“Fine,” I’d say.
The flowers around my room died off and got thrown out. My grandmother Ingram sent a second bunch of flowers, a spring bouquet with tulips and roses, which must have cost her a small fortune. My grandmother Lingard sent me a linzertorte, cut into squares and packed into a cookie tin. Dr. Epstein couldn’t keep his hands off that one. He came to my room in the early mornings, before he went to his office. “How are you today?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Mrs. Hughes-Pincke sat down with me for half an hour a day, eleven to eleven-thirty, leaving just as the lunch cart started coming down the hall. “Good morning, Isobel,” she’d say. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I’d tell her.
She’d ask me questions. When she got close to how I was feeling about things, I’d say “Fine” or “I don’t know,” and she’d start up on something else. I didn’t mind telling her facts. But when she asked things like, “This boy, Marco, is he a boy you’ve dated often?” I knew she was fishing around and I didn’t say much.
“No.”
“Is he someone special?”
“No,” and I’d let her know in my voice that I wasn’t interested at all in the subject.
Nobody, I realized, was talking about what had happened, as if everyone was pretending everything was normal and all right. So was I, but not for the same reason. Nobody wanted to hear my troubles. “Fine” was what they wanted to hear.
I didn’t think about much of anything because I watched a lot of TV. I didn’t think about school, and everyone, although when Lisa called I’d ask, “How’s school?” I’d ask about it and then I’d tune out her answer. It didn’t interest me what was going on, not really. What interested me was what people were thinking about me, having lost a leg and all, being crippled. I wanted to know what I could expect. Nobody was talking to me about that, not at all. I figured that was because they knew it would get me down. What they didn’t know was how far down I was already.
Besides, I didn’t need to know what people were thinking. I could guess.
“How are you?” they asked.
“Fine,” I answered, not exactly lying, but—lying through my teeth.
Only the black nurse didn’t ask. She didn’t care. She didn’t like me much, and I didn’t like her much either. I didn’t know anything about her, not even her name. She looked about thirty-five; she didn’t wear any rings. Every day she would come into my room and massage me for a while, then take me for a walk in the wheelchair. Never did she ask me how I felt.
One day, it was the middle of the week, maybe Wednesday or Thursday—I wasn’t sure because I never was sure what day it was until I got the evening TV programs. It was the middle of the week, I knew. She didn’t wheel me down to the sunroom and back for our daily outing that day. Instead, she wheeled me to the elevator and pushed a button for a higher floor.
I didn’t want to ask her any questions, but I did, without turning around to look at her. “Where am I going?”
“To the PT room,” she answered. I had no idea what the PT room was, but I didn’t ask her about that because I figured she already knew I didn’t know.
PHYSICAL THERAPHY it said on the door. PT. I didn’t want to go in.
But of course I had to go in. My nurse put me on a rubber pathway with a big metal fence, the kind you see on March of Dimes advertisements. I didn’t look at anybody else in the room. I just hauled myself down the walk, turned myself around, and hauled myself back. She never told me how many times I had to do it, so I just kept hauling along. I could hear voices in the big room. My nurse didn’t say anything. When she’d had enough, she put me back into the wheelchair and took me down to my room. She helped me onto the bed and left.
As soon as she was gone, I got back off the bed and used the walker to go to the bathroom. I stood splashing cold water on my face until I knew I was all right.
When I came out, Mrs. Hughes-Pincke was there, sitting in the chair, waiting. She didn’t get up to help me or anything, just sat and stared at me while I worked the walker around and finally got myself up onto the bed.
“Good morning, Isobel,” she said. “How are you?”
“Fine,” I told her.
“But Isobel, you don’t seem to be eating very much,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought about that. I looked at her, seeing mostly stomach.
“I’m not awfully hungry,” I told her.
She couldn’t argue with that. “The food here isn’t that bad, is it? For a hospital? You aren’t dieting, are you?”
“I never needed to go on a diet, or anything. I never worried about my figure.”
“Really?” Her face woke up. I looked to the open doorway. “Most girls do. Why didn’t you?”
I shrugged. “I guess I was too busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Things. You know. School and cheerleading and all.”
She didn’t ask the natural next question, “What are you going to do now?” I was just as glad she didn’t, but I knew that, because she didn’t ask, it was in her mind. I didn’t let it get into my mind, though.
“How big is the cheerleading squad?” she asked instead. Mrs. Hughes-Pincke knew how to ask questions I could answer. She was curious, I guess, about the life of a typical high school sophomore.
“The whole squad is twenty-four, but there are only twelve of us that actually do the cheerleading. Were you ever a cheerleader?” I asked her.
She smiled and shook her head, and her smile stayed on her face the way a happy memory stays in your mind. “I went to a girls’ school, a boarding school actually. We played sports, but—cheerleading was too … too high school for us. One didn’t carry pompoms,” she said, mocking herself.
