“What was my life like. I was an engineer, I told you. I had a little company. Employees.”
“That’s right. Orthotic devices. How did you get started doing that?” It seemed so strange, like choosing to be an undertaker. But Caddie had always had a secret horror of amputation, people’s missing limbs, stumps, stubs. It shamed her, how much revulsion she would feel at the sight of some poor person’s artificial leg or mechanical claw of a hand. She counted it one of her pettiest failings.
“My father stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and lost his leg from the knee down. He walked around on a clumsy, painful prosthesis for years, then he invented a better one. Eventually he designed the prototype for the first Full Speed Feet foot. He wasn’t even an engineer, he was a cabinetmaker.”
“Full Speed Feet.”
“The foot line we make. We do the full range of lower-extremity orthotics, but feet are our specialty.”
“Do you have a…a factory?” She was trying to picture the work environment of a company that made feet.
“Sure. It’s small. Ever heard of Kinesthetics, Inc.?”
“No. I don’t think so. Maybe,” she added thoughtfully when she saw he was disappointed.
“Hold on.” He got up and went inside, came back with a folded brochure. “Here. By the way, your grandmother’s asleep.”
She was expecting a picture of a flesh-colored artificial foot made out of rubber or plastic or something, but this…it looked more like a pair of grass clippers. It was a dark gray metal contraption with bolts and springy, odd-shaped parts at the base and two long, arching prongs at the end. Toes?
“This is our basic model, the Pacesetter. We also have a child’s foot called the Running Start, another for athletes, the Mach Run. They’re all patented FSF feet.”
They could be customized, she read, to fit almost anyone’s weight or activity needs. Their polycentric design and multiaxial function provided outstanding durability, comfort, and a more natural, noiseless gait.
Noiseless. She couldn’t help it, that gave her a queer feeling. “It’s so high tech. This is what you put in your shoe? Don’t some people want something a little more…I know they never really look real, but—”
“This is the innards, Caddie, the part that’s engineered for locomotion and joint alignment, weight distribution, functional foot drop, equilibrium. It goes—” He flipped open the brochure. “It goes inside a foot shell. Like this.”
“Oh!” Here was the kind of fake foot she’d had in mind. “Oh, I see, it goes inside. And this is flexible, the shell thing? All right, I get it. Well, this isn’t…it’s really…it’s interesting.” This isn’t as creepy as I thought it would be, she’d almost said.
She turned to the back page, which had a photograph of “Our R&D Team,” four smiling, friendly looking young people, three men and a woman. “Your staff looks—” She peered more closely. She put her fingertip under the chin of one of the men. “Is that you?”
Magill rubbed his whiskery cheek, raised his eyebrows.
“Is it? Gosh, you look really…” Healthy, with color in cheeks that weren’t sunken and flesh on a neck that wasn’t stalky. Confidence in shoulders that weren’t so bony they poked through his shirt like coat hangers. He was smiling the same slightly sly, off-center smile as always, but without the self-mockery in his eyes to make it suspect.
“The point is, we make some of the most progressive lower-limb orthotics in the world. The Running Start is a hell of a foot, I wish I had a picture of it. It’s the first time some of these kids have ever walked on anything halfway approaching a real foot. Now all of a sudden they can run and play and jump, they can rotate, they’re stable, they don’t get exhausted. Their parents write us letters, Billy played soccer for the first time in his life, Katie’s gait looks completely natural, nobody even knows she’s wearing a prosthesis.”
He kept talking, the longest she’d ever heard him at one time, speaking with animation and no irony, telling her why the Running Start was revolutionary and explaining the biomechanics of something new, a foot he’d been working on before his accident; he wanted to call it Roughshod, it would be super-tough, athlete amputees would wear it for long-distance and rough-terrain hiking.
“Is your father still working?” she asked when he paused. “Still inventing things?”
“He died about four years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. And now you run the company?”
“What’s left of it.” He tilted his head and closed one eye to stare at her.
“Do you have a mother?”
“Sure. What do you think, I hatched?”
“I meant, is she living?”
