Lizzie!

by Maxine Kumin

  I filled Trippy in on Jeb Blanco. I described the first time we saw him land. Two men in a big black Lincoln Navigator car came roaring up past Henry’s zoo sign and drove straight out to the plane. Then they drove back to Henry’s house and Jeb Blanco got out to talk to Henry. By then the two men were in the backseat and I couldn’t really see them because the windows were tinted. Blanco was wearing a bright blue polo shirt with a monogram and the kind of loafers that have tassels on them. Not your average drop-in at a petting zoo, oh, no. He looked like he owned the whole state of Florida. And there was something very familiar about him. I told Trippy I had a feeling I’d seen him before, but where? So I sort of blurted, “Didn’t we meet somewhere once? You look … like somebody I think I know from somewhere.” It was a jerky thing to say. I was embarrassed.

  I remember that he laughed and said, “Everybody tells me that, pequeñita. I just have the kind of face people are used to looking at.” And when I asked him, “Are you here for Buddy and Blossom? Are you here to take them away?” he said, “No, I promise you. I just came to see Henry and his mother.”

  Because it was the first time we’d met, he extended his hand to my mom. “Jesús Ernesto Blanco,” he said. “But call me Jeb. It’s from my initials, see? J E B.”

  And so she had no choice. “Rebecca Peterlinz,” Mom said, and shook the hand he reached out to her. It was tanned with a thick gold ring on the little finger and his face matched his hand. We don’t sit out in the sun without putting on tons of sun cream but people still do. I have to say that he had a sweet sort of face with deep blue eyes and the kind of rimless glasses you expect to see on a professor. I know this because I saw a ton of professors back in Wisconsin before my accident.

  He didn’t exactly ask me what happened. People don’t because it’s rude. But he sort of took my mom off to one side and I knew he wanted to know had I been born this way. And here I am all this time with a mashed spinal cord. Can’t take a step without my quad canes—not even able to swim, really swim, anymore because I have to drag my legs behind me.

  CHAPTER 3

  Trippy loved our cottage. She loved sleeping on the air mattress Mom had made up for her in my room. She made us promise not to talk all night but of course we did. Half the night, anyway. Trippy raved over our living so close to the water; it was the first time she’d ever seen the ocean. She loved listening to the soft slurp of the waves. She said living on the inlet where you can watch ocean liners leave and come back is better than boss. Living on the inlet is okay. Mom takes me down to the beach just about every afternoon when it’s warm enough. She pushes my chair as far as it will go in the sand and then I get out and kind of crawl into the water. I tried not to make a big deal out of it when I scooched out of the wheelchair onto the sand in front of Trippy. Once I’m all the way in I look just about like everybody else, and we had a great time horsing around in the ocean.

  “This is way sweet, goonie! The salt water holds you up a lot better than the water in the college pool.” After our fingers had turned into prunes, we coasted into shore on the best wave we could find—the waves are really only ripples here at the inlet compared to the real waves farther down the coast.

  That was how we dragged out our afternoons on the beach. We dragged them out because we didn’t know when we’d get to be together again after this visit. “But now that Grammy and Gramps have moved down here, maybe I’ll be coming to Florida a lot,” Trippy said.

  And I said, “Maybe.” We hooked our little fingers together the way we used to when we were just kids.

  “What goes up the chimney?” Trippy said.

  “Smoke.”

  “May your wish and my wish never be broke.”

  “—en,” I said and we laughed and sort of hugged.

  I miss the girls who were my friends before the accident. I can’t say I miss the way they were after, when I couldn’t hang out with them on the soccer field after school or go to the movies in a gang Saturday nights. I couldn’t talk anymore about the boys who were always acting like idiots in class to impress us. Or at least that’s what we thought they were doing. Trippy was the only one who stayed in touch with me. We talked on the phone sometimes and we emailed a lot, but it’s hard to stay best friends from a distance. Mom wouldn’t let me go on Facebook, which she called a social scourge—look that one up. I have to wait till I turn fourteen. She didn’t approve of Skype either. Some of my old more-or-less friends sent Christmas cards and a lot of them were from the kinds of families who always put a Christmas letter in with the card. I hate those letters. They’re always about how the whole family went skiing in Colorado and ice fishing on Lake Michigan and what the kids did that summer, hiking and rock climbing.

