Amy Kiger-Williams
Bent Knee
Barbara’s left knee felt as if two jagged rocks were grinding together inside the curve of the joint. She felt pressure, tenderness, and inflammation, then gradually, the searing pain that flared up whenever she walked long distances or placed her weight on her knee, and eventually, whenever she moved her leg at all. There were moments when her knee would freeze up, and she bent it gingerly, degree by degree, to try to get things moving, but the knee would have its revenge. She wanted to double over to collapse on the floor from the pain but doubling over would involve bending the knee even further, which would even be more agonizing.
She knew what the cause was. The cartilage in her knee had worn away, and Dr. Martinez told her that it was bone-on-bone at this point. Getting up from her desk at work was painful. Getting out of bed was painful. Driving her car was painful. She had already been through enough, she thought. This was just maddening after everything she’d already gone through. Plus she was too young for this to happen. Forty-six and already her knee had crapped out on her. Wasn’t this supposed to happen to her in her sixties?
Her best friend, Jutta tried to convince her to get the surgery. Jutta worked in the next office over from her at work, so she saw how Barbara limped in and out of her office, to and from the weekly status meeting, in and out of Artie’s corner office. “Barbie,” Jutta said as Barbara leaned against the round white Formica table in the break room after enduring the pain of bending her knee to get her yogurt out of the back of the office refrigerator. “What are you doing with this?” she asked, with just a tinge of the German accent she had been slowly losing over the course of her adult life in America. “This is crazy. You have to get this doctor to fix your knee.”
Barbara held onto the table, unclenching her grip on the table as the pain subsided. “I know. I just don’t want to do it.” She thought of the scalpel, the anesthesia, the plastic ball and hinge that would inhabit her body instead of the living bones with which she’d been born. “I’d have to be out of work for a couple of weeks. What’s Artie going to do?”
Jutta laughed. “Oh, screw Artie. He’s the least of your worries. Go get that knee operated on or I’ll have to do it myself.” She held a plastic knife before her and made swiping motions in the air. “And you don’t want that.”
In the end, Barbara gave in. She knew she would. It was inevitable. She always gave in to everything, but she didn’t want to dwell on all of that while she was on the gurney. She hadn’t eaten since the night before and was starving. She thought of what she usually had for breakfast, a bowl of oatmeal with pecans and dried cranberries and a cup of Earl Grey tea. Her last meal had been a late lunch in her hospital bed, Salisbury steak in a pool of brown gravy and some flaccid green beans. They brought her in the day before to run a few pre-op tests, in addition to the chest x-ray and the blood work that had been done the week before. Her surgery was also scheduled for 6 A.M., so she tried to look at the bright side in the fact that she wouldn’t have to lie sleepless in her bed all night and then get up at 4 A.M. to drive to the hospital, hungry. She could just be sleepless and hungry in the hospital bed.
The attendants wheeled her into the operating room. The last operation she had had was in the research hospital. She had looked up at the endlessly high ceiling and saw windows in the walls at the top, behind which sat white-coated residents sitting in amphitheater seats, watching her, drinking coffee, and holding notepads. As the anesthesiologist asked her to count backward from ten, she saw a young man seated in the front row behind the glass, pointing at her and laughing to his friend in the seat next to his. After that, she woke up with unbearable pain in her chest, and her left breast was gone.
“This is different,” she whispered to herself. “This is very different.”
The anesthesiologist was a young man who reminded her of one of Artie’s kids. Artie had two sons, and this doctor looked like Thad, the windsurfing college dropout who had incurred Artie’s wrath by attending six semesters at Brown, then dropping out to “find himself.” This doctor had completed that process. He had found himself. He introduced himself as Dr. Stringer and then explained that the drug he would administer would render her unconscious throughout the duration of the operation. As he spoke, she noticed how well-defined his hands were, even underneath the latex gloves he wore. She could see the broadness of the tops of his hands, even the veins that stood out in relief under the opaque, milky rubber.
Dr. Martinez breezed in and nodded to Dr. Stringer. He turned to Barbara and said, “Let’s get you walking like you used to. Doctor, are we almost ready?”
The nurse put the needle for the IV in the top of Barbara’s right hand and taped the catheter to her skin. Barbara winced. “Sorry if this hurts,” she said. The nurse attached the IV tubing to the catheter, hooked up the bag of sodium chloride, and then hung it on a pole. Barbara watched as the saline solution started dripping into her veins. She heard Dr. Stringer and the nurse organizing drugs and instruments on a metal tray behind her; then the nurse attached another line to the IV and hung another bag on the pole.
