Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  “Shut up, I’ concentrating.”

  “Make way,” she called out. “Pregnant woman, make way, please. Please step aside, pregnant woman coming through,” she called out.

  “Rosamunde!” I protested, stopping on a step and looking back at her. I could have died, but I was laughing instead, as laughter rippled through the surrounding wave of students.

  It was Rosamunde I told about the odd thought I had, watching Lauren by her locker one day before homeroom. Lauren was standing, talking to a couple of boys. I saw the tall, stiff way she held her body, a model’s pose, and the blank expression on her face. Lauren wore too much makeup, I thought, watching her red mouth move as she said something. She stood as if she was already posing for a photographer. Her glance moved slowly around, seeing who was watching her. When she met my eyes, she gave me a photographic smile.

  It was terrible—it was as if she was enclosed in a glass cage, posing for the people who might be watching. The boys didn’t notice this, and I wondered who did. With all that Lauren had, I thought, leaning my weight against one crutch while I took books and papers out of my locker—why should she keep herself locked away behind glass like that?

  But what did she have? She had her looks. She had friends like me, who had never even looked at her carefully enough to see ho—separated she was. She had, I thought, as I kept on thinking about Lauren and remembering the years I had known her, a mother who had left her behind when she went out to start a new life, a father who insisted that she had to be a good student so he must not even have known that she wasn’t too smart. Why would her father do that? Maybe because he didn’t like her, not the way she was. Once I’d thought of that, I thought it might well be true. Nothing Lauren’s father had ever said to her that I’d heard, or that I’d heard about, had any affection in it. He set down his expectations and as long as Lauren met them he left her alone to do whatever else she wanted, as if he didn’t like her any more than he ended up liking her mother. Lauren didn’t even have a family of her own. Poor Lauren, I thought. No wonder she hid behind a glass shield.

  I went up to her then, meaning to say something—I didn’t know what. To make a new connection to her, to who she really was; because Lauren could really use a friend, I thought. When she saw me coming toward her she smiled her photographic smile and shut her locker. “Izzy, how are you?” she said. She moved away, too fast for me to speak.

  Lauren couldn’t even risk standing next to someone visibly crippled, as I said to Rosamunde. Rosamunde dismissed her as shallow. “What do you care what a person like that thinks?” she asked me.

  “I don’t,” I told her, which was true. Rosamunde was satisfied, but I wasn’t.

  The next chance I had to speak privately to Lisa, I tried to tell her. “Lauren won’t—can’t—talk to me anymore, but—No, look, that’s okay, I understand,” I cut Lisa off before she could interrupt me to reassure me that Lauren didn’t mean that at all. It was hard enough having a private conversation with Lisa, who always had people around. We didn’t have time for fake excuses, we didn’t have the time to waste. “I’m kind of worried about her. We always saw her as just goodlooking, Lisa, and I thought you might be able to let her know …see, I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think she’s happy at all.”

  Lisa looked seriously at me, and then agreed. “No, she isn’t. It’s that guy. I didn’t know she liked him all that much, but I guess she did. She’s really sad about not seeing him this year. I’ve been trying to think of someone else she might like, Izzy.”

  “No, I mean, if you think about her looks—”

  “Are you trying to say that Lauren’s not pretty anymore? Because that’s not true. She might even go for an interview with an agency.”

  I gave up and let the conversation come back to our usual channels. “Of course I still think—Lauren’s lovely, you know that. I hope she does get picked by a modeling agency.”

  “You know, Izzy,” Lisa said, her voice emotional, “I really admire you. Here this thing has happened, and you haven’t changed at all, you’re just as nice as before. I really admire you.”

  I was embarrassed in about three different ways. One of the ways was for Lisa, because she didn’t know anything about me, or about Lauren, or about people—and she honestly thought she did.

  Lisa and Suzy still acted like we were friends, whenever we happened to be in the same place, and we talked in about the same way. Lisa had no idea of how differently I felt about a lot of things, but she couldn’t. Suzy could have but she wanted to maintain the pretenses; she wasn’t interested in what was real. I didn’t mind; I didn’t mind when we met up together and I didn’t mind when we didn’t.

