Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  “Nothing that I know of, nothing you don’t know about. She just doesn’t know she’s supposed to be falling under your spell. No, seriously, Jack, she’d probably go with both of us, if she was free, if we let her pay her own way.”

  “She’s weird.”

  “She’s got her own plans for her life. She knows what she’s doing.”

  “What difference would a date make?”

  “Jack,” I advised him, feeling pretty strange to be talking to him that way, “if I were you I’d try to be friends first. Then see.”

  “Who cares, anyway,” he said.

  “Besides, it would probably take a long time,” I said, knowing how impatient he is.

  He didn’t answer, but he did take the two of us to see an adventure film. Rosamunde grumped about how stupid it was, but Jack and I liked it, and she was grumping as much because Jack wouldn’t let her pay her own way as because of the movie.

  Rosamunde spent a lot of time at our house. She said she wanted me to come to her house once I got my wooden leg. She never would call it anything else, as if keeping it a joke made it not so bad. Well, she was right. “Our house is so small, you couldn’t move around on crutches. I don’t think you could fit a wheelchair anywhere in it. I don’t know what we’d do if—”

  “You know, the thing is going to be fitted onto the stump, and then be held in place with all kinds of straps,” I told her. I wasn’t looking forward to that, to learning how to strap on an artificial leg and have all that hardware around my hips, all the time. If I thought about it when I was feeling low, that by itself could bring on one of the weepy fits nobody but me knew about. The times I was so ashamed of. I thought it was time I grew up and stopped crying about what couldn’t be fixed.

  “But it could, it could happen to any one of us. There’s no guarantee.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Straps and all? It sounds pretty bad, Izzy. Like a girdle.” Rosamunde never tried to look on the bright side.

  “Adelia says I’ll get used to it.”

  “She should know. Did she like her cookies?” Rosamunde and I had made a big box of Christmas cookies for Adelia.

  “She did. She really did.”

  Adelia had gotten to like me, and that pleased me as much as the birth announcement from Mrs. Hughes-Pincke had pleased me: as if I was a real person, not just a cripple they had worked with.

  “Do you know what I really mind, Izzy?” Rosamunde asked. I was wrapping my presents in my room, and she was hanging around watching me. She was staying for dinner that night, because she didn’t have a job.

  I thought she was going to give me her little speech about how if somebody else—another color, another social stratum, another country, or even another part of America—had had my accident, she wouldn’t have gotten the same quality of treatment, and how that wasn’t right. “What?” I asked, getting ready to tune her out.

  “I mind … I used to really like watching you move around, because you always seemed so comfortable in your own body, and it wasn’t anything you thought about, or even noticed; it was just the way you were, that was what was so great about it.”

  “You’re talking in the past tense,” I said, carefully keeping my eyes on the ribbon I was tying, thinking how much I’d changed.

  “No, that’s not true. I mean, I was. I mean, it was the past tense, but you still have that way of being—comfortable to be with. Only it used to show, anybody who saw you saw it, just looking at you. Because it wasn’t just being comfortable with your body that made you so nice. But I really mind that.”

  Then I did look at her. “I mind it too,” I said.

  “For all the good it does, right? Listen, I’m going to go see if your mother needs any help.”

  “You’re going to go see if you can improve the meal,” I joked. “Don’t antagonize her, okay?”

  She stayed out in the kitchen and they stopped talking when I came in, but I ignored that. I don’t know what they were saying, but after the twins had driven Rosamunde home that night, my mother said to me: “She’s got more depth than any of your other friends, Rosamunde, doesn’t she? It’s not just intelligence either, is it?” I didn’t say anything. She was thinking aloud. “But she’s not going to have an easy life of it, she’s just not an easy person. I do wish she’d do something with herself, have her hair cut, dress herself…”

  “I’m working on the haircut,” I admitted. “But I figure it’ll take months. She’s pretty insecure about her looks.”

  Rosamunde also had something to say. “Your mother puts on a false front. She hides it, but she really has thoughts about things, did you know that? About how she wants her family to be, what a good mother does—even why she does all that charity work, kind of like some aristocrat with her noblesse oblige.”

  “Princess Di?” I asked her, remembering.

  Rosamunde grinned. “Yeah, well, I was right, wasn’t I?”

  My mother gave me a big box of long skirts for Christmas. She made them all herself, one out of black velvet, two out of Indian prints, one denim, and two corduroy. She didn’t say, and I didn’t say, but we both knew that if I wore long skirts, it wouldn’t be so apparent that there was a foot missing under them.

  “Keeping me feminine?” I asked her.

  “That’s my job,” she answered. We didn’t need to say anything about how much I liked them and how much she had liked making them for me.

  The twins gave me my second favorite present. They had scoured antique stores and found me a gold handled walking stick.

  “Open it,” Jack said, grabbing it away from me to show me that if I twisted the top I could draw out a thin sword.

  “It’s only a fencing foil,” Joel said. “He told us he wasn’t allowed to sell a real blade with it.”

  “Isn’t it neat?” Jack demanded.