Dr. Stringer came around to the side of the bed and injected a syringe into the hub of the IV line. He placed his latex-gloved hand on her shoulder. The hospital gown was so flimsy she thought she could feel the plastic through the cloth. She noticed how the left side of her gown was full and tented and sloped down to the right side where her breast used to be. “OK, Barbara, here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “Just relax. Take a deep breath and start counting down from 10.”
Barbara looked at the giant round light fixture above her head, shining down on her like a beacon. This is how it started the last time, she thought, but she closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and started counting backward.
Barbara came to in the recovery room, on a bed that was partitioned off from the rest by striped green floor-to-ceiling curtains. She felt a throbbing pain in her left leg, which was tightly wrapped with bandages. She felt weirdly disconnected and had trouble piecing together the sequence of events. She rubbed her eyes and realized that her glasses were back in her hospital room. The stripes on the curtains looked blurry to her. She closed her eyes, realizing that the curtains were all that there was to see, that there was really no point in trying to shake off the grogginess. She let it overtake her once again and slipped back into sleep.
The next time she woke up, she heard two nurses chatting outside her curtain. They were talking about another nurse who had called in sick, and how they’d have to adjust the schedules of those who were already on duty to accommodate the patients. Barbara’s eyes were closed, and she was just listening. For a moment, Barbara imagined that it was Jutta and Artie talking about her, how they would have to shuffle things around in order to make sure the office kept running smoothly while Barbara was out. She shouted out, “Hey! I’m here! What do you need me to do?” She opened her eyes and realized where she was, and she flushed when a nurse opened the curtain and poked her head inside.
“Hello!” the nurse said. “You’re awake! Is there anything that you need?”
Barbara shook her head. “I think I was dreaming and I just shouted out.”
The nurse pulled back the curtain and walked to the bed. “Sometimes that happens, honey.” She grasped Barbara’s wrist, then wrapped a blood pressure band around her arm and pumped it up, then released it, feeling Barbara’s pulse while checking her wristwatch. She took the chart that hung from the foot of the bed and scribbled on it, then returned to Barbara’s side.
“Sometimes the anesthesia makes people horribly nauseous,” the nurse said. Barbara glanced at the nametag that said “Yolanda” that was clipped onto her bright green scrub shirt. A fuzzy toy monkey gripped the tag with its paws. “How are you feeling? Do you need anything? Do you feel sick?”
Barbara groaned. She could only feel the pain in her knee. “Not really. My leg really hurts, though.”
Yolanda smiled. “Well, honey, that’s part of the territory. Let me see if I can get you some pain meds. If you need anything, there’s a buzzer on the bed that you can use to call me or one of the other nurses.” She pointed to the call button, and Barbara nodded.
“Thank you,” she said. “How long do I stay here?”
“We just have to get you more awake and let you see the attending physician. Then they’ll wheel you back upstairs to your room.”
Barbara closed her eyes after the nurse left. She felt a mild wave of nausea wafting up her esophagus. Power of suggestion, she thought. She remembered how she felt after the breast cancer surgery. Her chest was on fire, and she threw up in the little puke-yellow kidney-shaped bedpan that they kept on the table beside her gurney. She was drugged out of her mind back then, but she vividly remembered this. She thought about all the time she spent keeping the cancer out of her thoughts. The cancer had wrecked everything. Before she had cancer, she had a husband, Gregory. They had a house. They were a team. Then she got sick, and Gregory got scared. He left midway through her chemo treatments. He talked about his needs, about getting his head on straight. He stopped contributing to the bills and stopped direct depositing his paycheck into the joint account. He rented a U-Haul while Barbara was in the hospital overnight and moved his things out. From that point forward, Jutta took over. Jutta took her to chemo, helped put her house on the market, and helped her to find an apartment. Barbara didn’t like to think about all of this. This was something she had tried to put behind her. She was slowly getting her life back together, getting back on track, doing what she needed to do. She wasn’t supposed to be thinking of those days. She had vowed to move forward, to dwell on the future instead of the past.
Somehow, her mind wasn’t cooperating with these plans of hers, though.