  Meeting people is easy here in Florida. For one thing, people are outside more. Everybody comes down to the beach, just to walk up and down looking for shells or to exercise their dogs. A lot sit around and play cards or talk about how great it is not to be stuck in the snow and ice. And there I am, either sitting in my wheelchair or crawling back to it. No one could ignore that and even though it’s not polite to ask what happened to you, it’s also rude not to smile, say hello, and start a conversation.

  I guess you could say Teresa and Digger are our best friends here. We met just chatting the way people do on the beach. They never said anything about my wheelchair, which I was just climbing back into that day when Teresa stooped down right next to me to pick up a crushed soda can somebody had left behind and Mom tsk-tsked about people who litter and one thing led to another. After they had introduced themselves, I got introduced too. That was only our first rendezvous, which is French and means you present yourself. Pretty soon it got to be a daily beach get-together. It turned out that Digger used to be the police chief of Montandino, a town in California, but then he had a heart attack and they retired to Florida because they have a grown-up daughter who lives here. He says it was only a little heart attack, but Teresa says he lost some of his heart muscle and he needs to take care of what he’s still got. She is always after him to take daily walks—he does walk down to the jetty every morning early—and not to eat those doughnuts that he buys at the 7-Eleven. She wants him to eat fish three times a week for the omega oil. I don’t know why it is good for your heart, but Digger said he doesn’t like fish, period.

  Then I got to introduce Trippy to Teresa and Digger, whose real name is Diego. Their last name is Martinez, and now Teresa’s teaching me Spanish. Like la pequeñita means little one.

  After I explained that Trippy was visiting me from Wisconsin, I said, “Teresa told me she once was a union organizer in California.”

  Trippy didn’t know what that meant. I hadn’t known either, until Teresa and I got to talking about a zillion things. And one day she told me about her killer jobs with the migrant fruit pickers and workers in the tomato fields and so on.

  I asked Teresa to explain about getting the workers together to ask for things like enough Porta Potties in the lettuce fields. Or higher pay for picking grapes seven days a week when they all got ripe at once.

  “Oh, like marching in a line with signs,” Trippy said. “Picketing. I’ve seen that on TV.”

  “Well, we didn’t have picket lines exactly, but we held up signs and shouted slogans till the crops started to rot.”

  “And then the managers were willing to let you have a union,” I added.

  Teresa smiled. “Something like that. They were willing to talk about the workers’ grievances.”

  That was a new word but I knew right away what it meant. I had a few grievances of my own at Graver Academy from being in a wheelchair and being called crip behind my back. And I hate it when the soccer team huddles before a game and comes up yelling Be braver be braver forever for Graver. They don’t know Day One about braver. First the horrible headaches after the accident that went on for days, then finding out that I didn’t have any feeling in my legs and feeling so sorry for myself that I just wanted to lie in bed and not answer when peop
le came in. I’d pretend to be sleeping. My mom wouldn’t let me give up. She kept bringing me the daily puzzles from the morning paper and a new Jane Goodall book I hadn’t read yet and so on.

  I explained about Trippy’s nickname. Digger thought it was pretty neat. He said he got his name when he was a little kid. “I had a shovel and I was always digging.”

  “For what?”

  “For water. Or maybe for gold.” We all laughed.

  Well, the next day Trippy had to go visit her grandparents, who were snowbirds, people who come to spend the winter in Florida after they retire. They lived about an hour away. Her grandfather drove up to get her and she was going to stay with them one night. We’d still have almost a whole week left to hang out.

  “It’ll give you more time to work on your autobiography,” Trippy said. “So do some more and I’ll read it when I get back.”

