Grandma said it was an outrage. "One of two terrible things will happen," she predicted. "She'll either kill herself, or worse yet, she'll get along fine and end up in vaudeville. We've had six clergymen, a smattering of lawyers and doctors and a raft of school teachers and good honest farmers in this family. We've never had a show girl!"
"What about Great-great-great-cousin Thaddeus?" Bernice demanded, just to keep things interesting.
"Hah! That was on your mother's side." Grandmother nodded her head with satisfaction. "And even that rascal wasn't a show girl."
"But he was a perfectly marvelous outlaw and shot a man in cold blood," I bragged. "That's just as bad."
"It's not just as bad." Grandma stated with finality.
"Now, listen to me, Mother." On rare occasions Father was bold enough to stand up to Grandma.
"We're off the subject. Louise is nine years old and she wants some roller skates for her birthday. Is there anything so strange in that? Bernice had roller skater when she was nine."
"That's different. Bernice didn't make an unnatural spectacle of herself using them. Everyone will stare and first thing you know, Louise will become a disgusting little exhibitionist and skate off with a carnival or something and you'll never see her again. It's a pity she isn't a little lady, content to learn to sew and do water colors and read good literature. I never skated when I was her age, and I had both my limbs."
When Grandmother spoke of her own legs, she called them limbs, as if they were slightly more refined than ordinary appendages.
In reality Grandmother wasn't the sharp-bladed battle-ax she pretended. She was really fond of me and every new hurdle I wanted to leap seemed twice as hazardous to her as the last one.
But Father bought me the skates. I had already experimented with Barbara Bradley's and knew I could manage. With a skate on my one foot and a crutch on each side, I propelled myself. My balance was exceptional-as is most every uniped's. This is a natural physical compensation that develops quickly--as do strong shoulders and arms. After a few good shoves, I could lift up my crutches and coast along easily on the one skate, pushing with my sticks only when I needed fresh momentum. For a child of nine supposedly sentenced to a plodding pedestrianism getting back on wheels was sheer ecstasy.
Of course, I fell frequently while developing skill on roller skates. Every child sprawls when learning to skate. I am not convinced that I spread myself out on the sidewalk any more often than a normal child does. But this is the curious fact: my playmates wise in their childhood, accepted my spills as inevitable to the process of learning--but adults didn't. No army of rescuers advanced double-quick time to pick up any other youngster on the block when he came a cropper. But whenever I took a header, for all the turmoil the minor catastrophe created, it might have been a four-car smashup at a busy intersection. All the women in our neighborhood must have squandered their days with their eyes glued to a crack in the window blind while I learned to roller skate. For a brief time, I was as prominent as a lurid scandal.
Whenever I fell, out swarmed the women in droves, clucking and fretting like a bunch of bereft mother hens. It was kind of them, and in retrospect I appreciate their solicitude, but at the time I resented and was greatly embarrassed by their interference. It set me apart and emphasized my difference. For they assumed that no routine hazard to skating--no stick or stone--upset my flying wheels. It was a foregone conclusion that I fell because I was a poor, helpless cripple.
"What must her mother think!" was a phrase with which I became very familiar. I know now what my mother thought. Inside our house, she too kept her eye on the crack in the blind, and she wrung her hands and took to biting her fingernails while she developed a lot of fortitude. For Mother differed from the other women in only one particular. She never ran out and picked me up. I believe that Father, a normally devoted-husband, threatened homicide if she did.
Eventually, of course, nobody paid any attention to me. The women abandoned their watchful vigils at windows and went back to more pressing problems--their baking and dish washing. I rolled up and down the street unheeded and was no longer good box office.
However, the roller-skating incident left its mark on me, and consciously or unconsciously, it influenced my future approach to physical activity. I was, by nature energetic and athletic. I wanted to engage in all sorts of "inappropriate" games and sports, but I became overly sensitive to failure--foolishly so. I had a stubborn pride that was wounded by any hint that my handicap was a "handicap." It really wasn't much of one, compared to the frustrating handicaps many less fortunate people carry. Still I was practically neurotic over The Word. My feathers ruffled at the drop of it. A wise psychologist friend of mine has since put a name on this attitude of mind. She called it a tendency to overcompensate.
When I learned to swim, I insisted that Father drive me out to the country to a friend's ranch where, in guarded privacy, I went through my dog-paddling period in a muddy irrigation ditch. I forewent the greater comfort and the companionship of,the public swimming pool until I not only swam as well as other eleven-year-olds (the age at which I took to the water), but better. Then, when I made a public appearance, no one even noticed my handicap--I falsely deduced.
