Izzy, Willy-Nilly

by Cynthia Voigt

  Francie came in, dead tired, and went up to bed. I would have liked to talk to Rosamunde, but I knew she was babysitting almost all during the holidays, except Thursday, when she would be with her family.

  I was depressed, or maybe just sad. My heart felt kind of sore and swollen. I told myselfs—titching, waiting for it to be time to go to bed, wondering when my parents would get in—that I would feel better in the morning. I reminded myself of the way my moods switched. That didn’t make me feel any better, but it kept me from feeling much worse.

  Maybe because the day was gray and drizzly and the trees were bare, or maybe because I woke up so much earlier than anyone else, maybe that was why Thanksgiving Day wasn’t any easier than Thanksgiving Eve had been. I was just as glad it was gray and drizzly outside, since that matched how I felt inside. However, once everybody was up and hanging around in the kitchen, either frantically busy getting the turkey stuffed and into the oven, or sitting around being bored until the next period of frantic activity began, I forgot about being gloomy.

  This was, in fact, the best family time of any holiday. We all knew it, I think, but we all pretended it wasn’t true, because we thought the best ought to be when we were dressed up and sitting around the table together. My mother loves that kind of family occasion. I think she likes to sit at one end of the table, looking at the food she’s cooked and the children she’s raising and the husband she’s been married to for twenty good years. I don’t blame her. But she never seems to learn that by the time dinner’s on, everybody is sort of frazzled, and bored with one another. Families don’t work according to holiday timetables. By the time we all sat down to these ceremonial meals, everybody was already thinking about what was coming up next. My father, who is more realistic and practical, seems to know this. He always has a couple of discussion topics he brings to the holiday table with him.

  We always start Thanksgiving dinner out with a minute of silence. I looked all around, while that slow minute ticked by. Ivory and rose were the colors of the room. The silver on the table shone against the linen cloth. My parents sat at either end. Francie sat quiet beside me. My brothers, in dark suits and striped ties, sat across, looking young and handsome, looking mischievous but reliable. They sat quite solemn, both of them, and as the minute ended I nudged Francie and whispered, “Look at them, just look at them.”

  She knew what I meant, and smiled sideways at me. I thought, for an unexpected lifting moment, that we could eventually get to be good friends, my sister and I; then her eyes went to my father, who held the carving knife over the turkey, to measure her share of skin against everyone else’s, and I thought it would be a while before that time came.

  I got too much attention that dinner, for Francie’s taste and for mine too. I was wearing dark corduroy pants, which was the closest thing I owned to dressy trousers, with a blouse my mother had loaned me. They all agreed with my mother that I looked pretty, a little older, and certainly well. “But I like long hair on a girl,” Jack said. “I wish somebody would cut my hair,” Francie said and Joel winked at me. My mother wanted to give a party for me, maybe over Christmas, which everybody thought was a great idea. Everybody except me, that is, and Francie too, i f you count her insistence on having equal time for a party of her own as disagreement. Nobody listened to my objections until I finally asked them please to lay off. Then they all stared at me. “I don’t even know who I’d invite,” I told them.

  My mother started to override that, but Joel and Jack said that maybe instead they’d give a party, over Christmas, one of those open house parties, and invite almost everybody they’d ever met, especially kids from school, to catch up with what was going on. That diverted my mother, who wasn’t sure she wanted to take on a party for the twins. Jack said we’d invite Rosamunde too, and I said she probably wouldn’t come, and he raised his eyebrows in disbelief. I said Rosamunde and I would go to the movies, or something, or I’d find someone else go with me. Francie said she’d go with us, if it wasn’t a horror movie. My father cleared his throat. He cleared it again. We all gave my father our full attention.

  “I’ve been thinking—your mother and I have been talking about it—How would you children like to have a swimming pool put in?”

  That was odd, I thought, because we had asked him before if we could have one, and he had always said it was too expensive.

  “That’s expensive, isn’t it, Dad?” Joel asked.

  “I think we could find the money.”

  “With a diving board?” Francie started on a list of requests.

  “Where would it go?” Jack wondered.

  “We’ve got plenty of yard space. We’d have to fence it in, so nobody would just—wander into it,” my mother told us. “But not chain link, something wooden.”

  “Could I invite people over whenever I wanted?” Francie asked. “Will it have a deep end?”

  “I guess,” Joel said thoughtfully, “it would increase the value of the property. It’s probably not a bad investment.”

  My father agreed. “However, it would mean we wouldn’t take a summer vacation. And we’d have to do the maintenance on it ourselves.”

  “We’d still go to the club pool, wouldn’t we?” Francie asked.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “We can’t ask Daddy to give up his golf.”

  “Or my tennis,” Francie said.

  “Besides,” I said, since they seemed to be waiting for me to say something, “you can take it off taxes.” I had figured out what he and my mother were doing, and I did think it was pretty nice of them, but I also felt—bitter. They would put in a pool, build a high fence all around it, and I would be able to get exercise. Swimming was good exercise. It was even going to be part of my PT program, after Christmas. With our own pool, shielded from anybody looking in, they thought it wouldn’t be so embarrassing for me.

