Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  “I can imagine,” my mother said, sort of thoughtfully, her pink lips forming the words slowly. “But you’re going to have to get used to it.”

  “I know.”

  “But it makes me so angry, sometimes. The way people act. Like, a lot of people asked if we were going to sue the Griggerses for damages, because we could make a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, Rosamunde said that.”

  “If we could sue them and get your leg back … I’d be camping out in the courtroom.”

  I knew that was true. I’d already known it, and I could hear it again in her voice.

  “But there’s nothing we can do, except—cope with it as well as we can.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So, don’t you want to get your hair cut? I was thinking, maybe something short and feathery. That’s easy to take care of, and it might look terrific on you, because your face is much less round, you know.”

  I knew. What I didn’t know was why I should bother trying to look terrific. Nobody was going to think of me as a pretty girl again. But I didn’t want to tell my mother that, since she didn’t seem able to accept that idea, that my whole life had changed. If she thought I was going to have a normal social life now, well, I didn’t want to depress her.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, “give me a couple more days to get used to the idea.”

  “Next week then?” She was pleased.

  “Next week. I promise.”

  “And if anyone says or does anything, anything, to make you uncomfortable, I’ll dump permanent lotion all over her head,” my mother promised.

  “Well, that’s a relief to know.”

  She laughed. “Since we’ve got the afternoon free, do you want to stop at McDonald’s for lunch and then take a drive in the country?”

  She hadn’t understood at all what I’d been saying to her.

  “I mean, in the drive-through, Lamb.”

  “You know, I would like that. I feel like—I’ve been cooped up for ages.”

  “You have, silly, you have.”

  We ate in the car and my mother drove us out into the low hills, past working farms and posh estates. The trees had all turned to fall colors, so the entire landscape was like a quilt of colors, yellows and reds, mostly, and browns. I’d never noticed before the way the hills flowed, or the way the trees grown over them made the world look like a huge feather bed with the quilted colors laid over it.

  I’d never noticed also what I saw as the car crested a hill and a valley opened out before me: the way the sky overhead completed the picture. That day, the blue sky was crossed by heavy gray clouds, which charged up toward us. There were soft, smoky grays in the clouds, which turned whiter at the edges. In the distance, as if a charcoal painter had smudged in a darker line, curves of darker gray echoed the curves of the hills. I felt my eyes drinking it all in, or—more precisely—breathing it all in. Breathing was what it felt like.

  The gray in the sky made the colors of the leaves glow deeper. We rounded a curve and I saw one tree, standing in the middle of a little pasture, a golden tree. Of course, it wasn’t really gold, but it looked as if every leaf had been painted over with liquid gold, the way it shone. I watched that tree as we came up to it, with the gray clouds behind it; I kept my eyes on it as we drove away and left it behind. In my head, the miniature Izzy was just sitting there, knocked down by it, her eyes big with looking.

  14

  The next morning, Saturday, that tree was still in my head, glowing under gray clouds. “Sometimes I wish I could paint,” I told my mother.

  “It was weaving I wanted to do.”

  “Why didn’t you?“ I’d never even known she wanted to.

  “I took a class, when I was pregnant with you. But—some people have good hands, and I don’t. It was depressing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So was I.I would like to have been a craftswoman.”

  Suzy and Lisa arrived at midmorning. I was half-expecting them. They hadn’t called to say they were coming, but it seemed likely that they might, so I had washed and dressed and gone to the bathroom and all, just in case. Suzy and Lisa wore jeans and sweaters. Lisa’s sweater was a pale blue Fair Isle crew neck. Suzy wore the same letter sweater, which she draped over the back of the chair, forgetting that last week she had denied owning it. Or, perhaps, thinking that I would forget her denial, or that if I remembered I wouldn’t dare ask. Or hoping that I would.

  I didn’t ask.

  We had mugs of tea and English muffins. We talked about what was going on at school, the latest issue of the newspaper, what couples had formed or broken up, what new oddity any teachers had developed. We talked about the two boys Lisa had dates with that weekend, comparing them for looks and interest and likeability. After an hour, Suzy started looking at her watch and trying to catch Lisa’s eye, while Lisa ignored her. Lisa asked me if I had enjoyed studying with Rosamunde. “Sure,̶ I said.

  “Yeah, she was boasting all around about it,” Suzy said.

  “Boasting?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t,” Lisa said. “I don’t know why you have it in for her.”

  “Saying how she’d been here at your house, as if that was some great privilege. You know how she is, Izzy, sort of a leech. I mean, she is definitely not cool at all. She’s desperate to have friends and she hangs around the in-crowd—and there she was, yesterday, acting so big because she’d been over here, helping you with your homework, for God’s sake.”

  “I didn’t know you were having trouble,” Lisa said.

  “Acting superior,” Suzy muttered.

  Well, I thought, she certainly looks superior to you. The little Izzy inside my head clapped her hand over her mouth. Like Lisa, I ignored Suzy’s muttering.

  “With English.”

  “Did it help?” Lisa asked.

  “Yeah, she’s really smart. She’d make a good teacher.”

  “That’s about all she’ll make, with her looks.”

