I still haven’t learned to drive a car. Once I was vacationing with a boyfriend who pulled into the deserted parking lot of a hamburger restaurant and demanded that I at least give it a try. After he pointed out the subtle difference between the gas and brake, we swapped seats, him howling in protest as I swerved out onto the two-lane road. It was a Sunday and there wasn’t any traffic to speak of. I passed a boy on a bicycle and an elderly woman pushing a wheelbarrow. Their close proximity made me nervous, so I moved toward the center of the road, where it felt safer. I sped up, pretending that I was rushing a pregnant woman to the hospital and then I slowed down and wandered onto the gravel shoulder, making believe I’d fallen asleep at the wheel. We came upon a ranch house painted the color of a pencil eraser. A man stood in the front yard. He wore an apron and attended a smoking grill. I tapped the horn and waved, expecting him to drop his tongs and run for cover, reacting as though he had seen a chimp behind the wheel. Rather than diving into the shrubbery, the man raised his mitted hand in salute before returning to his business. It was thrilling that someone might mistake me for a driver, that I might for one brief moment appear responsible and self-reliant. I enjoyed my outing but knew I’d never make a habit of it. Driving is too dangerous, and besides that, I’m just not the type to fill out insurance forms. I moved to cities with decent public transportation systems, Chicago and then on to New York, which is even better because there are more taxis. You hold out your hand for a ride but retire your thumb, folding it against your palm. The drivers don’t speak much English, but that’s partly what you’re paying for: the quiet.
Every now and then I’ll find myself in a car driven by some friend and we’ll pass someone standing by the side of the road. His hair is rowdy from the rush of passing traffic, and his lips move in what is either a curse or a prayer. I want to tell the driver to pull over and stop, but instead, pretending a sudden problem with the radio reception, I lower my head until the ghost has receded from the rearview mirror.
the incomplete quad
I spent my high-school years staring at the pine trees outside my classroom window and picturing myself on the campus of an Ivy League university, where my wealthy roommate Colgate would leave me notes reading, “Meet me on the quad at five.” I wasn’t sure what a quad was, but I knew that I wanted one desperately. My college friends would own horses and monogrammed shoehorns. I’d spend weekends at my roommate’s estate, where his mother would say things like “I’ve instructed Helvetica to prepare those little pan-cakes you’re so fond of, but she’s had a devil of a time locating fresh cape gooseberries.” This woman would have really big teeth that she’d reveal every time she threw back her head to laugh at one of my many witticisms. “You’re an absolute caution,” she’d bray. “Tell me you’ll at least consider joining us this Christmas at Bridle Haven; it just wouldn’t be the same without you.”
I fantasized with the nagging suspicion there was something missing, something I was forgetting. This something turned out to be grades. It was with profound disappointment I discovered it took more than a C average to attend Harvard. Average, that was the word that got to me. C and average, the two went hand in hand.
I was sent instead to a state college in western North Carolina where the low brick buildings were marked with plaques reading ERECTED 1974, and my roommate left notes accusing me of stealing his puka shell necklace or remedial English book. I expect someday to open the newspaper and discover the government had used that campus as part of a perverse experiment to study the effects of continuous, high-decibel Pink Floyd albums on the minds of students who could manufacture a bong out of any given object but could not comprehend that it is simply not possible to drive a van to Europe.
I spent my year buckling down and improving my grades in the hope that I might transfer somewhere, anywhere, else. I eventually chose Kent State because people had been killed there. At least they hadn’t died of boredom, that was saying something. “Kent State!” everyone said. “Do you think you’ll be safe up there?”
I arrived the following September and was assigned to a dormitory largely reserved for handicapped students. It had always been my habit to look away from someone in a wheel-chair, but here I had no choice, as they were everywhere. These were people my own age who had jumped into a deceptively shallow pool or underestimated the linebackers of the opposing team. They had driven drunk on prom night or slipped off their parents’ roof while cleaning the gutters; one little mistake, and they could never take it back. The paraplegics gathered in the lobby, perfecting their wheelies and discussing their customized cars while the quads purred by in their electric chariots, squinting against the lit cigarettes propped artfully between their lips.
