Izzy, Willy-Nilly

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Thank you,” I said.

  My parents didn’t say so, but I could tell from the way they looked at me that they thought so. The twins had left in such boisterous good humor that I knew they had been relieved by what they had seen in me. Francie had gotten entirely used to the idea, forgetting—the way children do—that things had ever been different and Rosamunde … I don’t think it ever crossed her mind that I wouldn’t. Adjust, that is.

  I knew what they were thinking because everybody began talking about when I was going to go back to school. “The cast comes off at the end of the week,” Dr. Epstein told me. “How do you feel about going back to school?”

  “You’ll want to have it cut and styled,” my mother said, asking me when I wanted to make the appointment for my haircut, “before you go back to school.”

  I could see why they thought I was adjusting so well. But I knew I wasn’t. It was as if my life had cracked in half, and the two parts of it were as different as night and day. The day Izzy was the one everybody saw and talked to. The night Izzy, only I knew about. She was scared; she did a lot of weeping and whining alone in her room. She was ashamed of herself, and she tried hard to make herself accept what had happened, but she couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it. The shock had worn off, but whenever I started to think of everything that had changed, everything I could never have or do now, there was nothing I could do to make myself accept it.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to school, anyway; in fact, I was sure I didn’t want to. When we went to have my hair cut, I knew why.

  I used to like going to have my hair cut. I liked the mirrors in the room and all the smells of lotions and shampoos. I liked to sit there—young and fresh and pretty—and see what the women were having done, to make themselves look younger and prettier. I liked the way my mother’s hairdresser teased me about boyfriends and dances. Not anymore, though. Somebody held the door open so my mother could wheel me in, and a few people who had met me came around to say how sorry they were. What was I supposed to say to that? It’s all right? There were too many people in the room, and their eyes avoided me, and they stared.

  At least, there was no waiting. My mother parked me beside one of the big chairs a normal person would have climbed up into, and Leigh—who always did my hair—got right to work. I don’t think I said more than three words all the time I was there. She clipped and cut. My mother talked, and I concentrated on keeping my face set into a pleasant expression. I didn’t care what they were doing to my hair. I didn’t care about the pockets of whispered conversations all around me. I only cared about getting finished with this.

  Leigh sprayed and trimmed, then worked over my head with a blow-dryer, then trimmed a little more. She must have been half an hour solid on that haircut. When she finally gave me a hand mirror, she sounded pretty pleased with herself.

  I didn’t mind the hand mirror. I looked into it. My face looked pale and my eyes dark blue, and my mother was right about my eyelashes. Somehow, the short hair, feathered around my head and blown back from my face, looked especially good on my eyes. I looked, I thought, a little older. My hair even looked more blond. “Thank you,” I said over my shoulder. “It’s really nice.”

  I guess that’s five words already. I meant it of course, because it was a good haircut. I looked pretty. I thought if I was going to have to be crippled I’d rather not look pretty. I thought, any other time she would have teased me about boyfriends loving it. I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand the way all the women, who had been pretending not to notice me, now had some comment to make about how nice I looked—the other hairdressers and the women with curlers all over their heads.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” my mother said, once we were settled in the car again. “Was it?”

  “It’s a really good haircut,” I answered her. Because it was bad, and these were only strangers. It would be worse, I knew, if they had been people I already knew, from before.

  Adelia had me working on crutches that week, getting ready. She recommended the old-fashioned kind, tall wooden crutches that fitted into my armpits, because eventually I’d have canes and things and the tall crutches would keep me walking straighten I propped myself up on them, trying to remember how the people I’d seen with broken legs or ankles had used them. My blouse pulled up out of the waist of my skirt because of them.

  “It’ll be much more comfortable once that cast comes off,” Adelia told me.

  I nodded, concentrating on how wide to space the crutches, how to step them forward. After a couple of days, I could really sort of move around. Not fast, or anything, but I could go where I wanted, turn or go forward, and keep my balance easily. I started going down the whole length of the room, moving between the other PT patients and their nurses.

  That was my mistake, because while I was looking at the floor and concentrating on balance, I walked myself right up to a full-length mirror.

  I couldn’t stop myself from looking. There was this blond girl with feathery hair, on crutches, with her shirt pulled up and hanging out over her plaid skirt. Her right leg hung down about two inches from the hem, and then stopped.

  It was grotesque.

  It wasn’t so bad, actually. It wasn’t anything as bad as Jeannette Wheatley’s face, in terms of looking at it and wanting to never have to see it again. The skin looked sort of normal colored. There wasn’t a big mass of lumpy flesh at the end of my leg. Just a stump.

  The stump hung down about two inches below my skirt. It looked grotesque.

  Adelia stood behind me, and I looked at the two of us in the mirror. She was much bigger than I was, taller and broader. Her ankles were thick and her calves muscular. I looked at myself again, trying to make myself see it and accept it. That was my grotesque stumpy leg there. I’d never seen it like this, the way it would look to other people. I had to accept it, I guessed, but I couldn’t accept it, and I didn’t want to have to.

  Adelia spoke from behind me. I kept my eyes on the stump, making myself look at it. “There isn’t anything you can do about it, Izzy.”