  “Do you like the idea, Izzy?” my father asked me.

  I knew he wanted me to be excited about it. But I couldn’t be, because I could just see myself in a bathing suit. However, I wanted to say something right to him, because he was doing what he always did—taking good care of us, making sure everything was the best he could provide for us. The trouble was, he couldn’t possibly understand how depressing it was to even think about swimming, and summer, and how I would look in a bathing suit. I didn’t know how I could swim with only one leg, anyway.

  “It would certainly be convenient,” I said.

  He was disappointed, but the look my mother gave him warned him not to say anything. He wanted me to be really pleased, but I just couldn’t be. I was grateful, and I knew I would like having our own pool to swim in privately, since I had to swim.

  “Thanks, Dad, both of you,” I said. He couldn’t know how it felt to be a fifteen-year-old girl with part of a leg amputated and my whole life changed. “I’m pretty lucky,” I said to him. He liked hearing that; he thinks we ought to appreciate what we have.

  “You’re talking like it’s going to be Izzy’s pool,” Francie objected. “It’s mine too; I’m in this family too. I ’ l l get to use it too, won’t I?”

  “Sure, except for whatever we decide is Izzy’s special time,” my father said.

  He had it all worked out in his head, because he’s thorough about things. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Summer was a long way off.

  “But that’s not fair, unless I have a special time too,” Francie argued. “And i f she has a special time, what i f I have a friend over and we want to go swimming? What i f it’s a really hot day and we can’t go swimming because it’s Izzy’s special time? What i f I have a friend who can only come over at a certain time—”

  “Francesca,” my father warned her. Jack and Joel were just laughing at the way Francie’s mind worked. I was wishing I could leave the table, because—because my being there, in the family, was making demands, and they were acting like I wanted to make them or had no right to make them. Nobody understood, nobody could understand. I felt shoved into
some special area, away from everybody else; I felt like they were trying to pretend I was still normal, ignoring the useless stump of a leg that would hang down i f I stood up. I didn’t know what to think—except that I wanted to get away where I wouldn’t have to think about it at all.

  Instead, however, I tried to quiet Francie down, before she worked herself up into a real fit and totally ruined the day. “We can negotiate,” I said. “I’ll let you trade TV hours or something, i f you want to. If you’ll give me two of your TV hours, I’l l give you one of my pool hours.”

  “But that’s not fair, that’s twice—” she started. Then she said, “Are you teasing me?”

  “Sort of. But we can change our schedule, i f we need to.”

  “Okay. If you promise.”

  “I promise,” I promised. That was the end of the scene. I didn’t feel any better, but everybody else did; and since I couldn’t feel any better, it was good enough that they did. “How about one of those slides?” I asked my father, who was glad to have a practical question.

  We went on to what kind of material we’d want the walks around the pool made of and what kind of planting up against the fence and what kind of poolside furniture. My father and Jack talked about the machinery involved in keeping the filter system working. They were both eager to learn how to run the kind of pump-house equipment a pool would require, and they had forgotten, in their eagerness for machinery, what was the first cause of all this. That is, me. I watched them talk and thought how alike they were in that. If there was a problem, they both wanted to do something about it, build a pool or kill Marco.

  I couldn’t blame them for not understanding, and I didn’t want to. I just realized, for about the first time in my life, I think, that there were some things, if I expected them of my father, I was bound to be disappointed.

  That didn’t bother me, or anything. Neither did realizing the same thing about Jack. I could count on them to take care of me, but—

  It is possible to be too busy being practical. There are some problems that don’t have practical solutions, or that have more kinds of solutions than just practical ones. Or that have no solutions.

  Francie and I did the dishes, with her grousing that all I did was stand by the sink and rinse off while she had to do everything else, and it was hard, until I finally did blow up at her. I told her she was entirely too self-centered. She went wailing out of the room and I tried to finish the dishes by myself. I was glad when Joel came in to replace her, because rinsing a plate, then hopping along until I could put it in the dishwasher, then hopping back to get the next one—I didn’t know how I was going to manage to scour the roasting pan. Joel told me that he and Jack were going to take me out for dinner the next night.

  “But—” I said. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to think about it.

  “Nowhere fancy, we thought we’d drive up to the Inn at Kirk’s Crossing. You don’t have to wear a tie or anything.”

  “I never have to wear a tie.”

  “C’mon, Izzy. You’ll be with us; it’ll be all right.”

  “All right? Going out with you two wild men?” I knew I’d have to do it, for their sakes i f not for my own.

  “You want to ask a friend?½

  “Lisa?”

  “No, not her, she’s—Rosamunde?”

  “Did Jack suggest her?”

  “Yes, why? Mom says she’s the one you’re seeing most of these days. Jack says he can put up with her for your sake—if she’ll wear a decent skirt or something.”

