Izzy, Willy-Nilly

by Cynthia Voigt

But I was faking it. Inside, I was cold and gray. Joel’s words—whatever it was he was saying—didn’t even come close to touching me, not even their color touched the surface of my eyeballs.

  It was so solitary there inside myself. I just wanted someone to reach in there and connect, just for a minute, just so I would know it could be done.

  Joel wasn’t planning on staying long, I could tell by the way he’d look at his watch as if he had a class to make. I could tell by the way he kept the subject on front-end suspensions that he was talking from about one-third of his attention, and the rest was busy doing something else. Just the way I was listening with about one-third of my attention, and the rest was busy. The more he talked, and the more he kept his words out between us, the more I got frightened and the more it bothered me to have him sitting there, not trying to really connect.

  Finally, because it was either that or burst into tears, I interrupted him. “Why didn’t Jack come?”

  Joel’s voice stopped dead.

  “Joel?” I reminded him that I was there and had asked a question.

  He shrugged, and grinned. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “There’s this girl…”

  I knew he was lying, because that’s exactly what I do when I lie. You look someone straight in the eye so they’ll believe you’re telling the truth. I knew that, but I didn’t know what his lie was supposed to hide. He was hiding things from me, and I wondered if something terrible had happened to Jack.

  Whatever it was, it was so bad that Joel wasn’t going to tell me. That meant it was pretty bad. I no longer wanted to know. He was getting up, telling me he had to get going, to see the parents and get back to school in time.

  “In time for what?” I asked.

  “Just a party,” he said, looking all around my room, “but I’ve been looking forward to it.”

  “I’ll tell you who I think has a girl,” I said. That made him look worried, and he was trying hard to keep his face cheerful. “Say hi to Jack for me, will you?”

  He took his bright balloon words with him, and the room was empty. Empty, that is, except for me where I sat alone in it.

  That was when I began to realize how much everything had changed. I realized then that my friends weren’t going to come to keep me company, because on the weekends, on Saturday morning, we made our plans, depending on who had what shopping to do, or if any of us had a date or a party, or whatever was going on. They were probably going to be doing something anyway, in the afternoon. They probably would rather do that than come to the hospital, anyway. Probably it made them sick to look at me.

  Probably nothing had happened to Jack too; probably he just didn’t want to look at me.

  I’d never minded being alone, or feeling alone—like, especially, if I was out in the country somewhere, I liked to get away alone and concentrate on everything there was to see and hear. But before, I’d always been alone just until whatever was going to happen next. There was always something coming along to happen next, so I could enjoy being alone until then. Now, I was alone until—nothing was going to happen next.

  As if I was being punished, as if it was my fault. As if I wanted to be crippled.

  The long minutes of the afternoon dragged by. I had the TV on, for the noise and something to look at. In a way, I didn’t really believe the phone wouldn’t ring, or the noises in the hall wouldn’t turn into someone coming to see me. In a way, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to sit alone in my room all day. So, in a way, I was expecting something, as the minutes went by, one after the other after another.

  I began to think about them, about Suzy and Lisa and Lauren. They ought to come and see me, they ought to know I’d like company. I’d have gone to see them, I knew that. My mother would have made me, even if I hadn’t thought of it myself.

  But I didn’t want anybody coming to see me if they didn’t want to. And nobody wanted to, it looked like. I thought I’d like to tell them a thing or two. Tears began to trickle down my face, because … They didn’t have to treat me this badly, and they really shouldn’t do it now. Not now. Not when everything had changed.

  I had half a mind to call Suzy up and tell her… how much she’d hurt my feelings. She should at least be feeling bad about it. I dried my eyes, scrubbing at them with a tissue, thinking about what a rotten best friend Suzy made. She could at least call.

  My mother came into the room after a while and said it was time to get me into the wheelchair for a ride, because Francie was downstairs and wanted to see me. Was I too tired? she asked me. Was I warm enough in the bed jacket, which looked very nice, didn’t it?