  I didn’t need her to tell me that.

  “Except maybe wear trousers. You’d pin them up in the back.”

  I’d never thought of that. My mother had removed all my pants from my drawers, so I thought there was some reason not to wear them. But maybe there wasn’t, maybe my mother just thought pinned-up pants looked too crippled, or something.

  I looked at my stump. Pants couldn’t look any more crippled than that did. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Adelia’s bright white uniform and her dark skin. I thought again that she and I had the same kind of problem: Everybody who saw us knew right away what label to use. When Adelia said there wasn’t anything to do about it, she knew what she was talking about.

  I looked into her eyes in the mirror, but she was checking the time. I wondered, then, if she’d ever wanted to do anything about what she was. I did about myself, but that didn’t mean she would change to white if she could. Because we had different kinds of problems, however much they were the same in one way. She’d probably say hers wasn’t even a problem at all, not for her. I hoped that was what she’d say.

  “Definitely pants,” I told her, turning away from the mirror.

  As my mother drove me home, my legs covered with a car blanket and the wheelchair folded in the rear of the station wagon, I asked her. “Why did you take away all my pants?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I need some pants to wear. These skirts are too shot—and—and—I wish you hadn’t gotten rid of my pants.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Oh. Do we have any safety pins? To pin them up with.”

  “You wouldn’t rather have a hem?”

  “No. That would look worse.”

  “But we can’t get pants over the cast, Izzy.” My mother sounded like she was apologizing.

  “Oh.”

  “After Friday, though. Unless—how much does it matter to you? We could
certainly sacrifice a pair of jeans. We could easily slit the leg to make room for the cast.”

  All along the road the dried leaves were being blown by the wind. Leaves rushed toward us, brown and yellow and red, skittering along the roadway, just being blown along.

  “Yes, please,” I said to my mother, suddenly exhausted. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Love, it’s okay. That wasn’t even much of a show of temper. It wasn’t anything like the performances you put on last year.”

  “I’ll have to try harder,” I joked back.

  “You’re doing just fine,” my mother said, serious again. “You’re doing just right. I’m so proud of the way you’ve adjusted.”

  You adjust the hem of a skirt, making it longer or shorter, so in that sense I guess I was adjusted. You adjust the temperature in a room, or an attitude, which means changing it, and in that sense too I had been adjusted. But these were all, as we said in Latin, passive verbs: I was the subject but I didn’t do anything. Everything was done to me, had been done to me. I thought about that, and then, when we got home again, I took out the bag Rosamunde’s mother had given me in the hospital, to think about a design for the blank canvas, to stop thinking about adjustment.

  My mother was going out for lunch and then doing errands and the grocery shopping, so I had the house to myself until Francie came home. I spread out the square of canvas and looked at it: It was a brown mesh, with a white tape sewn all around the edges, about a yard long and a foot and a half wide. I tried to see a picture on it but I couldn’t. So I took the pad of graph paper and a pencil and started sketching.

  It was something to do, I thought, making a lot of little pictures all over the paper, trying to find a shape I liked. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t do it, because there was nobody but me in the house. It didn’t even matter, I thought, looking at a sketch with a tree that looked like one of those rocket lollipops and a straight line for the grass and pillows for clouds, if I couldn’t draw—which I couldn’t. When I got a general design I liked, I took a fresh sheet of graph paper and tried it larger. The tree was in the middle, at stage center. Behind it, I put clouds in layers, trying to make the edges wavy so the sky wouldn’t look striped.

  The hardest thing, I discovered, with that sketch by my side as I tried to x in the squares, the way Rosamunde had said I should, was to get a sense of the tree. I couldn’t figure out how to get the leaves in, the layers and layers, each individual leaf there but making only a part of the whole golden tree.

  Just before Francie was due, I packed all the papers away into the bag and returned them to my room. When Francie came in, I was sitting in the den, reading a beginning needlepoint book. I was looking at different stitches, wondering how I might use them to get the effect I wanted.

  I was having a good time. I was entirely happy right then. I remember recognizing the feeling and looking up, surprised. As soon as I recognized it, however, I lost it. Like a little kid grabbing at a soap bubble, I thought: When you touch it, it bursts.

  Francie slouched into the room and dumped her knapsack to the floor. “There’s nothing to eat.”

  “Have some fruit. Have a jam sandwich. Have some milk. Do you have any colored pens I could use?” I asked her.

  “What for?”

  “Just something. Do you?”

  “Yeah, I have some upstairs.”

  “May I borrow them?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not? What’s the matter with letting me just borrow your pens? I won’t break them or anything.”

  “I don’t have to,” Francie said. “You can’t make me.”

  I knew that. I tried to think of some bribe I could offer her.

  Francie dropped her vest down on top of her knapsack and put her hands on her hips, glaring at me.

  “Boy, what’s wrong with you today?” I asked.

  “Wendy’s having a birthday party.”

  “So what?”

  “She said she wasn’t going to invite me.”

  “Yes, she will, Francie; she always does. Don’t be silly. Why did she say that, anyway?”

  “Because I didn’t vote for her to be the princess in our Christmas play.”