My swimming ability, in point of fact, probably was more conspicuous than utter ineptitude would have been. But blissfully, I had no such realization. In the water. my arms and shoulders, disciplined into extra strength by my crutches, compensated in the Australian crawl for my one-cylinder flutter kick. I felt completely anonymous happy moron, me! Actually, I wasn't the least bit anonymous, although my family encouraged me in this wild surmise. My sister tells me that my red bathing cap, bobbing about in the water, was invariably pointed out to bystanders. "See the little girl in the red cap? Would you believe it, she only has one leg!"
The same was true of tennis, which I learned in semisecrecy. Father taught me in the early morning hours when the courts were unpopular. My father didn't permit me to luxuriate in a lot of fancy complexes, but he was sympathetic with my reluctance to display physical clumsiness. Tennis presents more limitations for an amputee than swimming. The basic constraint is the necessity of holding one crutch with just the upper arm, leaving a hand free to manipulate a racket. I heard of a man with a left leg amputation who played tennis with only one crutch. I always used two since I am both right-handed and right-crutched and could not control both a racket and a completely weight-bearing crutch with one arm.
In spite of restrictions, I did fairly well at tennis as a child. I even competed, with average success, in a few junior tournaments. This brief period of minor distinction was not the result of exceptional skill, however. It was rather the happy aftermath of the advantage of earlier and better instruction than my contemporaries. Father was a very able tennis amateur. He was infinitely patient in developing in me a good serve and a strong, deep-court drive to offset my inadequate technique at the net. In playing tennis I discovered that it is essential to hug the serving line. It is easy to run forward, but not backward, on crutches. I am completely vulnerable at the net or even mid-court where a lob over my head spells defeat. I can't readily retreat to get it on the bounce and the alternative, a high aerial stroke, invariably makes me drop a crutch.
I enjoy tennis very much, but stacking up all the good points of my game against the poor ones, I come out a mediocre performer. "A good, average housewife tennis player." someone dubbed me-- and that is no enviable distinction. I usually compete with people who are better than I, so am rarely victorious-- which is perhaps just as well.
Friends who know me, and with whom I play frequently, don't care whether I win or lose. We just play tennis. Some of them avoid cutting and lobs because it keeps our game more rallying, but they are in no way offensively patronizing to me.
Pit a stranger against me, however--especially a male stranger--and he will methodically do one of two things, according to his basic character. He will make the gallant gesture and let me win--which is easily detected and humiliating. Or, he will kill himself before admitting defeat by a one-legged woman.
I once confronted across a net, by the conniving conspiracy of some school friends, a boy who was notoriously cocky on the tennis court. The essence of the cunning plot was that I must defeat this self-advertising fire-eater so ignominiously and completely that he would never again hold up his arrogant head. I had no confidence in my ability to do this and frankly, neither did my conspiring boy friends. It was such a superb scheme, however, that they were all willing to cooperate on its success. They concluded that if I won, it would be magnificent irony--a baby stealing candy from a man, for a change.
Two boys were assigned to pound away at my backhand for a week. and spies reported my unsuspecting enemy's weaknesses and strengths. He was definitely not the ball of fire he advertised, but he was better than I, it was mournfully agreed. However everyone hoped that I could at least give him enough competition to make him feel foolish. I was pledged to outplay myself, even if I folded in complete collapse.
I didn't even know Charlie, the victim, but it all seemed solemnly important to me... at the time. I was fifteen, and the prime-mover in the plot was a very handsome muscular gent of seventeen for whose smallest favor I would gladly have given my last leg.
By the most contrived casualness, I was introduced to Charlie at the tennis courts. where he was loudly quoting what Bill Tilden said to him and what smart repartee he handed Bill. The game was arranged; We had decided to contract for only one set, as my well- wishers in their wildest dreams, didn't hope I'd last longer than that.
In analyzing mine and my opponent's weaknesses, one great big one was overlooked. The outcome of that game was not traceable to technique and tenacity and my newly polished backhand, although all these helped, no doubt. The game was won on temper-- both mine and Charlie's. To start with, The Cock's first sentence contained fighting words. as far as I was concerned. He said, with a patronizing air, "Sure, I'll take her on if you guys don't want to bother.I don't mind a bit."
I let this go by unchallenged. I merely seethed. Then he suggested that he should be handicapped if he played me. "I'll give you fifteen," he offered pompously. This was red flag to my bull!"
"Pooh! I'll give you thirty," I counteroffered. This was red flag to his bull!
We marched out on the court as mad as if we'd just blacked each other's eyes. Temper warms up my reflexes, but it completely melted Charlie's. He belonged to the racket-throwing persuasion.
I must have been dropped on my head as a baby. I can't imagine any other explanation for squandering exertion as extravagantly as I did on that occasion. I wouldn't work that hard today if I were promised the Davis Cup for keeps. Somehow, I got the psychotic notion embedded in my half-a-mind that nothing matter so much as beating Charlie.