“She lives in Phoenix with her new husband. Which is fine with me, I have no issues with it.” He smiled, but he sounded tired; he and Dr. Lieberman must’ve gone into that pretty thoroughly. “She’s got a new life and I’m glad for her,” he said, rubbing his forehead hard. “Nothing but glad.”
“Okay,” Caddie said, and they lapsed into silence. “She must worry about you, though.”
“This is how you get ’em to tell you all the gory details. Right? You just keep chipping away.”
“Who?”
“Your subjects. I hear old man Lorton wants you to write his life story next.”
“My subjects.” She laughed. “Actually, I don’t say much of anything, I just write down what people tell me.”
“You’re good at it.”
“Thanks.”
“You were probably good in English. I was terrible. Twelve years of lit classes and I only remember two things.”
“What?”
“Sympathetic characters and concrete detail.”
She thought of Christopher: four years of piano lessons and all he could play was “Für Elise” and “Chopsticks.” She handed Magill his brochure back. “How long do you think you’ll have to stay here?”
As soon as she asked, she was sorry. He straightened up from his friendly slouch and turned away.
“I know, I’m sorry, but I don’t understand—why can’t you work? Couldn’t you…if you just…” Sat still and didn’t move, closed one eye, told other people what to do, explained exactly what he wanted to those nice-looking people in the photograph…
“Do you think I’d be here if I could work? Something’s wrong with my head. I’m an engineer, a designer, I’m supposed to invent things—my brain’s scrambled, I can’t draw a line with a straight edge. I can’t see things, images on a computer look like nothing, it’s just meaningless lines—”
“Well,” she interjected, because that wasn’t true, she happened to know. “Unless it’s cheerleaders.”
She wanted him to laugh, but he started away, moving jerkily out into the bumpy, grassy yard. He got about ten yards, using his stick to take furious whacks at dandelion heads as he went, before he staggered to a stop. He swayed, bracing his knees for balance, then gave up and sat down hard on the ground.
She walked out to him, careful not to hurry. When he saw her he fell over backward, holding his temples and squinting up at the sky, which she imagined was spinning. She stood over him. “Are you okay?”
“Go away. Take your grandmother and vacate my room.”
She sat down, folding her bare legs and blowing a dandelion seedpod off her knee. “I walked all the way over here from my house, aren’t you impressed? I am, except now I have to walk all the way back.”
“Take a cab.”
“No, I’m on a health kick.”
“You’re fine.”
She pondered whether or not that was a compliment. “Nana has a new art project. It’s on…well, it’s hard to say.”
“Oldness.”
“Oh, you heard.”
“She wants all my old cigarette butts.”
“I don’t understand why it always has to be all. Is it still art if you don’t pick and choose?” She plucked a clover shoot out of the ground and pulled the leaves off one at a time, letting them fall in her
lap. She nibbled the stem. Magill was shading his eyes with one hand, looking up at her. “Too bad,” she said, wistful, “you can’t make a prosthetic device for your poor head.”
He smiled.
Christopher had nice lips, too. Fuller than Magill’s; the bottom one was downright pillowy. “I have a date tonight,” she said.
“Oh, good for you.”
“He’s a therapy animal expert.”
“I know.”
What a wonderful job, so sunny and happy, so perfect for Christopher. “I met him through Finney,” she explained, and told Magill about Christopher’s cramped little office and the mission of CAT. She told him about King, the wonder dog.
“I’m more of a cat person.” He folded both arms over his eyes.
“They have cats, too. They have everything, even horses, even chickens.” She told him about Estelle. “I’m thinking of taking the training. Not with Finney, I guess he’s hopeless, but I could borrow a dog. Christopher says I could even borrow King after I go through the program. I think it would be really worthwhile, something I could do in my spare time. Everything changes when you bring a dog into a room full of sick people, even if they’re just sick with—especially if they’re just sick with loneliness. They forget all about themselves. They love the dog, and it’s really love, not just oh, how cute. Sometimes it’s the first time they’ve communicated with anything in a long time. All of a sudden they’re back in the world. In the moment. And it lasts, it starts relationships with the other people, I mean it doesn’t just stop when the hour’s over and the dog leaves. It keeps going. A beneficial cycle.”
