Izzy, Willy-Nilly

by Cynthia Voigt

  I woke up to the dim light from the open doorway and somebody bending over me, to wrap the blood pressure strap around my right arm and put a thermometer into my mouth. “There now, open your mouth, that’s good.” The voice was soft. “Isobel? That’s a good girl. You can go back to sleep in a minute.”

  I didn’t think I would, but I did. I wondered if my dream was what had actually happened; but the tree, I remembered, was on the wrong side of the road. In the colorless night of my dream, the tree trunk rushed toward me, bright white under the car lights, thick and tall, every groove on the bark etched clear. It came after me and something threw me at it.

  “It was an elm,” I said, opening my eyes. There was daylight in the room and a pale blue sky showed through the window. My mother turned around from the window. “Mom? Was it an elm?”

  “What? Was what an elm? How do you feel, Lamb, do you feel all right?” She put her cool hand on my forehead. She had her makeup on, eyes and lips, and her brown hair was neatly combed, the spray holding its waves in place. Seeing her, looking the way she normally did, made me feel better. Everything was going to be all right, everything was going to get back to normal.

  I saw my leg, or, rather, the length of my leg, hoisted by the knee and hanging from pulleys under its concealing blanket. I moved the toes on my left leg. I stretched my shoulders without moving my arms. I took a deep breath, against my ribs. I turned my head on the pillow and looked at the locker in the room, then I turned it the other way and saw a plastic jug on my night table. I thought I might like a drink of water.

  “Daddy had to go to the office,” my mother told me. “He’s coming by later.”

  “I had a dream.”

  “Francie sends her love. She even wanted to have me bring you Pierre.” Pierre is a stuffed frog, about Francies favorite stuffed animal.

  “Is today Monday? Today’s Monday, isn’t it?”

  “So you wouldn’t be lonely, she said. She’s really upset, as you can imagine. The twins say hello and—they’re going to try to get home this weekend, if you can have visitors.”

  “Can I? Has anybody called?”

  “I don’t think anybody hasn’t called. I’ve got a list a mile long. I’m keeping a list.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “What time is it?”

  “Around nine.”

  “History,” I said. My first-period class was History and everybody in the class would be sitting in the assigned seats; probably envying me for not being there.

  “If it’s not your friends on the phone, it’s your relatives,” my mother said. “I’m tempted to rip it out of the wall, really I am. Someday I’m going to do that. And you’ll all wonder why.”

  “A good mother would let her kids have their own phone,” I told her. This was our normal kind of conversation, which made the night seem very far away.

  “Don’t you wish you had a good mother?’ She gave me her usual answer to that kind of remark. “What did you dream?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It was an elm, Sweetheart,” my mother said. Her eyes watched my face carefully as she told me this. “Did you dream about the accident?”

  I didn’t know.

  “But it was on the wrong side of the road.”

  “Your car was on the wrong side of the road.”

  Then the dream made sense. My mother waited. I had a sudden, frightening question: “Why don’t I have to go to the bathroom?”

  At that, my mother smiled; she knew what I was thinking and she knew what she wanted to say. She sat down in the chair and leaned forward, looking pretty. “They’ve run a tube called a catheter directly up into your bladder. There’s a sack at the other end.” She watched my face. “Don’t think about it too precisely, Izzy, just be glad they know how to do it.” One of my mother’s volunteer positions is at the hospital, where she does publicity work. She’s an upbeat person and loves stories about the miracles of modern medicine. My father is much more practical and serious. He’s a tax man, with offices in the center of town. Our whole family, even my mother, used Dad’s office as a way station—or so he said, grousing the way he does when he really is pleased—between shopping trips and dentist appointments. It was like an “extension of the living room,” he groused. “What are my clients supposed to think?”

  As I thought of the twins, I thought of Francie too, and how much she loved Pierre. “Tell Francie that—I’d love it if Pierre could spend the night with me,” I said to my mother. “Tell her I’d take good care of him.”

