Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  “It’s much better than mine.”

  I ignored that. “Thanks, kid,” I said. “And you too, Dad. It’s just what I wanted, better than I asked for. You were nice to call Dad, Francie.”

  She nodded her agreement with me. I took a careful look at her, wondering just what did go on in her mind, wondering how she couldn’t know that the way she was standing there so smug, expecting everybody to be thinking good thoughts about her, would make it hard for people to feel loving toward her. She really didn’t know much about people, I thought, looking at her gangly body, her long arms and legs, and then her long hair, almost ashy blond, her deep eyelids and her bony nose. I looked and looked at her, seeing her.

  “What are you staring at?” she finally said.

  “You. You really are going to be lovely, do you know that?” It was true, and I’d never known it before, however much I’d figured my mother was probably right about Francie’s looks.

  “I don’t care,” she muttered sulkily.

  “I don’t care if you care or not,” I snapped. “But I do like these pens.”

  “I knew if you told, they’d make me give you mine.”

  Little sisters, I thought. I wondered if a little brother would be any better.

  17

  On Saturday, after we had put in a couple of hours on schoolwork, I asked Rosamunde what the difference was between little sisters and little brothers. “ When push comes to shove, none,” she told me. “ Are you going to get rid of that wheelchair now? I hope so, it’s pretty depressing, sort of sitting there empty—like it was waiting. Is Francie acting up? She’s not like you, you know, and never will be, i f you ask me. Are you going to show me how you do on the crutches? I mean, I’ve been admiring the way you sit on a real chair, just like a real person,” and she smiled at me. When Rosamunde really smiled, her eyes lit up and her whole face lit up too.

  “Do you ever wear lipstick?” I asked her.

  “What goes on in your mind, Izzy?” she demanded, but still teasing me. “Whenever I think you’re coming along well, you start talking about lipstick, or something.”

  “You’re avoiding the question. I’d like to make up your face sometime. Well, I would, it would be interesting.”

  “It would be disappointing. Are you going to show me how you do on crutches? You’re the one who’s avoiding.”

  “No, I’m not. Why do you want to see that, anyway?”

  Rosamunde had piled all of our books on the table.

  “To see how mobile you’ll be. I’ve been thinking you ought to see i f all of your classes—how many classes do you have on the second and third floors?”

  “Just Math and Latin. Why?”

  “If they could be moved to the ground floor. Your mother should ask. When are you coming back?”

  “I haven’t thought about it. After Thanksgiving, I guess. Maybe.” I took the crutches she was holding out for me and went down the kitchen for her, turned around at the dining room doorway and came back. Turning was slow and awkward, but the rest was all right. I felt about thirty pounds lighter without the cast on my leg. It felt good to be wearing jeans again too.

  “Don’t you ever put on weight?” Rosamunde complained, sitting there and watching me.

  “I guess not.”

  “What about your wooden leg, when do you get that? What does that mean—that with a cane you’ll be all right?”

  “I don’t know. I only look just so far ahead.” I leaned on the crutches to talk with her. “All I know is next I start on a Nautilus machine, which even Adelia says is hard work, and her idea of hard work is—more than I can imagine. After that comes swimming.”

  “Swimming? What, to keep in shape?”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to think about how I would look in a bathing suit.

  Rosamunde changed the subject. “Let’s cook something, do you want to? Do you want to learn how to make piroshkis, or anything?”

  “What?”

  “Okay, how about a cake?”

  “There are some mixes in the cupboard to the right of the stove.”

  “Mixes? Mixes?” Rosamunde stood up in mock horror. “We’ll make it from scratch, once we see what supplies your mother has in.”

  Rosamunde was opening and shutting cupboard doors, nosing through our supplies. “We have to polish up your domestic skills, or else what will you have to offer a potential husband?” She turned around to look at me while she hit that subject, so I knew it was something she’d been thinking about. “I’ve been wondering about that, and I bet you’ve been worrying too. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I never know what boys think, and I don’t care much—”

  “You will,” I said, as i f she was a kid Francie’s age.

