“Good,” she said.
Lisa put her eyes on my face and kept them there. Suzy and Lisa stood on opposite sides of the high hospital bed. “This is just something silly,” Lisa said, handing me a box wrapped in bright red paper and tied around with a big white ribbon. It was the kind of thing Lisa always did, not only getting a present, but also wrapping it up nicely.
I unwrapped the box and then took out a stuffed cat, made of something that felt like an angora sweater, made to be floppy and cuddly. “It’s great,” I said, cuddling it. “I love it.” I sat the cat on my lap, close and warm.
“It’s good to see you,” I said, and it was. “It feels like ages since I’ve seen you,” I said, and it did. “Lauren, Suzy told me about Christmas, and I’m really sorry. I think it’s terrible. Did you try talking to your mother and telling her how much you want to come down? Maybe she thinks it doesn’t make any difference to you, you know? Maybe if you talked to her, maybe she just doesn’t understand how much you want to—”
Lauren just looked at me and shook her head. Suzy was right, she really did look unhappy, sort of pale, even with her makeup on, as if she was suffering. I hadn’t known she was so serious about this boy.
But I could tell she didn’t feel like talking about it. “How do you like me in a bed jacket?” I asked Suzy. “It had lace when my mother bought it, scads of lace”—I showed them with my hands where the lace had been—“hanging down. But she took it off.”
“It’s nice,” Suzy said.
“It looks good on you,” Lisa said.
The radio played softly. I didn’t know what else to say to them, and they didn’t say anything to me. The radio played in the background and the silence grew.
“What’s going on at school?” I finally asked. I looked from Suzy to Lisa, because Lauren just stood frozen, leaning against the door frame.
“The usual,” Suzy said.
“We’re starting midterms. You know how that is,” Lisa said.
“I guess she does.” Suzy talked to Lisa, across the bed. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make myself study for History—she makes everything so boring. Even her tests are boring, even when I know all the answers. Every time I look at that book I start to fall asleep. Really. Do you have class notes, Lisa?”
Lisa always took good notes during classes, and she always studied. She had to work for her grades, but she didn’t mind working. If I’d worked as hard as Lisa, I’d have been on honor roll too, probably, but I had other things to do. Lisa played field hockey too, but that wasn’t the same kind of commitment as cheerleading, and she was always well prepared.
“You can use them if I don’t need them,” she offered, knowing that Suzy wouldn’t take the time to copy them over.
Suzy was staring again and didn’t seem to hear her.
Lisa kept on looking at my face. I wondered if I was getting a big crop of pimples or something. “How long will you have to be in here?” Lisa asked.
“About two or three more weeks, I guess.” I made a face.
“You’ll miss a lot of school,” she observed.
“I guess so,” I agreed. After a little silence, I added, “I guess the school will send me my assignments.”
“That’s right,” Lisa said, as if it was news. “I’d forgotten it, but they do that. Or home teaching.”
She didn’t have anything to talk about, and neither did Suzy, and Lauren just stood there by the door saying nothing. That was odd, because we’d always talked and talked, all of us, all four together or whoever was around. We talked about everything, from nuclear war to French kissing; we could spend hours making up our faces under Lauren’s direction, styling one another’s hair, and just saying whatever crossed our minds. We were friends, good friends. We were old friends from seventh grade, which was when Lauren’s father moved to Newton. Lisa and I had even been in the same elementary school and Suzy had come in fourth grade. Sometimes we talked over what had happened in years before. Sometimes we talked about one another. If we ever decided something was wrong about one of us, Lisa would go and tell her. It was Lisa who told me, at the start of eighth grade, that boys would like me better if I didn’t always try to show off how much I knew about sports, just because I had older brothers—like me better as a girlfriend, that is. Nothing happened to any of us that we didn’t talk over with our friends. And now we couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I wonder what I should name this cat,” I said.
Nobody had any ideas.
