Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (6 page)

Stop
what,
though? I had no idea.

The day after a particularly menacing late-night fight, my parents sat my brother and me down in our den. “Your mother has a drinking problem,” said Dad. I honestly did not understand what a “drinking problem” meant. I thought it meant drinking too many liquids. (Annnnnd . . . another blonde moment.) The tone reminded me of the time he told me I was going to have a few toes removed and I woke up with no foot. I thought he was downplaying the problem.

“She’s going away to a treatment center for a few months to get help,” he said.

“What treatment center?” I asked.

“Phoenix House. It’s in Arizona.”

I’d had enough geography to know that Arizona wasn’t within driving distance of New York City. Okay, so Dad was
not
downplaying the situation. It was serious.

“Are we going, too?” asked Andre. He was seven.

“We’re staying here,” he said.

Andre looked crushed. He’d been passed between baby-sitters and relatives during the year following my accident. Mom and Dad had, by necessity, given me so much more attention. He was second born and second fiddle. I couldn’t blame him for any resentment he might have for me.

I felt as devastated as my brother to lose Mom to rehab. She
wouldn’t be home for months? That was a long time for a kid, especially one as needy as I was.

During the family meeting, Mom sat quietly, her hands in her lap, staring at the carpet. She let Dad do all the talking. I wasn’t sure if this was all his idea, but she certainly didn’t look happy about it. She was resigned. Maybe she thought it was a good idea, or she was just going through the motions to please Dad.

I don’t remember exactly how her departure for rehab at Phoenix House went. She must have said good-bye, but I can’t recall. It did seem like she was home, and sick. And then she was gone. Disappeared. The house still smelled like her, which underscored her absence. I ached for her.

A few days later, Dad came home with a golden retriever puppy. When I suffered a loss, be it limb or parent, Dad bought a dog. I named her Sandy. Clever had died a year or two earlier.

My anxiety episodes got worse in severity and frequency. If Mom were home, she’d rush me to the doctor. But she wasn’t there. Those trips must have been a huge pain in the ass for her, and never amounted to anything but a dismissal by the doctors. My mom was my panacea. My rock. With her gone, I was more vulnerable. When my mother was in Arizona, we relied on our baby-sitter. As cool as Carmen was, though, her attention wasn’t remotely comparable to Mom’s. She also favored my brother. So I would go to my room, lie down, and struggle to breathe until I could.

A week or so after Mom left, Carmen sent me on an errand to Pioneer Supermarket for milk and bread. It was on Seventy-third Street and Columbus, a five-minute walk from our apartment building. I’d made that walk hundreds of times. The avenue block between Central Park West and Columbus was long, with no stores to populate it, and empty of people that afternoon.

Suddenly, I felt outside of myself and very weird. Nothing specific triggered the sensation. I wasn’t reacting to a car horn, a loud noise, or a bolt of lightning. I was fine, and then, in the snap of a finger . . .
not
.

My hands turned clammy, my heart raced, my breathing became rapid and shallow, I broke out in a sweat, and I thought I was going to die. The fight-or-flight reaction hit me full force. My instincts were screaming
run!
I took off at full speed (for me), sprinting to Columbus Avenue, toward stores and pedestrians. Being among people felt better. I put my hands on my knees and bent down. Slowly, my heart quieted. My breaths deepened. The panic passed. I never thought it would pass and I seriously thought I was going to have a heart attack or die.

I got the bread and milk at Pioneer and went home. I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I thought I’d gone crazy for two minutes and felt ashamed. Those two minutes felt like an hour. I definitely didn’t want anyone else to think I was losing it. Our family had more than enough to deal with.

Since I’d felt better among people, I tried not to be alone for fear of that out-of-body sensation coming back. To this day, I still experience these sensations in certain situations, especially on tiny airplanes. However, at least I know what they are. I’ve never walked that particular stretch of Seventy-third Street alone since that day thirty-odd years ago. My brain associated the attack with that block. Although I knew there was no connection, I avoided the “scene of the crime” for fear of another attack.