  Downstairs, Francie sat with my father on one of the big sofas near the main entrance. She was clutching Pierre in her arms. My father’s arm was around her. Francie just stared for a long time. I didn’t know what to say, so I sort of looked back at her and then at old green Pierre, clutched at her chest. I looked at the goofy green face and the place where Francie had loved off one of his eyes.

  After a while, my father asked her, “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  “Hi, Izzy.”

  I knew how she felt, the way you feel when everybody around you is sad and serious. Like when somebody else’s dog has died, and you’re trying to think of something to say.

  They didn’t stay long. My mother wheeled me back into the big elevator, where a couple of visitors kind of looked at me, then looked away. When we were back in my room, and I was back up on the bed, I finally asked my mother. “Can I go home? Mom?” At home, at least, I would know every there, and now everybody had seen me there wouldn’t be that first time.

  “I don’t think so. Saul hasn’t said anything about that.”

  I just wanted to be in my own bed, in my own room. I wasn’t going to ask for a lot of attention, or anything, or special care.

  “I know it feels long, but it hasn’t actually been that long, Angel, and your body has had—a pretty bad shock.”

  She didn’t even want to say yes. She didn’t want me to come home. She had that distracted look on her face that meant she wasn’t telling me something but she was thinking about it. I’d seen it before, like when she would ask me to babysit for Francie because she and Dad simply needed an evening out on their own, just the two of them having dinner and going to a movie, and then Francie came in to say she needed help with her spelling words or her math problems. Before she could answer Francie, my mother would stand there with a distracted look on her face while she juggled out how many reasons there were for them to stay home and help Francie, and how many to go out and pay attention to themselves.

  For Francie they usually stayed home, I thought.

  “Saul would have to give permission. He’ll tell us when it’s the right time,” my mother said. She pulled my blanket up. I shoved it down. “You’re going to have to be patient, Lamb.”

  They didn’t want me at home. She didn’t.

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “You look tired,” she agreed, brushing my hair off my forehead.

  I didn’t want her to do that. I pushed the button to flatten out my bed. There I was, and this horrible thing had happened to me, and she was thinking that it was inconvenient to have me home.

  I didn’t want to think about that, because I could sort of understand how they’d feel about having a crippled kid, all the problems and all. I shut my eyes. I heard her leave the room.

  As soon as she’d gone, I raised the bed again and turned on the TV. My mother didn’t come back and see what I had done. Probably, I thought, because she’d been in a big hurry to get back down to join Dad and Francie and get back home to whatever was so important there.

  Dr. Epstein came in for the daily examination. This time he kept me flat on my back for longer than usual because he was changing the bandage. I didn’t mind, I just lay there as silent as always. When he raised the back of the bed and I hunched myself into a comfortable sitting position, he asked me, “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” I
said.

  “How do you like Helen?” He must have seen that I didn’t know who he was talking about. “Hughes-Pincke,” he added.

  “Oh, she’s fine.”

  “PT going all right?” he asked. “Physical therapy,” he said.

  “Oh. Yes. Fine.”

  I thought it was time he left. It was Saturday, after all, and he should be home with his family. He picked up my hand and looked at my fingernails, as if he was studying them. This, I knew, was a way of looking for anemia. Lauren’s mildly anemic, which is how I learned that. I waited.

  “Are you losing weight?” he asked me.

  I didn’t know.

  “Okay, Izzy, I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re doing well, you know.”

  “Then can I go home soon?”

  “Not right away,” he said, stopping partway out of my room, turning around to give my question his full attention. “Not for at least a week more, and probably closer to two weeks.” That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “You’re young and you’re healthy, but it still takes time, even for people who are young and healthy. To heal.”

  I just nodded my head and bit at the inside of my cheeks.