  I could say that to Rosamunde. I did say it to her, indirectly, a couple of days before Christmas vacation started. “I see what you mean about best of breed,” I told her.

  Rosamunde never said what I expected her to, and she didn’t this time either. “I never did think you had enough vanity,” she said.

  Rosamunde was around a lot at school. She was around when I was standing up or moving, not just when I was sitting down and looking like anybody else except for the crutches parked within reach. She was keeping an eye on me, I knew, although she didn’t want to seem to be keeping an eye on me.

  She was there when what I had been really dreading happened. The hallways at school are crowded and busy, everybody moving from class to class in the two-minute passing time, some people trying to fit in a quick smoke, or a quick kiss, or a quick conversation. People kind of move along without thinking of much more than what they have in mind. I was making my slow way along the hall to Latin one afternoon, tired as always at the end of a day, looking forward to newspaper, not thinking about much, when somebody cut past me from behind without cutting it quite wide enough. My crutch flew out and away and I lost my balance. I fell down onto the floor, on my face. For a long time it seemed a lot of people stood around, and brittle silence was in the air.

  I was too tired, I didn’t need this—humiliation, and I was sprawled there on the floor, flat on my face. I knew I was going to have to roll over and take the crutch someone would hand to me and heft the weight of the backpack as well as my own weight and get up. I knew what I looked like, helplessly sprawled there, with my jeans leg pinned up with a stupid diaper pin over the amputation. And I suddenly couldn’t do any more.

  Then Rosamunde was there, telling people to go away. “Hey, she’s fine, she’s just doing this for attention.” She crouched down near me.

  I raised my face and shifted awkwardly to a sitting position.

  “We’re not going to feel sorry for you,” Rosamunde said, looking me in the eye. She had her books in her arms and her hair in those two little-kid pony tails. Her eyes stared into mine.

  She had given me something to say. “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to try something more dramatic.” I smiled up around at the circle of staring faces, as if it was just a joke.

  Rosamunde didn’t even reach out a hand to help me.

  The faces looked a little puzzled, but more relaxed. I grinned at everyone, whoever they were.

  The bell rang, and they hurried away.

  Then Rosamunde did put down her books. We were alone in the deserted hallway, the classroom doors closed all along the corridor, the empty faces of the locker doors closed too. Rosamunde helped me up, waited until I had balanced myself on the crutch I held, then passed me the other. “Are you okay?”

  Inside my head, the little Izzy was still collapsed onto the floor in a miserable puddle. She was weeping away, and I was weeping away too, leaning on the crutches. “I want to go home,” I said. Wailed.

  Rosamunde took me down to the girls’ bathroom. She didn’t tell me to stop crying, she didn’t comfort me, she didn’t do anything but sit on a sink and wait. It didn’t take all that long.

  I washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked all right.

  “Ready?” Rosamunde asked, sliding down from the s
ink. The sink groaned a little and she looked at it. “Geez—I’m lucky I didn’t rip it out of the wall. Can you see trying to explain that to the principal? ‘Yes, Miss Webber, how did you happen to rip a sink out of the wall and flood the entire first floor of the building? I’m waiting to hear, Miss Webber.’ So, are you ready?”

  “We’re really late. You’re late.” As we went down the hall, me swinging along on my crutches at a good pace because I could move along pretty fast when the way was clear, I was steeling myself to say in front of the whole class that I had fallen down and Rosamunde had stayed to help me. It wasn’t that it was a bad excuse, or that I thought Mr. DePonte wouldn’t accept it, or would make a scene or anything. It was just so humiliating to be pitiful and helpless. The problem was that, although I could probably come into any class at any time I wanted without getting yelled at, Rosamunde couldn’t.

  He turned around from the board as we entered. There were about twenty kids in the room, all looking at us. I opened my mouth.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” Rosamunde said, “but—I had an emergency and Izzy helped me out.”

