4. One-Armed Girls Need Swimming Lessons Too

4

ONE-ARMED GIRLS NEED SWIMMING LESSONS TOO

NADYA WAS REQUIRED to wear her arm to school, the way a child who had recently been fitted with their first pair of glasses might be required to wear their glasses. She had tried objecting, only to be informed that a properly grateful little girl would understand and appreciate what was being done for her, not make her parents’ lives more difficult by complaining when she had nothing to complain about.

As always, Pansy had played the bad cop while Carl looked placidly on, not supporting his wife but not objecting, either. Nadya had pled and tried her very best to explain her objections, all for naught, because she was small and they were large and they were helping. How could she be so ungrateful as to refuse to let them help ?

So she was whisked away to school with the unfamiliar weight of the new arm hanging heavy from her shoulder and pinching her skin, and that day the other students looked at her like she was somehow broken for the very first time. They had grown accustomed to overlooking Nadya’s missing arm, seeing absence as a part of her body; having an arm suddenly appear was worth staring at. What’s more, the arm was visibly artificial, and Nadya was visibly uncomfortable.

She wasn’t the only child in school with a prosthetic; one of the boys in fifth grade had a prosthetic leg, and they were all used to Michael. He didn’t even walk with a limp most of the time, save for right before he was fitted for an improvement. And one of the teachers had a prosthetic eye, which one student or another would periodically claim they had seen her remove and drop into a glass of water. So while a few of the other students might have been staring with intent to mock, the majority were simply fascinated by the appearance of something new in their environment.

Nadya loved going to the zoo with Carl and Pansy, even if Pansy found most of the animals loud and unattractive, and just wanted to look at birds and tigers all the time. And one of the concepts she liked best was the idea that every animal, from the biggest or the smallest, had zookeepers assigned to something called an “enrichment team.” Those were the people whose job it was to find them new toys, new things to taste and smell, new ways to keep their enclosures interesting and engaging, so they wouldn’t get bored and start breaking things for fun.

She thought, sometimes, that she and all the other students were part of a massive mutual enrichment team. They gave each other something new to look at every single day, keeping them from succumbing to boredom and destroying their enclosure.

And today, thanks to her new arm, she was the something new. She’d been the something new once before, when she first arrived at the school. She hadn’t liked it then, and she didn’t like it now.

She squirmed through her morning classes, fidgeted through recess, and, when lunch arrived, rushed to the cafeteria to be at the front of the lunch line, grabbing her tray as she always did, only to discover that her new arm interfered with the way she would normally brace it against her body. She staggered, unable to use the arm to support the tray even without the weight of her lunch, unable to get the tray between her arm and her body. It was only when one of the other students stepped in and helped her that she was able to get to her lunch and head for the table where she usually sat. Her cheeks burned the whole way. It was rare for her to need help with basic tasks, and while she had been warned that there would be a period of adjustment, she wasn’t used to feeling helpless.

Nadya sat at the table, picking at her macaroni and cheese, and hated her new arm a little bit more than she had before the bell rang. One of the boys prodded her in the shoulder and asked a question about her prosthetic. She answered softly, barely aware of her own words, and bent her arm at his request, demonstrating the way the elbow bent when she flexed her stump. The other kids began talking enthusiastically about the arm, how cool it was, how lucky she was to have it, and didn’t seem to notice that they weren’t talking about her anymore at all. They weren’t talking to her, either; like a room full of kindergarteners with a fun new toy, they were talking about the toy.

It was her assistance device, her mechanism for better interacting with the world, not a replacement for who she was as a person. She’d never really considered her missing arm a disability—it was just the way she was made, and always had been, and it didn’t stop her from doing anything she wanted to do—and now it was all the other children could see.

She didn’t like it. It burned.

They finished lunch and rose, an amorphous group of second-graders on their way to the playground. Nadya moved within the pack, as she so often did, neither hanging back nor pushing her way to the front. Her stump ached. She wanted to remove the arm and rub more lotion into her skin, but she didn’t dare attract attention to the arm again: it would only cause the other kids to focus on it, when she desperately didn’t want them to.

“Dodgeball,” said one of the boys. “Since Nadya can finally play!”

Nadya blinked and protested. She couldn’t “play,” as they said, couldn’t hold or catch or throw the ball any better than she’d been able to the day before. But she could be pulled to the dodgeball court, and she could use her hands—both the one she was born with and the one she was wearing—to bat the balls out of the way as they came rocketing toward her. The other kids laughed and laughed, and if most of them liked her and didn’t understand how they were making her unhappy in fundamental, unkind ways, they were still young enough not to understand all the possible forms of cruelty. Nadya dodged and twisted as well as she could, but was still hit by several red rubber balls before the bell rang again to end lunch and they all went trooping back to the classroom, where she hunched in her seat and stared at her paper, and hated.