“I have a sort of psychologist,” I said. “She’s a psychological liaison nurse, whatever that means. You can imagine how my mom feels about that.”
Nobody said anything. I knew, the same way that you know when a party is being a flop, that they were sorry they’d come.
“She’s got one of those hyphenated names, Hughes-Pincke—with an e. She told me to call her Helen.”
“Are you going to?” Lisa asked.
“My parents would kill me. You know that. They’re not like your mother, Suzy.”
“Speaking of whom, she asked me”—Suzy smiled, looking like herself—“if I thought I’d be more comfortable calling her by her first name, when I turn sixteen.”
“Oh no,” Lisa said. “What did you tell her?”
They talked across my bed.
“I didn’t know what to tell her. I know what she wants me to say, of course. I mean, I know she means well, or I think she does—at least, she says she does—but I wonder sometimes if she isn’t just kidding herself. The way she wants to pretend we’re all really sisters.”
“It’s not just with you, she does it with Bethy too, doesn’t she?” Lisa asked. Bethy is Suzy’s older sister. Mrs. Wilkes was only married for five years before she got divorced and opened her boutique and dedicated her life to raising her girls.
“Then we’ll have the three of us, just three sisters all together,” Suzy said. “I wish she’d get married.” She had often wished that.
“Oh well,” Lisa told her, with nothing in her voice to give any indication of how she felt about it. Lisa never judges, she just listens. “She’s probably worried about how he’d treat you.”
Then they had run out of things to say again, and I tried to think of something else. It was hard, because I had to ignore Lauren, who was behaving so oddly. Usually, even when she was bored, she could put on a dazzling smile. She saw me looking at her then and put one on for me. I pretended to smile back and wished she’d just go out into the hall so I could ask Lisa what was wrong with her.
“Aren’t you going to get in trouble for cutting classes?” I asked Suzy.
“Naw.” Her eyes came back to my face. “My mother asked your mother, on the phone, and your mother said she thought you felt well enough, so my mother gave me a note saying I have her permission, so it’s a legal absence. Lisa’s mom did the same, didn’t she?” Lisa nodded. “And Lauren already had a dentist appointment, which is why we came today—But that reminds me,” Suzy said, “it’s almost ten, we’d better get going if we’re going to get to school for third period. Lisa? And Lauren’s appointment’s at ten, but that’s just around the corner, so that’s all right.”
They hurried to the door. “Hey,” I said from the bed. Lauren was already in the hallway, out of sight. “Thanks for the presents,” I said, talking quickly. “It’s great to see you. Come again, okay?” Lisa nodded, and Suzy moved out of sight. “Bring a Monopoly game or something,” I suggested.
“That’s a good idea,” Lisa said. “See you.”
She was out of sight before I could answer. The room felt empty, then, more empty than before, with only the radio playing softly. I could hear them, all talking now, as they went back down the corridor, the way voices sound when kids get out into the hallway after an exam.
I listened, until the sounds had faded away. Then I picked up the bouquet and turned it around in my hands, wondering about Lauren. There were some people who couldn’t stand hospitals, because th
e idea of sickness and weakness and dying frightened them so much. I thought maybe Lauren was like that, which I hadn’t known. Of course, we’d never been sick, except with flu and things, so we’d never have noticed. I thought that I’d like to ask Lisa about it, and maybe I’d call her up in the evening. Because I wasn’t sick and I wasn’t dying.
There was only the faintest smell of roses to the bouquet. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it—since I wasn’t going to a dance where I could carry it in my hand, with its ribbons trailing down. I smiled at how inappropriate the bouquet was; I didn’t mind that, because it seemed very like Lauren not to figure out the appropriate thing. The stuffed cat, which I sat up on my shoulder to feel the soft fur against my neck, was a silly thing too. I opened the top Harlequin.
About thirty pages into it, I closed it and put it on the night table. I tried the other one.
