Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  Jack was up from the table and halfway out of the room. “We can go to the mall. Let’s say in to Mom first, that’ll give you girls about forty-five minutes so you better work fast. Joel, what are you waiting for?”

  “She’s upstairs, sewing. In your room,” I called after them. I heard the two sets of feet thundering up the stairs. I didn’t think my mother would be too surprised to see them. The whole atmosphere of the house changed when they were in it, as if all the air in all three stories had received an electric charge.

  “Boy do they have energy,” I said unnecessarily.

  “Yeah. How’d you manage to keep your own personality, with them around?”

  I couldn’t answer, partly because it was such a new way of thinking about my brothers that surprise had me quiet.

  “Makes me glad I’m the oldest.”

  “Do you think that’s why? Because they’re the oldest, not because they’re boys?”

  “That too,” she said, “and because there are two of them, I bet. Are they like you?”

  “What do you mean, do you mean, are they nice?”

  “Don’t pick on me, Izzy, you know what I mean. Are they good people, that’s what I mean. Although, none of you seem to have a realistic sense of money—those games cost thirty dollars, or thirty-five.”

  That wasn’t much money, I thought, then I thought that it clearly was to Rosamunde, and I wanted to drop the subject. “If you want to know what they’re like, stick around for the afternoon.” I thought of telling her that it looked like Jack was flirting with her. Then I thought that wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do to Rosamunde, because I knew Jack was a big flirt. He used to love it when Suzy and Lisa and Lauren came over, and he’d sweep through the room impressing them. I guessed Rosamunde wasn’t used to having people flirt with her and I didn’t want to make her self-conscious. It was hard to behave normally with someone you thought might notice you, especially if it was someone older, in college, and I didn’t think Rosamunde would have a good time if she couldn’t act normal. Even though her normal wasn’t what everybody else’s normal was.

  When we sat down around the table, the new game spread out while Joel read the directions, my mother left to get a dinner. “What a pleasure,” she said. “What a treat to have you here for dinner.”

  “She didn’t feel that way last year at this time, did she?” Jack asked Joel.

  “Last year, it was all complaints about how much we ate.”

  “Now she appreciates us,” Jack said.

  My mother laughed. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” she reminded them.

  “Fonder enough for lobster?” Jack asked. “A good mother wants to give her children everything.”

  “A good mother knows how to moderate her sentiments,” my mother said.

  Rosamunde said we should play in teams, so Jack claimed me for the stupids. “Wait,” Rosamunde said. “I know, we’ll play boys against the girls.”

  “That’s not fair,” Joel said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, we’re older, and—”

  “Uh-oh,” Rosamunde said. “Izzy, do you hear what he’s implying?”

  “Yes, and he’s probably right.”

  “I don’t believe that and you shouldn’t either. Don’t you have any faith in me? Besides, where’s Francie? How can you have a family game without Francie?”

  She was right, and we all three knew it. Joel went off to haul Francie in. We decided to play girls against the boys, simply because nobody could give Rosamunde a good enough reason not to. Francie wanted to play with the pink piece. “We’re the girls,” she said, “so we’ll be pink.”

  “And you take blue.” I tossed the blue piece at Jack.

  “I want green, don’t you, Jo?” But Joel didn’t care.

  “Blue, you’ve got to be blue,” Francie insisted. Rosamunde and I just laughed. I sat between Francie—who kept nudging into me in her excitement to move our piece around the board—and Rosamunde. It was a good game. Joel was the best on their side, but Jack knew surprisingly accurate details about sports and science. Rosamunde would read the questions and nag them about what high school course they should know this from. Rosamunde was by far the best on our team, although Francie had a surprising knowledge of entertainment, when it came to rock stars and TV programs. I even had a moment of glory, brief, but important since it got us the brown Art-and-Literature triangle for our piece. Jack looked at my question and smirked at Joel. “This one’s for Izzy, my soul mate, who hasn’t read a book outside of school for years. Izzy? What’s the name of David Copperfield’s first wife?”

  I said it quietly and confidently: “Dora.” Then I broke up laughing at his expression. “Come on, give us the piece, you know that’s right.”

  “Dora what? The rules say it’s got to be what’s written down.”

  For a minute I thought he had me, then I realized: “Dora Copperfield.”

  Joel drummed on the table, pleased. “She’s got it, Jack.”

  “Spenlow,” Rosamunde offered. “Dora Spenlow—if they asked for her maiden name.”

  Joel looked over Jack’s shoulder at the answer. “It’s just Dora, you creep.”

  Jack sputtered, grumped, and muttered, “Girls.” Francie crowed aloud that we were going to win.

  We didn’t win, but we came close, and the only reason we didn’t was because we had bad luck with the die, trying to get into the middle before the boys did.

  My mother took Rosamunde home, late in the afternoon, even though the twins offered to do it. As soon as we were just ourselves together, the family started giving its opinions. “She’s sure different from the rest of your crowd,” Jack said.

  “I like her,” Francie announced. That surprised me. We were picking up the game. Francie gathered up the little triangles to put back into the plastic sack. “I do. She looks at me as if I am really there, not like I was some—bug.”

