Lizzie!

by Maxine Kumin

  Praise for Lizzie!

  “Smart, spunky, and delightfully quirky, Lizzie is an unforgettable heroine.” —Kyoko Mori, author of Shizuko’s Daughter

  “This is the captivating young adult novel we might well expect from Maxine Kumin, whose poems are some of America’s best crafted and most enjoyable.” —X. J. Kennedy, poet and author of The Owlstone Crown

  “I love Lizzie!—the novel and the delightful, spirited girl at the heart of it.”—Hilma Wolitzer, author of Introducing Shirley Braverman and Out of Love

  “As a blind author and lover of literature, I have always wanted to read a story about a hero or heroine with a disability whose disability isn’t central to the plot. Lizzie! is a wonderful read about just such a character.” —Laurie Rubin, author of Do You Dream in Color?

  Lizzie!

  Maxine Kumin

  Illustrations by Elliott Gilbert

  Seven Stories Press

  Triangle square

  books for young readers

  New York • Oakland

  Copyright © 2014 by Maxine Kumin

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  College professors may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411

  Kumin, Maxine, 1925-2014

  Lizzie! / by Maxine Kumin.

  pages cm

  Summary: A bright, curious girl in a wheelchair who enjoys visiting a petting zoo in her Florida town uncovers a mystery surrounding a shack full of screeching monkeys.

  ISBN 978-1-60980-518-0 (hardback)

  [1. Wheelchairs—Fiction. 2. Paralysis—Fiction. 3. People with disabilities—Fiction. 4. Animals—Treatment—Fiction. 5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.K949017Li 2014

  [E]—dc23

  2013025662

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Again, for Judith

  FOREWORD

  If you think this is just some sweet sappy story about two kids in wheelchairs and a dear patient single mother, get over it. You could live your whole life and not have this much stuff happen. This is my AUTOBIOGRAPHY! It took me almost a whole year to write it and I promise you it is not boring. So either start reading or shut this book now. It’s up to you.

  Lizzie

  CHAPTER 1

  Lizzie stop! Stop Lizzie!” Those were the last words I heard before I did a cannonball off the diving board and slipped and split the back of my head open on the edge of the pool. I bled so much that the whole deep end turned pink. At least that’s what my best friend Trippy—short for Triple A—told me a week later when she came to see me in the hospital. Her real name is Ashley Anne Addington and she likes her nickname which by the way I thought up.

  “I swear it Lizzie. Pink as a petunia. Here.”

  Trippy is a major liar. She says she just exaggerates. If my whole body bled dry it wouldn’t turn the pool pink. The human body only contains ten pints of blood. And by the way I don’t like commas. They’re too curly all over the page so you’ll see I don’t use them very often.

  She brought me a whole box of peanut brittle my favorite food. I wasn’t supposed to eat it because it gets stuck in my braces. But nothing like that mattered anymore. If I wanted ice cream for breakfast I could have it. That’s what made me cry but I never let anybody see me except a couple of times my mom. We both knew everything changed with that one cannonball off the bare board. They’d taken the old coconut matting off to replace it but they hadn’t put up a sign saying KEEP OFF.

  I don’t remember the ambulance ride or anything much about the whole rest of the day. When I came to I was in the hospital in the I See You which stands for Intensive Care Unit and my legs didn’t work at all. I couldn’t even feel them.

  That was two years ago. I miss the whole gang of us faculty brats who used to horse around the indoor pool. Most of all I missed Trippy but guess what? She just flew down to Florida to visit us. We live in a neat little cottage Mom bought this year once the lawsuit got settled. Trippy’s going to stay ten whole days over her winter break. Flying down here by herself the day after Christmas was her big present. For my big present I got this desk with extra-wide kneeholes I can roll my chair right into. That was all I needed to start writing my autobiography. Trippy read what I’ve written so far.

  “You’ve got to put commas in, Lizzie. It’s too hard for the common everyday goon to read.”

