CATHERINE HAD ALWAYS TRIED TO BE FRIENDS WITH HER body. When she was ten years old and suddenly started falling down, when she was eleven and it became difficult to put one foot in front of the other, when her daddy gave her a stick he had cut from the fence row to use as a walking stick, Catherine spoke lovingly to her legs, told them she knew they were doing their best, told them that they must try.
Every night after she went to bed she put Jergens lotion on her thighs, knees, shins, calves, feet, just slathered it on to stimulate the circulation. As she smoothed on the lotion, she said “good legs, good legs” to them, as though they were two long cats. Not wanting to worry her parents, she waited till they were asleep before she began the massage. She would whisper to her legs about long walks she had taken with Donny, and how she used to wade in the creeks and let the minnows nibble her toes. She reminded them that she wanted to have a bicycle someday, when her balance was better, and they could do the pedaling, if they were well and strong. What hills they would fly over, what blossoming trees—redbud, dogwood, and mimosa—they would skim under!
Once, when she was coming up the steps, the toe of her saddle oxfords caught the lip of the step and she fell. “Damn,” she said, for the first time. She was twelve, and it was the first time she had ever said a swearword. The first time she had come close to cursing her failing body.
Her daddy was about to take Mommy to the doctor anyway, so he had taken Cat along, too. The doctor looked at the bruise close to her temple and said that it wasn’t serious. “It’s your mommy we got to worry about,” he said to her, as though she’d been trying to get undue attention.
She tried, shyly, to tell him more. “Sometimes I can hardly walk,” she whispered. “And I trip, like this time. Daddy gave me a walking stick.” She didn’t want her mother to hear.
“You’re at the awkward age,” he said. “Do you have your period yet?”
Catherine had said no; she didn’t ask what was a period, but whatever it was, she was sure she didn’t have it.
“Once you have the curse,” he said, smiling, “you’ll get more graceful.”
She’d always liked Dr. Higgins. She felt reassured, but on the way home, in the car, she asked what a period was, and her mother had glanced at her father, and then told her that she would explain later, that they’d have a woman talk.
“Your mother needs to rest now,” her father said.
When they got home, her mother went straight to bed. Catherine went to the kitchen and washed the dishes that had piled up in the sink. Standing up in front of the sink, she didn’t have to move much. Her father came in and told her he appreciated her taking over the dish washing. She realized he meant she was to do it from now on.
From now on till when? she thought but didn’t ask.
She stood at the sink carefully washing the dishes till she was stiff. Her pelvis felt like a chair into which the rest of her torso sagged, and her legs were as numb as the dumb legs of a straight-back kitchen chair. The dishes took a long time that night because Cat noticed her grip was becoming uncertain. Several times, a plate or cup would try to slip out of her grasp. She felt relieved when she got to the metal pots and pans. When one of them crashed down against the sink, she knew, even as it fell, that it could not break.
What her mother had was cancer. Cat herself was beginning to get breasts, and she wondered if they, too, would become cancerous. In the bathtub, she told them they were pretty, though one seemed slightly larger than the other. She told them to be good, and not to cause trouble. Getting out of the tub was a terror. She would turn around so that she was on her knees, grasp the side and push herself up. Once she slipped and her cheek smacked the porcelain and then skidded down the back slope of the tub; her nose went underwater. After that she drained all the water from the tub before she tried to get out, even though it meant soap scum would settle back onto her skin.
Finally she told Donny that he needed to be home when she took a bath, that he needed to come in when she called and help her out.
He smiled at her and said he would close his eyes; he promised. He wouldn’t peek.
He didn’t ask why she couldn’t get out of the tub by herself, a thirteen-year-old girl. He knew. Together they conspired to try to keep their secret from their parents. Their mother hardly left the bed now. Usually their father was seeing about the fields or the fences when it was time for Cat to creep down the steps for school. They didn’t walk anymore to the bus stop. Donny rode his bicycle all the way to school, with Cat sitting on the seat over the back wheel. The steps up the school bus were far too high, and she didn’t want the other children to see that Donny had to help her. One day, when they stood at the top of the five steps from their porch going down to the yard, and they were late, Donny said, “Just let me carry you down.”
“All right,” she said, because she knew it took almost a minute for her to navigate each step.
He had swooped her up and whispered, “Just think of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up the steps to rape her.”
The laughter had just burst out of her. Donny and she had never said the word rape before. But while he pedaled furiously along the highway, and she could barely hold on, she cursed her body. She cursed her hands, not her increasingly useless legs. She couldn’t afford to offend the legs, but the hands ought to be reliable. She cursed her hands because they barely had enough strength to hold on safely, and she didn’t want to tell Donny.
Sometimes, when she sat by the fire reading and struggled to turn a page, she saw him staring at her. He couldn’t wipe the worry off his face fast enough.
Once in school, Mr. Whitlock, her science teacher, asked her if she would mind carrying a note down the hall to another teacher. She smiled reassuringly, but said, “I have a stomachache today. Maybe somebody else would be better.” He looked at her peculiarly but said nothing in reply.
At the end of the period, he came and stood by her desk. He asked anxiously, “Are you feeling better now, Catherine?” She answered as brightly as anyone could, “Oh yes! Thank you.” But he continued to stare at her. “You’re one of our best students,” he said. “Let me know if there’s ever anything bothering you. We could talk. I know your mother’s ill.”