  The afternoon dragged by. I had a snack of peanut butter crackers and an apple, but it wasn’t crunchy peanut butter so I didn’t eat it, and the apple wasn’t at all crisp. Dinner came in, but I wasn’t hungry. I ate the mashed potatoes, because the gravy was okay, but left the two thin slices of meat and the limp salad and the lumpy pudding and the peas. I never eat peas.

  I thought, as the TV played over my head, that if only Suzy would come by, just to say hello, just for a minute, or call up, just to say hello—but it was too much trouble for her. For them. For any of them. They had more interesting things to do.

  I thought that, somehow, I’d just disappeared from their lives, like sliding down into water and the water closes over your head as if you’ve never been there.

  I told myself that probably Suzy had something she had to do, or maybe she thought I was too sick or something. I told myself that I ought to make an effort. So I picked up the phone and dialed Suzy’s number. Ms. Wilkes answered. I asked for Suzy.

  “She’s out, I thought she’d have told you. They said—they had some shopping to do and they were going to stop by and see you. I guess they didn’t?”

  “I guess they didn’t have time.”

  “But I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” Ms. Wilkes’s voice went on, warm and gushy, “just to say how terribly sorry I am. Oh, we all are. We all just feel so bad for you, it seems so cruel and unnecessary and—it’s a terrible thing,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “When I think that it was just a week ago. Just last week—we’ve been so worried and unhappy. But you mustn’t mind about Lauren, dear; it just hits some people like that. Some people are like that and I’m afraid Lauren is one of them.”

  Like what, I wondered. What had Lauren been saying?

  “And I tried to tell her, as a mother, the way I feel, because she doesn’t have a real mother, just that stepmother and her own mother out living it up, thinking only of herself. I tried to tell her that it’s so terrible, and you young people are so careless, as if nothing could hurt you, that if we can take it as a warning, or a lesson, and learn from it. Try to salvage some good from this tragic thing. Then maybe something good can come out of this terrible thing that’s happened to you. But you know Lauren, she never listens to anyone. I just hope—”

  I never found out what she hoped. I had this picture of the little Izzy inside my head, standing there waving her detached leg at a crowd of people, like a safety monitor waving her stop sign.

  “Tell Suzy I called, would you please?” I interrupted Ms. Wilkes.

  “I certainly will. I’ll tell her more than that, because I told them how lonely it can get in the hospital, and they promised me they’d go see you. In fact, I’m pretty angry at Suzy. She let me think she’d seen you. That counts as a lie, in my book.”

  I rang off. Ms. Wilkes didn’t know how many little lies Suzy told her, just to keep her from creeping into Suzy’s life and taking it over. Suzy’s friends knew. It was friends who really knew all about you, what you were really thinking about, what you really wanted. I felt that way about my friends, anyway; that they were the ones who knew me.

  Listening to Ms. Wilkes really got me down, I thought. What was I supposed to do with all her pity and her learning lessons? I thought I might call Lisa, and we could talk about it and laugh about how bad what she said was—but I didn’t dare. Lisa would have been there too, shopping and not coming to see me.

  You’d have thought that I’d have been all cried out, but I wasn’t. You’d have thought I’d have been able not to just sit there, with the light out, thinking about how I wished—

  Wishing I’d never said I—d go to the party with Marco, wishing that people could, like some other creatures can, grow back lost limbs, wondering if, if I wished hard enough if maybe I could, thinking how I’d feel if I woke up in the morning to find that this whole thing was a dream. Sometimes dreams seemed so real you had to believe them. Or if I could wake up and find my leg back. I knew how that would feel, and I knew what I’d think and how surprised my parents would be, because if that happened, I’d just put on a bathrobe and walk home and I’d come to the door and ring the doorbell, and they’d open it there I’d be, standing on my own two legs.

  But the next morning, when I woke up, nothing had changed. I never knew until then, I never even suspected because I always just sort of figured people weren’t trying hard enough to cheer up, how it felt to be depressed.

