Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  “Don’t tell me you like having someone just lean on the horn, just sit there and honk his horn for you.” She hacked away at tomatoes.

  I knew what she meant, and I agreed with her, but “He wasn’t honking for me” is what I said.

  13

  By the time I got into the kitchen Monday morning, everybody had left the house. My mother had set me out a bowl of cereal and a jug of milk. She had moved the toaster to the table, with bread beside it and the butter plate. She had poured me a glass of juice.

  I ate alone, the room bright with sunlight, the whole big house empty around me. After I’d finished, I tried to clean up after myself. I didn’t have anything else to do. Putting things back on the counter wasn’t too bad, it was just awkward. I got the milk back into the refrigerator without any trouble. But when I tried to rinse off my dishes—grabbing the sink to hoist myself up to turn the water on, the wheelchair braked under me so it wouldn’t roll away backward, holding the cereal bowl under the water but unable to stop water spraying all over, and then I had to get a paper towel and try to mop up all the wet places … .

  I’d never thought how little I’d be able to do, all the things I’d taken for granted before. I’d never thought about how much I would be handicapped, even with chores. I’d been planning to make my bed, but I didn’t even leave the kitchen. I sat there in the bright silence, alone in my wheelchair. Inside my head, the little Izzy was all folded up on the floor. She looked like a bad imitation of the dying swan, her leg-and-a-half stuck out and her head bowed down. I wished they hadn’t left me all alone in the house, and I wished there weren’t five whole days to get through before the weekend, when there would be people around again. It wasn’t that I wanted to be with people, particularly, not even my family. It was just that whenever I was alone my mind slipped down into grayness and I couldn’t stop it.

  There wasn’t, after all, anything else to think about. There wasn’t anything to look forward to, or anything. I used to do a lot of daydreaming, romantic stuff about the boys I liked, so I never used to mind being left alone. But romance was not in my future anymore.

  The little Izzy put her arms around over the back of her head.

  When it was time, my mother managed me into the car and then put the wheelchair in the back. We drove down to the hospital, where she unloaded me by the front door, then parked the car in a visitor’s slot. I wore a skirt and sweater, jacket and scarf; I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, then on the carpeting, then on the linoleum floor as we went up to the PT room. The same black nurse was waiting for me. “Good morning, Mrs. Jones,” I said to her. “Have you met my mother?”

  They shook hands, and my mother went off to get my assignments, while I got put onto the walking ramp. Up and down, I went up and down. Then my mother came back to pick me up. “Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” I said. Mrs. Jones didn’t answer.

  After my mother had unloaded me, she emptied the car. She had books and assignments, everything from my locker. She had a new needlepoint kit, color-coordinated with the one I’d finished. After lunch, I set myself up at the desk in my room to start catching up.

  Biology and Math were easy, and for World History I had to read the chapters and write answers to the questions. But the English—I couldn’t understand Shakespeare’s words, and the Romeo and Juliet paraphrase assignments were nothing I’d done before. So I wrote out a plot summary that took me three pages, front and back. Latin was translation and memorizing vocabulary and the subjunctive. I made vocabulary cards.

  I worked about half an hour on each course and made a good start at everything. The assignments were all typed out by the principal’s secretary. Each class had its own typed sheet, so it was easy to keep track. My mother had the tests to give me when I thought I was ready.

  That afternoon and evening, I tried to call Suzy, but she wasn’t home. I left a message with Ms. Wilkes that I had some questions about homework.

  Tuesday was about the same, and I was really out of patience with Suzy by the time I went to bed that night. I was embarrassed to call her house anymore, like I was begging her to call me up. I knew Lisa couldn’t help me with the homework and I wasn’t calling up to try to get Suzy to talk to me. I had a reason for calling. All Wednesday afternoon I waited, but Suzy never called back. My mother asked if I’d like her to try to help, but I already was taking up so much of her time, I felt guilty enough without having her spend hours on my homework. Besides, I was doing all right with three of the courses, so it wasn’t desperate.

  It was just that I didn’t understand why Suzy couldn’t at least call me back to say she didn’t have time to help. Only I did understand, because Suzy wouldn’t want to say that, and she wouldn’t want to say, yes, she would help; so she would just pretend she didn’t have any calls to make. When Ms. Wilkes reminded her, she’d probably lie. Once she had lied, she couldn’t possibly pick up the phone and call me.

  I was tired of Suzy and her problems and her lies and her friendship that wasn’t worth having. I quit, I said to myself. I knew she had troubles of her own, but I was sick of being nice about it. I thought, Wednesday night, that I’d better call Lisa, even though I knew how hard it would be for her to try to explain to me what she had to work so hard to understand herself. Then I thought of Rosamunde.

  But I didn’t want to call Rosamunde. It was like, if I did that, I would be asking her to be my friend, and she wasn’t the kind of person who I had for friends. She was different from the people I had for friends, different from me too. Except I knew I liked talking to her. She had a lot to say. And I knew that when she came to see me I had a better time than when my friends came to see me.

  I didn’t understand my reluctance to call her. I guessed, because I’d never had to ask anyone like Rosamunde for any kind of help before. But I still wasn’t sure I was ready to take that step.