We talked about whether there was something sexist about cheerleading, and I could see what she meant. Then I asked her what it was like, going to a boarding school. “I made some awfully good friends there.” That smile washed over her whole face again. I wondered what she looked like when she wasn’t swollen up with pregnancy. “You get to know people awfully well when you live with them. And some of the girls I went to school with—well, they make good friends. I guess there’ll be somebody moving up to take your place on the cheerleading squad.”
She was going to ask me how I felt about that, about losing my place. So I said, “I think I know who. There’s a ninth grader, Georgina Lowe. Georgie, she’s pretty good. She’s the one I’d put in.” I wondered who had been put into my place. Lisa hadn’t told me and I hadn’t asked.
“What does that mean, being good at cheerleading?”
“Georgie’s got really good coordination, she … her sense of rhythm is terrific. She’s pretty and kind of enthusiastic. Even when practice is hard, even though she knows she’ll have to wait a year or two to be on the squad, she always works as hard as she can. She always comes to the games and tells us what we looked like. She’s outgoing and nice, and she’s got a good figure—She always looks like she’s having fun, I guess that’s probably really important.”
“Is she a friend of yours?”
“She’s only fourteen.”
“You’re not much older.”
“Yeah, but—Except for the cheerleading squad, we don’t have anything in common.”
“Then friends are people you have things in common with?”
“Sure, because you can feel comfortable with them.”
There was a little silence.
“Then you don’t think that opposites attract.”
“That’s what they say about love,” I reminded her.
There was another little silence.
“So you don’t think of me as a friend,” she said.
“You’re a grown-up.”
“Ah.” She smiled. I could see why that amused her. “And I’m married.”
“And pregnant,” I added, without thinking, just as if she was a friend.
“What about your friends, do you
have a lot in common?”
“It’s not as if we’re all the same. But even though we’re different, we think the same about things, we have the same standards. And things.”
Even as I said that I could see that it wasn’t true. But I didn’t mention that to Mrs. Hughes-Pincke. “We’ve been friends for years. We’re really comfortable together,” I said.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mrs. Hughes-Pincke said. She hoisted herself up out of the chair, with a little ouff sound. “Do you want me to leave the door open?”
“Please,” I said, waving back at her from the bed, then turning on the TV. It was a game show, with housewife-type contestants and an occasional man. I sat watching it, working up my dislike of it; because the gray, cold feelings that waited for me at night had started to reach out around my heart, and I could keep them away by disliking the TV show. With the door open, I wouldn’t embarrass myself by crying. Because Lisa, who was the only one to talk to me, when she talked to me she wasn’t talking to me the way we used to. Of course, I reminded myself as the lunch tray was set down in front of me, Lisa was the most grown up of us, so of course she would talk to me as a grown-up.
A lady won two thousand, four hundred and fifty-seven dollars and decided not to come back the next day to try to win more. She and her husband, she said, had dreamed for years of going to Hawaii, and now they could. She didn’t want to risk losing the money. She didn’t want to be greedy. She had prayed that they would be able to go, and now they could and that was enough for her. The quizmaster, who had a few minutes to spare, I guess, tried to tease her into coming back and trying for more.
My father had a business lunch and my mother had to take Francie to the dentist, so she wouldn’t come by until later in the afternoon. I settled back to an afternoon of the soaps. I kept myself occupied during the commercials by counting out how many more days it was until I could go home, how many Mondays and Tuesdays, and how many hours, and then I took a sheet of paper and started figuring out how many minutes.
If I started down the slide, as the minutes of the afternoon ticked by, I caught myself up by listening to the noises from the TV and switching the channel, or setting out a game of clock solitaire. Clock solitaire takes a long time to play out, especially if you have to set it out on a bed.
I was sitting up in my pink quilted bed jacket, with the cards spread in a circle on the bed and The Road Runner Show on TV, when Rosamunde Webber came into my room. She stopped just inside the door and just stared at me, for about half a minute.
I just stared right back, with the squeaky cartoon voices in the air.
Rosamunde looked like always, in a big blue windbreaker with PAL on it, in denim overalls that did nothing for her figure, her brown hair thick and curly in two ponytails at the sides of her head, her face all wrinkled up around her beady eyes, the way it got when she was thinking hard. She had her hands jammed into the pockets of the windbreaker.
“You look terrible,” Rosamunde said, without moving. We all agreed that her voice was the only attractive thing about her. She has a low voice that sounds grainy, as if she were always just a little bit hoarse. “You weren’t taking drugs or anything, were you?”
“No.” I was shocked.
“I didn’t think so, but anything’s possible. Are you going to ask me in?”
“Sure,” I said. I turned off the TV and opened my mouth to tell her to come in and sit down.
But she hadn’t waited to be asked. She slouched down in the visitor’s chair. “You do, you know. Look terrible. You look like death warmed over. Are you all right?” she demanded.
I didn’t know what to say.
“No, that was really stupid, even for me. What is it, is the food that bad? I’ve never been in a hospital—what a place. All the way up here I was half-convinced somebody, like some nurse or a passing doctor, was going to look at me and grab me to tell me I have some fatal disease. Don’t you feel that way? Hospitals scare me, I’ll tell you.” She stood up and moved to the window, hoisting herself up to sit on the sill. “Doesn’t it scare you?” she demanded.