  I didn’t waste any time.

  CHAPTER 4

  While Trippy is visiting her grandparents, I am going to write down what my life was like before my accident. I had a best friend Tony next door, who was a year older than I was. When you’re still a little kid of seven, someone a year older is practically an adult. He got us into lots of trouble. We lived on a wide leafy street where a lot of the houses were very old. Many of them didn’t have garages because they were built before people had their own cars. In Wisconsin this can be a major problem because if the plows come through after a snowstorm and your car is still on the street, you get plowed in. Tony’s dad was a radio broadcaster on our public radio station, and that meant he kept an eye on all the forecasts. He made sure his car was facing out in the driveway and that the driveway was clean—Tony had to shovel his share—so all he’d have to do was shovel out the bottom of the driveway after the plow went past.

  Tony’s dad went on at twelve o’clock noon on the dot and he sometimes didn’t get home till nine at night. Anyway, one snow day, which means there was so much snow even the school buses couldn’t get through, we got this bright idea of tying our sleds to his bumper. The drifts were so high on either side of the driveway that our sleds were pretty much out of sight. His dad was in a hurry and there wasn’t any reason to look behind, so he started the engine and took off. We bumped out of the driveway and skidded across the road as he turned right and then straightened out as the car started uphill. It was a gas! Then another car came up behind us on the steep part and the driver honked and honked till Tony’s dad looked in his rearview mirror.

  When he got out he said, “You damn fool kids!” so I knew he was pretty mad. He untied the sleds and threw them in the trunk and told us to walk home. He frowned at me and then he said to Tony, “I will deal with you later.” I won’t tell you what happened after that except to say we missed a whole weekend of perfectly good sledding.

  Then there was the day Tony made a bunch of little teepees out of wooden matches, the kind you use to light woodstoves or bonfires, and then he lit a match and held it to the first teepee, which went up so suddenly that he jumped back with a scorched wrist. But Tony’s dad didn’t think that had taught him enough of a lesson, so he bought a six-pack of those big boxes of matches, 250 matches to a box, and he sat Tony down on the back stoop with a brass plate and he said, “You sit here till you have struck every single match in this six-pack. I want to see every match piled neatly on this tray, understand?”

  I can tell you this because I was hiding behind the hedge that separates our backyards.

  Tony whined, “But it’s suppertime, Dad.”

  “Well, this is instead of supper.” And it was.

  Tony and I had a clothesline pulley we had rigged up between our two bedroom windows, only mine was in the bathroom because my bedroom was on the wrong side of the house. In fact, Tony’s dad had helped us rig it up. He said he had had one back when he was a kid in Plainfield, New Jersey, where the houses were much closer together and he and his pal used to swap baseball cards that way. Well, I put two candy bars I’d been saving up in the basket and pulleyed them across to Tony that night. So that was his supper. And I didn’t get caught.

  The other adventure I remember was making our own snuff. We knew smoking tobacco gave you cancer but we figured sniffing it would be okay. Tony said that baseball players did it all the time. Tony’s grandfather smoked cigars once a week outside their house, because his grandmother couldn’t stand the smell. He kept his supply in a special box. Tony helped himself to one and then he enlisted me to help grind it up. We used my mom’s coffee grinder and we ground and ground for about ten minutes, with a couple of cloves in it too for flavor, until the coffee grinder just quit. I said I thought it was tired and needed a rest and we should just get our snuff out and go outside. Which we did. We shook the powder into a little sandwich bag and went out into Tony’s yard where there was still a swing set, though everybody had outgrown swinging on it, and we each sat on a swing.

  “Who’s going first?” Tony said.

  “You are, it was your idea.”

  “No, you should, it was your mom’s coffee grinder.”

  So I did. I took a big pinch of it between my thumb and my first finger the way he said and I stuffed it right up my nose.

  “Now sniff!” Tony said.