  “She’s not good-looking like the rest,” Jack said, “but then, she’s not dumb either.”

  “Suzy’s not dumb,” I said.

  “C’mon, Izzy,” Joel said. “There”s a lot more to being smart than having the right answers in school.”

  “Although, I kind of like her nose,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, I approve of her too,” Joel said to Francie.

  “Now that you’ve settled my life,” I groused.

  At dinner, my mother finally said, “What a strange child. Her father’s a policeman.”

  “I told you that. What difference does it make?”

  “A city policeman.”

  “The dregs.” Jack defined it.

  “But because of the school system,” my mother went on. “Hendrik, would you do that? Would you take a job that was—well, you know, nowhere near your first choice of the jobs you were offered, one you probably wouldn’t like—so your children could go to good schools?”

  “I never had to face that decision,” my father pointed out. “And I’m glad I didn’t.” We were all chewing on barbecued spareribs, one of our great favorites.

  “My question is, what does she see in Izzy?” Jack said.

  “You’re kidding,” my mother said to him. “I wonder what you see in her,” she said to me.

  “Jack means because she is pretty high-powered, intellectually,” Joel said. “But Jack always underestimates Izzy”s brains. We all do, because she’s so easygoing—even you do, Sis,” he told me. “But Jack’s just… working to his own convenience when he does that.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jack said, his temper rising. “You just idealize people, Jo; you’re not realistic at all. Right, Izzy?” He grinned at me.

  He expected me to go along with him, as always. I didn’t want to, although I didn’t want to disagree either, because I had no idea. So I bit my thumb at him.

  Nobody else said anything either. They all thought they had figured me out. I wondered what my father, quiet at the head of the table, was thinking. I was willing to bet he was think
ing along the lines I was, that nobody should be so sure of what I was like, not anymore.

  15

  The next morning it stormed rain, and the wind blew around the house. My mother said she was glad after all that the twins had driven back to school after dinner, although she had tried to convince them to stay over. After breakfast, I went to my room to do the Latin exercises and try some translation. As I worked, I heard the rain sluicing down and spattering against the windows. The wind hummed fiercely around the house.

  When my mother interrupted, late in the morning, to tell me I had visitors, I thought it must be Lisa and Suzy, and I hoped they wouldn’t stay long. I had promised myself that when I finished a week’s assignments I could try to design the needlepoint. It wouldn’t hurt to try, I thought.

  “A boy and a girl,” my mother said. “I don’t know them," she said to me.

  When I rolled myself into the front hall, expecting—still trying to figure out who it might be, so not expecting anybody—and saw it was Tony Marcel, with Deborah beside him, standing in our hallway with rain dripping off his hair and his slicker … I wanted to turn around and wheel back into my room. And shut the door.

  But the wheelchair where I sat, looking up at them, was too clumsy. I would have had to back it around and everything, like a remote control car, and that would have been even worse. So I said hello and introduced them to my mother and couldn’t think of anything to say when she left us.

  I had forgotten how slender Tony’s neck was, how long his legs were, what a good straight nose he had. I had never noticed the green in his light brown eyes before, or the way one of his eyeteeth just overlapped the front incisor. My mother had said we’d want to sit in the living room but I would have died if I’d had to roll the wheelchair down the ramp. “Let’s use the den,” I said. “It’s warmer. On a day like today.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “That’s some storm, isn’t it?” Deborah asked. She sounded pleased by the storm, as if it were a personal pleasure to her.

  I agreed and led the way down the hall, into the den. I would have rather gone behind them, but they didn’t know the way. At least, I didn’t have to look at them watching me. I didn’t know how I was going to get through whatever conversation we were going to have.

  They sat on the sofa, facing the blank TV screen. The Sunday paper was piled on the coffee table and the curtains were drawn closed, against the weather. I sat, or rather, I parked my wheelchair near the doorway, where there was plenty of room. I made sure the blanket was spread out all over my lap and legs.

  “They say the winds may gust up to seventy,” Deborah said. “That makes it almost a gale.”

  “Oh dear,” I said, since it was clearly time for me to say something. As soon as I said that, I felt really stupid. “How are you?” I asked them, which was equally stupid.

  “We’re fine,” Tony said. He was sitting forward, not relaxed. He was wearing a light gray sweater and jeans. “You look—”

  He couldn’t finish that sentence and I felt a kind of bitter pleasure. At least, he wasn’t a liar.

  “Izzy,” Deborah said, taking pity on Tony, “we have felt—terrible, really terrible. And we’ve come to apologize.”

  I didn’t much want to talk about this. “It’s okay,” I said, “it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Not precisely,” Deborah agreed, “but we know Marco better than you did.”

  I swallowed. I watched Tony swallow. But it wouldn’t do any good to have people feeling sorry for me, and guilty. I didn’t want to be the object of everybody’s pity. “I can see how you feel,” I told them, looking especially at Deborah. “And I think—well, I think it’s nice of you to come tell me that. No, I do. As long as you know I don’t think it’s your fault, at all, really. I mean—well, I was just unlucky, I was the unlucky one.”

