Olga’s Leg

Waking at home with two healthy legs tucked under her blanket surprised Olga nearly as much as waking in a hospital room a few months before with just one.

Actually, this was more surprising because she’d at least had some memory of how the leg had been lost. It was hazy and she’d been drinking that night, but she knew what had happened and who it was with and why it wasn’t his fault. When her leg returned, she was asleep. She hadn’t felt any different going to bed, and her leg had come back without waking her up, and now it seemed fixed as if it had never been lost.

It was harder to get used to walking again than she would have imagined, though not as hard as it had been to learn with one leg. It wasn’t only a leg she had lost, or a new sense of balance she’d struggled to gain in the weeks and months of doctor’s visits following her accident. She had changed her whole sense of herself and of her body and of how she moved through and filled up and made an impact on the world, of who she was and why she mattered as Olga, a person like and unlike others, a person whose body did the same sorts of things as other bodies, right down to losing a leg. But only Olga’s body did those things, both ordinary and exceptional things, in quite the way Olga’s body could do them, and learning to maneuver with only one leg had required her to adjust them all.

And now she needed to adjust herself back, but not all the way back, because even with both of her legs, the one that had stayed and the one that had gone, she couldn’t walk on the new leg without knowing she’d lost it and could lose it again at any moment.

She spent the morning on stuttering steps around the blocks by her building, past the schoolyard where she watched children shriek at each bounce of a yellow kickball. She wondered when kickballs became yellow instead of the red color she knew, and she marveled at how quickly things change in childhood and from one childhood to another -- just when you get used to something, it isn’t that way anymore. She hadn’t even had time to tell all her friends about losing her leg, and now should she tell them at all?

She walked to the park where she’d been going lately, where other one-legged women gathered daily with their children. She had aligned herself with them already, with their rolling contraptions and baskets of gear, with their side-to-side rambles as they dodged around jungle gyms and swinging swings and traded wise smiles with each other. They had offered her tips even when they were strangers with only that one thing in common: a body with one leg and one leg alone.

She’d lose all of those new connections; she’d be thrown from the club for no other reason than that her body was her own again whether she liked it or not, whether she wanted it back or she didn’t. She hadn’t asked to lose her leg though she had put herself in harm’s way, and if she didn’t invite the accident to happen she certainly stuck her leg where it might. She’d accepted that these things might occur to a body and are bound to sooner or later, but not that such things might be undone once done -- an accident can be cleaned up, but it can’t be erased.

At the park she was just like she’d been; no one spoke to her and no knowing nods came her way. She shuffled out of the way of the one-legged women along with all bipedal others, like she’d never been part of the club. She felt guilty for wishing she’d never lost her leg and for coveting the attention that could clear sidewalks and win her seats on the bus. She longed for the body she thought was her own.

She didn’t stay long at the playground. It was too hard to watch. Olga wandered out toward the road at the edge of the park where the fast traffic was thick, and she stood on the sidewalk on only one leg, testing herself, reaching out, remembering herself as she’d been and wondering whether she would be that way again, or whether something about her legs would make them grow back every time.

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