All she could see was the top of his forehead and his pressed-together lips; the rest of his face was hidden under his ropy forearms. Under his T-shirt, his spiky rib cage rose and fell with his breathing, dropping off to an alarmingly concave belly. If he were six feet lower, he’d be a skeleton in the ground.
She shook that thought away. “Are you going to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“First Nana, now you—I might as well go home.” She pulled a grass blade and tried to whistle on it between her thumbs. She leaned back on her hands and looked at a buzzard circling high up in the clouds, or maybe a hawk. A grasshopper jumped on her knee. She brushed it off and stood up.
“Okay, well, see you.”
“Have a nice time tonight with Timmy.”
“Christopher. Who’s Timmy? Oh.” Lassie’s boy. “Ha-ha, very funny.”
He smacked his lips, ostentatiously readying himself for sleep.
“Don’t lie there for long. Don’t go and pass out, you’ll get sunburned.”
No answer.
She made a face he couldn’t see because his eyes were closed, and set off on her long walk home.
9
This is what I missed in high school, Caddie thought, jumping up when Christopher did to cheer somebody’s leaping catch of a fly ball to center field. Beer sloshed from her cup onto her thigh, and she just laughed. It was a warm, buggy, sweaty night with the smell of popcorn and dust in the air, heat lightning in the distance. The Beavers were beating the Trolls by fourteen runs, nobody was taking the game seriously, and everything was funny.
“I’ve never done this before!” she dared to tell Christopher, who put his arm around her back and leaned closer to hear. “I’ve never been to a softball game. Or a baseball game, or football!”
He had a way of looking amazed when she told him things like that, things he’d apparently never heard anyone say, and then looking politely thoughtful. She wished he would tell her what he was thinking, even if it was Where did you come from, Mars? But he just opened his eyes in amazement, then pursed his lips in thought, as if filing the information away for later.
“I was in the orchestra instead of the band,” she tried to explain, but he just grinned, ran his fingers into her hair at the back, gave her head an affectionate shake, and went back to watching the game.
Oh, well, he wouldn’t understand anyway. In high school he’d have been one of the players on the field, or else he’d have been sitting on one of these hard, splintery bleachers surrounded by his attractive, confident friends, speaking the foreign language Caddie had never mastered, performing the social rituals she couldn’t duplicate. Except for music, adolescence for her had been one long personal embarrassment. She’d never held that against the favored ones like Christopher, though, or even particularly envied them. It would’ve been like envying gods: pointless.
The Beavers hit six more runs in the seventh inning and the game ended, or collapsed. Christopher steered Caddie out on the field and introduced her to his friends, Rick and Toby, Wesley, this was Keith, here was Glen—she lost track of names when their wives and girlfriends joined them. They were all on their way to a bar on the west side, Hennessey’s, they went there after every game, were Christopher and Caddie going to join them? “Want to?” Christopher asked her, but that was only a formality, and before she knew it she was sitting on a sticky bench in the corner of a loud, crowded tavern, trying to shout a pizza order over an endless Allman Brothers song on the jukebox.
Toby was the chef at a restaurant in town, Rick was Christopher’s landlord, Glen’s wife, Phyllis, was a team leader and dog trainer at CAT, Keith—Caddie couldn’t hear what Keith said when he explained himself, but she nodded and smiled and pretended she did. She’d never really liked loud, noisy bars, having to strain to hear and shout to be heard. It came to her now that the appeal wasn’t the ambiance anyway, it was creating your own little island of intimacy in the middle of chaos. Pressing her arm against Christopher’s arm, enjoying the cup of his hand on her thigh, feeling his warm, beery breath on her cheek—it was like watching a violent summer storm from the safety of a screened-in porch, cozy and exciting at the same time. This is how real people live, she thought, this is what they do all the time. Everything that must be prosaic to them, the pretty neon liquor signs glowing over the bar, the wafting palls of blue cigarette smoke, the long line of variously shaped rear ends on the bar stools, seemed exotic to her tonight. This was good clean American fun, and she was like a new immigrant from some third-world country, dazzled and overwhelmed and hoping to fit in.