The first quarter I roomed with a fellow named Todd, an amiable Dayton native whose only handicap was having red hair. The quadriplegics had the best drug connections, so we often found ourselves hanging out in their rooms. “The hookah’s over on the shelf,” they’d say. “Right next to the rectal suppositories.” Over time I grew accustomed to the sight of a friend’s colostomy bag and came to think of Kent State as something of an I.V. League university. The state would pay your board if you roomed with a handicapped student, so second quarter I moved in with Dale, a seventy-five-pound sophomore with muscular dystrophy. I learned to bathe Dale and set him on the toilet. I turned the pages of his books, dialed the telephone, and held the receiver against his mouth as he spoke. I dressed him and combed his hair, fed him and clipped his toenails, but I can’t say that we were ever close.
Midway through the term Dale was sent back home to live with his parents, and I moved in with Peg, a fun girl with a degenerative nerve disease. Peg was labeled an “incomplete quad” and liked to joke that she couldn’t finish anything. Already we had something in common. She had come to school to escape her parents, who refused her any beverage after 6 P.M. They complained that at the end of a long day, they were simply too worn out to set her on the toilet. God had chosen her to suffer this disease, and if she had any complaints, she should take it up with Him. This was a nasty illness that left its host progressively incapacitated. Peg’s limbs were twisted and unreliable and had a mind of their own. A cup of scalding coffee, a lit cigarette, forks and steak knives — objects sprung from her hands with no prior notice. She wore thick glasses strapped to her head and soiled sheepskin booties on her useless, curled feet. Peg’s voice was slurred to the point that information operators and pizza-delivery services, thinking she was drunk, would hang up on her. Unnerved by the sight of her, Peg’s professors automatically agreed with everything she had to say. “Good question!” they’d shout.
“That’s very perceptive of you. Does anyone else have any thoughts on what she just said?” She might ask to use the bathroom, but because no one could understand her, it was always the same answer. “Good point, isn’t it class!”
In the cafeteria she was met with frantic congeniality. Rather than embarrass themselves trying to figure out her choice of an entrée, they just went ahead and piled everything on her plate.
A person in a wheelchair often feels invisible. Push a wheelchair and you’re invisible as well. Outside of the dorm, the only people to address us would speak as if we were deaf, kneeling beside the chair to shout, “FATHER TONY IS HAVING A GUITAR MASS THIS SUNDAY. WOULD YOU LIKE TO JOIN US?”
Peg would beckon the speaker close and whisper, “I collect the teeth from live kittens and use them to make necklaces for Satan.”
“WELL SURE YOU DO,” they’d say. “THAT’S WHAT OUR FELLOWSHIP IS ALL ABOUT.”
For Peg, being invisible was an old and tiresome story. To me, it definitely had some hidden potential. So began our life of crime.
We started off in grocery stores. Peg had a sack on the back of her wheelchair, which I would fill with thick steaks and frozen lobster tails. There was no need to slink behind pyramids of canned goods, hiding from the manager; we did our stealing right out in the open. Peg carried a canvas bag on her lap and s
tuffed it with everything she could get her hands on. Canned olives, teriyaki sauce, plastic tubs of pudding — our need had nothing to do with it. The point was to take from an unfair world. We quit going to the cafeteria, preferring to cook our meals in the dormitory kitchen, the butter dripping off our chins. We moved on to bookstores and record shops, guaranteed that no one would say, “I think I see that crippled girl stealing the new Joni Mitchell album.” Circumstances prevented us from stealing anything larger than our heads, but anything else was ours for the taking.