  Goons is what Trippy always called our gang of girls. In a friendly way, though. As in, “Come on, all you goons, let’s go!” But I agreed, so from here on you’ll see a few more curlies here and there.

  Lots of kids in northern Wisconsin are good swimmers. The winters are so long and cold that the indoor pool is a major playground. Our whole gang of girls could swim in deep water by the time we were four. My mom, a professor of psychology, did laps three times a week. Our favorite thing in the world was doing cannonballs. We always raced to be first off. To jump the highest. To jump the farthest.

  Trippy said I need to explain why we live here in Florida now. It’s so that I will always be warm. People with spinal cord injuries usually have trouble regulating their body temps, and you can count me in on that. While I was still in the hospital I went downstairs to the rehab clinic every day. The PTs—that stands for physical therapists—were like my older sisters. Like my older sisters would have been if I hadn’t been an only child. My mom is what they call a single mother. My father was a sperm from a sperm bank in California that specializes in sperm from very intelligent men. And that’s probably why I’m in the eighth grade, even though I’m only eleven and a half.

  Anyway, the PTs were my cheerleaders egging me on. Every morning they got me out of bed and fitted me with braces. In the big treatment room I met kids who’d been in car crashes and fallen from ladders and off runaway horses. There we all were, trying to learn how to walk again. Or tie our shoes. Or fit the simplest pieces into a puzzle.

  So what I figured out was it could have been a whole lot worse. My spinal cord wasn’t cut in two—severed is the word doctors use. It was “shocked,” but nobody could say if I would ever get any feeling back in my dead legs.

  Even though she had plenty of other things to do, Trippy came to watch lots of afternoons. “Don’t mind me, I’m just here to kibitz,” she’d say, and they’d let her hang around.

  The PTs worked my arms and legs. They strapped me to machines with timers that beeped when I’d done enough arm pulls and leg presses, but I can’t really feel what my legs are doing, so I just pushed as hard as I could. Trippy was there, kneeling down by the leg machine. “Come on, you old goon you, you can do two more,” she’d yell. She’d make me so mad that I did.

  The PTs gave me rewards of balloons and sticks of gum as if I were a three-year-old. When I took my first step hanging onto the parallel bars without one of them holding me up by the belt tied around my waist, they whistled and cheered. I was holding on for dear life.

  “Look at you, you old goon you! Hip hip! Three cheers!” Trippy yelled.

  I was glad Trippy was there to see. That was a good day. I’m supposed to get upright every day and use my quad canes to take five steps. But I still need the wheelchair to go beyond the front door or back porch.

  CHAPTER 2

  The day a
fter Trippy got here we went to Wilderwood to see the bear cubs. Mom and I go about once a week to HENRY’Z PETTING ZOO. That’s what his sign says, he thinks the Z is cute. His name is Henry Eberly but Henry the Huge is what Mom and I call him behind his back. He is so fat he has to hold his pants up with two belts fastened together.

  Henry tells people that the cubs’ mother was shot by a hunter and that’s how come he got to raise them by himself. Well, that’s a lie. Orphaned cubs have to be turned over to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and they’d never send them to some little roadside zoo. You can find that out online in two secs. You can also go to their website myfwc.com in case you want to find out more about what they do and it’s not just black bears. For instance, the manatee death toll this year is double the usual number and they tell you why.

  “Five dollars a week to get to play with baby bears? Wow! How neat is that?” Trippy said. “It’s worth five hundred dollars! How far away is it?”

  “It’s all back roads,” my mom said. “A little more than half an hour.”

  But I knew exactly. “It’s seventeen-point-eight miles. Their names are Buddy and Blossom. I used to be able to snuggle them both in my wheelchair with me but now they’re getting too big.”

  “But golly, goonie, imagine getting to cuddle real live bears! That’s way beyond sweet!”

  Trippy made me feel lucky. But I told her it wasn’t so terrific anymore. “The thing is, they’re getting scratchy, they start fighting to get down and Buddy nipped my ear the last time. It only bled a little. Henry says he’s going to have to let them go pretty soon. Then his cat had kittens and I got to keep one of them, Tigger. She’s a calico and calicos are always female. Well, almost always, we looked it up on Google.”

