Under the White Tablecloth

In a concert hall in Vienna an audience watches as an accordionist takes a stool beside an unfurnished table and begins to make music. Minutes later a man in the third row leans over his wife to whisper when she hits him with the program. He’s missed it. By the time he returns his attention to the stage all is normal again, the table with the draping white cloth is still, the accordionist, busy pressing wind between his hands.

The next time it happens the man catches it—one of the table’s legs seems to move, only for an instant, to the flow of the music. The accordionist sees it too, but by the time he stands the leg has resumed its place. He keeps playing, and both the audience and the musician spend the next few minutes second-guessing themselves over the half-glanced motions of the varnished Red Oak table legs. Slowly the table becomes more bold, lulled by the pitch and pull of the accordion. The four-foot legs lift and seem to float, slide as if to dip. They’re dancing.

The accordionist sees this with intrigue and well-played surprise. He steps up his tempo, and his music begins to follow the table rather than entice it. The man in the third row is hit again by his wife; he’s going to miss the best part. The musician brings his music to a peak, the legs move forward, and out crawls a woman from under the suspended white tablecloth, her gesture as elegant as the music that lulls her. Her name is Lisa. She’s wearing wooden prosthetics made specifically for this performance, two legs custom fit for her amputated fingers, two more for her legs that stop at the knee.

The audience gasps, the music gains aggression, and Lisa rises on two legs, the others raised above her waving twelve-feet over the shaking musician. Then, gradually, the music that animated her slows, talks her down from her anger, lulls her until she’s back under the cloth, hunched, hidden, and no longer a threat.

The audience stands with an ovation.

Lisa’s been dancing for as long as she can remember. Back in Connecticut, when she still had her fingers and the parts below her knees, she danced every day. She’s the lucky one, she says, among the girls she grew up training with; she didn’t develop an eating disorder to keep her figure when she hit her teens. Instead she left the art, and when she moved to Boston after high school she put her moves to work in a gentlemen’s club to pay for college. Here she didn’t need to vomit to get ahead. What she needed here, she says, was a breast job.

A coworker of hers had just had the surgery, and according to Lisa the new breasts were to die for. Patrons must have thought so too, because the girl’s tips soared exponentially. Lisa saw implants as a career investment, a way to make more money, pay off her loans and see the world. Weeks later she was in Canada holding a silicone bag in each hand as she wavered between cup sizes. The operation is cheaper there, and the doctor came highly recommended.

The implants were in for only five days when she realized something was wrong, not nearly long enough for the swelling to go down or the bandages to come off. She never got to see what her new breasts looked like. Instead, she was rushed to the hospital, deep in the throes of septic shock. Doctors didn’t think she would live. Her only chance at survival: an amputation of her fingers and her legs below the knee.

That was ten years ago. And since then she’s turned down dozens of interviews and called off her lawsuit against the doctor she found out had previously given two other staph infections by using unclean equipment. Interviews, she says, are edited to support intent, not exploration—skewed to support a predetermined agenda. People want to interview her for the inspiration story, the story of a dancer who overcame tragedy, the story of Lisa before and after, of Lisa without the in-between. The lawsuit—that was just too long, too intense, too expensive, and too much of a long shot with the Canadian legal system.

She’s moved on—at least, as far as she can. She can turn down the media interviews, but she can’t stop the masses, the stares, the questions. Not a day has gone by that she’s not been asked how it happened. And when you’re reduced to telling one trauma, one story over and over again, Lisa says, you really begin to want for a change of topic. Still, it’s not the telling that’s her greatest struggle, it’s the way she has to tell it, the pressure to package her story in a form that others can deal with. People only want to hear the half-story. They don’t want to hear about the pain, about the dressing changes that felt like peeling skin, about lost friends or a lost career. They want a story they can digest, a story they can pin a fault to, assign a moral, and stretch out onto to their everything-happens-for-a-reason, feel-good, never-gonna-happen-to-me canvas of self-serving, inspirational mantras. Lisa doesn’t have that story. That’s why she takes to the stage, where weakness is a strength, where deformity is captivating, where she decides how people see her, and where a safe and quiet table can become a twelve-foot monster posed upright with rage—and moments later, a dancer with all the grace and softness of a music-box ballerina.

When she’s offstage she’s got other legs: everyday legs, swimming legs, running legs, sexy legs with garters and high heels. But she never covers her hands. She likes to feel things, and if she puts something over them she loses that.

Her running legs get the most attention—two rubber-treated rails of carbon-fiber shaped like vertically-bisected hearts. The most common reaction is a thumbs up. It seems like every block she jogs is marked by a fresh SUV, window rolled down, driver’s thumb extended and pointed to the sky. Sometimes they shout at her: you go girl, way to be. But she never sees those same faces beside her on the sidewalk. She doesn’t inspire them to run, only to smile and wave—noting as they roll up their windows how they’ll have to tell their friends about the person they saw who’s making the most of her life, about the person less fortunate, about the girl who’s as safe as a table, the girl whose story goes from tragedy to triumph without a bump.

She sees a few less thumbs during the wintertime, when it’s too cold to crack a window and let the heat out, too cold to stick a thumb out in the wind. That’s one advantage of having less extremities—it’s easy to feel bitter, but much more difficult to feel cold. You don’t need gloves when you haven’t got fingers.