  I almost burst out laughing. It was just like Francie. “And you told her about it, right? Why did you tell her?”

  “Because she was saying it wasn’t fair and somebody must have counted the votes wrong. Because I don’t think they did count the votes wrong.”

  “Who did you vote for?”

  “Me.”

  “Oh.” I knew I shouldn’t laugh, and I didn’t. “Did you win?”

  Francie shook her head, emphatically. “It’s going to be a slumber party. But I told her.”

  “Told her what?”

  “Her mother will make her ask me. So that’s all right.”

  Francie left the room and I sat there in my wheelchair wishing my mother would come home right then, so I could tell her about that conversation. She would get a kick out of that conversation.

  “Anyway,” I called after Francie, wheeling down the hallway to follow her into the kitchen, “can I please, please, borrow your colored pens. Just for an hour?”

  “I told you, no. Ask Mommy to get you some. She gets you anything you want, anyway, now.”

  If I hadn’t been in a wheelchair, I would have stomped out of the room. As it was, I had to back around a couple of times to reverse my direction. If they hadn’t taken the door off the hinges, I could have swung it behind me so hard it would rock back and forth, clump, clump, clump.

  I went back to my own room and took out some homework. If my parents had been home, Francie would never have said that. I scratched out the answer to a problem, waiting for the tightness in my throat to ease up. No wonder Francie didn’t have any real friends.

  There was a knock on the door. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Francie.”

  “Go away,” I said.

  She opened the door and came in. “What are you doing?”

  “I said, go away. That means, don’t come in. I meant what I said.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t do anything about it,” Francie told me.

  I thought I would burst into tears of shame and frustration. I thought I was angry enough to get out of the wheelchair and hustle my sister out of the room by the scruff of her neck. I was angry enough to move normally. Inside my head, the little Izzy blew up like a red balloon. I thought I would throw the math book at Francie’s head.

  I did none of those things. I sat there, half turned toward her, getting control, holding control. I don’t know what I looked like, but Francie got up from the bed and started backing toward the door. I paid no attention to her. It had nothing to do with Francie. It had only to do with me, with my relationship to me.

  “I’m telling,” Francie said. “I’m going to tell Mommy on you. You’re being mean and you’re jealous and I’m telling.”

  She didn’t close the door but that didn’t matter, because she wouldn’t be coming back. I didn’t have to worry about Francie. She was my parents’ problem, handling her, teaching her how to behave like a human being.

  I felt sorry for her, and I would have liked to help. I even knew what was wrong with her. Here was this older sister she envied and admired, who could do anything, as far as Francie knew, and I had turned into a cripple. For years, she had been sort of comparing herself to me, with me as the example, and however she felt about it, she still thought I was the perfect example. Then a terrible thing had happened to me. Francie had to figure out—she was smart enough, that was half her trouble—that terrible things could happen to anybody, whether you were the good sister or the bad sister, or anybody.

  I knew Francie was frightened, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I had myself to take care of first. Because I was frightened too.

  I was sorry to be the cause of Francie’s fears, but she was also blaming me for them. As long as she did that, I knew, thinking about it, as long as she cou
ldn’t stand to feel sorry for me—which she couldn’t stand, because she felt so sorry for me—I couldn’t say anything to her, couldn’t tell her in any way, or show in any way, that this wasn’t as bad as she thought.

  Unless, I thought grimly, it was just as bad as she was thinking it was. And I wasn’t so sure it wasn’t.

  I got back to math, which was pretty soothing stuff at that point. I heard my mother drive up, but she didn’t come to say hello. I guessed she was occupied in the kitchen with Francie. After a while, after a biology chapter and two scenes of Romeo and Juliet, I heard the TV go on. I came out at about the time my father would be home. I rolled right along into the kitchen. My mother had a roast cooking and the salad made, ready to be dressed. She was sitting at the table, going after the legs of a pair of jeans with her big sewing scissors.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  She held out packets of diaper pins. “Will these do? I didn’t know if you’d want pink of blue or yellow pins, so I got all three.”

  “I can color coordinate,” I told her. “Thanks, Mom. I won’t look too awful,” I tried to tell her. “I don’t think.”

  “I don’t care how it looks,” she said, not meaning exactly what she was saying. But I knew what she meant.

  “Anyway, isn’t Francie watching an awful lot of TV?”

  “Oh, Francie,” she said, with no amusement in her voice. “Izzy, I’m sorry—if half of what she told me is accurate, she really was—”

  “Francie-ish,” I finished for her. “It’s okay, Mom. I guess I can live with her.”

  “I’m not sure I can.” She got up to pour herself a glass of wine, then sat down again. “I know—in my bones—she’s going to be all right; she’ll make a good person when she grows up. It’s just going to be so hard on the rest of us, get-ting her there.”

  So my mother was just as surprised as I was when my father came in a few minutes later and handed me a bag. “Francie said you wanted these,” he said. “She said I had to get them on the way home, or everybody here would be upset.”

  It was a box of forty-eight colored pens, stretching out across like a freshly ironed rainbow. I looked at my mother. She didn’t know anything about it. Francie came into the room, as if she was coming in about something else, and looked at the box on my lap.