers and go through memorabilia, run my fingers over Roger’s gold cuff links, flick Gary’s lighter on and off, release the photo of Butcher, the golden retriever, from its frame, pull out Lenny’s Strunk and White and read about possessives.

  Then I get up from my bed, go to the window, and open it. I break up what crackers I’ve left. I spread them on the sill and wait until I have a sill full of birds, pecking and scraping for crumbs. In the summer (and more so in the winter) I am visited by many small birds, ones that are sullied-looking and hungry. They fly away and then fly back. They hop nervously and twitter lightly. They carry everything away.

  LATER, JIMMY #3 CALLS. He says, I know we just saw each other, but do you want to go out tonight? On a date? Then he adds: Don’t forget the leg.

  Ha-ha, I tell him.


  After I shower and dress in a red skirt, a wrap top, and cowboy boots, I come out to find my mother still on the couch, sleeping with the leg in her arms. I clear my throat until she rouses herself, rubs her eyes, and gives me a sweet, almost starry-eyed look. I say, I have a date. And it’s really time for you to get going. I add: Don’t you get enough beauty rest, as it is?

  She seems surprised by the passage of time, and groggy. She says, I was having the most splendid dream, Anna. Your father and I were dancing to a waltz. I never wanted to wake.

  I grab my purse and check my watch. I open the door, but she doesn’t move.

  He’s not picking you up? she asks, and smiles in that rigid way she often does. I couldn’t tolerate that in a man.

  Well, I say. Better than being coddled.

  She frowns. I’m not entirely idle, you know, she says. I had a reason for coming. From her purse she removes a black velvet box, and from the box she removes a ring. It is a modest ring—platinum band, a small, solitaire diamond—and something my mother with all her many lovers wouldn’t be caught dead wearing these days. She takes the ring and holds it up to the light, squints, then places it in the hole of my father’s leg. She smoothes the wrinkles of her dress and says, I feel like I’m finally free.

  I say, You told me he never asked.

  She looks out the window, to the neighboring apartment buildings. She wrings her hands. I say a lot of things. He asked after he lost his leg, and what could I tell him then? Tell me, Anna, what would you have said?

  She gets up, collects her purse, and, at the door, she stops and faces me. He did leave us behind, she says. He changed.

  I BRING THE LEG to dinner. Why not.

  Jimmy #3 arrives at Bandito’s dressed in a button-down and khakis. He sits down, glances at the leg, and says, I wasn’t really serious about that.

  I had a change of heart, I explain. I felt sorry for the leg, being there alone in the apartment like that. Jimmy #3 gives me that look, and then, as if he gets the joke, he laughs. He laughs even though there is nothing funny.