Oh, how she hated. She hated being forced to conform to other people’s idea of normal, whether they be cultural or physical. She hated how easy it was for the adults in her world to pass her around like a doll, moving her from Russia to America, from house to doctor’s office, from her bedroom to wherever they wanted her to be. She hated that her agency had been taken away from her in ways she couldn’t fully articulate, and she sat at her desk, and she seethed.

Until the bell ran for the end of the day, and she rose, gathered her things, and scooted for the door as fast as her legs would take her, not pausing until she was at the bus-stop line. Once there, she waited anxiously, jiggling her weight from foot to foot, counting the seconds until the big yellow bus pulled up and she could climb aboard, ready to head for home. They had to wait while the children who were in less of a hurry came out of the school and got onto the bus. Nadya squirmed deeper and deeper into her seat, self-conscious in a way she couldn’t remember ever having been before, right arm pressed up against the bus wall where no one would poke at it, or stare, or ask questions she didn’t want to answer yet. How was she supposed to tell people how she felt when she didn’t know yet how she felt?

The bus pulled away from the stop with a lurch. Nadya closed her eyes. They were on the way home. She was safe.

When they reached her stop, she got off the bus without saying anything, staring down the block at the square, comfortable shape of the house she shared with her adoptive parents. If she squinted, eyelashes laced together like the fingers on folded hands, she could blur the outline enough to make it resemble the orphanage, which might not be well-beloved but was certainly familiar. She knew who she was at the orphanage. She knew who she was expected to be. She looked down at the artificial palm of her right hand, eyes still half-closed, and through the blur, it looked almost real.

But she wasn’t a girl with a right hand. She was a girl without one. It had never defined her, but it had always been a true part of who she was, as true as her dark brown hair and lighter eyes, as true as her slightly snaggled left incisor. All the little pieces of a person. She didn’t know how to be this new version of herself.

It was a transition many had weathered before her, and many would weather after, and had her new parents ever considered that perhaps a girl who’d never had a hand might not miss having a hand and taken steps to help her through the process, she might have taken it as smoothly as some of them. But Carl and Pansy had been looking for a child, partially because their pastor said it was their proper Christian duty and partially because they thought they ought to want one, and now here she was, lost, with two adults who barely understood what it was to be responsible for another living being.

Nadya blinked away the beginning of tears and trudged toward the house, right arm dangling by her side and left hand clutching the strap of her backpack, keeping it from slipping down her shoulder. Pansy’s car was in the driveway as Nadya let herself in, stepping out of her shoes before heading down the hall toward her room.

“How was your first day?” asked Pansy, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

Nadya stopped and looked at her in confusion. She had been at this school since September, and they wouldn’t change classes until next September. “It was… fine,” she said, having learned that positive but noncommittal answers would usually free her from the burden of parental expectation, confusing or not, more quickly. Pansy was still looking at her expectantly. “We’re doing multiplication in math. After I finish my homework, may I go to the turtle pond?”

“I don’t want to hear about your homework, I want to hear about how the other kids reacted to your arm, ” said Pansy, now sounding annoyed.

Ah. So this was another scripted conversation, then, and as usual, Nadya was on the wrong foot because she hadn’t learned her lines. She never did. She still forced a smile, and said, “They found it very interesting. Michael, who’s three years ahead of me, has a prosthetic leg, and he plays kickball all the time. I played dodgeball for the first time today.” The bruises were already forming.

Still, she kept smiling and waiting to hear that she had finally managed to say enough, to satisfy Pansy’s insatiable desire to be the one who did things correctly, the one everyone looked at and said “There, that woman, she’s a good woman, a pious woman, devoted to her family, she’s the one I want to be like.” And to her great relief, Pansy relaxed and nodded, saying, “Your homework comes first, but after that, yes you can go to the turtle pond, as long as you finish at least an hour before dinner. Come and give me a hug.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nadya, and trotted obediently over to hug Pansy with her left arm, resolutely ignoring the disappointment on the other woman’s face at her failure to use both. Pulling away, she walked down the hall to her room, leaving Pansy watching after her.

Pansy sighed and shook her head as Nadya vanished into her room. She was trying so hard to understand the girl, but nothing they ever did seemed to be good enough for her. She was serious all the time, seeming to look toward a future that she had yet to share with either of the adults who cared for her. She’d expected an orphan overflowing with gratitude over being offered a better life, and had thought Nadya would absolutely embody that spirit when she’d first seen her among the other children, a bright-eyed little director gleefully organizing them according to her own design. How had that child become the one they had? It didn’t make any sense.