  “You aren’t paralyzed, or anything,” my mother told me. “It’s just precisely what Dr. Carstairs told you.”

  Then I remembered what Dr. Carstairs had told me. “I didn’t like him,” I said quickly.

  “He’s the best around,” my mother said. “You know your father, nothing but the best.” She didn’t like him either, I could tell from the way she’d answered. But I also knew that my father would have personally sprung a child molester from prison if he was a better surgeon.

  Dr. Epstein, my pediatrician, came into my room that morning. My mother said his name, surprised. “Saul.” He rested his hand on her arm for a minute. He was reassuring her. “And you, young lady.”

  Dr. Epstein has always been my doctor. He’s easy to talk to, because he fixes his funny little eyes on you and waits to hear what you have to say. His face, even hidden behind the beard he wears, always looks interested and sympathetic and amused, all at once. He always knows what to do and what to say. That morning, all he said was, “Well, young lady, you certainly gave us a busy weekend.” His eyes kind of checked me over, and he didn’t seem displeased with what he saw.

  “Saul was here Saturday night,” my mother explained.

  “To hold your father’s hand,” Dr. Epstein explained. “Your father was holding your mother’s hand, so I held his. You look more perky today.”

  I giggled. It didn’t hurt. “I guess I am.”

  “Then I’ll go look in on my other patients and see you again. Soon,” he promised me. That was something to look forward to. “I had appendicitis last night,” he told us. “Do you know how long it’s been since I had appendicitis? No, of course not, how could you?”

  He didn’t wait for us to answer any of his questions. I looked at my mother and she looked back at me. I didn’t need to say what I was thinking, because I knew she was thinking the same thing. Certainly she said it often enough. “What a good doctor. What a good man he is.”

  My father came by on his lunch hour and again after work, when my mother had gone home to be with Francie. My father didn’t talk to me; he just sat in the chair, being there, as the sky outside the window got dark. I didn’t want to talk. I was feeling tired again, and weak, and I told myself that that was always the way it was when you were sick. You always felt best in the morning and worst in the evening. I watched my father, who was studying papers from his attaché case. The nurses came and went, taking my temperature, taking my blood pressure, giving me shots. Every now and then my father would look up and see me. Our eyes would meet and he would nod and look back to his papers. He was keeping an eye on things, taking care of me.

  It was after he had gone home and a nurse was sitting in the dim light that I began to remember. They were right, I thought, it does all come back to you.

  2

  It was the Wednesday before that when Marco had asked me out, to the football team’s postgame party. I thought at first he was just going to offer to drive me home in his orange VW bug and I thought I’d accept. The late bus takes everybody who has a practice, or an activity, or detention, so it goes all over Newton and takes hours. Besides, Marco was a senior, the first senior who’d asked me to do anything. He was a notorious flirt, but I couldn’t see what harm driving home with him would do. As a tenth grader, I might date seniors. There were other seniors I’d rather have had notice me, like Tony Marcel, but Marco was a beginning.

  When he asked me, instead, if I wanted to go to the po
stgame party on Saturday, I was really surprised. I didn’t sound surprised, though. I kept cool, even though I was the first of my friends to be asked out by a senior.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Marco grinned. He’s a grinner, probably because, while he’s not handsome, his stocky body and sort of pushed-in features make him cute. Cute and grinning go well together. I grin some myself, sometimes. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  “I’ll have to ask my parents.”

  “Ask your parents? What are you, a kid?”

  I didn’t answer that. I knew that trick boys have, that way of getting you to act like they want you to by telling you if you were grown up you would. I could see by his face that he was waiting for me to apologize and act embarrassed, so I just kept quiet. I made sure he couldn’t see what I was thinking, though.

  “How will I know if Mommy and Daddy will let you out?” he finally asked.