  “Do you like her?” Lisa asked.

  “She’s pretty funny.”

  “Who wants to talk about her anyway?” Suzy wondered. “Lisa, if we don’t get going we’ll be late. There was this boy, well, a college man actually, at the mall last week, when we were having lunch, and I told him we have lunch there every Saturday.” Suzy grinned at me. “He was pretty cute, wasn’t he, Lisa?”

  “He was. Kind of like Robert Redford.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “But I still don”t think he was in college,” Lisa told me.

  “He wasn’t dressed like a high school kid,” Suzy said.

  I had the feeling they’d had this argument before, all week long.

  “I thought he was one of the boys from Saints,” Lisa told me. Saints is a local boarding school. “Suzy believed him.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? Can you imagine how my sister will feel if I get invited for a college weekend? She’d die. She’d be so jealous, she’d turn green. He looked as old as the twins, didn’t he?”

  “What college did he say he went to?” I asked.

  “He didn’t, not exactly. You could tell,” Suzy told me.

  “Would someone in college go to meet girls at a mall?” I asked.

  Suzy stared at me for a long time. “You’re just jealous,” she said, finally.

  “No, I’m not,” I told her, “I’m just trying to be logical.” But I thought to myself, Of course I am, you jerk, what do you expect?

  “Anyway, Lisa, you said you’d go back with me.”

  I didn’t pay any attention, because I was realizing that Suzy had just said to me what you said when you wanted someone to go away, get out. I was realizing, watching them get up and put on their down vests, that of my three best friends, only one of them seemed to want to continue our friendship.

  “Lisa,” I said, “you know, I went for a drive yesterday—for about the first time—”

  “Sounds like a good idea, getting out of the house,” L
isa agreed.

  “And I saw—”

  “Are you coming or not?” Suzy demanded. “I don’t much care, except you said you would, but if you’re going to we had better get going.”

  Lisa shrugged, following her out the door, saying she’d talk to me later or something. I thought that Lisa wouldn’t have minded staying.

  Rosamunde arrived on the dot of one, which was when she’d said she’d be there. I had finished my day’s allotment of algebra problems and the biology reading, and she suggested that we work on Latin. We spread the books out, but Francie came in and sat down with us, asking Rosamunde questions that had nothing to do with anything. I sort of sat back, waiting for Francie to tell Rosamunde all about her great gymnastics achievements. Once Francie had made her point about how great she was, she’d go back and watch TV or something. “Do you do gymnastics?” Francie asked, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

  “Listen, kid,” Rosamunde said. “Your sister and I have work to do. Why don’t you beat it?”

  “I do,” Francie went on. “I’m on a team and we have meets and—”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Rosamunde interrupted. She got up and took Francie’s arm. She marched Francie to the open doorway. “Later, maybe. But now you have to scoot. We’ve got stuff to do.”

  “I’m going to tell, Izzy. It’s everybody’s kitchen, not just yours.”

  “You do that,” Rosamunde answered. “Go ahead. Just don’t come back.”

  Francie’s lower lip stuck out, but she left. She didn’t go upstairs to where my mother’s sewing machine was purring. Instead, I heard the distant TV go on. “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a herd of little brothers and sisters,” Rosamunde explained. She sat down again, hunched over the Latin textbook and her open notebook. As she started explaining about the subjunctive, I heard her digestive tract rumble. I tried to concentrate on what she was telling me, but I kept being distracted. I wondered if she was sick, or something. She didn’t look sick. She looked like always, sort of lumpy and badly dressed and not pretty.

  “Are you sick or something?” I finally asked.

  She shook her head, concentrating on what she was trying to explain about let us verbs.

  “Hungry?” I guessed.

  She shook her head.

  Her stomach rumbled.

  “You are too,” I said. “Did you have lunch?”

  Rosamunde shook her head, getting impatient with me.

  “Do you want something to eat?“

  “I wasn’t invited for lunch, it’s okay. Are we going to—”

  “I can’t concentrate when your stomach sounds like that,” I told her. “Why don’t you get yourself something to eat?”

  “It’s not my house,” Rosamunde said. “It’s your house. If you want to get me something, I’d like that. But I can’t just barge around and take things out.”

  She made me cross, although I don’t know why exactly. We’d had hot dogs for lunch, with plenty of extras because my father likes hot dogs for lunch on weekends, so I made her hot dogs. It took me a long, awkward time, rolling around in the wheelchair, to get everything out of the refrigerator, to take out the frying pan from the low cupboard and put it on the stove and drop a pat of butter into it. I hauled myself up with one hand to reach down a glass for milk. “You could help,” I complained.

  “It’s good for you,” Rosamunde’s low voice answered me. I didn’t turn around. “It’s important for you to feel self-sufficient.”

  “What are you, a psychiatrist?”

  “Are you angry at me? I didn’t mean to make you angry, do you really want me to do something?”

  “Well,” I said, “if I wasn’t—in this thing—you’d be helping, wouldn’t you?” Until I’d said it, I didn’t know I was thinking it. But once I’d heard myself say it, I knew it was true. “So why don’t you watch the hot dogs, because I can’t. Unless you like them burned.”