  “Neat,” I agreed.

  “I think it’s sort of dashing,” Joel said, and I knew what he meant. It was like being in an old pirate movie, or a period romance filled with sword fights and damsels in distress. I knew what they meant by the gift.

  I even went to a party that vacation, at Lisa’s. Not a New Year’s Eve party—I spent New Year’s Eve babysitting Francie—but still, it was a party. I wore my long velvet skirt and I made myself go. Once there, I made myself talk with people and tried to make sure that anyone who talked to me had a good time. It was harder work than I remembered, being at a party. Rosamunde didn’t help—she stuck close, making me feel even more self-conscious, as if we were eighth grade girls at our first boy-girl dance or something. Finally, I turned to her and said, “Don’t cling, will you, please?”

  She moved right off and stayed away. For a minute, I was shocked at myself. You didn’t say things like that to your friends, you didn’t say the truth like that; but of course you do, to your real friends, you can say the truth. When I saw Rosamunde going with a boy into the darkened living room, where music was playing and couples were dancing, I winked at her. That time, I could see, I surprised her.

  Lisa was thoughtful, terribly thoughtful, settling me thoughtfully into a big comfortable chair, coming thoughtfully back again and again to bring me a Coke or someone to talk to, which made it hard for me to have any kind of conversation, with her hovering around being so thoughtful. I appreciated her intention, but she didn’t know how she wasn’t helping one bit. After a while I just got up on my crutches and started moving around on my own. Suzy hung around for a while, carrying on this disjointed whispered conversation. “You should have warned me about him—Marco,” she would whisper in my ear, to give the impression that we were best friends, telling secrets. I thought that was sort of funny and sort of sad.

  It was a tiring evening, and I was glad when Joel came to get me. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “All right, I think,” I told him, sitting in the car, my crutches propped beside me.

  “Life getting back to normal?”

  I knew what he was asking, and I knew
he would report in to my mother, and I appreciated it even though I minded. “No,” I told him, “but it was all right, and that’s what I was worried about.”

  Lauren, elegant in a long black dress, her face a mask, had always been in another room; if I moved into a room where she was, she moved on out of it. Unlike Lisa, who thought I needed special attention to help me through a tough situation, or Suzy, who thought I was likely to turn out to be popular again, Lauren thought I was a cripple.

  She was right, I was. Am. But that wasn’t all I was, I thought, and besides, it was bad enough, she didn’t need to add to it by avoiding me that way, even though I thought I could see why she felt the way she did, because she was so frightened of what would happen to her if she wasn’t perfect to look at—that didn’t make any difference to the way it made me feel, when she—and Lisa being so hatefully thoughtful and—

  So it was a bad night. It was bad enough, everything was, without knowing that the brave front I put on was only a cover-up. I swore to myself that starting the next morning, I wouldn’t ever cry again like that, over that. I promised myself I would stop. But I couldn’t even keep my promises to myself, and I spent the small, dark hours of that morning sniveling away in the darkened bedroom and not liking myself one little bit.

  22

  Going back to school wasn’t easy, but I had newspaper to look forward to. I also had—to my surprise, because it wasn’t as if I’d been working that much harder—a good chance of making the honor roll for the first semester. I thought I would like telling my parents if I made the honor roll.

  After the first day things quickly got back to normal, or what had become normal, if being carried up the cafeteria stairs by John Wintersize every day could be called normal. Things in the newspaper room weren’t quite the way they had been, though. In fact, between Tony acting strangely out of sorts with everyone and Deborah on a perpetual high because she had gotten into Stanford on early admissions, we seemed always to be on the edge of arguments, and it seemed hard to get even the routine tasks done on schedule. Most of the staff were seniors, and these semester grades were the ones that went to the colleges, so everyone was working hard for exams. That had something to do with it. Tony had most to do with it, though, because he was the one who pulled everybody together to work on a job—and he didn’t have his mind on what he was doing, although he never forgot to get up and bring me my crutches when it was time to go. It wasn’t as if he had changed or anything. I guessed something was making him unhappy, and I was sorry about that, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  Rosamunde made me go to a basketball game. “Just one, you have to.” I didn’t see why I had to, although I could see why she thought I had to.

  “Just once, just to get it over with,” she said. “I’m going to nag you until you do, so you might as well give in easily.” I considered offering her a trade, her haircut for my attendance at a game, but I decided against that. It was a little too much like blackmail. Besides, if I went along with her, then I could remind her sometime later that I had done this for her, so she should at least just talk to a stylist. That, I thought, might work more effectively. So I went to the basketball game on a Friday night in January, with Rosamunde.

  We arrived early, to be sure to get seats on the bottom row of the bleachers. The team didn’t win. In fact, they lost badly. The stands, however, didn’t mind that. People yelled and cheered just as loudly as if the team had been winning. Nobody really cared. Everything was pretty informal, people drifting around and talking while the game was going on. Rosamunde and I talked to a number of people, and Tony and Deborah sat down just behind us, so we carried on a four-person conversation through all the quarters. “Are you enjoying yourself?” Rosamunde said to me.