  I thought for a minute of just walking away from him, but I wanted to go to the party. These postgame parties weren’t a big deal, just get-togethers for the team and other seniors, but it was a good chance to let them see me, outside of school. Marco finally figured out that he wasn’t going to get an answer to that crack either so he said, “Okay, I’ll check with you tomorrow, or sometime. You’re a cool chick, aren’t you, Izzy?”

  That made me laugh. “Maybe I am,” I said, not minding it a bit if he thought I was.

  My parents didn’t much want me to go out with Marco. They didn’t know him, or anything about him, except that he was a senior and played football. He hadn’t been a friend of the twins’. “Won’t all the kids there be older than you?” my mother asked.

  “I’m fifteen, Mom.”

  I knew what she was thinking. The twins were only one year beyond being seniors, and while we’re not the kind of family who tells one another everything, my parents knew enough about what went on to be glad to stay up all night the night of the twins’ prom and to serve a bang-up breakfast at four in the morning, with lots of coffee, and not to mind how many people slept over the rest of the night at our house. I had heard about things my parents didn’t know, because the twins talked to me more than to them. I suspected there were things I didn’t know too. But my mother didn’t say what she was thinking. She just looked at my father, at the other end of the table. My father didn’t say anything either.

  At that point, I discovered how much I wanted to go. More than anything. “I’m not a little kid,” I said. “I know how to take care of myself. You just don’t want me to grow up, you say you trust me but you’re only saying that.” I was working myself up. It had been a while since I’d worked myself up. During ninth grade, there wasn’t anything we didn’t fight about. It seemed like they were always misunderstanding what I meant. All last year, we fought a lot, especially at dinner. But they seemed to have calmed down and tenth grade was going along pretty easily. “You think I can’t handle myself so you’re not going to let me go and—”

  “Nobody said you couldn’t go,” my mother corrected me.

  “Then I can?”

  “I guess so. But I wish you wouldn’t. If it helps, you can tell him I won’t let you go out with older boys yet.“

  “Great, that would be great, wouldn’t it,” I asked sarcastically. “That would just about kill any chance of anybody asking me out again. You can’t do that, Mom. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. But I’d like to.”

  I ran around the table hugging everybody. When I called Suzy and Lisa that night, they were jealous, but happy for me. I would have felt the same way if it had been one of my friends, not me. “What’ll you do if he tries something?” they both asked me, and I told them what I thought I’d do. “What if he’s drinking?” they asked. I reminded them that I had the twins to educate me. Neither of them had an older brother. “What are you going to wear?” “Who do you think will be there?” “You’re so lucky, Izzy.” At that point, I decided that I should play it cool, as if it happened every day; I didn’t want to be the center of a lot of conversation the next day, like some ninth grader going out on her first date, or something. “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t think Marco’s so great.”

  In fact, I didn’t even like him much. One thing I always like in a boy is a slender neck, and Marco had a thick neck, just a chunk connecting his shoulders to his head. But you didn’t have to be wildly in love with someone to go to a party with him.

  The party was at John Wintersize’s house. His parents had sensibly fled the scene, so we had the whole downstairs to ourselves. There was dancing, Ping-Pong, and talk. Sodas and beer were in the kitchen, along with big boxes of chips and pretzels. I fitted in all right and I had a good time.

  Marco and I split up pretty soon after we got there. I danced with a lot of people and sat in on a lot of conversations. Mostly, it was the boys who decided what the conversations were about, because it was the boys, not their dates, who were friends. Every now and then, Marco would come sit down with me, or dance with me. As the night went on he’d try putting his arm around me, but it was just fooling around, not as if he was really interested, not as if he was likely to try anything later. It was just so he’d look good to his friends. I didn’t mind because it showed everyone that I wasn’t a kid, even if I was the only sophomore there.

  The music played continuously and the lights in the room where we were dancing were turned off. The air smelled of beer and smoke, some of which—to my inexperienced nose—seemed suspiciously sweet. I didn’t say anything. The subject didn’t come up.