  I said that, and I half meant it. In a way, I really believed it. In another way, for the other half, I wished—

  “You are something, Izzy,” Tony said then. “You know that? You are really something. I really—” He couldn’t finish that sentence either.

  “A better man than I,” Deborah said, smiling at me. I could feel in her smile that she had relaxed, after she had made her apology, and that she was beginning to think I might be interesting, an interesting person, and that she approved of me. I liked her thinking that about me; I liked being a person of whom Deborah thought well.

  “We wondered, when you come back to school—we’d like …” Tony’s words stumbled around; he looked from the hands spread out on his knees to me, and then back to his hands again. “Can you believe how badly I’m saying this?” he asked Deborah.

  “I can believe it,” she told him.

  “We’d like you to try working on the paper,” Tony said. “I don’t know what you’d like, or be good at, writing, or the business end, or editing or what, but we all—everyone on the staff—want you to try. What do you say?”

  Talk about not knowing what to think.

  On the one hand, being on the paper was … Well, it was a select crowd of people, about the best people in the school, who were on the paper, the ones who were smart but not weird, the most interesting people. On the other hand, I couldn’t think of anything I could do on the paper, except be pretty bad at what-ever job they gave me. It wasn’t as if I was talented or anything. So I’d probably flub it and be an embarrassment. I knew, as well, that if—if this hadn’t happened, they would never have considered me. I would still be one of the cheerleaders, which I couldn’t do now, but because I couldn’t do that now they were asking me. Besides, I didn’t know anybody on the paper.

  “I can’t,” I said, looking now at my own hands. I didn’t want them feeling sorry for me, I didn’t want people coming around out of pity because I couldn’t be a cheerleader anymore. I didn’t need to go out and not be able to do something else, while everybody around me let me go on trying because they felt sorry for me.

  “Why not?” Tony asked. He sounded offended, as if he really cared about having me on his paper. I guessed he felt as if he had offered me a great treasure, and I had just turned it down, which hurt his feelings.

  “Because,” I said. “Because—well, because you feel guilty and that’s why. Why you’ve asked.”

  Tony got up from the sofa and sort of paced around the small room. The room didn’t give him much room for pacing, because his legs were so long.

  “Okay, okay,” he said.

  “I”m sorry,“ I said, trying to let him know that I didn’t mean to insult him. I wished Deborah would say something. I was feeling uncomfortable, out of my depth in this conversation. It wasn’t as if we knew each other well enough to talk like this.

  “For God’s sake, Izzy,” Tony said. “Look, of course it’s because we feel guilty. I mean, who wouldn’t? I should have gone ahead and taken you home, I should have had the guts. And the brains too. And it’s because I feel sorry for you too, if you must have the truth.”

  I didn’t feel any need for the truth, frankly.

  “And I thought this would be easy,” Tony said to Deborah. “Once I nerved myself to do it. We underestimated you, Izzy.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “But I really want you to try it, and I think you ought to, for your own sake.” He stood in front of me, waiting for my answer. “If it makes any difference, I’d feel a hell of a lot better about myself if you’d agree to try it.”

  I tried to think, but I couldn’t. I felt sorry for Tony, because he was essentially a nice person, and he felt he should have prevented what happened to me. It wasn’t his fault, and he knew that, but he also knew that he was connected to what had happened, and he felt responsible to do something, whatever it was in his power to do. I liked that about him.

  “I don’t want you to feel badly about yourself,” I tried to tell him.

  “So you’ll say yes?” he asked me.

  Deborah laughed. “You’re rushing her, Tony. Give her a little time. Right, I
zzy?”

  I nodded my head, grateful to her. I felt like a little kid, but I didn’t mind that, just as long as I could get some time to really think about it.

  “But you will think seriously about it, won’t you?” Tony asked.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked him, looking up into his greenish eyes without even realizing what I was doing, just as if I wasn’t crippled. “You know what a—compliment it is? I mean, everybody wants to be on the paper.” Then I remembered and stopped looking into his face.

  “Good. Good. Then we’d better go, before I say something wrong again. Deborah came along to give me moral courage.” He laughed. “Now maybe I can concentrate on that history paper.”

  Deborah offered to wheel me back out to the door. I refused her offer, but had to let her turn me around and head me in the right direction, trying not to show anything of how that made me feel. I think she understood that, because she talked to Tony about the paper over my head as she worked the wheelchair around, but then—reather than obviously avoiding the subject—she remarked to me as I wheeled down the short hall, “That’s harder than I thought to move.”

  “Well,” I told her, “it’s not so bad on the level, especially if there’s no rug, and downhill is easy. It’s only going uphill that’s hard.”

  Tony had his slicker on and his hand on the door. “Isn’t that the truth,” he said to me. As if I had meant to say something profound.

  “See you, Izzy,” Deborah said, going back out into the rain. “Say yes, please, okay?” and she pulled the door closed behind them. I sat for a minute, absolutely still, not thinking about anything in particular. Thinking how sad everything was. Thinking that I could see why Tony was so wild about Deborah.

  16

  Everybody thought I was adjusting well. Dr. Epstein said so, when he came by after office hours on Monday, to look at my leg and admire the way it had healed, to look at my face. “You’re adjusting very well, Izzy,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.