Leesa Fenderson
Palance
Your foot doctor looks like a late 90s George Clooney, salt and pepper hair just at his temples and a scruffy beard. You look at your feet and you’re happy you got your toenails done. You don’t think that George Clooney was ever the sexiest man alive, but you’d at least like to have your toenails done if he’s going to be examining them.
“What brings you in today?”
“I broke my toe,” you say, lifting your injured foot.
You lean back on the examining table, protective tissue paper crinkles below you.
“Let’s have a look.”
Clooney snaps on green latex gloves as he sits on a low stool. “How did you injure it?”
He doesn’t say ‘break’ although the tip of your middle toe, on your right foot, is fat and throbbing. You found the word edema on WebMD and wore your beach flip-flops through the grey Crown Heights snow to the subway. Walking from your doorman building, you feel a strange nostalgia. You remember exiting JFK from Kingston into your first snow at 10 years old, and you remember that no matter how thick your coats got every winter, you still felt emotionally ill-equipped for Brooklyn’s coldness year after year.
You decided to take the subway because a cab to the City would be ridiculous. But as soon as your toes brushed a patch of muddy snow that shifted a bit and had a tail, on the fourth painful step down into the subway, you turned around, climbed back up, ordered a ride-share to mid-town Manhattan, and chalked the exorbitant fare up to the game. The game was partying the night before with what was left of Black Brooklyn on the first night of Kwanzaa.
Clooney is eye-to-eye with your Fenty bad gyal neon pink polish and you’re wondering how soon you can get out of here and get back to your second day of Kwanzaa lovers rock, reggae brunch.
You answer his question. “I was at a club last night jumping—”
“Plyometric training?”
“No, a bar turned nightclub.”
You imagine his incredulity is at your age, damn near forty.
“I wasn’t really jumping, it was soca music—”
“Oh, like Bob Marley,” he says as he twists your toe at the joint.
“Aye,” you wince.
“But that music is slow,” he turns his furrowed brow to you for an explanation.
“Bob Marley is reggae and Jamaican. Soca is Trini and a mix of calypso and Afro rhythms—they have very different syncopations and upbeats,” you say.
He raises his palms as if under fire.
“Jumping wouldn’t cause this type of injury.”
“Well, we started to palance to one side and dude next to me went the wrong way and came down hard on my foot.”
“Did you elevate your foot or ice your toe?”
You breathe out remembering the throngs of people moving from one bar to the next all night. The groups were thick and viscous and vibrant like carnival or Labor Day on the parkway but with coats and Timbs and old snow.
“The DJ paused the song,” you continue to explain, “and told us to all face the bar and started the song again. We all palanced, but then he played Jump Around Di Place and that’s when I jumped, a lot.” You smirk as if caught doing something you no longer allow yourself to do.
“No, I didn’t elevate it.”
“So, you’re moving side-to-side in a group?”
“Yes, in a group,” you bristle at the way he says ‘group’. You want to say the first day of Kwanzaa is Umoja for unity, but you’re not even sure what that would mean here.
“Then you jump?” More furrowed brow.
“Is the choreography necessary for the x-ray?”
“Not certain that it’s broken yet, are we?”
He turns to look at you and he is smiling that smile that someone who is deemed an expert at something smiles at you for your limited knowledge. You notice the corners of his eyes crinkle in a way that makes his face appear equally kind and handsome. You hate him and his first-person plural.
“Shouldn’t you order an x-ray?”
“We need to ascertain if the injury you think you have is in the phalanges,” he points at the tips of your toes, “that’s not so bad. Metatarsals,” he points down, “lower in the foot, would be bad. Are you landing on your toes or the balls of the feet for this palance?”
“Toes. Maybe also the balls.”
“Do you mean,” he stands up and goes into a Heisman trophy position. His green-gloved hand extends out. His starched white coat is stiff. He alternates from right to left, like he is warming up for cardio. His eyes flash up to you. You have nothing for him. Blank. He walks back over to you triumphant—like he just did something.
“Nope. Not it. Not at all,” you say.
“I’m sure I was close,” he nods with his lips pressed together. “Looks like your toe is fine since you alternate legs throughout the dance.”
“Well actually, you don’t alternate legs. I’d show you but my toe is broken.”
He raises his pointer, “We don’t know that it’s broken. Do we?”
You google ‘palance dance’ on your cell. You find a video and play it for Clooney. You feel like you’re unzipping your coat outside of JFK to show him the goose down inner lining.
He takes your phone, watches the video and then restarts it. He goes into the Heisman trophy and hops to the left when the singer yells palance, then he hops to the right. He does this for the whole song. Your face remains blank. He looks down at the positioning of his feet and starts again. You realize then, on the third chorus, that there’s no way out. You’re in some Misery type holding pattern of cultural appropriation and denial to health care. You nod with your lips pressed together, yes.
“Yup, that’s it,” you say.
“That is some workout,” he exhales at you under the beam of your encouraging smile. “The metatarsals are probably fine but let’s order you an x-ray fo yo broke toe.” He pantomimes early 90s hip hop hand gestures hitting each of the last four syllables.
You roll your eyes and lean back remembering a long-ago childhood injury when you cut your leg to the white meat on an exposed nail on the fourth step of the walk-up, where you and your mom were cotching when you first got here. It’s on President, a street so wide and so full compared to home you felt like it housed every single transplant to America. It was a street that everyone who had no place to go went. From your shiny, gentrifying apartment complex you often look down at that street and at the dilapidated roof on your old walk-up building and wonder about the newly arrived seeing the moist cloud of their breaths hang in the winter air for the first time in their lives.
Sitting on the examining table, looking at the back of Clooney’s head as he types in an order for your toe x-ray, you hear your mother’s voice from that day on the fourth step telling you what you should have told yourself about your toe this morning: nuh bodda wit di cow bawlin, find a socks and soak it in rum, put on the kettle for some soursop leaf tea, and guh read yuh book.
Leesa Fenderson
Leesa Fenderson is polishing a collection of short stories. Her work appears in Fractured Lit, Joyland Magazine, Story Magazine, CRAFT Literary Magazine, Callaloo Journal, Vibe Magazine, Moko Magazine, Paper Darts Magazine, and elsewhere.