  “It’s all right,” I said to her, trying to be precise. “Are you?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  When the cheerleaders stepped out in front of us, wearing short pleated skirts and enthusiastic smiles, waving pompoms, Rosamunde absolutely ignored me, so I knew that this was worrying her. It was worrying me too. I watched the drills with the close attention you give to somebody else doing something you know how to do. I watched Georgie Lowe, who even stood in my old place at the end of the line because we were almost the same height. Georgie wasn’t as sure of herself as the rest of the squad, but there was something about the way her face was glad as she called out the cheers, or the coordination of her moves maybe, that made her better to watch than anybody else, even those girls who moved with sure, dancer’s rhythms, or whose figures were better. Georgie looked at me a couple of times, and I made sure to smile right at her. After the game, I went over to her and told her she looked good.

  “You know,” Georgie said, her eyes going briefly to where my pant leg ended, “I’d rather have waited another year, if—”

  She didn’t know how to say what she meant, but she meant what she said, and she had the courage to try to say it.

  “I thought she’d put you in to replace me,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “Sure, you were the best choice,” I said. “I’ll see you, okay?”

  Rosamunde and I left right away, with the other people who weren’t going to parties afterward. She was coming back to spend the night, and I was glad of that because if I’d spent the night alone I knew what I would have thought about. If I couldn’t control myself, and I couldn’t, having Rosamunde there would do the job for me. “How depressing was it?” she asked me.

  Turning it into words made it easier to deal with. “Pretty depressing.”

  “Well, it’s behind you now.”

  The little Izzy in my head was lying on the floor with her crutches knocked away, just weeping miserably, but nobody knew that, and I was going to learn how to make myself pick her up by the scruff of her neck and shake her until she stopped that.

  As exams came closer, a lot of the staff either cut the newspaper meetings or left exactly at the end of the hour. The only thing I could think of to help Tony out was to put in a lot of hours myself, doing anything that needed to be done, even writing up articles that were easy enough for me to do, like lunch menus or the calendar of events. Tony worked at his end of the table. I worked at mine. I don’t think he even knew I was there. I didn’t try to talk to him. He didn’t say much to me, beyond, “Proof this, would you, Izzy?”

  He drove me home and talked about the next issue. I’d try to help him consider ideas for articles or topics for special reports. He’d park his old Chevy in front of our house, come around to open the door, and hand me my crutches. He never came in with me and I never asked him, but he always stood there, watching until I was safely inside the house. I wished he’d just drive off, but he didn’t.

  One of those late afternoons, when the whole empty school echoed quiet around us, he passed me the editorial page for a final check. I still had half an hour before my father would come to pick me up. Tony was staying at school to watch a rehearsal of the play, where Deborah had a major role. I read the editorials and letters for a final time, putting in corrections with a blue pencil. Tony just sat at his end of the table, looking tired, twisting a pencil in his hands, looking troubled. I got down to the list of staff members and found my own name there, under Editorial Staff: Izzy Lingard.

  “You put me on the staff,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You put me on the staff.” I pointed my pencil at the place.

  “Oh. It’s about time, don’t you think?”

  I looked at my name for a minute and then I realized what was wrong. I crossed out Izzy and wrote in Isobel. I passed the page back to Tony. He looked over my blue markings. “Is that your name? Isobel? It’s a nice name.” He smiled at me then, looking even more tired and troubled.

  “It’s my name sometimes,” I told him. “More and more as I get older.”

  That amused him. “Nobody ever calls Deborah, Debby—and nobody even remembers that my name is Antony—it’s pretty hopeless,
isn’t it?”

  He wasn’t really asking me, he was just talking. He was thinking, I thought, about how she was going to go out to Stanford, and from there who knew where, or how far, while he was going to go to the state college. He would be living at home so that he could work part-time on the local paper, which his uncle owned. It would probably come to him, in time, which he said was all he wanted for his life, to be really rooted in one place and really take part in its history. Yet he was thinking about losing Deborah.

  “If it were me,“ I said, “if I loved her—”

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, with no expression in his voice.

  I had thought about this. “Then I’d try to just enjoy the rest of the year. You never know, anyway, what’s going to happen so why not just—make the most of the time you have? If it were me,” I finished clumsily.

  Tony just stared at me and stared at me. “I’ve been acting like a jerk,” he finally said, but his voice sounded pleased. “Haven’t I?”

  I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know what was true.

  “I have,” he assured me, his smile showing his crooked teeth. “But you’re right, Izzy, you’re pretty sharp after all, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that either. He kept on looking at me until it made me uncomfortable.

  “I just had a crazy idea. Listen, I think we should really be friends, you and I. Isobel Lingard, let’s be friends all of our lives. What do you say?”

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” I answered, smiling back into his eyes.

  “Good. That’s settled then. I’ve got to run, take these to the printer, and get back in time to apologize to Deborah—if she hasn’t written me off entirely as a jerk. Your father’s coming to get you, right? Okay, then, I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”