That first anxiety episode led to others, about once a month. An attack came when I least expected it. I was completely at its mercy. When it was over, I was amazed to have survived it. I was equally convinced the next attack was going to kill me or push me over the edge into lunacy. My nightmare vision was that I’d fall on the floor, kicking and screaming, and a crowd of people would gather
around me, gawking. Not only did I live in fear of that happening, but I also feared being found out that I’d been having the episodes. I kept them secret, just as I hid the abrasions that could have caused osteomyelitis and might have killed me if left untreated. I didn’t want anyone to know. I learned to keep the internal sensations from showing. I might get quiet for a few minutes. But otherwise, I appeared normal. Meanwhile, inside, I was coming undone.

When I was fourteen, I found a book on anxiety at a bookstore and finally had a name for what I’d experienced: panic attacks. I wasn’t alone. Other people also had episodes of sudden terror. I was so thrilled! I searched the book for a cause . . . say, for example, a gruesome accident as a young child. The best conclusion I could draw at the time was that I was probably born with a predisposition to anxiety and the accident lowered my baseline. My hospital and surgical history brought on hypochondria. Anxiety and hypochondria fed off each other. I became fearful that something would go horribly wrong with my body and mind. An unexplained bruise had to be leukemia. A headache had to be a brain tumor. I believed that
any
tiny symptom meant I was dying. Mom’s mysterious illness, and Dad’s obsession with weird food and healers, only reinforced my fears.

My mortality
had
been violently challenged. Most people believe in their own immortality until their early thirties. They do reckless stupid things—drive drunk, smoke, party heavily, do drugs, and have unprotected sex—without worrying about the consequences. When they said, “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” they meant it. I never had that kind of blind faith. For every kid who was warned, “You’ll lose an eye!” how many actually lost the eye? One in a hundred thousand? One in five hundred thousand? How about the kids who were told, “You’ll lose a foot!” How many actually lost the foot? One in a million?

Something bad
did
happen to me. I was convinced,
If something else bad is going to happen, it’ll happen to me
.

Having your foot chewed off as a child affects a person.

My parents sent me to a shrink to talk about it when I was seven or eight. The therapist asked me to draw the barn and the barn cleaner. Crayons were going to cure me. The shrink badgered me to talk about the accident. I hated the sessions, and complained until my parents let me quit. People have suggested that my anxiety was the result of not dealing emotionally with the accident. My response to that is: bullshit. Unless you’ve walked a mile in my shoe, you can’t judge my behavior.

All I wanted was to move forward with my life. I never grieved for the girl I might’ve been. I never mourned for the lost part of myself—nor will I. I don’t do self-pity.

I was, am, determined to have a great life. Not “a great life, considering.” I decided very early on that I could do it all. I could go anywhere and be anything. I wouldn’t get mystical or romantic about the tragedy. The accident was not “a blessing in disguise.” It was an accident, period. It didn’t change the essential me. I loved running around, dressing up, and feeling pretty, on one foot or two. The accident didn’t make me philosophical or morose. As a teenager, my biggest annoyance about having one foot was that I couldn’t wear high heels, miniskirts, or short shorts to get boys’ attention. Some might think that was shallow. I think it made me a normal, healthy girl in New York, which was all I wanted to be.

•  •  •

In seventh grade, I switched to the Fieldston School (the same middle/upper school that followed Ethical Culture). The campus was located in Riverdale, the Bronx. I started taking the bus there
with older kids. Greg, an eleventh-grader, was a football player with a tender side. There was something wounded and irresistible about him. He talked to me in the halls. The tiniest attention made me fall madly in love. I planned my life around bumping into him. I’d layer on the eyeliner in the bathroom and giggle with my friends about him. He seemed to enjoy my crush, but it went nowhere.

My next serious crush hit in ninth grade. Mike was a year younger than me, but he looked like he was a grown man. He had dark hair everywhere—arms, legs, back, chest. I was fascinated by his pelts. My celebrity fantasy boyfriend back then was Sylvester Stallone (don’t laugh!). Mike was the closest I’d seen to that kind of animal masculinity.