  Mr. DePonte made us stand there while he considered that, the piece of chalk in his hand. An “emergency,” as we used it, was a menstrual problem. Everybody knew that, and teachers never questioned it. Mr. DePonte looked from Rosamunde to me and back to Rosamunde again.

  “Is this true, Izzy?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said. I was about to explain what had really happened, but he said, “Rosamunde, sit down. Izzy, take your seat. We’ve been disturbed enough as it is.”

  He let everyone else out of class five minutes early and held me and Rosamunde back. They both came to where I sat. I didn’t want to have to explain to him, but I knew I could, and I knew I could put a brave face on it.

  “Now, ladies. Would you say you had a good reason for being late?” Mr. DePonte asked us both. His eyes were brown, velvety brown, and serious without being angry or curious.

  Rosamunde and I nodded our heads.

  “All right then,” Mr. DePonte said, standing there looking at both of us. “I assume it won’t happen often, or even ever again, but don’t lie, Rosamunde. When you lie, you insult me, whatever your reason. I’m not asleep up there, you know.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Rosamunde said.

  “It wasn’t Rosamunde’s fault,” I told him.

  “I figured that out.” He smiled at me. “I’ve been wanting to say, Izzy—”

  I didn’t want to hear his sympathy. I didn’t feel strong enough to respond correctly.

  “Well, you must know how we feel—”

  I nodded my head.

  “Because—you had such great legs,” he said. He blushed then, looking as young as the twins, and he almost ran out of the room. Rosamunde and I sat there for a long minute staring at each other before we broke into giggles.

  “Well,” Rosamunde finally said. “Well, well.”

  “He didn’t mean to say that,” I told her. I got busy going to newspaper, hugging what Mr. DePonte had said close to myself: because even before, he had noticed me specially, even when there wasn’t anything special to notice; Mr. DePonte who made a point of never noticing anything. He hadn’t said what he really meant, I knew that. What he really meant had nothing to do with my legs at all.

  21

  There were so many differences, and some of them were improvements, in a funny way. In a way, it was like my tree needlepoint, compared to the kit I had started out with. I could see in my tree, as I worked on it, something of the feeling the tree itself had given me, even though it didn’t have the same professional look the kit had. I had thought the hardest part to get would be the gold of the leaves, but it was the sky that gave me real trouble, that I had to take out after I’d done it, stitch by stitch, for as many long days as it had taken me to stitch it in. The tree needlepoint was my own.

  Rosamunde said it was really good, but she couldn’t do any sort of handiwork, and besides, her sense of color and design was pretty poor; but my mother said, looking over my shoulder while I picked out the gray stitches, “It has something, doesn’t it? I don’t know what, and—you know what I’d do with the sky?”

  “Don’t tell me, Mom, okay?”

  She understood. What was different was that I could see her understanding.

  Most of the differences were not improvements. If you think of all the things you can do with two legs, then of all the things you can do with one, all you can do with one leg is hop. Whenever I saw the little Izzy in my head, she was lying flat on her face with her crutches knocked away from under her and her jean leg pinned back with a stupid diaper pin—like a warning.

  Christmas was a quiet vacation, and I was glad of that. My mother took me shopping at the mall for the twins and Francie, for my father. But my father wasn’t the one who took me out to get my mother a present. My father isn’t good at Christmas, or birthdays; he isn’t good at presents. He doesn’t know what people will want and he hates shopping and he hates wrapping. His presents are the daily and weekly and yearly ones, the whole life that he works to make for all of us. It was Rosamunde who came downtown with me to find something for my mother. I picked out a silk slip, pale yellow, with lace set at the bodice and the hem. I knew how it would make my mother feel to be wearing a slip like that under her dress. It was at the Treasure Trove, of course. Rosamunde was grumpy about it, maintaining that the money could have kept an African family fed for a month and ominously silent when I paid for it by charging it, with a request that the bill be sent to my father at his office. “It’s so easy for you,” she grumped, once we were outside again. She carried the wrapped box for me while I swung along on my crutches. I wasn’t feeling any too cheerful myself, after all the gushing sympathy of the woman at the Treasure Trove, who kept bringing things to show me, as if I couldn’t move around on my own, or as if I’d knock something over and not pay for it. Or something.

