Izzy, Willy-Nilly Page 16

  “Mom,” I told her, from my place back at the kitchen table, “your class prejudices are showing.”

  “Don’t tell me you like having someone just lean on the horn, just sit there and honk his horn for you.” She hacked away at tomatoes.

  I knew what she meant, and I agreed with her, but “He wasn’t honking for me” is what I said.

  13

  By the time I got into the kitchen Monday morning, everybody had left the house. My mother had set me out a bowl of cereal and a jug of milk. She had moved the toaster to the table, with bread beside it and the butter plate. She had poured me a glass of juice.

  I ate alone, the room bright with sunlight, the whole big house empty around me. After I’d finished, I tried to clean up after myself. I didn’t have anything else to do. Putting things back on the counter wasn’t too bad, it was just awkward. I got the milk back into the refrigerator without any trouble. But when I tried to rinse off my dishes—grabbing the sink to hoist myself up to turn the water on, the wheelchair braked under me so it wouldn’t roll away backward, holding the cereal bowl under the water but unable to stop water spraying all over, and then I had to get a paper towel and try to mop up all the wet places … .

  I’d never thought how little I’d be able to do, all the things I’d taken for granted before. I’d never thought about how much I would be handicapped, even with chores. I’d been planning to make my bed, but I didn’t even leave the kitchen. I sat there in the bright silence, alone in my wheelchair. Inside my head, the little Izzy was all folded up on the floor. She looked like a bad imitation of the dying swan, her leg-and-a-half stuck out and her head bowed down. I wished they hadn’t left me all alone in the house, and I wished there weren’t five whole days to get through before the weekend, when there would be people around again. It wasn’t that I wanted to be with people, particularly, not even my family. It was just that whenever I was alone my mind slipped down into grayness and I couldn’t stop it.

  There wasn’t, after all, anything else to think about. There wasn’t anything to look forward to, or anything. I used to do a lot of daydreaming, romantic stuff about the boys I liked, so I never used to mind being left alone. But romance was not in my future anymore.

  The little Izzy put her arms around over the back of her head.

  When it was time, my mother managed me into the car and then put the wheelchair in the back. We drove down to the hospital, where she unloaded me by the front door, then parked the car in a visitor’s slot. I wore a skirt and sweater, jacket and scarf; I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, then on the carpeting, then on the linoleum floor as we went up to the PT room. The same black nurse was waiting for me. “Good morning, Mrs. Jones,” I said to her. “Have you met my mother?”

  They shook hands, and my mother went off to get my assignments, while I got put onto the walking ramp. Up and down, I went up and down. Then my mother came back to pick me up. “Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” I said. Mrs. Jones didn’t answer.

  After my mother had unloaded me, she emptied the car. She had books and assignments, everything from my locker. She had a new needlepoint kit, color-coordinated with the one I’d finished. After lunch, I set myself up at the desk in my room to start catching up.

  Biology and Math were easy, and for World History I had to read the chapters and write answers to the questions. But the English—I couldn’t understand Shakespeare’s words, and the Romeo and Juliet paraphrase assignments were nothing I’d done before. So I wrote out a plot summary that took me three pages, front and back. Latin was translation and memorizing vocabulary and the subjunctive. I made vocabulary cards.

  I worked about half an hour on each course and made a good start at everything. The assignments were all typed out by the principal’s secretary. Each class had its own typed sheet, so it was easy to keep track. My mother had the tests to give me when I thought I was ready.

  That afternoon and evening, I tried to call Suzy, but she wasn’t home. I left a message with Ms. Wilkes that I had some questions about homework.

  Tuesday was about the same, and I was really out of patience with Suzy by the time I went to bed that night. I was embarrassed to call her house anymore, like I was begging her to call me up. I knew Lisa couldn’t help me with the homework and I wasn’t calling up to try to get Suzy to talk to me. I had a reason for calling. All Wednesday afternoon I waited, but Suzy never called back. My mother asked if I’d like her to try to help, but I already was taking up so much of her time, I felt guilty enough without having her spend hours on my homework. Besides, I was doing all right with three of the courses, so it wasn’t desperate.

  It was just that I didn’t understand why Suzy couldn’t at least call me back to say she didn’t have time to help. Only I did understand, because Suzy wouldn’t want to say that, and she wouldn’t want to say, yes, she would help; so she would just pretend she didn’t have any calls to make. When Ms. Wilkes reminded her, she’d probably lie. Once she had lied, she couldn’t possibly pick up the phone and call me.

  I was tired of Suzy and her problems and her lies and her friendship that wasn’t worth having. I quit, I said to myself. I knew she had troubles of her own, but I was sick of being nice about it. I thought, Wednesday night, that I’d better call Lisa, even though I knew how hard it would be for her to try to explain to me what she had to work so hard to understand herself. Then I thought of Rosamunde.

  But I didn’t want to call Rosamunde. It was like, if I did that, I would be asking her to be my friend, and she wasn’t the kind of person who I had for friends. She was different from the people I had for friends, different from me too. Except I knew I liked talking to her. She had a lot to say. And I knew that when she came to see me I had a better time than when my friends came to see me.

  I didn’t understand my reluctance to call her. I guessed, because I’d never had to ask anyone like Rosamunde for any kind of help before. But I still wasn’t sure I was ready to take that step.

  You can’t take any steps, I reminded myself. Rather than think about that, I rolled myself down the hallway into the kitchen and pulled out the phone book, to see if I could find her number. I didn’t even know where she lived, or anything; I didn’t even know her father’s name. I flipped the pages of the directory, looking for Webber, reminding myself that she had offered to help, if I wanted her to. Reminding myself that Rosamunde seemed to mean what she said.

  There were only two possibilities, and one of them was a luxury condominium complex, so I decided to start with the other. “Is this the home of Rosamunde Webber?” I’d ask. I moved the wheelchair over to the wall phone, the directory open on my lap.

  Then I just sat, looking up at the phone. I could sort of jump up to get it off the hook, but I didn’t know how I’d be able to dial the number. I started to memorize the number, thinking that I could hang on to the phone—and hope my weight didn’t pull it off the wall—while I dialed. If I had the number memorized. I didn’t want to ask someone to dial the phone for me; I didn’t want to be that helpless; I didn’t want to need their help for such a small thing.

  Frankly, it was pretty depressing, sitting there, thinking all of that, feeling angry and helpless and confused, and I couldn’t keep the numbers straight, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to make the phone call. After all, they wouldn’t flunk me or anything. People didn’t do that to cripples. Mr. DePonte wouldn’t do that, would he? And I didn’t want to go back to school anyway, did I? And have everyone staring at me.

  I tried to concentrate on the number. Francie was in the den with the TV on, so I couldn’t use that phone without driving her out and hearing what she had to say about that. It wasn’t hard to memorize a phone number. I didn’t know why I was having so much trouble doing a simple thing I’d done dozens of times before.

  When the phone rang over my head, I leaped up and grabbed it, then fell back into the chair which was moving away behind me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Izzy? What’s the matte
r? You sound out of breath.”

  “Rosamunde?” I didn’t have to ask, though; nobody else had a voice like hers. “I was just going to call you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, kind of slowly. “It doesn’t matter to me.

  “No, I was, but I don’t know where you live, and then—we have a wall phone, so I was trying to memorize the number