  You can’t take any steps, I reminded myself. Rather than think about that, I rolled myself down the hallway into the kitchen and pulled out the phone book, to see if I could find her number. I didn’t even know where she lived, or anything; I didn’t even know her father’s name. I flipped the pages of the directory, looking for Webber, reminding myself that she had offered to help, if I wanted her to. Reminding myself that Rosamunde seemed to mean what she said.

  There were only two possibilities, and one of them was a luxury condominium complex, so I decided to start with the other. “Is this the home of Rosamunde Webber?” I’d ask. I moved the wheelchair over to the wall phone, the directory open on my lap.

  Then I just sat, looking up at the phone. I could sort of jump up to get it off the hook, but I didn’t know how I’d be able to dial the number. I started to memorize the number, thinking that I could hang on to the phone—and hope my weight didn’t pull it off the wall—while I dialed. If I had the number memorized. I didn’t want to ask someone to dial the phone for me; I didn’t want to be that helpless; I didn’t want to need their help for such a small thing.

  Frankly, it was pretty depressing, sitting there, thinking all of that, feeling angry and helpless and confused, and I couldn’t keep the numbers straight, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to make the phone call. After all, they wouldn’t flunk me or anything. People didn’t do that to cripples. Mr. DePonte wouldn’t do that, would he? And I didn’t want to go back to school anyway, did I? And have everyone staring at me.

  I tried to concentrate on the number. Francie was in the den with the TV on, so I couldn’t use that phone without driving her out and hearing what she had to say about that. It wasn’t hard to memorize a phone number. I didn’t know why I was having so much trouble doing a simple thing I’d done dozens of times before.

  When the phone rang over my head, I leaped up and grabbed it, then fell back into the chair which was moving away behind me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Izzy? What’s the matter? You sound out of breath.”

  “Rosamunde?” I didn’t have to ask, though; nobody else had a voice l
ike hers. “I was just going to call you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, kind of slowly. “It doesn’t matter to me.

  “No, I was, but I don’t know where you live, and then—we have a wall phone, so I was trying to memorize the number????”

  “I said it’s okay.”

  “But it’s true. I don’t tell lies.”

  I could hear her breathing and thinking. “No, you don’t, do you? What did you want?”

  “Help. With English and Latin. Could you, do you think?”

  “Hey, I’d be glad to.” The voice did sound glad. It sounded like she was smiling. “But it’ll have to be after supper, and my dad’s on night shift. Could one of your parents drive? The weekend is easier. I’ve only got a Sunday babysitting job this weekend. How desperate are you?”

  “Pretty desperate, if you count not understanding anything I’m supposed to be doing—except the paraphrases, I’ve almost finished the first act, but I can’t believe she really wants us to do all that work. But I don’t understand what they’re saying.”

  “Look, see if someone can do the driving tomorrow night. You’ll feel better if we take a look at it, won’t you?”

  “Yeah, I would. I’ll call you back, once I ask and all. What is your number?”

  She told me. My guess had been correct. “That was the one I was going to try,” I told her. “Because I figured you didn’t live in a condo.”

  “Why do you sound surprised? You’re not stupid, you know.”

  “Ha,” I said. Then I remembered. “What were you calling about?”

  “I just thought I’d read something to you I thought you’d like.”

  “Okay. Read it.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it sounds pretty silly, now that I think about it. I just thought you might be interested.”

  I waited.

  “But now that I look at it, I don’t really think—”

  “Just read it.”

  “Well, maybe … Do you remember Dora?”

  I thought. Dora? Dora who? I didn’t know any Doras—then I did remember that Dr. Epstein said I looked like Dora in a book. “The one who died,” I remembered.

  “This is before, it’s when she first meets David Copperfield, or when he first meets her. Listen: ’I don’t remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off Dora entirely, and sent away half a dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather diminutive altogether.’ I told you it was a stupid idea,“ Rosamunde’s voice said quickly in its normal tone.

  “No, it’s good. It was funny. You read well, don’t you. Did that remind you of me?”

  “Not exactly, I just always liked that scene. You reminded me of Dora later. When she’s dying. She’s sort of a twit, but essentially a really nice person.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “You know what I mean,” Rosamunde protested.

  “No, I don’t, not exactly. But I liked that, I liked the way it sounded. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a famous writer before. I mean, other than Judy Blume.”

  “There’s famous and famous,” Rosamunde said.

  “Look, I’m going to find my mother, and I’ll call you back. Are you sure you’ve got time tomorrow?”

  Rosamunde was sure.

  My mother wasn’t so sure. “I didn’t know you two were friends,” she said; but she was willing to do the driving, she said; it would be no trouble.

  Once Rosamunde got to work with me, sitting in the kitchen again because there wasn’t room for the two of us at the desk in my room, I was the one who wasn’t sure. The first thing she told me was that I’d wasted my time writing endless summaries of Romeo and Juliet. “Your summary’s supposed to be one paragraph per scene, and then you paraphrase only the lines she’s indicated,” Rosamunde told me, skimming over the pages and pages of painstaking writing in which I’d tried to disguise the fact that I didn’t know what was going on most of the time. She looked at the typed page of assignments and shook her head: “You’d think an English teacher would be able to write clear directions. I can see what happened.”