  “Probably. But not yet, thank heaven—although it could be a defensive mechanism, you know? I worry about that. Anyway, they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, so I could teach you how to bake things. Although,” she went on, rattling on, no longer looking at me, “I’ve observed that the way to a man’s heart is through his eyes, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” I stood watching her, embarrassed and amused.

  “I’d like it i f it was through his brain. I’d have a better chance. Good, your mother gets real butter, we’ll make a genoise, you can beat it sitting down. You need a stool in here, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “For you. You can lean against the counter, but you ought to get her to get a stool for you to sit on, since you’re going to take up cooking.”

  I started to laugh. Rosamunde hesitated for a minute before joining in. “Yeah, I do sort of take over and give orders, don’t I?”

  We made the cake, with me sitting at the table and following directions. While it baked, I went back to my room and brought out the design I had drawn. I’d made two careful copies, one in pencil on the graph paper, one with dots of color on another sheet of graph paper, to show what the colors would be. “What do you think?” I asked, leaning my crutches against the table and sitting down beside Rosamunde.

  “I don’t know how you’re going to carry your books, at school,” Rosamunde said. The two sheets of paper that I’d carried into the kitchen in my mouth had damp tooth marks on them.

  “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

  Rosamunde looked at my drawings. She didn’t say anything. I knew they weren’t any good, but I’d thought I rather liked them. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Well, what do you think?” I asked again. She was going to say they were pretty bad, and I guessed that wouldn’t upset me or anything.

  “Well …”

  I started to reach out for them. She put her hands on the papers.

  “Wait. I’m still looking at them. You won’t make my mother jealous, that’s for sure.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not at all what I would have done.”

  “Never mind, it’s just something I tried.” It made me a little angry, even though I knew a lot of the anger was disappointment. I wanted the design to be good.

  “It might work up all right. I can never see these things until they’re finished. I have no imagination. My mother gave up on me long ago,” Rosamunde said, studying and studying the two sheets of paper.

  I didn’t say anything, just kept my hand on them and, when she removed hers, pulled them in front of me.

  “Hey, Izzy, you’re not offended, are you? I mean, you said you didn’t have any talent. You didn’t expect them to be wonderful, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t expect—”

  “That would be too much to expect,” Rosamunde went on. “I mean, you lose your leg and now at last you can be a brilliant artist. Life doesn’t work like that.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You’ve got a good sense of design, though.”

  “I do?”

  “Sure. You must know that. And you’ve got good taste, which means good color sense
—like your mother. So, I think this will work up. Can I take it to my mother and ask her about wools? If you had something with a kind of sheen to it, like floss or something, for some of these leaves—”

  “She’ll laugh at it.”

  “Well, i f she does, you won’t be around to hear it.”

  I liked the way Rosamunde thought about things.

  “Rosamunde,” I asked her, letting her keep the two pages of drawings. “What did you mean, good people?”

  “Hunh?”

  “When you were asking about the twins, remember?”

  “Oh. I remember. I meant, good people. You know.”

  “Do you think I’m good people?”

  “Make that singular,” she told me. “But yes, I do. I mean, I always did. I mean, I always thought of you as kind of what people like you should be like. Best of breed,” she explained.

  I giggled. I couldn’t help it. “Like a dog show?” I’d never thought of myself, or my friends, like that, as a breed. “I think I’m flattered.”

  “Maybe that’s a stupid way of putting it, but it’s what I always thought. I always wanted to be friends with you, you know. But—well, you didn’t want to be friends with me.”

  “I know,” I said. This was an apology I owed her. “That was pretty stupid of me.”

  “Agreed.” Rosamunde smiled again. “So, while we’re on the topic, what do you think of me?”