I shook my head, no. “Anyway,” I said, getting my manners back, “how are you?”
“Well,” she said, her face wrinkled again and her eyes staring at me, “I’ve got this ache in my little finger joint on my left hand, which might be juvenile arthritis, and I think I’m going to have to get reading glasses, or something, because of headaches, either that or I’m developing sinus problems, I haven’t decided which.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to show that wasn’t what I meant, and she’d taken my question seriously.
“Joke,” Rosamunde said. “It was a joke.”
That made me feel pretty stupid. “Oh,” I said again.
“You really do look terrible. Thin. Are you eating?”
The staring was getting through to me. “Of course,” I said. I was going to say something about hospital food but she didn’t give me time.
“I’ve always heard that the food’s bad in hospitals.”
“It’s not great.”
“Not great? C’mon, Izzy, you can have a negative thought.”
I resented that. “It’s not that bad, not at all, considering. It’s just bland.”
“Bland? Like what? Like those steamed hamburgers you get at Thruway cafeterias?”
“Not that bad. It’s—institutional cooking.”
“I guess then rice would be okay.”
She was right. “Yeah, the rice is usually pretty good.”
We had run out of things to say. She swung her legs back and forth, then sort of looked at herself in her faded overalls and slipped down from the windowsill. She wandered around the room. I sat in the bed and watched her, wondering why she had come, wondering how long she was going to stay.
“Is that your cat?” she pointed.
“Lisa gave it to me.”
“Cute,” Rosamunde said, in her low voice. “Very cute.”
I heard her sarcasm, but I didn’t answer it.
“So, what do you do all day?” She was down at the end of the bed.
“Watch TV.”
“How can you stand it?”
I shrugged. I knew what she was thinking, about how that was like the kind of person nobody wanted to be, who just sat and watched TV all day long. Eating candy and chips and watching TV.
“It would drive me nuts,” Rosamunde said. She opened the door into the bathroom. “Hey, that’s not bad, a private suite, not bad at all. I guess, though, you won’t have to worry about paying for college, will you? That’s pretty funny, if Marco Griggers—who is one of the world’s prime jackasses—pays to send you to college.” She went on and on, standing by the open bathroom door and watching me. “You should have seen him last week. I thought he was going to wet his pants he was so scared, like a cross between a jackass and a rabbit. He kept cornering Suzy and asking her questions. Are you going to bring charges?”
“Charges?”
“You aren’t that dumb, lzzy.”
I wasn’t, but her voice when she said it sounded like if I wasn’t that dumb I was pretty close.
“Marco says he can’t remember anything, but he’s a liar. I guess he was drinking, I hear those parties get a little wild sometimes, or maybe smoking dope or something. That’s what I think,” she said.
She waited, but I didn’t say anything. I was ready for her to leave.
Rosamunde began fiddling with the walker. She moved to stand inside it, and then leaned her weight on it and took a few steps. She went toward the door, and I hoped she would go out it, but she didn’t. She turned around, playing with the walker, talking.
“The old club loyalty, is that it? Geez, this thing makes me feel decrepit, really decrepit. Does it do that to you?”
“Oh,” I said, as if that was just the beginning of a sentence.
“It’s clumsy,” Rosamunde said. “I didn’t think you’d lie about it. But then, who knows, maybe it’s just because I know he??
?s such a twit, the way he spent the first week twitching, and now he’s hinting that since his reflexes are good, his trained reflexes, he doesn’t think it could have been him driving. Maybe I should be feeling sorry for him instead. Do you think?”
I didn’t think anything, except that I really wished she’d go away. I couldn’t think of what I could safely say before she would start in again.
Rosamunde turned the walker so that she faced me. She raised her right leg, bending her calf up behind it from the knee. “You don’t feel sorry for him, do you? Nobody can be that nice, not even you. Suzy does—but Suzy does all her thinking with her glands.”
“Suzy’s smart,” I reminded Rosamunde.
“You’re kidding.” She looked honestly amazed.
“You know she is. She always gets top grades.” I thought, with relief, of what I could say to get her to leave: “You’re just jealous.”
“Jealous of Suzy?” She stood there, short and clumsy-looking in her baggy pants that covered thick legs, her hair dull and its style unflattering. “Why would I be jealous of Suzy?”
“Because she’s smart and she looks good and she’s popular,” I snapped. I figured that would get rid of her.
Rosamunde stood there on one leg, like an overweight crane, and thought. Her eyes kind of glazed over, the way they did sometimes in class. “I hope not,” she finally said. “I’d like to think better of myself.”
I groaned inside my head.
With her leg still folded behind her, Rosamunde tried to take a step. She shoved the walker a couple of inches in front of her, then sort of hopped up to it. The walker rocked under her weight. She stumbled up against it, her leg went back onto the floor, and she leaned on the top railing, as if against a fence, to ask me, “How do you do it? And how do those old people do it? I mean, they’re pretty weak. I guess you just get used to it, but I’m so uncoordinated, I bet I never would. Do you think?”
I didn’t have time to say anything.