  “I’m sorry.” Rosamunde got up and stood by the sputtering pan.

  “Stop apologizing, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. Her face looked curiously without expression, especially her eyes, which were watching the two hot dogs lying in butter as if the fate of the whole world depended on turning them at the right time.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I guess I’m not doing enough for myself. Do you know that yesterday it was the first time I’d been out of the house? Except to go to the hospital for therapy.”

  “But you’ve been home over a week.”

  “I guess I didn’t want to.”

  “What did you do yesterday?”

  “We just went for a drive. It wasn’t any great achievement. But I saw this tree—it made me wish I could paint. It was gold, like the metal gold, you know? Like liquid gold, the way it shone.”

  “Does liquid gold shine?” she asked.

  “Who knows? If it does, this is what it would look like. And it was so—beautiful. Under a gray sky and the grass all around it sort of deep green, the way grass gets when the sky is gray.”

  Rosamunde turned the hot dogs. I buttered the sides of the rolls and gave them to her to grill in the pan. Then I went to pour out milk, a little embarrassed about what I’d just said, about beauty, especially since she didn’t have anything to say in response.

  “I wonder,” Rosamunde said at last. “Have you made up your design for that canvas yet?”

  “What canvas?̶

  “I guess that answers my question.” She chuckled, turning around to see my face go red, because I had remembered what canvas, and who had given it to me. “That’s okay, I’ll never tell, she’ll never know. But you could try to make that into a needlepoint design, if you wanted to.”

  “I can’t draw.”

  “It has nothing to do with drawing. You just X in the squares on the graph paper. Then you pick out colors. Your mother could probably help.”

  “But needlepoint things aren’t like that, they don’t look like what I’m picturing.” Even while I protested, though, I wanted to try it.

  “Kits are different, but you know how I feel about them. I think you ought to try it.”

  “Maybe I will. But how could wool get the colors right?”

  “My mom’ll know about that, there must be something—like silk or something—that would look the way you want it to. Once you get the design done.”

  “I would like to try,” I said. Rosamunde put the hot dogs into the rolls and slathered them with mustard. She carried them to the table. I followed with the glass of milk, which I handed to her before I parked myself again. “Will you help?”

  “Of course not.” She swallowed. “It’s not good unless it’s your own design. Then it doesn’t matter how good it is, because it’s yours.”

  “It was beautiful,” I remembered.

  We got back to work, and she had me copying out conjugations because it was the best way to memorize, she said, when the back door flew open and the kitchen filled up with people and noise.

  The twins had come home.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Hey, Izzy, hey. Hey how are you, you look great.”

  “You look like a human being again, not some starving refugee. You look like yourself.”

  “Dad’s playing golf, right? Good, then he won’t get a chance to ask me about grades.”

  “What is this, Latin? I passed that course.”

  And, to Rosamunde, who was sitting silent, “Who are you?”

  I introduced her. “You’re that one,” Jack said. Rosamunde nodded, but didn’t seem to have anything to say. Then she laughed. “Yeah, I’m that one.”

  “What’ll we do, Izzy?” Joel asked. He had pulled down a box of cookies from the shelf and taken the milk out of the refrigerator. Jack was making himself a sandwich. “You want to go out for a pizza or anything? How about a game of Monopoly?”

  I didn’t want anything more than
just to be in the same room with them for a while. They were talking back and forth and laughing; they brought sunlight into the room and they filled it with words in their rough voices. They made me feel good. I sat back smiling at them, until they slowed down a little. They had come home, I knew, to see me. They hadn’t told anybody, I knew, because my mother had only defrosted one package of pork chops for supper. They had decided, even though it wasn’t long at all until Thanksgiving, that they wanted to see me right away.

  “What are you, a tutor or something?” Joel asked Rosamunde.

  Before she could answer, Jack said, “No, she’s the new friend, I told you about her. The one who yelled at me.”

  “I’m even more pleased to meet you,” Joel smiled.

  “I’m not so sure,” Jack said, grinning at Rosamunde. He looked good, I thought, leaning back with one arm draped over the chair, with the grin that suited him on his face. He knew he looked good too, and I knew perfectly well he was waiting for Rosamunde to giggle or blush or something, the way my friends did around my brothers.

  Rosamunde didn’t do any of that. Instead, she looked uncomfortable and asked me if she shouldn’t go, since we were through working. Jack looked surprised and Joel’s eyes smiled. But I could tell that Rosamunde really was uncomfortable and sort of embarrassed, feeling out of place and in the way. “You haven’t even looked at the conjugations I did,” I argued. “And you said there were three points about the subjunctive and we’ve only covered two. And besides, if we’re going to play Monopoly or something there’s no reason for you to go, is there?”

  “Or Clue,” Jack said. “I’m unbeatable at Clue.”

  “Are you?” Rosamunde asked, sort of measuring him with her eyes, as if she doubted that he was as good as he said. “What about Trivial Pursuit?”

  “We don’t have that one yet,” Joel said. “But we could get it. We should have it. Are you an expert? Your family plays every night?”

  “No,” Rosamunde said, “but we’ll probably get it for our parents for Christmas. It’s pretty expensive.’