  I’d been miserable. I’d been blue. But depressed, no, I hadn’t been that. I never knew how it felt to sigh out a breath so sad you could almost see tears in it. I never knew the way tears would ooze and ooze out of your eyes. I never knew the way something could hang like a gray cloud over all of your mind and you could never get away from it, never forget it.

  My parents both came and played three-handed rummy and talked about one thing and another. But their voices never got through the cloud. They didn’t suspect anything, though, except that I was tired, which I kept telling them. I wasn’t about to do any weeping and wailing in front of anyone. If I found myself doing that, I thought, I’d be nothing but ashamed, nothing but a puddle of shame. It was bad enough being crippled.

  Lisa and Suzy did come in the midafternoon, and my parents looked relieved to see them. “We’ll leave you alone to tell girlish secrets,” my mother said. “See you tomorrow, Lamb.”

  I sat up in bed and tried not to look the way I felt. There was a gray heaviness lying on my shoulders and swelling up like a balloon under my heart. I guessed, although I didn’t ask about it, that somebody had given them an earful.

  The first thing I heard was a lot of excuses about yesterday, and then a lot of not-telling what had gone on yesterday evening, whatever that was supposed to keep me from knowing. Finally, not because I was interested, but just because it would get them talking and keep them from staring at me, I asked about what was happening at school. They started slow, but they got warmed up pretty soon and told stories across my bed, talking to one another. Suzy had taken the only chair so Lisa—after looking once at the foot of the bed—wandered around, sometimes leaning against the foot of the bed. I concentrated on looking normal.

  After about half an hour—but it felt like about three hours—Suzy looked at her watch and said in a great fake voice that she didn’t know it had gotten so late. I caught Lisa looking at my face, and her eyes looked as if she had a lot of things to say, but wasn’t going to.

  “Yeah, it is late,” I said, agreeing with Suzy that it was time to go.

  “It’s impossible during the week,” she said to me, but not meeting my eyes. “I mean, I’m so busy—but next weekend, for sure. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

  I shook my head, knowing that my voice would shake if I tried to use it.

 
“When are you going home?” Lisa asked.

  I shrugged, to say I didn’t know.

  “I bet you’re looking forward to that,” Lisa said.

  I pushed the ends of my mouth out into a smile to show that, yes, I was.

  Finally they left. I unclenched my teeth, unclenched the muscles around my eyes, which had been holding the tears back, and the miniature Izzy in my head just stood there, hanging onto a walker, all drooped over it. They’d been forced to come. They hadn’t even ever asked about what had happened to me. “How are you?” they asked and I said, “Fine,” and they took that for the truth.

  Gray water rose up over the miniature Izzy’s bent head.

  7

  It finally struck me, as the next week went slowly by, Monday morning to afternoon to evening, Tuesday to Wednesday, that everybody asked the same question. “How are you?”

  I said the same answer, “Fine.”

  There wasn’t, of course, very much of an everybody. My mother came every day, whenever in her day she had a free hour or two. She’s always busy, always doing something. I didn’t know what was keeping her so busy, which project or which committee, but I knew I could count on seeing her every day, in the afternoon or evening. My father came to have lunch with me. He’d buy it at a deli—a big sandwich and a pickle, a carryout container of iced tea—and I’d watch him eat. He’d knock on the door, even though it was open. I’d say come in and he’d sit down and unpack his lunch onto his lap. Hospital lunches were served early, so I’d always finished with whatever I was having. I’d watch him eat and then we’d talk about different things. “How are you?” he’d ask, as he sat down.

  “Fine,” I’d say.

  Lisa called a couple of evenings and we’d talk for a few minutes, general gossip and what was going to be on TV. She was the only one who called. Most of the time, the phone sat black and silent and sulky on the table. Suzy didn’t call me and I didn’t try calling her again. I knew what was going on. Ms. Wilkes had made me her “Cause of the Week” to nag Suzy about; and Suzy was rebelling, as she always did. So it was only Lisa who’d be on the other end when the phone rang. “How are you?” she’d ask.