Heads of the Colored People(43)
And she proceeded to keep right on yelling as Kelly’s smile faded and the customer lines parted to form a congregation around Marjorie’s pulpit.
THIS TODD
This Todd was going to be different because he didn’t insist that he was okay with his condition. He seethed, unapologetically, and he liked telling me how much he missed his legs, after a movie, before I climbed onto or off his lap, whenever I saw him slumped in his chair and the mood was ripe for melancholy. He didn’t do any of that Pollyanna-before-the-fall stuff; he was Pollyanna right after the fall, and I liked that. He liked talking to me about it; he needed me to listen. My head filled the crook of his shoulder like a plinth for the Venus de Milo.
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The first Todd’s name was Brian, and I met him at the mechanic’s. I sat in one of those polyvinyl chairs waiting for these men, who pretended they weren’t talking down to me, to fix whatever was wrong with my car and to change my oil, because a good way to make them think you know something about cars is to get your oil changed. The waiting area smelled of rubber and stale coffee, and to avoid the lady across from me who complained—to me and the television—about the president’s stance on women’s healthcare, I stared at the calves to my left. A purple rash interrupted their smooth brown and wrapped itself around the man’s Achilles tendons—maybe lower, but I couldn’t see below the socks or sneakers—and then ended, like a farmer’s tan, right at the place where his shorts were hemmed.
He used a cherrywood cane with an ebony fritz, beautiful materials. I hate those offensive people who’re all, “How did you become handicapped?” or, “What’s wrong with you?” so I decided to make some small talk that might encourage him to voluntarily tell me about his condition. I still don’t know what to call any of these guys—“differently abled,” “disabled,” “gimps,” with an emphasis on reappropriating the term for good—so I just call all three of them Todds because that makes sense to me. Even now that their likenesses and eccentricities have formed a frieze around the upper walls of my mind, I still find them nearly interchangeable, except for this Todd.
The first Todd, Brian, laughed when I told him his cane looked really expensive and asked if I could touch it. “What kind of icebreaker is that?” he said. Then he told me his name and that I had “no game.” That he would respond to a girl clearly out of his league with such confidence, to assume she was the one hitting on him, surprised me.
We talked until his car was ready. I liked the sinewy veins in his legs above the purple and the way his jaw clenched when he seemed to be thinking. His taupe eyes were rimmed with hazel. “I’ll call you,” he said, and I said, “Right,” in my incredulous but still-flirtatious voice. When he stood and applied pressure to the cane, I saw that he walked off balance, his torso rocking from side to side like the eyes on one of those Felix the Cat clocks. I prayed his phone would die and somehow lose my number, but when he called, sounding so confident, so casual, I remembered why I had given it to him.
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When I picture this Todd—not Brian, but this Todd, the third—I see his neckline, edged up so neatly you would think someone used a straight razor instead of clippers; he is always seated with his back to me, a slight cock to his neck, like he is looking upward, toward something better.
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Dating a Todd wasn’t that weird. Initially, it took a lot of adjusting on my part. I hesitated before introducing the first Todd to my friends, in case they did something to make him feel alienated or special. My friends aren’t always as sensitive as I am. I considered arriving really early to everything so that Brian would already be seated and no one would see him hobble in, just to avoid the awkwardness, not because I was embarrassed. I resolved that there would be no dancing. Yes, his pants would cover the contusions, and he could probably make the sway look like swag if he stood in one spot. But at the time I worried about the stigma of the cane. Unless “Big Pimpin’?” came on at the club—and why would it?—the cane would be a dead giveaway.
Everyone loved Brian, though, and I thought I did, too. We talked about regular grad school things, his interests in anthropology and autoethnography. He understood my sculptures and my latest montage, and I pretended to listen when he talked about normative whiteness and invisibility and cultural insensitivity. There was no paralysis to overcome. We parked easily when we carpooled to campus and enjoyed accelerated access to rides at Disneyland before they stopped letting people do that—because believe it or not, some people will fake a handicap to get advantages. People actually hired their own Todds to move through the lines. I got used to his wheelchair, which he used on extended trips, and was soon comfortable operating it, leading him, pushing him with ease. I liked watching him struggle to pull on the compression socks he wore to bed. I liked the way the “flesh color” of the heavy fabric contrasted against the shades of brown of his skin, mottled as it was from the bruising and swelling, as if someone had stroked and wrenched and twisted the legs and squeezed the dark meat of them into pale casings. I tried to imagine rendering the image in sculpture, but could never settle on the right materials.
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OF COURSE THERE were problems with Brian. I tried to make myself available for him as much as possible, not just sexually, but emotionally. But he could never balance his optimism about himself with his need for help. He was always like, “Kim, I really don’t need any help.” “Kim, my legs don’t define me.” “Please don’t introduce me that way, Kimmy.” “Kim, it’s like some kind of fetish for you.” “No, Kim, I don’t want to play candy striper. No, you can’t remove the bandages.”