For spring break we decided to visit my family in Raleigh. Being invisible has its merits when you’re shoplifting but tends to hold a person back while hitchhiking. We parked ourselves beside the interstate, Peg’s thumb twitching at odd intervals. The five-hundred-mile trip took us close to three days. It was our story that we were a young married couple heading south to start a new life for ourselves. Churchy couples would pull over, apologizing that their car was too small to accommodate a wheelchair. They couldn’t give us a ride, but would we accept twenty dollars and a bucket of fried chicken?
You bet we would. “There’s a hospital in Durham we’re hoping might do some good,” I’d say, patting Peg on the shoulder. “Here we are, a couple of newlyweds, and then this had to happen.”
CB radios were activated and station wagons appeared. Waitresses in roadside restaurants would approach our table whispering, “YOUR BILL HAS BEEN TAKEN CARE OF,” and pointing to some teary-eyed couple standing beside the cash register. We found it amusing and pictured these Samaritans notifying their pastor to boast, “We saw this crippled girl and her husband and, well, we didn’t have much but we did what we could.”
Someone would check us into a motel and give us cash for bus fare, making us promise to never hitchhike again. I’d take Peg out of her chair, lay her on the bed, and sprinkle the money down upon her. It was a pale imitation of a movie scene in which crafty con artists shower themselves with hundred-dollar bills. Our version involved smaller denominations and handfuls of change, but still, it made us feel alive.
We were in West Virginia when one of the wheels fell off Peg’s chair. It was dusk on a rural state highway without a building in sight when an elderly man in a pickup truck swooped in and carried us all the way to my parents’ front door, a trip that was surely out of his way. “Five-four-oh-six North Hills Drive? I’m headed right that way, no trouble at all. Which state did you say that was in?”
We arrived unannounced, surprising the startled members of my family. I’d hoped my parents might feel relaxed in Peg’s company, but when they reacted with nervous discomfort, I realized that this was even better. I wanted them to see that I had changed. Far from average, I had become responsible in ways they could never dream of. Peg was my charge, my toy, and I was the only one who knew how to turn her off and on. “Well,” I said, wiping her mouth with a dinner napkin, “I think it’s time for somebody’s bath.”
My brother and sisters reacted as though I had brought home a sea lion. They invited their friends to stare from the deck as I laid Peg on a picnic blanket in the backyard. My father repaired the wheelchair, and when Peg thanked him, he left the dinner table and returned handing her a second fork.
“She didn’t ask for a fork,” I said. “She asked for your watch.”
“My watch?” he said. “The one I’m wearing?” He tapped his fingers against the face for a moment or two. “Well, golly, I guess if it means that much to her, sure, she can have my watch.” He handed it over. “And your belt,” I said. “She’ll need that, too. Hurry up, man, the girl is crippled.”
My mother visited her hiding place and returned with a wad of cash for our bus fare back to Ohio. She called me into the kitchen and shoved the money into my hand, whispering, “I don’t know what kind of a game you’re playing, mister, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” It was an actual whisper, designed to be heard only by me.
The bus ride back to Ohio was long and cheerless. The second time Peg asked to use the bathroom, I snapped. “You just went three hours ago,” I shouted. “Jesus, what’s your problem, do I have to take care of everything?” It got on my nerves, the way she depended on me. We’d gone on this trip, she’d had a good time, what more did she want? How was it that by the time we left my parents’ house, I was considered the cripple, not her but me, me who had to do everything while she just sat there spilling ashes down the front of her shirt.
My mood deteriorated. We returned to school, where Peg related our adventures to a crowd of friends. I listened in, silently substituting every we for an I. “We” didn’t talk a truck driver out of thirty dollars and a brand-new curling wand, I did that, ME, how dare she take half the credit. “She is some kind of brave,” our classmates would say. “I wouldn’t have the courage to do half the things that she does — and I can walk!”