  Tony Marcel was there, but I didn’t know who with. He never tried to talk to me and didn’t ask me to dance. A couple of times I went into the kitchen when I knew he was there to say, “Hey,” to him, just in passing. I didn’t want him to think I was like half the girls in my class, just falling to pieces whenever he came into view. But I wanted him to know I was there.

  “Hey, Izzy, how’s it going?” he would answer.

  “Fine,” I’d say. Then I’d move back to another room.

  I had to be home by one, my parents said, which meant one-fifteen at the latest. I didn’t mind that. I was having fun, but I didn’t feel entirely at ease. I couldn’t really relax with them, not the way I could with my friends. Marco pretended to be surprised when I went and got him from the group sitting on a long sofa watching Ping-Pong games, but he’d said, “Yes, sir,” to my father when he’d picked me up, so I knew he was faking.

  “That’s what I get for cradle-robbing.” He made a joke. It was, I thought, a pretty predictable joke and not very funny, and I pretended I hadn’t heard it.

  But he didn’t get up. He just sat there, grinning at everybody. I didn’t know quite what to do. Anybody who knows me knows I keep to my curfews and not just because my parents won’t accept excuses. “Hey, are you trying to get me grounded or something?“ I laughed. I wanted to be home on time, but I wasn’t about to make a scene or anything. I didn’t want to make that mistake. I figured the best thing was to treat it like a joke.

  Somebody said Marco couldn’t get up, he’d been sitting there swilling all night. Everybody laughed. Marco laughed too and raised his can of beer as if he were making a toast.

  “I’ll take you home, Izzy,” Tony said.

  I thought—I don’t know what I thought—I thought that was a great idea. I didn’t say anything, of course, but I wouldn’t have minded that one bit.

  “Hey, man, you trying to move in on my date?” Marco asked. He lurched up.

  And there I was, almost with two seniors fighting over me. I remember thinking that and reminding myself that neither one of them was really thinking about me at all.

  Somebody else suggested that Marco should have some coffee before he got behind the wheel, but Marco said he’d only been drinking beer and everyone knew you couldn’t get drunk on beer. He didn’t want any coffee, he said, because his evening wasn’t finished yet, wasn’t anywhere near finished, just becau
se it was time to put the children to bed. He was going to be right back, he said.

  “If it’s inconvenient for you, I can always call my parents,” I suggested, in a sweet and sincere and naive voice. Everybody thought that was pretty funny, except Marco. He began to get angry, which wasn’t cool at all, which made him even angrier.

  I began to wonder if he wasn’t drunker than he was acting, but by then we were almost at the door. Tony and John and a couple of girls were moving with us. The girl with Tony was another senior, who worked with him on the paper, Deborah—never Debby—dark and pretty and smart and funny. She was looking at me, but she didn’t say anything.

  “You all right, man?” John asked Marco.

  “Never better. For Christ’s sake, it’s only a couple of miles.”

  The air outside the door was black and cold, refreshing. I was a little nervous about Marco, but—you just don’t ask somebody else’s date to take you home unless your date really can’t, unless you want the reputation of being more trouble than it’s worth to take you out.

  “Okay, Izzy?” Tony asked me. He didn’t look really worried, just as if he wanted to reassure me. I couldn’t believe the way he was really looking at me, and I grinned at him. I thought that someday, probably not right away, but sooner or later, Tony Marcel was going to ask me out. I knew that, the way you sometimes do, the way you sometimes feel things click into place. Seniors or not, boys were just boys, and they all acted the way boys did. So I grinned at him and did a little dance inside my heart, and said, “I’m okay.”

  In his car, heading down along the dark roads, Marco asked me if I’d had a good time. I told him I had. He said maybe we might do it again sometime, and I laughed inside myself. He was checking me out, to be sure I’d say I’d go out with him again. “You’ll have to ask me and see, won’t you?” I teased.