  I sniffed and then I sneezed and then I couldn’t stop sneezing and my eyes ran along with my nose, and then I was coughing until my mom came out to see what was going on. I went on coughing and sneezing for about an hour. I’m warning you, stay away from snuff!

  The coffee grinder was never the same after that. Mom finally went out and bought a new one, and she took fifty cents a week out of my allowance like almost forever to pay for it. Tony’s dad got a better job with a TV station down in Madison and they moved away. I was very sad about that.

  But I had a best girlfriend too, back then before my accident. That was Trippy, who you’ve already met. We were at that age between scuffing around in our mothers’ high heels and actually putting on makeup and giggling about boys. Well, I haven’t really gotten to that stage yet but my mom says I will. Before I know it I’ll get my period and I’ll grow breasts, that’s what she says. It’s funny to remember this now, but I can still see it. In Trippy’s room she had a dressing table with a skirt around it and a three-way mirror that stood on it. It never occurred to me how special it was that each of us had our own room. I hadn’t found out yet how most of the world lives, and that a lot of people are lucky if there’s even one bed for the entire family on a dirt floor. Getting to know Teresa helped me begin to understand how rich we are compared to most of the world. So you might say that I’ve grown up enough to think about other people’s lives but I can’t get that dressing table out of my head.

  Trippy and I were real tomboys back before my accident. There wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, like pump the swing so high it looped the loop which was forbidden or climb up to the tree house and then keep on going higher. It was a big copper beech tree with lots of places you could lie back with your feet wedged in a crook and just stay there reading comic books all afternoon. We didn’t read comic books though. Back then we were reading the first Harry Potters and then I got onto Doctor Doolittle. That was until I found Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees. I couldn’t get enough books about primates in the wild. Even though I was only nine years old I was hooked on saving the environment for wild animals. For instance when we grow up and have kids and our kids have kids they may be the last human beings on Earth to ever see an elephant. Or a polar bear. It is just too sad to think about.

  Back in Wisconsin my mom went out on a lot of dates. She didn’t call them dates but when the sitter came which was usually one of her students from the university she’d say, “I’m just going out to dinner with some friends, Lisa.” (Lisa was my favorite.) “Here’s my cell phone number. I’m leaving it on so don’t hesitate to call if Lizzie sets the house on fire.” This was a favorite joke from Hilaire Belloc. Mom used to read his poems out loud to me at bedtime. “George” was my favorite and his
balloon does set the whole house on fire. You should look up his book Cautionary Tales for Children.

  Her dates were old friends from the university—two professors and one dean—and none of them were father material. Then she met this man who was a writer. He wrote articles for magazines and on the side he was writing a novel. His name was Timothy Shoemaker and I liked him a lot better than the men in the old friends category. He would play hopscotch and statues with me and one rainy day I taught him how to play jacks. We sat on the floor and played onesies and twosies and so on all afternoon. He was fun to be with. Mom seemed to think so too and for a while we saw a lot of Tim. Mom went away with him for a long weekend once. Afterward I asked her was he father material? “Would you marry him?”

  She said, “He’s not the marrying kind,” and changed the subject. I found out way later that there was another woman he went away on long weekends with.

  I haven’t said yet that I have another friend, he goes to the same school I do and he’s smarter than I am. We’re both in the eighth grade at Graver Academy, which is a private day school. Mom can afford it because of the settlement. I don’t know how much money she got. For one thing, she would never tell me and for another, the settlement says she can’t ever say. Josh is a year and a half older than I am. He started school a year late which I’ll explain about later, but then he skipped a grade. Because he’s a boy his parents wanted him to be in an age-appropriate grade. That’s what he told me. I didn’t tell him I skipped two. I guess being age-appropriate isn’t as important for girls.

  I try to do the Sudoku numbers puzzle and the word Jumble in the newspaper every morning before school. I hate it when I get stuck and can’t solve one or the other. It practically ruins my day. Mom says I’m an addict—you know, like an alcoholic. Anyway, my chair folds up and it’s no trick at all to heave it into the backseat at the last minute for the drive to school.