The spring quarter began but by the second week, I’d stopped attending class, deciding instead to bone up on my drugs and become my own private adventurer. I signed up for sky-diving lessons at the local airfield. The training sessions were deceptively simple, but when the time came for the actual jump, they had to pry my white knuckles off the wing of the plane. I begged and pleaded and all the way down I pictured myself in a wheelchair, hoping that the person assigned to care for me would have none of my qualities. The earth was a grid, a quilt of tidy patches maintained by sensible, hardworking people who played by the rules and treated every stranger as though he were Christ in disguise. My parachute opened and I promised God that once I landed safely, I would turn my life around. I’d spin the globe and wherever my finger landed, I would go there. Even if it was one of those countries where people squatted in the soil, eating porridge from their shit-smeared palms, I would go. I’d swat the flies from their dung-colored faces and carry them piggyback across crocodile-infested waters if that’s what it took to clear my name. The harness between my legs was causing unbearable pain, and I accepted it as my first test of strength and tolerance. The Lord could have my testicles. I’d grant him a finger or two and even throw in a couple of teeth if I had to, just so long as He left me my spinal column. I hit the ground running and didn’t stop until I was a half mile from my landing site. When the instructor came to gather my parachute, I stubbed out my joint, saying, “I don’t see what all the fuss was about. That was nothing.”
At the end of the school year I hitchhiked to San Francisco, enchanted with the idea of leading an adult life surrounded by people who could wash their own hair. My friend Veronica got me a room at a residence hotel, and I found work as a bicycle messenger. The streets of my neighborhood were fragrant with eucalyptus trees, and every passing stranger offered the hope that tomorrow just might be the day I was offered a comfortable job or a twelve-room apartment. I was far from my family and often pictured them suffering their vacations without me. They had treated me poorly, but I had come out on top because that was the kind of person I was, headstrong and independent. Me, the winner.
I was cooking spaghetti and ketchup in my electric skillet one night when I heard the pay phone ring outside my room. It was Peg, calling to say she had rolled away from home.
“Good for you,” I said. “This is going to be the best thing you’ve ever done.” When I learned she was calling from the San Francisco airport, I modified my statement, saying, “I don’t know about this, Peg. Won’t your parents be worried about you? What about your education?”
What followed was a lesson that college bears no resemblance to civilian life. Leaving the building involved carrying Peg up and down five flights of stairs before returning for her wheelchair. The landlord charged me a double rate for having a guest in my room, and I lost my job when Peg fell against the bathtub, taking five stitches in her head. This was a big city where people held on to their fried chicken. Nobody cared that we were a young married couple searching for a better life and not even the buses would stop to pick us up. Fed up, Veronica and I decided to head north to pick apples. I told Peg, hoping she m
ight accept the news and return home, but she held fast. Armed with a telephone directory, she placed collect calls to government agencies whose workers held the line when she dropped the phone or took twenty minutes to locate a pen. Volunteers wheeled her to meetings in cluttered ground-floor offices where paraplegics raised their fists in salute to her determination and tenacity. She wound up living alone in a brick apartment building somewhere in Berkeley. An attendant visited every twelve hours to prepare her meals and help her onto the toilet. If a spasm sent her onto the floor, she lay there patiently until help arrived to dress her wounds. When her parents called, she either hung up or cursed them, depending upon her mood. Peg’s greatest dream was to live far from her parents and enjoy a satisfying sexual encounter. She sent a postcard detailing the event. There had been three wheelchairs parked around her waterbed, the third belonging to a bisexual paraplegic whose job it was to shift the lovers into position. Within a year her health deteriorated to the point where she could no longer be left alone for twelve-hour stretches. We both wound up crawling back to our parents but continued to keep in touch, her letters progressively harder to read. The last I heard from her was in 1979, shortly before she died. Peg had undergone a religious transformation and was in the process of writing her memoirs, hoping to have them published by the same Christian press that had scored a recent hit with Joni!, a book detailing the life of a young quadriplegic who painted woodland creatures by holding the brush between her teeth. She sent me a three-page chapter regarding our hitchhiking trip to North Carolina. “God bless all those wonderful people who helped us along the way!” she wrote. “Each and every day I thank the Lord for their love and kindness.”
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