  “You?” I didn’t know what to say. “What do I think of you? Now? You mean, like, good people or what?” I was trying to figure out what to say. “I never thought much about it,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. “I mean, I like you,” I said. But I knew that wasn’t what she was asking. So I took a breath and told her the truth. “Weird,” I said. “You are definitely weird, but good weird. You’re a good person to be around, you know? You sort of make me think about things and get me doing things. I was pretty stupid, I think, about people, before—”

  “Well, experience broadens us—or what’s the good of it, right? You know, I figured we’d get to be friends, eventually. Maybe.”

  “You know what my mother thinks? She thinks you ought to have your hair cut short.”

  Rosamunde pushed her chair away from the table. I felt her anger. I had never felt her anger before, and it was a little frightening. I wondered if I ought to apologize, but I didn’t see why she should be so angry at me. What was wrong with suggesting a new hairstyle?

  “Your mother thinks—I get pretty sick of mothers. I get pretty tired of not being left alone to be who I really am. As if that weren’t good enough,” Rosamunde said. She was pretending to study the way the cakes were rising in the oven, the three layers in their round pans. She punched the button that turned on the oven light, crouched down to peer in, then punched the light off. “As if all we were going to do is live exactly their lives all over again. As i f we thought their lives were so perfect.”

  It was as i f I’d tapped into some deep well of emotion. The little Izzy in my head leaned over a stone wall, peering down and down. I’d had no idea about Rosamunde.

  But my mother had seen her sobbing by the elevators that first day, when she had been making jokes and acting super-practical all the time she was in my room. There was more to Rosamunde than I’d been admitting to myself. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the part I hadn’t admitted.

  I thought i f I apologized we’d get back out of deep water and onto safe ground again. Then I thought that i f we did that, I’d never really know her. If I wanted to really know her. But if I started to quarrel with her, even about the question of what my mother said about her hair, she might blow up—like Jack. Jack had that same deep well of emotions, hidden away.

  “You mean you won’t even think about it?” I asked Rosamunde. “But what’s the worst that could happen if you tried a new haircut?”

  “I could look like a real jerk,” she told me, turning around and leaning back against the stove. “Me“—she waved her hands in front of herself, sort of pointing at her overalls—“with a cute little haircut?”

  The nice thing to do would be to reassure her that she would look great, I thought to myself. Then I realized that that wouldn’t be very nice, since she might look just the way she was afraid she would. “I see what you mean,” I said. “But I do wonder, you know. It might look sort of—really stylish.”

  “Or really jerky.”

  “Next time you—re at the mall, you ought to try on a wig, a short—haired wig, but curly, so it would be something like what it would look like. Just try it on and see what you think.”

  Rosamunde burst out laughing. “You are so—feminine, do you know that? It’s terrific. I’d never think of that—and I’d never dare do it. Unless you come with me, because I’d trust your word about how it looked. Would you do that?—She was tempted.

  —I can’t go to the mall.—

  “Why not?—

  I didn’t answer the truth: Because I don’t want to go out and be stared at.

  My mother liked the cake a lot, but she was a little concerned about Rosamunde. “I’m grateful to her, don’t mistake me,” she told me that evening in her I’m-about-to-give-you-awarning-for-your-own-good voice. “But—she’s not really your kind of friend, is she? She’s so different, in everything, her attitudes, her background, her values. You’re seeing an awful lot of her, Izzy, Lamb.”

  A year ago I would have told her not to pick my friends for me, and then stomped out of the room. But it’s impossible to stomp with crutches, anyway. “I like her,” I said.

  “So do I, sort of. And I’m grateful to her, because your other friends—”

  “No, they haven’t, have they?”

  “But Lisa has always struck me as such a nice girl. I guess I’d hate to see you drop your friendship with Lisa, while you’re going through this period of adjustment. That’s all.”