  “Tigger out of Winnie-the-Pooh? I wish I had a kitty. Or a dog, I’d take really good care of a dog. But we can’t have any pets. My mother is allergic to practically everything in the universe. Including lima beans and perfume.”

  “I carried Tigger around everywhere at first. Now that she’s big enough, she jumps up to my shoulder and we ride around together. I have to close her in the house when it’s time to go to school, though.” I’m not exactly crazy about school either—except for Josh, but more about that later.

  Before we got there, I explained a little about Henry. “He can make anything grow. He can take up a handful of dirt and sniff it—almost eat it—and decide what could grow there.”

  Trippy made her famous gagging sound at that.

  I ignored the sound effects and explained that he’s got a humongous vegetable garden with cucumbers climbing up one side of the trellis and beans climbing up the other side. “Beans all over. Skinny green kinds and flat yellow kinds. Tomatoes everywhere, some of them tied up to stakes and some of them sprawling. Lots of different squashes, kinds I’ve never heard of and neither has Mom because they probably don’t do well up north. Henry says they’re Mexican. And eggplant.”

  “Eggplant, yuck.” Trippy rolled her eyes. “I could live my whole life without a single bite of squash, too. But growing your own cukes and tomatoes would be kind of neat.”

  The best thing about Henry is hearing him talk. I said that at first he was hard to understand.

  “I don’t know what kind of accent he has but you get used to it after a while. He was telling us about his life, saying his da had been a truck farmer. He grew good carrots and long-day onions and the sweetest strub-bries—I love the way he said that word—in the whole state.”

  “Strub-bries?”

  “Yeah, that’s how he says strawberries.” I went on imitating the way Henry talked about his father.

  “ ‘Lotsa things they said wun’t grow in Florida, like punkins that need it cool and pineapples that need it hot, he grew ’em good. Jess cuddn’t make much of a livin’ doin’ it.’ So Henry says that’s how he got into commercial flowers with his ma after his pa died. Snapdragons mostly, because they didn’t need the steady heat roses do. ‘But hail, they was bringin’ flors in from Chile cheaper ’an we could raise ’em, so I quit.’ ”

  I can’t do it exactly but flors is another great word.

  And then we were there. No sign of Henry, but we knew he’d see our car and he’d come out of the house soon.

  I showed Trippy his tame iguana. “It’s six feet long if you count its tail. Mostly it just lies on a branch of this live oak tree.”

  “What’s this? It looks like a humongous turtle!”

  “It’s a tortoise that’s more than a hundred years old but you hardly ever see it move. Once though, it came out of its shell and took a piece of lettuce from me and I got to see how its wrinkly neck connects to the top and the underneath parts of him and how its eyes are red.”

  “Red eyes,” Trippy said. “How weird is that?”

  “I thought maybe they were red with sorrow. Mom said she suspects all old tortoises have red eyes and that this one probably wasn’t sad at all. And look over here. Henry’s got these two gray African geese with funny red feet and they hiss all day as they waddle around.”

  There were lots of chickens pecking about in the grass for insects. “They’re so tame that if you hold out anything for them to eat you can just pick them up, see?” I leaned out of my chair, scooped up a fat hen, and fed it a raisin I had in my pocket. “Want to try?”

  Trippy shook her head. Instead she wandered off to check out the two pygmy goats. “These are pretty cool, Liz. And what about this little donkey? I’d give anything to have a little donkey for a pet.”

  “He’s a burro from out west and he’s crazy for carrots. He likes apples, too. Here, hold a piece out flat on your palm like this.” I showed her.

  Trippy laid the apple slice out on her hand and he scarfed it right up. Then he nuzzled her for another. “Oh I love the way his nose tickles me. It’s sweet the way all these guys roam around loose.”