I only made it through ten pages of that. I guessed maybe I was in the wrong mood for love stories. Certainly, it did seem tome that—given the odds—there couldn’t be as many perfectly beautiful women as there were Harlequin books with perfectly beautiful women in them. I looked at the mystery my mother had brought, but I turned on the TV instead, without turning off the radio.
Neither of the machines was turned particularly loud, but they crowded the room with voices. I started with a movie on the TV, and as soon as the advertisements came on, I switched to a game show, and from there to a rerun of Gilligan’s Island and then I found Sesame Street.
I came in on one of the Grover-waiter scenes, where Grover gets everything wrong and the customer never has anything to eat. Grover is my favorite character, and he made me smile, as always.
With the TV and the radio making noise, filling the room, smiling because of Grover, I shoved the tabletop away from over my lap and looked at what they’d been staring at, Suzy and Lisa and Lauren.
5
The bed was elevated at the back and bent up a little for my knees, so I could sit easily. In the temperature-controlled air of the hospital, the only blanket anybody needed was a light one. I looked at my legs.
I looked at my leg.
I looked at my leg-and-a-half.
There was one long thick leg under the blanket, and one short leg. The short one looked like a monster zucchini under the blanket. After it stopped the blanket lay flat.
All of my body trembled, my heart and stomach jiggling inside my ribcage, my shoulders going back and forth like a guitar string. I was cold and afraid. I held up my hands and looked at them, to see their shaking, but it didn’t look like they were shaking. It just felt like they were shaking.
I tried to swallow but I couldn’t. I moved my toes back and forth. At the end of my left leg the blanket twitched, but nothing happened under the flat white blanket on the rest of the bed.
I looked at my legs and one of them had been cut off short forever.
I looked at myself and I knew exactly what Lauren felt like.
I pushed back the blankets—not to look more closely, but because I was going to throw up, or I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to see anybody, and I had on a long nightgown so I didn’t have to see myself. I worked my leg over the side of the bed and got the bottom of the cast onto the floor. It was awkward, but I could keep some kind of balance by hanging onto the bars of the bedstead. I worked myself around until I was almost standing on my one clumsy foot, then reached out to grab the walker that waited beside the locker. Once I had that, I sort of hung over it until the wave of faintness passed. Shoving the walker ahead of me, inching along, dragging my heavy foot while I kept my weight on my arms and shoulders, I made it into the bathroom.
I bent over the sink, but I didn’t have to throw up. I turned on the cold water and splashed it all over my face. Then, for the first time, I looked at myself in the mirror, the one that hung over the sink.
I looked terrible.
Turning around, leaning back against the sink while I headed the walker the other way, I got out of the bathroom and back onto the bed. My nightgown tangled down along my leg-and-a-half, but I didn’t try to straighten it, I just pulled the sheet and blanket over it all. I pulled the table over again and put my forehead down on it and then covered my head with my arms.
My brain wasn’t working. It was as if the little Izzy was running around and around in circles, some frantic wind-up Izzy, screeching No, no, no.
But it was Yes, yes, yes.
And I knew it.
I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it.
I felt, with my forehead against the flat Formica, my arms wrapped cold around my dirty hair, as if I were sliding. I felt as if a huge long slide was slipping up past me, and I was going down it. I couldn’t stop myself, and I didn’t even want to. I wasn’t even going down the slide particularly fast, I was just going down, and down, without any hope of stopping. Something heavy and wet and cold and gray was making me go down, pushing at the back of my bent neck and at my shoulders. At the bottom, wherever that was, something heavy and wet and cold and gray waited for me. It was softer than the ground when I hit it. I went flying off the end of the slide and fell into the gray. The gray reached up around me and closed itself over me and swallowed me up.
The words hammered down on the back of my neck. Crippled. Amputated. “Not me,” I answered each one of them. Handicapped. “No, not me” Deformed. “Not me, please.”
“Isobel?”