Barbara was out of work for four weeks while she learned to walk on her new knee. The pain lessened day by day, and after a week, she was surprised that the incision hardly hurt at all, even though it wasn’t yet completely healed. Day by day, it was easier to walk, easier to bend, easier to do nearly everything. She used a walker for the first week and then graduated to a cane, and after the third week, she felt comfortable enough to walk slowly on her own. She still had to take the blood thinners that Dr. Martinez had prescribed, and she still wore the ugly putty-colored compression stocking on her left leg to keep the blood circulating, but she was improving, day by day.
Barbara worked from home during this time on the laptop that the company provided. She answered emails, took conference calls, and Jutta showed up at her apartment twice a week with her mail and a bag of groceries from Shop-Rite. They ate dinner in the apartment those nights, takeout and Chinese food. Barbara unbandaged her knee and let Jutta inspect the scar.
“They did a nice job,” Jutta remarked. “That’s the loveliest scar I’ve ever seen. It looks like it will heal up nicely. Not jagged, nice and straight, not too red. Does it hurt anymore?”
“A little,” Barbara said. “But not as much as it had.”
“Well, you’ll need to heal up well because you’re going to want to kick Artie in the shins when you get back. He let that intern use your office and he’s looking a little too comfortable in there. You may need a crowbar to pry him off your chair when you return.”
Barbara shook her head. “Don't worry. I can handle him. I can handle both of them.”
Jutta nodded. “Oh, I know you can. You’re so capable. You’re the most capable person I know.”
Barbara sighed. “Oh, God, capable. Don’t talk to me about being capable. I’m so fucking sick of being capable.”
Jutta grabbed her hand and patted the top of it. “Being capable is far better than being a weakling. Like some people we know, your little Gregory. Better that he’s gone. Good riddance.”
But Gregory wasn’t really gone, Barbara thought. He hadn’t moved out of the area. He hadn’t changed jobs. Barbara knew where Gregory was. He had moved to a townhouse in Little Falls for a while, then he moved in with Thea. Barbara knew Thea from around town. Thea had even helped Barbara to find her new apartment, about six months before Gregory even met Thea. Thea was a real estate agent, and she drove around the leafy, quiet streets of Montclair in a black Mercedes with a vanity plate that read HOTRL8R, talking on her cell phone, making deals. Barbara was tempted to phone and report her to the police and get her arrested for talking on her cell phone. Barbara was shocked that she hadn’t gotten picked up yet, and she was secretly hoping that she would. Schadenfreude.
It had been two years since Gregory left, and Barbara would still see his car around. Actually, she didn’t just accidentally drive past him. She’d drive around, looking for his car. She’d take her lunch hour and drive past his office on her way to Panera. He was an attorney with an office in a low-slung brick strip mall off Route 46. He had a silver Lexus that he always parked in the same space, opposite a nail salon, facing the building, and she’d drive by to see whether he was there. Once in a while, he’d be leaving the building or coming back to the office, and she’d see the top of his head as he ducked in the car, or she’d watch him drive past her, sometimes on his cell phone. Again, she’d feel that urge to flag down a policeman. She’d try to tamp down the anger she felt inside her, flaring like a pilot light that never went out.
When she went out to look for him, she never told Jutta where she was going, that she was out to try to get a glimpse of him to keep her fury alive. Jutta would have held her by the shoulders to try to shake some sense into her. Barbara knew that what she was doing was stupid, but she couldn’t help herself. She and Gregory had been together for ten years, and even though she couldn’t forgive what he had done to her, she still felt something for him. She wasn’t sure that it was love anymore, but she did feel this need to know what he was doing. Searching for him made her feel a little more alive. She felt this strange mixture of anger and excitement and indignation every time she saw his car, and she tried to remember some of the love that she had once felt for him. She didn’t think that what she felt was love anymore. It was what love became when it was irrevocably fucked up. She couldn’t help but feel that all the time, and she wasn’t sure where to go with that emotion.
Some days she’d go out to lunch with Jutta instead. She’d get Thai food or Mexican, and Barbara would wonder whether Gregory was getting lunch, too. What was he eating? Who was he dining with? Did he take a sandwich back to his desk and answer emails through lunch, the way he used to do sometimes? She thought about these things too much. She could never admit this to Jutta. Jutta always encouraged her to move on. Barbara thought that Jutta didn’t need men. Even though she was attracted to men, she didn’t find them all that useful, so she didn’t get involved with them. And she thought Gregory was the worst kind of man. He was cowardly. He was the man who backed out when things got rough. He was the man who walked away when his wife was at her lowest point, bald, weak, missing parts of herself that were so important to her and to him, and then he walked away with other parts of her, her self-esteem, her relationship, her sense of herself as a desirable creature. And then he took up with HOTRL8R.