  I agreed. “There aren’t any fences at Wilderwood except over here where he keeps Buddy and Blossom. See that old wrecked truck? That’s where they like to sleep. And that piece of sewer pipe? They love to crawl through it and climb on what’s left of that big gumbo-limbo tree, so it’s not too bad. We always come with pecans, that way they’re always glad to see us. Bears love nuts. And Mom always packs apple slices. Carrot chunks too sometimes.”

  “Gumbo-limbo—what a snazzy name for a tree!”

  “Yeah, see, it puts up all these side branches, kind of like a hammock.”

  “So all this belongs to Henry. I guess he’s pretty smart.”

  “In some ways. But about other things, he isn’t—well, he isn’t quite bright. I think he knows it too but it doesn’t bother him one bit. Like when I ask him to name the last five presidents. Or what is the capital of Indiana? The square root of fifty? He just scratches his head and crosses his eyes.”

  “Well, come on, Lizzie! Those are way too hard. I don’t know all the answers.”

  I had to grin at that. To tell the truth, neither did I.

  And then Henry came out and we had introductions all around. He unlocked the gate to the cubs’ enclosure and insisted on wheeling me in. I was perfectly able to wheel myself in but I think he was trying to show off in front of Trippy. Buddy came right over to me. I was able to pull him up on my lap and feed him pecans one by one. I gave Trippy a handful to feed to Blossom, who cuddled with her on a tree limb.

  “Nobody would believe this back in the whole entire state of Wisconsin!” she said.

  After the bears had cleaned up all the treats, we went off to look at Henry’s veggie garden. It’s an amazing place. He has a buyer who comes every week to pick up his produce and take it to fancy grocery stores and restaurants in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

  Trippy admired the tomatoes. Some were as big as softballs, others were shaped like tiny pears. “How does he keep it so neat? He must spend hours and hours out here pulling weeds.”

  I couldn’t picture big fat Henry on his knees weeding but Trippy was right. There was ha
rdly a single weed growing up through the mulch. Weeks ago, Henry told me his gardening secret was chicken manure—“It’d make nail parings grow,”—and mulch, which was spoiled hay he raked up from the goats and the burro.

  “Once they tromp on it even the least little bit they won’t eat it no more but it don’t go to waste. I just tuck it around my plants. But I wish I could get some sallet greens, you know, the kinds a leafs folks eat raw from a sallet bowl, they just don’t do good here in the heat. They put up one row of leafs and then they bolt. ’Specially spinach; folks like to eat baby spinach leafs.”

  I asked him what bolt means and he told me. “That’s when they put up a flower stalk and then it goes to bursten and makes seeds.”

  When I told Trippy about it, she sympathized. “I’m not crazy about salad but we eat it every night. Mom gets these bunches of red lettuce. I bet Henry’d love to grow them. Does he live all alone here?”

  “No, he lives with his mother. I’ve never seen her, though. Mom asked him, Is she bedridden? He said no, she gets around as much as she wants. Not much, though. He said he cooks for her but he has to keep it soft now because she can’t chew well anymore. He didn’t say well of course. He said good. And when Mom made a sympathetic noise in her throat, he said he’s been trying to get her into one of those a’sister livin’ places. And then he told Mom that as long as she owns this land they say she’s too rich to get in.

  “And when Mom said, ‘You mean you’d have to sell it?’ he told her no, because then she’d still be too rich with the house and all. Then I heard him say, ‘Might be I could give it away, though.’

  “I could tell from the look on Mom’s face that she was horrified. She told him not to do anything without a lawyer and she made him promise her. She made him promise not to give away any of his land. Because it might be worth a lot of money—it might be very valuable.

  “Then he said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t jess give it away like that. Happens there’s a big businessman—you met him, Jeb Blanco? Happens he has his own plane and he flies it in on that ole cow pasture where the dozer smoothed him out a place to land? Him and me, we might make a deal where he owns the land for a good cause but I still live on it, and he gets my momma into a really good a’sister livin’ place. And then I can travel around. I’d get me one a them movin’ homes. I allus wanted to travel around.’ ”