  “Lay off, would you?” I told Rosamunde.

  I’d hurt her feelings, I could tell, watching her trudge beside me. I was tired of her cracks about money, but I could sympathize with how frustrated she might feel, even though I thought a lot of her frustration was sour grapes. So I told her, while we were having Cokes and fries and waiting for my father to pick us up and take us home, what I wanted to give her for Christmas. “A haircut. Oh, it’s okay, I won’t, but I’d love to see how you’d look with short hair, all over your head—”

  “I’d look like a poodle,” Rosamunde said. “Like a dog. Like a jerk.”

  She was feeling down.

  “I looked up poodles once,” I said. “They’re one of the smartest breeds, and they’re really cute.”

  “I don’t do cute—I leave that to you cheerleader types,” but she had started to smile.

  “And they’re the easiest to train,” I finished.

  “Isobel Lingard, if you think—you and your mother—you’re going to—”

  “What does my mother have to do with this?”

  “—turn me into one of your—preppy types. Look, your hair looks good short, but it looked good longer, even with that dumb lookalike flip you all wore. Mine doesn’t look good any way I wear it.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. She just stared at me, her jaw set. “Anyway, I think I’ll tell my father to get my mother a piece of nice jewelry. Diamond earrings, what do you think?”

  Rosamunde groaned.

  “No, they’ve had—such a hard time this fall. With me. She’d like having them, and he’d like giving them to her, and it wouldn’t be hard for him to find some.”

  “I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea.” Rosamunde ate a couple of fries, dipping them into the catsup. “I’m just adding it to my list of how I’ll know I’ve arrived—having charge accounts for my kids at the local boutiques, giving my husband diamonds for Christmas.”

  “That’s backwards, he gives you diamonds.”

  “Not with my luck, with my luck I’ll end up with a real failure,
a nogoodnik, a cad and bounder, a ne’er-do-well, who—wait, he’ll give me diamonds, but they’ll be charged to my account and by the time the bill comes, he’ll have left me, he’ll have run off with my secretary.”

  I had heard all about Rosamunde’s plans for herself, law school and a career in the corporate world. I was a little shocked at her ambitions, and at the way everything she did was aimed at the first step, a scholarship to a top-flight college. That was why she was in Latin Club, to show how broad her interests were. That was why she got ads for the paper, so that eventually they’d have to give her preference when she applied to be on the staff.

  “If that happens, it’ll be your own fault if he does. Besides, you could have a male secretary.”

  “Who wants a male secretary? They wouldn’t know how to kowtow properly. Do you really think I’d look all right with short hair? Not your mother, what do you think?”

  Rosamunde was fun, even when she disappointed me. I knew she had to be more practical than I did, but I thought that she also took a kind of pleasure in reminding me of how much more practical she had to be. On the other hand, even watching television with Rosamunde was a kick. She muttered a running series of complaints. If a character on the screen said, at a highly sentimental moment, “Together we will find an answer,” Rosamunde would mutter, “Together you ought to find a new scriptwriter,” and Francie and I would break up giggling. It didn’t matter that my mother didn’t really like Rosamunde, or that Rosamunde didn’t like my mother. I understood why my mother would often tell me that Rosamunde wasn’t our type, pointing out how resentful Rosamunde seemed. I understood why Rosamunde said my mother had everything too easy, so she thought she had all the answers, as if cleaning ladies and charge accounts were signs from God that you were doing things right.

  I saw a lot of Rosamunde that vacation. We all did. Jack asked her out a couple of times, to a movie. She had babysitting jobs, though, which she didn’t seem to mind. Jack couldn’t figure her out: She seemed to like talking with him and arguing with him and playing Trivial Pursuit or just watching TV, but she never went out with him. “What’s she got against me?” he asked.