Jutta was absolutely right. But Barbara couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Barbara couldn’t drive for four weeks, either. She had physical therapy once a week and called an Uber to drive her across town to her appointments. She thought it was ridiculous. Her car was just sitting in the parking lot, leaking fluids, collecting dust on the dashboard. She was paying ten bucks a pop to travel across town, a ridiculous sum of money for a five-minute car ride. Why couldn’t she just hop in and take a quick spin in the Honda to her physical therapist’s office? She wouldn’t take the shortcut through the neighborhood as she usually did, a maze of cross-hatched roads that she would traverse in an attempt to avoid the parade of traffic lights on Bloomfield Avenue. She’d take Bloomfield, a straight shot, very few turns, just stoplights, and a 25 mph zone. She wouldn’t take her usual detours to try to catch a glimpse of a silver car as she drove by. How ridiculous she’d been acting. She’d just drive directly to the physical therapist. She could just quickly hop in and out of the car, and no one would be the wiser.
But Barbara decided not to drive to her appointment. She arranged for an Uber, and ten minutes later, a man in a green Subaru was waiting outside the door of her garden apartment. She decided not to take the risk of driving. What if something happened? What if her new knee seized up on her and caused her to veer off the road? She drove a little blue Honda Civic with a manual transmission, and somehow the idea of repeatedly pressing the clutch, using that new left knee over and over, frightened her. She imagined that she would not feel this way if she had an automatic. The left knee was a problem. If she drove an automatic, her left leg could rest comfortably while the right did all the work. She started second-guessing her decision to buy a manual. She bought it after the breakup, thinking it would be something fun and sporty to drive, something that would cheer her up and make her feel youthful. Now all she could imagine was that she could never drive her car again.
Barbara wore a T-shirt to the physical therapist so she wouldn’t have to take off her blouse there, but she changed into a pair of shorts in the bathroom. The physical therapist had recommended a series of exercises for Barbara to do at home to increase the strength of her new knee, and he asked her to get down on the floor and perform the same exercises for him. The therapist watched her knee as she bent it repetitively. She wondered if he was grading her on her performance. He would adjust the angle of her legs, ask her to point her toes, do little bits of fine-tuning here and there that would make the exercises just fractionally harder, hard enough to cause her discomfort and make her want to quit, or at the very least, revert to the incorrect method of exercising.
“Feel that?” he asked, as he put her leg into a position that made Barbara feel as if her stitches would pop and her new knee would fly out.
“Unfortunately, yes,” she replied.
“We’re trying to increase your range of motion,” he replied. He wiggled Barbara’s knee. “You have to keep that knee mobile. Keep moving it. You’re going to build up scar tissue, both inside and outside. If you keep moving your knee, you break up the scar tissue and it doesn’t build up. You have to keep breaking up that scar tissue.” He patted her gently on the calf. “OK, good. Get up. Hop on the bike.”
Barbara sat on a black stationary bicycle and slipped her feet into the straps on top of the pedals. She started pedaling, and the physical therapist sat on a metal folding chair beside the bike, watching the motion of her knee. “Good,” he said, watching her leg folding and unfolding as she pushed the pedals, turning the wheels. Barbara wished that he had a television in the room, something to diffuse the uncomfortable feeling that she got when she was being observed. She continued pedaling, trying to place her thoughts elsewhere, to the stack of reports on the coffee table at home, to the breakfast dishes that were crusting up beside the sink, to the unmade bed and the sheets that probably needed changing soon. She found her thoughts drifting to her scars, to the hospitals, to Gregory, and she pulled her thoughts back to the milk that she hoped Jutta would bring over after work, the sick philodendron that needed extra care after being ignored for a week, the mess that she hoped the intern wasn’t making in her office. She realized she’d have to go back to the office soon. She’d be getting back into a routine. This period of limbo would give way to the sameness, the familiarity of the life she lived before the operation. Her knee would heal, and she would carry on as she always had, one foot in front of the other, forging ahead, trying really hard. She was always trying so, so hard, and yet sometimes she found herself wondering what all the effort was for.