When she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, Phyllis went with her. They stood beside each other at the mirror, repairing their faces. Phyllis said, “I love that lipstick shade, Caddie.”
“Thanks.”
“Is your hair naturally straight? God, I’ve always wanted straight hair. Mine curls up like a party ribbon in this humidity.”
Phyllis was lovely, copper-haired, porcelain-skinned, dainty as an elf. When she left, Caddie stared at her reflection, trying to see herself as a stranger would, somebody as petite and cute as Phyllis, for example. Her hair had no style, just hung long and lank from a side part; she was constantly throwing her head back to get it out of her left eye. Did having no hairstyle make her look like a hippie, a sort of earth mother? Could that be her image to Phyllis and the others? To Christopher? She’d dithered for an hour over what to wear tonight and finally chosen, for reasons that seemed completely inexplicable now, a long black tunic of Nana’s over a short plaid skirt of her own, and sandals. What did this look mean? What was she in this outfit? She’d walked out of the house feeling leggy and fun, but under the fluorescent ladies’ room light and in the metaphorical shadow of small, stylish Phyllis, all she could see were flaws. Including the fact that the hem and pushed-up sleeves of her black tunic were covered with dog hair.
But Christopher smiled at her from all the way across the room. “Hey, you.” He stood up to let her squeeze back into her place on the bench, and for the two or three seconds he held her tight against him, her back against his front, all she felt was chosen.
They held hands under the table. He caressed her bare thigh in the most thrilling, matter-of-fact way, as if they were already intimate. “Would you like to dance?” he said in her ear. There was an area about six feet square near the jukebox where one
other couple was dancing, or, rather, swaying, not even moving their feet. The current song was a theatrical ballad by a singer Caddie disliked—she thought Christopher was joking or being ironic, that dancing to it was his way to make fun of this overorchestrated love song. But once in the circle of his arms, pressed against him and easily following the fluid slide of his long legs wherever he moved her, she could tell he meant it. Felt it, was into the sentimental lyrics and the woozy tune—and from that moment on she loved the song. How wrong she’d been about it. It was simple and real, it told the truth, and she’d been not only snobbish but cynical not to see that before.
Christopher’s whiskers prickled her cheek. He turned his head, and they danced with his lips in the hollow under her ear, she with her eyes closed, because when she opened them the room spun. The song ended, and in the interval of quiet before the next one, they kissed. People are watching us, she thought hazily, not caring. Christopher rested his forehead on hers and smiled into her eyes. “Caddie Winger,” he said, like a revelation, and she thought, This is real. Wake up, Caddie, it’s happening to you.
When he told them they were leaving, his friends looked knowing and not surprised. And glad, Caddie imagined, affection for them welling up in her. She had their approval, and also, right now, their interested speculation in her love life, her sex life. She didn’t blame them. She felt fascinating and unexplored, full of potential. A little like an exhibitionist. What she and Christopher were doing was public foreplay, and she liked it.
She’d met him at the ball field, so they had two cars. “Follow me home?” he said in the parking lot, with another of his devastating smiles. There had never been much mystery about how this evening would end, but just the same it was lovely to finally have everything confirmed and out in the open. Now she had only to obsess about how it would be, not if.
But first they had to walk King. He met them at the front door of Christopher’s first-floor apartment with no barking, but if he remembered Caddie from before, he gave no sign, had eyes only for his master. “Hey, big guy. You miss me? Hi, fella,” Christopher greeted him, ruffling his ears and thumping him on the back. They strolled behind King along the quiet sidewalks of Christopher’s neighborhood, holding hands, pausing each time the dog did his dignified business. King was so well behaved, he didn’t even need a leash. Would Christopher think she was a bad owner for not worrying about Finney’s walk? He didn’t say anything about it, so she didn’t either.