Joanna’s parents went away for the weekend once and I convinced her to throw a big football game party at her house. The whole team was coming over, including Mike. I tried on dozens of outfits, my hair tousled, with full makeup. He showed up with his friends. An hour later, Mike was in Joanna’s parents’ bedroom, making out with the hottest girl in the school. Not me. Her name was Justine. Her parents were best friends with my parents, and I always liked her. They lived in the San Remo, the building next door to ours (home to Dustin Hoffman, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Diane Keaton, Steve Martin, and Mary Tyler Moore). I had no reason to, but I felt betrayed. After that night, Justine was my sworn enemy.

I was
devastated
. I vowed never to forgive Mike,
ever
. But a few months later, he asked me out. We went to Pig Heaven, a famous Chinese restaurant on Second Avenue. Just being near him and all his manliness set me atwitter. I reached for my Coke, and it went flying across the table, all over the spare ribs, and into (gasp) his lap. My face flamed bright red. I was mortified. Mike was cool about it, though. Imagine if he had made fun of me instead?

You’d think jealous girls would have whispered behind my back,
saying something along the lines of, “Why does he want
her
? She only has one foot.” If they did, I wasn’t aware of it. In fact, in the high school jungle of survival of the fittest, my leg just wasn’t a factor. I wasn’t teased or bullied. My attitude was that I wouldn’t let my leg stop me from doing or being who I wanted to be. I sent a loud and clear “no biggie” message to my friends and classmates. They picked up on it, and believed it. If they wanted to backstab or gossip about me, they had other reasons to do it. But the leg didn’t come up.

It could have gone the other way, though. Kids can be cruel. I give a lot of credit to the Fieldston community. The educators and parents were good people. In Manhattan private school circles, Fieldston was an earthy type of place that nurtured tolerance, acceptance, and diversity. They had a course on ethics that taught compassionate behavior. I certainly reaped the benefits of the high ethical standard there.

For Mike’s part, he didn’t make me feel self-conscious about my leg—except for one time. Before we’d even kissed, Mike asked Joanna, “Does Aviva take off the fake leg when she sleeps? What about in the shower?” Joanna hesitatingly came to me with his list of questions. She knew I would be mortified. I didn’t blame him for idle curiosity. But I hoped he was thinking more about my boobs, and whether I was a good kisser. He soon found out, and must have been pleased. Mike and I wound up staying together for all of high school. I wore his football jacket and felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

I lost my virginity to him at Joanna’s house, in her parents’ bed. No offense to Mike, but losing it was an all-around unpleasant, crummy experience. We’d fooled around five thousand times by then, and had come close to the act itself. Actually doing it was almost a technicality—a very painful technicality. Mike used a condom. When he took it off, he put it on this little wooden statue behind Joanna’s
parents’ bed. We completely forgot about it and went back to our respective homes. On Sunday evening, Joanna called me.

“My parents came home. I’m standing in their room talking to them. And then I see this used condom on their statue!” she said. One can only guess how Joanna dealt with that one.

It took a while for her to forgive me about that.

By the way, I kept my leg on.

Mike didn’t ask to see my stump and I didn’t volunteer to show him. With the exception of Joanna, I kept the prosthesis on at sleepovers with my girlfriends, too. It was cumbersome, like wearing a boot, which wasn’t comfortable in bed. But I felt very self-conscious when I took it off. With Mike, my whole life centered around feeling and looking pretty for him. No way would I disturb that by revealing my most vulnerable and unattractive part.

•  •  •

Senior year, I was in love and drove myself to school every day with my new driver’s license. Anxiety was a hibernating bear all winter and into spring. I got accepted to Vassar College and all academic pressure lifted. I got a bad case of senioritis, nonfatal, and slacked off heavily. The prom was coming up and Mike was taking me. I had a beautiful, chic black sleeveless dress picked out and a pair of suede boots to match. Life was great.

Famous last words.

One day in June, I had to drag myself to gym class. I usually was fine about gym, but that day, I was dreading it for no particular reason. In retrospect, I might’ve been having a psychic moment. We were playing softball and I was in the outfield standing way, way back there, spacing out. I turned my face up to the sun and closed my eyes.