In her room, Nadya pulled books out of the backpack and dropped them onto the small desk provided for her use. She couldn’t think of any of the furnishings as “hers”: they had all been selected for her, not by her, and while she liked them well enough, they were much more suited to Pansy’s tastes than her own. That was all right: she’d never been able to pick her own things at the orphanage, either. But it just fed into the feeling that she was there to be a prop, not to be a person, and one day she’d be replaced by a little girl who did a better, faster job of conforming to Pansy and Carl’s unspoken, sometimes nebulous expectations.

That little girl would probably think this room was perfect exactly as it was. She wouldn’t dream of changing a thing. And if they bought her a prosthetic arm, she would be grateful to have it, not dubiously unsure that she wanted anything of the sort, not squirming when it rubbed against her skin. She would be a grateful, dutiful daughter, and they would forget Nadya entirely.

Nadya wished her well, even as she hurried through her homework and put it carefully back in her backpack, ready to be turned in the next day. She lived here now; even if this wasn’t going to be her home forever, it was still hers, and she would live with all its sharp edges and strangeness. She would be strong. That was what the matrons would have wanted her to be, what the other children would have expected from her, what Russia would have demanded of her, if Russia had been in a position to demand anything.

Russia had, after all, repeated the one crime for which Nadya had never been able to fully forgive her first mother. Russia had given her away when she was too much to care for.

Leaving her room, Nadya padded back down the hall to her shoes, relieved when Pansy didn’t appear again. Sometimes, permission to go out would be rescinded in favor of chores, especially when Nadya was going to see the turtles, which was unladylike and, in Pansy’s eyes, unnecessary. But her day had been long and unpleasant in strange new ways—ways she couldn’t help remembering as the unfamiliar weight of her new arm bumped against her side—and she needed the turtles.

Stepping back into her shoes, Nadya took her coat from the hook and stepped out into the crisp afternoon air, beginning what had long since become a familiar walk through their small housing development to the turtle pond. It had been a warm enough day that several of the turtles were basking when she arrived, and she paused, squinting at their round, familiar bodies, a flame of rage kindling in her soul.

Someone had taken a knife or a rock—something sharp, anyway—and scratched two words into the shell of the largest turtle currently basking on the log. But a shell wasn’t just a piece of clothing or a pack the turtle carried! It was the turtle’s body, naked to the world!

It took a moment for her rage to clear enough for the words to actually register: byt’ uveren. A beat later, she realized why that looked so strange, apart from words having no business on the back of a turtle.

They were written in Russian. Be sure. Be sure of what? Be sure it was a crime to scratch words into a turtle? Because she was absolutely sure of that. Still candle-bright with rage, Nadya ducked under the top bar of the fence and stepped onto the narrow strip of bare earth between it and the pond itself. The turtles were used to her by now, and watched her with slow, wise eyes, not abandoning their perch. What could one child do to them from a distance? She wasn’t one of the children who liked to throw rocks or poke with sticks. She was safe.

Nadya began inching her way around the pond, trying to watch her footing and the turtles at the same time. Had someone asked in that moment what she was intending to do, she wouldn’t have been able to give them a good answer. But she couldn’t just walk away, not when the turtle was so clearly injured. She had to help.

On the log, the turtles looked at each other, nodding in slow symphony, like they had reached a reptilian consensus. One by one, they dropped into the water.

The turtle with the words etched into its shell was the last to move, shifting position so that it was closer to Nadya as she moved along the bank. It watched her progress, watched as her eyes fell on the cattails and rushes that grew dense in the clear water, reaching for the sky, watched as those same eyes went terribly wide. Nadya stared.

She was used to seeing patterns in things where adults would insist there were no patterns, rabbits in the clouds and dancing bears in the shapes of leaves. But she had never seen a half-open door etched in waterweeds before. It looked oddly inviting, like it wanted her to step through it. But she couldn’t do that, because it wasn’t a door; it was just… a shape in the water, just an outline of something that wasn’t real.

She was so busy staring at the door that wasn’t that she didn’t notice how close she was to the edge, or how the ground under her foot had started to crumble, until she lost her balance and fell forward with a yelp, crashing into the water at the direct center point of the door that wasn’t there. The splash was surprisingly soft.

She didn’t resurface.

After a few seconds had passed, the turtle with the scratched-up shell dropped into the water, following her lead, and swam away.