DELETED SCENE

Cut Off My Leg!

Some stories don't make it into the final book.

Writing a memoir means making choices about what belongs in the story you're trying to tell—and what, no matter how good the story is, ultimately takes you somewhere else.

This is one of those stories.

It's about my parents, a backgammon game in Chicago, a honeymoon in Fiji, a stonefish, and a request that has been repeated at family dinners for more than fifty years.

It didn't make it into No Mud, No Lotus.

But I liked it too much to let it disappear completely.

So here's one from the cutting room floor. Enjoy:

Every family has an origin story it tells at every holiday dinner until the details have been sanded down smooth as river stone, repeated so many times that nobody in the room could tell you anymore which parts happened exactly as described and which parts simply became true through sheer repetition.

This is mine.

Or rather, it's my parents'.

Which, in the specific arithmetic of family memory, amounts to the same thing.

It was June 26, 1974, when Estelle and Lee got married, though the story actually starts a little earlier than that, on a rainy evening in Chicago, in a bar off Rush Street, at a backgammon table neither of them had any particular reason to remember afterward.

My father was working for a firm called Merck Sharp & Dohme downtown, the kind of job that came with a secretary and a reasonable expectation that grown men didn't spend their afternoons chasing women through the Chicago phone directory.

My mother was working as a travel agent for Qantas, stationed in the same city on the other side of the planet from where she'd grown up, which strikes me now as a fairly on-brand detail for a woman who'd go on to raise a son who couldn't sit still either.

My father and a friend wandered into that bar one evening, mostly out of the rain, and found two women at a table playing backgammon.

He fancied one of them immediately—Estelle, my mother, then a stranger to him in every sense—and asked, with whatever confidence a Chicago bar and a few drinks lend a man, whether he could see her again.

She agreed, reluctantly, the way you agree to things with strangers you don't expect to actually follow up.

He followed up.

The next morning he walked into his office and gave his secretary an assignment that had nothing to do with Merck Sharp & Dohme's actual business.

"I want you to call every travel agent on Rush Street," he told her, "and ask if an Estelle works there."

She did not love this assignment.

She did it anyway, because that's generally how it went in 1974 when your boss asked you to do something strange with total confidence that it was a reasonable request.

She got through four calls with no luck.

On the fifth, someone on the other end said, "Yes, Estelle works here, please hold."

My father's secretary, doing her actual job for possibly the first time all morning, put her hand over the receiver and told him she'd found her.

"Lee, I found the one."

"Hang up."

"What? You want me to hang up? Why did you make me call twenty agencies if you're just going to hang up?"

"I just needed to know which office was hers."

He left the office himself and walked over.

Small operation, the way travel agencies ran in 1974—a front desk, a back office, somebody's actual desk with an actual person sitting at it.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Estelle."

"She's out the back. One moment."

She came out a minute later, and if she was surprised to find the backgammon man from two nights earlier standing in her office, she managed not to show it.

"I'm Lee. From the backgammon night."

"I know who you are."

"I was wondering if I could ask you out tomorrow night."

"I don't know."

"We could just grab coffee. Or a light dinner. Nothing dramatic."

"Okay," she said, in the tone of a woman doing someone a small favor she hadn't fully decided she wanted to do.

Friday, five o'clock, my father called the travel agency to confirm.

"Are we still on for tonight?"

"Actually, I don't feel well."

"You're sick."

"I'm sick."

"How about another night, then?"

"Maybe."

He did not take maybe as a no, which, depending on how you want to read it, either says something concerning about persistence in 1974 or something correct about my father specifically.

He stopped at a Jewish deli on his way across town, picked up chicken soup, and got the address for her apartment from the same customer service woman who'd unwittingly helped him track her down two days earlier—apparently discretion wasn't a strong departmental value at that particular Qantas office.

He knocked.

My mother answered, not sick at all, having invented the illness the same way you invent an excuse for a date you're suddenly nervous about rather than one you don't want.

She looked at the man standing in her doorway holding a container of chicken soup he'd gone out of his way to get for a woman who'd lied to avoid seeing him, and some private calculation happened behind her eyes.