  I didn’t care about that. “Do I have to do it all over?”

  “It’ll be easier this time.”

  “Ha.”

  “Do it aloud. Tell me what happens in the first scene.”

  “There’s a fight.”

  “Between who?”

  “I don’t know, all these people, I don’t know what’s the matter with them. Then the Duke comes in and stops it. That doesn’t have anything to do with Romeo or Juliet, so I sort of skipped it.”

  “Wait, wait. Izzy, think. This is Shakespeare. He’s got a terrific rep, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, he’s had it for years, so it’s probably deserved, so you have to assume he knows what he’s doing. The first scenes in Shakespeare tell you what the themes of the play are.”

  “But Romeo and Juliet aren’t even in it.”

  “Think, Izzy. What does that make you wonder about?”

  “Why the scene is even in the play, since it’s just a fight scene—which is pretty funny too, since you don’t even know what they’re fighting about. They’re only servants, aren’t they? Why should they be fighting?”

  “Good question,” Rosamunde said.

  “Don’t be smug.” I didn’t much like feeling stupid. When I did homework with Suzy, she just told me the right answers. “Things must be pretty bad, if even the servants are fighting. But there isn’t anything they’re fighting for, is there? Except just to beat the other servants. It’s not as if they’ll win a war, or freedom, or somebody’s love, or anything. That’s terrible. I’d hate to live in Verona during those times; you’d never know what was going to happen when you went out the door in the morning, would you? No wonder the Duke is so angry at them. No wonder—Stop grinning at me like that. What are you smiling at?”

  “At you.”

  “You mean that’s right?”

  “Right, wrong, those don’t matter. See, Shakespeare sort of sets out this problem, and his characters deal with the problem.”

  “And he’s setting out the problem in the first scene.” I understood.

  “And you’re defining the problem,” Rosamunde agreed.

  Working with Rosamunde was a lot more time-consuming than working with Suzy, which was all right with me because I had a lot of time. It was also more fun, because she would drift off to talk about what something meant. Like, if you bit your thumb at someone in ancient Verona, what it was like today. “Giving someone the finger?” she asked me. “Do you think?”

  “Except doing that is—pretty bad. Is biting thumbs so coarse?”

  Rosamunde made her eyes into slits and glared at me. She lifted her thumb to her mouth and bit it. I bit my thumb back at her.

  “I think it’s more like thumbing your nose,” I said.

  All we did in the two hours was the first scene, but it was actually fun. We also drank cocoa my mother made and ate a bowl of popcorn Rosamunde said she didn’t need. “Thanks,” she said, putting on her PAL windbreaker while my mother—who had been drifting in and out—waited. “I had a good time.” Her face was kind of lit up from all the talking she had done.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “I’ve got a job tomorrow night too, but I could come over on Saturday. We didn’t even look at the Latin,” she reminded me.

  The next morning, maybe because I was still thinking about the stupidity of hating somebody because of the color of the livery they wore, I found myself thinking about Mrs. Jones again, and thinking about myself too, because I had what Rosamunde had called an external mark. I guess I was staring at Mrs. Jones while I thought about things. “What’re you starin
g at, Miss Lingard?” she finally asked me, her eyes black and hard.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones, really. I didn’t mean to be rude, I didn’t mean to stare. I was just thinking.”

  “Thinking what?” she demanded.

  “Oh,” I said. “I was thinking about Romeo and Juliet.” That was as close to the truth as I could get. I started to turn around and head back up the walkway, but the smile spreading across Mrs. Jones’s face stopped me. The smile moved as slowly as molasses. “Good Lord,” she said, “what you girls think about.”

  I didn’t try to explain. As I thanked her, at the end of the session, she said, “Lord, you’d better call me Adelia, since we’ve got months of work ahead of us.”

  I didn’t know what to answer. My mother wouldn’t approve. But my mother wasn’t there with us, doing the work. Someone you work with, it’s different. “If you’ll call me Izzy,” I answered. Adelia was, I thought, really a nice name.

  “I’ll see you Monday morning then, Izzy,” she said. She looked a little self-conscious saying that.

  “Okay. And thank you … Adelia.” I felt about ten times as self-conscious as she looked.

  My mother had been making noises for days about having my hair cut, and as we drove toward home she told me she had nothing to do that afternoon, why didn’t we go in and have it done.

  “I’m thinking of growing it long.” I stared at my hands in my lap.

  “Lamb. Izzy,” she said. Then she hesitated. “Izzy? I think I can guess how you feel, but—I hope, I really hope, you’ll be able to tell me the truth. Because if you can’t, then I can’t help. That wasn’t the truth, was it”

  “No. I guess I don’t feel ready to go out in public.”

  “Because people will stare,” she said.

  I looked at her profile as she drove the car. We were both belted in. Nobody in my family was careless about seat belts anymore. She looked so—well groomed and well dressed and pretty, my mother, and a little worried too. “Yes,” I admitted.