As soon as Charlie and I spun for serve, all the tennis games in progress on the other courts stopped immediately, and the players became our spectators. They all belonged in my camp and they helped me by none-too-sporting maneuvers. They worked poor Charlie into impotent fury by catcalls and other impertinences.
When he missed a shot or netted a serve, they'd all yell, "What's s'matter, got a Charlie-Horse?" This was regarded in our high school intellectual circles as overpoweringly witty. Everyone hooted and howled.
"Maybe you need some crutches, Charlie!"
"Fault!" they'd yell before Charlie's serves even bounced. To ensure a modicum of fair play, I had to call all the shots myself.
In spite of the tremendous nuisance value of my audience and the demoralizing effect on Charlie of his own temper, I had a desperate time beating him. We ran the set, most of the games long deuce-score ordeals, to twelve-ten before I won.
When it was over, my breath was coming in rattling gasps and I looked like a dripping hot beet just out of a stew pot and dragged home by an insensitive cat. Charlie walked off the court and broke up his racket by bashing it against a steel post. He wasn't a very lofty character.
I rode a brief wave of delirious ecstasy while a crowd of what I regarded as exceedingly smooth boys banged me on my aching back and shouted my praises. Then I staggered home to soak my weary heroic bones in a hot tub.
Father peered at me over his paper as I came in and collapsed on the davenport.
"Good God!" he gasped. Father was not a swearing man so I must have resembled a sister of Grim Death. "What in a holy name have you been doing?"
"I beat Charlie," I puffed proudly. "Been practicing for over a week to do it."
"Well-- you look as if you'd been beaten by a bunch of strong-armed thugs. Why was it so important to beat Charlie?"
"Because he's so darned cocky-that's why. Jerry and Frazier and Donald Manker and some other kids thought it up and planned the whole thing."
"Why didn't Frazier beat him?" Father asked with deliberate denseness. "Frazier's the best player in high school."
"Father!" I groaned. 'That wouldn't have meant anything. It had to be me."
"Oh-- because you're a girl. I see." Father again used his annoying simple-minded ruse. "Why didn't Helen Fitzgerald take on this Charlie? She's twice the tennis player you are. She could have beaten him without getting apoplexy."
"Oh, for goodness' sake, Father, are you dumb or something? Can't you see how much worse this dope would feel having me beat him?"
"I get it." Father sighed deeply. "Well. all I can say is that I'm disappointed in you."
"Disappointed in me! Every single person in this whole town thinks I'm wonderful, that's all!"
"Well, I don't!" Father snapped. "I thought you'd long since decided it wasn't sporting to take advantage of people because of your crutches."
"Father-- for heaven's sake, what's the matter with you? I didn't take advantage of him. I beat him fair and square. He played just as hard as he could. The score was twelve-ten-that shows you. The kids called a lot of the shots wrong but I corrected every time in Charlie's favor. And he offered me a fifteen handicap but I threw it right back in his face."
"You certainly salted his wounds, didn't you?" I stared, incredulous, at Father.
"You know--" Father paused to frown at me. "You present a very complex moral problem and I don't have any good precedents to follow in rearing you properly. But of this I am convinced: you took greater advantage of that boy today than if you'd frankly cheated him. You had a physical and personality advantage over him that must have made his defeat insufferable. If he'd beaten you twelve-ten, you'd have walked off .the court the victor, just the same."
"That's absolutely silly!" I protested, although this was true and I knew it. We'd counted on just that in our ingenious plot.
"It's complicated, I grant you, but not silly. This isn't complicated, however. I'm glad you can swim and play tennis and ride a horse, but the only reason I'm glad is because these things are fun. That's why you and everyone else is supposed to do them. When you play a game just to demonstrate what hot stuff you are on your crutches, it's time you quit and took up china painting, as your grandmother would have you do. Remember Grandma and your first roller skates? She was afraid you'd join a carnival if you learned to skate. Well--for my money, you were too close to the carnival for comfort today."
"Honestly, Father, you surprise me!" I protested even as my mind touched the peculiarly devious truth toward which he was leading me. "I suppose you just never want me to win anything." I continued perversely.
"Of course, I want you to win--but only the game. Now, beat it! Take a bath and go to bed. Get out of my sight. I can't stand you."
I started to cry as I left the room.
"By the way, you must have played inspired tennis today," Father called after me.
"I was hot, all right. I played much better than I am able to play."
"Hum...." Father sighed with what seemed almost wistfulness. "I wouldn't have minded seeing that game."
"You'd have put a stop to it though, I suppose-- You and your ideas!"
"That's right," agreed Father, "I would have."
He was furious enough with me to cheerfully shakeout my molars. But at the same time, reluctantly and in spite of himself, he was proud. The ethics of being crippled were, I decided, exceedingly complicated and obscure. But clear enough, nevertheless, that I never bragged to anyone about beating Charlie.