Anyone this determined to bring me soup is worth actually getting to know.

They kept dating.

They got married that June, outdoors, and afterward did what young couples with more romantic ambition than sense have always done—they got on a plane and didn't stop moving.

Fiji came first, on the way to Sydney, where my mother wanted her new husband to meet her mother and brother before the marriage had even had time to feel entirely real yet.

They landed in Nadi, took a short taxi out to a stretch of shoreline everyone still calls the Coral Coast, and did the thing newlyweds on a tropical honeymoon are contractually obligated to do:

They went for a swim.

My father went in first.

My mother stayed on the beach, watching him wade out, waist-deep, in water clear enough that neither of them had any reason to be nervous about what might be sitting on the bottom of it.

He stepped on something.

Sharp, he thought—a bottle cap, maybe, coral if he was unlucky.

He waded back in, saw a thin trail of blood coming off the bottom of his right foot, and did what men in 1974 apparently did about small mysterious injuries on a honeymoon:

Nothing.

"It's nothing. Just a cut on some coral."

"Do you need a doctor?"

"No. I'll be fine."

He made it about five feet up the sand before he collapsed.

What my father had actually stepped on was a stonefish.

The pain, by every account anyone has ever given of it, is not comparable to ordinary pain. It arrives complete, doesn't let up, and can come with swelling severe enough to turn a foot into something closer to a foreign object attached to the leg than an actual foot.

Within the hour, my father's right foot had swollen to roughly the size of a basketball.

A member of the hotel staff, carrying him back toward the resort with my mother trailing behind in a state somewhere past panic, took one look at the small puncture wound at the base of his foot and said the word plainly, like he'd said it before and expected to say it again.

"Stonefish."

The hours that followed were the kind of hours that end up defining a marriage's founding mythology whether the couple wants them to or not.

The pain didn't ease.

The swelling didn't stop.

The morphine the resort doctor could offer barely dented either.

And somewhere in the middle of it, flat on his back, my father turned to the woman he'd been married to for barely two weeks and made a request that has been repeated at every family dinner since, in roughly the same reverent, slightly disbelieving tone.

"If you really love me," he told her, "you'll cut off my foot."

"What?"

"Please, Estelle. Cut it off. If you love me, you'll do this for me."

I want to be fair to my father here, in a way the family retellings rarely bother to be.

People in the grip of extreme pain sometimes genuinely ask for the source of that pain to be removed. My father wasn't being a coward, or even particularly unusual.

He was a man experiencing something the human body has very few honest responses to.

And please remove the part of me that hurts this badly turns out to be one of them.

My mother did not cut off his foot.

There was, as it happened, nothing more the doctors on hand could actually do beyond more morphine and more waiting, which is its own kind of helplessness—sitting beside someone in agony with genuinely nothing left to offer them except your presence.

At some point that night, in a moment I have to imagine was equal parts practical and completely surreal, she called her own mother, Suze, back in Sydney.

"I don't know what to do," she told her.

"Where should I ship the body? Australia, or the U.S.?"

He didn't die, obviously, or I wouldn't be here to tell you a story I wasn't alive for.

He survived.

The swelling eventually receded, and the marriage that very nearly became a very short and very strange chapter in family history instead went on to produce, among other things, me.

Family legend has always maintained that his case ended up recorded somewhere in the Guinness Book of Records, among the earliest documented survivors of stonefish venom.

I've never personally tracked down the page.

I've decided, the same way I've decided about a red shoe on a hospice roof, that I don't need to verify it to understand why the story survived.

Some family stories earn their place at the table on the strength of the telling alone, whether or not you could ever produce the receipt.

What I know for certain is smaller than that, and probably more useful:

My parents' marriage began with a woman who lied about being sick, a man who wouldn't take maybe for an answer, and a honeymoon that nearly ended with her mother getting a phone call about shipping arrangements.

Whatever it is that keeps two people together for the rest of their lives, I've come to think it isn't the absence of a story like that one.

It's surviving it together, and then choosing, every year after, to tell it again.