  I wanted to tell her that I didn’t think it was a period of adjustment, but a change. A big change. But didn’t want to upset her. It must have been hard enough on her, acting calm and collected and grown up because that was what I needed her to be. I knew sort of what she wanted for me, in my life, what she thought was important. I agreed with her too; I wanted the same things for me. But I didn’t think I could get them, not anymore; certainly not in the old easy way. And I wondered too, if there weren’t other things I might want, not instead of, but along with what the old Izzy would have wanted. I couldn’t tell my mother that, though, because she would think I thought what she valued wasn’t important, and that wasn’t true. “I don’t plan to lose touch with Lisa.”

  “And she’s a dinger, I’m afraid,” my mother went on, still talking about Rosamunde. “She’s the kind of person who clings to a friend. You’ve always had lots of friends, and she could cut you off. I feel terrible saying this,” she admitted. “I feel terrible thinking about it, because sometimes I feel like just—hugging Rosamunde, I feel so sorry for her and so grateful to her for … caring about you, all the time she spends. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” I told her, which was true. “I don’t mind, Mom. I like you to tell me what you think,” I told her, to reassure her, if she wanted that reassurance. I reached over and covered her hand with my own, but I didn’t tell her what I was thinking.

  I was thinking about how I thought there were other reasons than pity for Rosamunde to be my friend, a lot of other reasons. I wondered i f my mother thought pity was the only reason.

  I thought about what she’d said, though, alone in my room that night, with the radio playing softly in the darkness. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, feeling pretty bad. “I just called,” Stevie Wonder sang, “to say I love you.” I lay there listening, wishing miserably that someone would just call to say he loved me.

  Of all the stupid things.

  18

  Thanksgiving is an odd sort of holiday at our house. It’s supposed to be a big family thing, a Norman Rockwell occasion, and that’s how we all th
ink of it; but as it always works out, the family spends most of the long weekend doing separate things. Maybe that was why the glooms set in earlier that Wednesday than usual. I wasn’t ready for a holiday season.

  When the twins arrived on Wednesday afternoon, they made a lot of noise about how good it was to be home, but the first thing they did was start making phone calls, making plans. Francie was going to have supper and see a movie with her friend Alice. My parents had a couple of cocktail parties to go to. M y mother, who had driven up to get the twins, got right to work on the laundry they brought. The house was filled with people, and then suddenly empty. I ate the supper my mother had left for me, folded the laundry, and dried out slices of bread in the oven then ripped them up into chunks for stuffing. I had told my mother I would make stuffing for the turkey. Rosamunde had assured me that homemade was miles better than any bagged kind, and a lot cheaper too, although that wouldn’t, she said, make much difference to us. I ignored the crack about money and decided to try her recipe.

  I was glad, even thankful, to be on crutches. First thing Monday, my mother had returned both the walker and the wheelchair, so I knew she was as happy as I was to get rid of them. On crutches, I could move from room to room without feeling like too much of a cripple. I spent some of Wednesday in the kitchen and some in front of the TV with the needlepoint. Rosamunde had been as good as her word and had brought over, Monday evening, not only the short list of assignments for the week, but also a bag of wool. My mother reimbursed her, while Rosamunde explained carefully, showing my mother the sales slip, that she had gotten too much because she wasn’t sure just what shades I wanted, and that as long as a skein hadn’t been broken into it could be returned for cash. While I worked the needlepoint, I had the TV on, but I only had it on for the company the noise made.

  I had my fingers busy, making neat stitches, and my ears busy, and I kept an eye on the clock because Francie was due back by nine-thirty. I kept my mind occupied with an inner argument about whether it wouldn’t be smarter to wait until after Christmas to go back to school. I was doing all right on the assignments, had been getting Bs on the graded work. So I wasn’t falling behind in school, and I wasn’t sure I had my strength up enough to get through a school day. Adelia had started me on the big Nautilus machine, lifting and pulling with my arms and legs. I thought I should probably continue intensive physical therapy for a few more weeks. Once I started school, I’d only go two times a week.