  But Rosamunde couldn’t come with us, because she had a babysitting job. She wouldn’t, she said, try to get a substitute. She needed the money, and besides she’d given her word. Jack got on the phone to try to argue with her, but she shut him up in about half a minute, demanding to talk to me again. “Do you mind?” she asked me. “I mean, do you want moral support? I don’t have anything that would look right anyway, Izzy.”

  “Just the three of us then,” Jack said.

  “You could take me,” Francie suggested.

  “No, we couldn’t,” Joel said.

  “Izzy gets everything,” Francie complained. “Just because she’s crippled.”

  There was a silence after that remark. The silence was so immediate that even Francie realized what she’d said. The twins couldn’t think of anything to say. My parents filled the thick silent air with their anger and embarrassment. Everybody looked at me. Francie’s eyes were wide and scared.

  I was standing on my crutches, and there was no way around the situation. The little Izzy in my head was beet red. But why, I asked myself, should I feel embarrassed? Because I did, I felt like I ought to be saying I was sorry.

  Nobody said anything and the silence filled up with all the things nobody was saying. Nobody said, “No she’s not.” Nobody could say that. Nobody said, “That doesn’t make any difference,” because it made all the difference in the world. Everybody just looked at me, wondering what I was going to do, everybody worrying about me.

  “Well,” I finally said, “every cloud has a silver lining.”

  That exploded them into talk. My father sent Francie to her room, until she could learn to govern herself, which Jack suggested might take several years. My mother said she hoped I wasn’t going to get bitter. I said I thought it was a joke, and I did think it was pretty funny, i f you thought about it. Joel told all of us to take it easy, please. Jack said he was—oh hell—going to have a brandy, and my parents didn’t argue. I went to bed, leaving them alone to worry and wonder and make plans where I wouldn’t have to be aware of it.

  As Thanksgivings go, it was one of the worst I remember.

  19

  On Sunday, I was trying to tell Rosamunde about the way the vacation had gone, trying to explain to her—and to myself—what I had been thinking about. I never told her, because I never told anyone, because I tried to forget about it and I succeeded, as if it never happened, about the way I carried on once I was alone in my room. What I told her about was the way my family acted. About me. My father, who was busy making plans, making adjustments; my mother who didn’t seem able to imagine any other kind of life than the one I had used to be headed for; my sister who was so filled with jealous resentment; and the twins, whose polite behavior at the restaurant had been as out of character as their asking me out for dinner. “I don’t know, Rosamunde,” I finally wound down. “I thought they were taking me out to show me, you know, that it wasn’t that bad, that it wasn’t going to make that much of a difference. But I got the feeling they were really doing it to show themselves.”

  “Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?” Rosamunde asked me. I was sitting at the desk, in a chair, with my crutches on the floor nearby. She was lying on her stomach on the big bed, facing me. “I mean, everybody is insincere that way. Even you. I mean, you act like you’re doing so well but… you don’t look different, but you sort of do … and I bet you’re still depressed a lot of the time, even though you don’t show it.”

  I didn’t admit she was right because—at that moment—I’d forgotten about it. I would have been ashamed to tell her about how I spent some of the nighttime hours, anyway. I was ashamed to admit it to myself.

  “Isn’t that true, Izzy?“

  “Not really,” I denied it. That was true, I thought, kidding myself. “So you’d say Francie is just, trying to show her sympathy?”

  “Not exactly. It’s her pity that she’s trying not to show. Like the people in the restaurant, the way you said they stared.”

  “That was terrible,” I said.

  “The trouble is, you”re used to people looking at you and envying you, wishing they were you. You’re not used to people looking at you and pitying you and being glad they aren’t you. But if you look at it from another angle, they’re both the same mistake, because people aren’t even seeing you”

  I just stared at her. Not looking at her either, I thought, but looking at the idea she had just given me.

  “Pr
obably, that’s why you’re dragging your heels about coming back to school. Dragging your heel, that is,” she said, and giggled. “Oh, Izzy, I’m sorry. That was sick.”

  “Yeah, but funny,” I admitted. “I’m not, though. I’m just not strong enough, physically.”

  “That’s not true,” Rosamunde announced. “I think you’re scared. And I don’t blame you, not a bit. But you’re going to have to do it, sometime.”

  “You’ve got gray eyes,” I announced to her.

  Rosamunde changed to a sitting position. “You’re switching the subject.”

  “No, I’ve never noticed before—they’re gray, with a real rim of dark gray around them. Let me make up your face, Rosamunde.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Izzy—” She sounded disgusted with me.

  “Not much, just to see if—why are you so frightened of makeup. And things?” I asked her.

  She smiled at me. “Touché.”

  “So, will you let me? Nobody’ll ever know.”

  “I bet. This is the beginning of the Improve Rosamunde Campaign. Isobel Lingard, aka Fairy Godmother, with a touch of her magic wand, or magic blush brush, and suddenly I’ll be—all the things I’m not.”

  “Sorry,” I said, sarcastic. I knew that tone of voice was one she’d listen to. “You’ll never make a Cinderella.”