On Barbara’s first day back at the office, Jutta organized a “welcome back” lunch for her. Artie allowed her to charge it to the department, so Jutta ordered pizzas and a platter of salads and sandwiches. Barbara spent most of the day in meetings, playing catch-up, and trying to remember to keep up with the exercises the physical therapist had instructed her to do under her desk. She extended her left leg and then bent it back. Over and over, she repeated this action—wash, rinse, repeat. She kicked Artie under the conference table in a finance meeting while she was doing her leg extensions. While Mitchell from down the hall was standing at the whiteboard, explaining a line item on the budget, her leg met Artie’s, a solid thwack on his calf. Her face reddened as she explained afterward that she was just trying to do her exercises. She didn’t mean to hurt him.
“I told you that you’d kick Artie when you got back,” Jutta joked. “See, I’m always right.”
Barbara stayed late that night, cleaning up her office, putting everything in order. It felt good to be back at her desk. It felt good to be getting back to normal. Her knee felt a little stiff. She felt like she hadn’t done her exercises nearly enough that day. She wrote a note to herself in black Sharpie at the top of her desk blotter: BEND YOUR KNEE. She didn’t know if it would help her to remember, but now there it was. She had no excuse. She couldn’t lie to herself that she never told herself to do this. It was right there on paper, see?
She organized her desk by putting the papers for the morning meeting at the center of her desk. She looked at the blotter again. She moved the papers away and then ripped the top page off the desk blotter, revealing a blank sheet of paper. She would remember. She remembered everything. She didn’t need any more reminders.
That night, she undressed in front of the full-length mirror. She looked at her reflection, thinking about the weird symmetry of her scars. Both sides of her body were fucked up now. She looked at the nearly fresh red scar on her left knee. It was flat, thin, new, something that she wasn’t quite used to yet. She looked at that knee and it still looked wrong. The shape of the knee was a little off. Her knees looked strange side by side. The scar traveled across the top of her joint, a straight line, neither a frown nor a smile. She moved up and across, staring at the right side of her body, the scar where her breast had once been. She remembered how Gregory had loved her breasts, how he’d sneak up behind her and cup her breasts after she got out of the shower, how he would pull her into corners or closets in public places to cop a feel. The left breast remained, unchanged. It taunted her. It still looked great. It hadn’t succumbed to the ravages of age and gravity. It was round and slightly full, with no stretch marks. It didn’t pull away from her chest, seeking the ground. She had seen women at the gym with flat, pancake breasts, breasts that had no curvature at all, breasts whose nipples pointed at the floor, with areolae the size of saucers, with breasts the size of balloons. Her breast was perfect. The only problem was that there was just one of them now.
Here was the scar: it was no longer red. It was flat, with small bumpy ridges where scar tissue had formed. It blended in with the rest of her skin. There was a small round whorl at the right side of the scar, a spot where the stitches that the surgeon had done inside her had poked out, and the knot at the end hadn’t dissolved or come undone or done anything that stitches were supposed to do. She remembered looking at the string in terror as the sutures healed, as the steri-strips fell off, as the scar slowly became less reddened and angry-looking. She remembered being terrified of pulling the string as if her insides would fall out as the knot pulled away from her. She remembered confiding this to Gregory in bed at night, curling up beside him, trying to spoon against him, feeling nauseous from the chemo. She remembered reaching up to touch her thinning hair, only to pull away a clump right from her head. She remembered how Gregory said, “I’m sorry, I need to sleep,” and edged over to his side of the bed, away from her. Then she remembered the checkup in the surgeon’s office, how she opened her flimsy dressing gown in the front and pointed out the small knot poking out from her skin, how she noticed the skin growing back around it, how she told the surgeon that she was worried what this meant about the stitches inside her, the ones that were supposed to hold her together.
She stared at that spot, that small indentation at the end of the scar. She’d been so scared. She remembered all of this now.
“Oh that,” the surgeon replied. “That’s easy.” She remembered how he pulled a pair of tweezers from a drawer and plucked at the string. The knot tugged against her skin where the scar had started to adhere. She held her breath, so sure that she would unravel from the inside, but instead, the knot broke away from her skin, snapping off as easily as popping the head off a dandelion.
Amy Kiger-Williams holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yale Review Online, South Carolina Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel and a short story collection. You can read more of her work at amykigerwilliams.com and follow her on Twitter at @amykw.