I lifted my face. A black nurse had come into the room. She gave the impression of strength, because her shoulders and arms were large, though she wasn’t especially big. She had a round face and wore her hair cropped short. Her skin was very dark, with purply-black tones to the brownness, and silky smooth. Her eyes were round and flat, without any expression in them.
“Isobel Lingard?”
I nodded my head. I wanted her to go away, because I was afraid I was going to cry. We didn’t cry, not the Lingards. We were brave and made jokes about things hurting, or at least the twins did, calling each other Gimp-O and Captain Hook, depending on where the injuries were. I didn’t want to cry, but I was afraid I was going to.
The black nurse put her clipboard down on my table and lowered the bed flat, without asking me. She rolled the table away. She pulled down the sheet and pulled up my nightgown. She didn’t say anything, just humphed and grunted. Then, “Roll over,” she told me.
“I can’t.”
Without saying anything, she put her arms under me and rolled me over. She took away my pillow so I was lying with my cheek against the sheet. She pulled up my nightgown some more, until it was up around my armpits. I was naked under it, and I felt ashamed and helpless, but I didn’t dare ask her what was going on, what was going to happen, because I thought if I moved my mouth I’d cry.
I felt her hands come down on the back of my shoulders, up under the nightgown.
“Relax, Isobel.” She sounded bored. I couldn’t see her because my head was facing the wrong way. All I could see was the ugly green face of the locker and the half-open door to the bathroom. “I can’t work on you unless you relax.” Her fingers dug into my neck.
It was a massage, I figured that out. She dug and pulled and kneaded, like she was making pizza. Her fingers hurt me.
I didn’t see why she had to do that. I didn’t know what else to do, though, so I just lay there, waiting for it to be over.
She worked along my arms and shoulders, then down my back. Then she worked at the uncovered part of my left leg, even on the toes, pulling them out, turning them as much as the cast would permit. She did the other leg too. Her hands grabbed at the flesh and pushed it, working it in circles. I had watched men making pizza crusts, but I had never thought before how it might feel to the dough.
When she finally stopped, I thought she’d cover me up and go away, but she hoisted me over onto my back again, and set to work on the front muscles of my legs. I pulled down my nightgown, as far as she’d let me, and lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for her to
be finished. It was a lot like being at the dentist’s, when you just wait for them to finish each section of your mouth, measuring how much longer it will have to go on.
When she finally got to the right thigh I said, without opening my eyes, “Can you stop now?”
She didn’t even answer, and I opened my eyes to look at her. Her face was blank, all of her attention on her hands.
“I said, can you stop now please.”
She shook her head. “We have to keep these muscles in shape.”
My mouth trembled a little, because she wasn’t paying any attention to what I asked her to do, to how I was feeling. “I don’t see why,” I said, thinking of all the ways I used to use my legs.
“You can’t put a prosthetic device on tender skin. We have to toughen up the skin on this stump.”
I didn’t say another word. I just lay there with my eyes closed, wishing her away. She didn’t have to hurt me. I was sure a massage didn’t have to be painful.
At last, she pulled my nightgown all the way down, pulled the sheets up, pushed the buttons to set the bed back in position, and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
She never once looked at me, at my face or eyes. I guessed if you’d finished working on the pizza dough, you wouldn’t bend over and say goodbye to it. You don’t talk to things. And that’s what I was, a thing, a messed-up body.
I turned on the TV and watched women squealing with delight and disappointment on a game show, while this slick middle-aged man did kissyfaces with them. The women were mostly older and pretty bad-looking, but they all had two legs. I kept the volume up, so I wouldn’t hear what I was thinking.
They dropped by some mail and a big basket of fruit from my grandmother Ingram and a round tin of homemade cookies from my grandmother Lingard who’s Swedish and cooks constantly. I wasn’t hungry. I read the cards. There were lots of get-well messages, and the people said they hoped they’d see me soon. But they didn’t know what I looked like now.