He was a washed-out-looking man, with clear plastic eyeglass frames and a girlish, Cupid’s bow upper lip. His eyes were so kind that she thought she’d never seen anyone so handsome. Even in college, she sometimes dreamed about Mr. Whitlock. We could talk, he always said in her dreams. She had heard that he had gone back to school, gotten a Ph.D. in biology, taught at Florence State in northern Alabama, was the father of five children.
“Thank you,” she had replied, back at the consolidated school. “Could you just give me a hand up?” And he had held out his hand to her, helped her stand, didn’t say another word. She tried to walk straight, but just at the door, she lost her balance and swiped against the doorframe. But she didn’t fall. She didn’t fall.
On the bicycle ride home, a truck came too close to them, and she jerked away. She came off the back of the bicycle into a ditch, and then Donny and the bicycle careened off the road, too. She could see that he didn’t have to fall. He’d wrecked to keep her company. The truck driver, a frightened farm woman, had stopped. The woman was crying. When she saw they weren’t bleeding, she cried harder.
Donny told her just to let him put the bike in the back, the wheel was bent. To please drive them home. On the way home, she apologized, offered repeatedly to pay to have the bike fixed, thanked God that they weren’t seriously hurt.
Then Cat had spoken up. “I may be hurt. Could you take us to the doctor instead? I’d like to talk to him, at least. Just for a precaution. I might be hurt internally.”
Donny put his arm around her. He looked at her like the perfect big brother. “Really, Cat?” he asked.
“No,” the woman said. “We’re almost at your place now. We’ll let your folks decide if you should go to the doctor.” She turned off the two-lane onto the long driveway back to the house.
When they got to the house, Donny told Cat he would carry her inside.
“I’ll leave the bike,” he said to the woman, “so you can have it repaired.”
Then he opened the truck door and slid to the ground. Cat scootched over to the edge of the seat and fell toward his outstretched arms. He turned around, hiked her up, once, higher into his arms, and carried her up the steps. As soon as they got inside, he set her on the sofa.
“I’m going to start lifting weights,” he said ruefully.
“Do,” she said. The glance of conspiracy passed between them. Almost she wished he would speak out. Almost she wished he would ask if they should tell somebody, and then they would talk about who to tell. But he didn’t. He sat down beside her on the green sofa, and they both stared silently straight ahead. They both knew she was getting around with increasing difficulty, but they wouldn’t admit it. Not out loud. On the bad mornings, she pretended to be too sick for one reason or another to appear at school. Donny would pick up her homework assignments. She never fell behind.
From the sofa they heard their mother snoring. Sometimes she groaned in her sleep.
“When I catch my breath,” Donny said, “I’ll carry you to your bedroom. When it’s supper, I’ll bring you a plate. I’ll clean up the kitchen and fix something for supper. Try to rest.”
“Thank you,” she said.
That night, while she ate her baked beans with cut-up hot dogs, she heard her brother and father talking in the kitchen, over their supper. Although she was propped up in bed, with her dinner plate on her lap, she almost felt she was with them. She could hear Dad and Donny pull out their chairs. Soon, she imagined, Donny would ask in his stiff, polite way How was your day?
“There’s something wrong with Sister,” her brother said. Cat couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Her legs are weak.”
“She spends too much time over them books,” her father said. “Even when she’s sick.”
“That’s not it,” she heard Donny say. Staring at the tines of her fork piercing a segment of hot dog, she listened intently. She was terrified and grateful. There was a desperate, insistent note in Donny’s voice, one she’d never heard before. “There’s something making her weaker and weaker.”
“She’s not a sissy,” their father answered. “She’ll be all right.”
No! She thought to Donny. Don’t believe it.
“Like Mother?” Donny asked. His voice was shrill. “Like Mother, when you said the lump in her breast was too little to worry about?”
“You speak with respect,” their father said. “Or I’ll wear you out. You’re not too big.”
“Listen to me!” It sounded as though Donny might cry.
“You always was one to get worked up over nothing.”
She heard Donny’s chair scrape back. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll call the doctor about Sister and make an appointment. I’ll ask the science teacher to drive us. He’s worried about her, even if you’re not. He asked me about her. He said she couldn’t write fast and he gave the class extra time to finish their last test so she could finish.”
Catherine was mortified. Her cheeks flamed with blushing. She hadn’t realized that Mr. Whitlock had extended the test time. Plenty of people beside her were still writing, even after he called time. No! she thought. Donny was just making that up to impress their father. Mr. Whitlock hadn’t noticed.
“Don,” their father said, and he sounded calm. “Y’all almost got runned over. It’s natural to be upset. Just sit down, son. Let’s finish our supper. Don’t talk loud. You might wake your mother up.”
“I’ll tell Mother,” Donny said, “if you don’t agree to schedule a checkup for Cat.” But his voice was calm.
Cat rested her fork in the baked beans. Don’t be harsh, she thought. They knew how hard their father worked. Sometimes they talked about all the things he had to do while they were in school. They always ended by saying He’s doing the very best he can. It was like saying amen at the end of a prayer. They both loved their father.
“I was planning to anyway,” their father said. “But your mother hasn’t got too much longer. She’s too sick to let on now about Cat. I was trying to wait.”
“How much longer?” Donny asked, and he sounded as though he was five years old.
It was just the question Cat had wanted to ask. Mother? How long? And she felt the tears gushing down her cheeks. She tried not to sob so she could hear the answer.
She couldn’t hear, but she heard Donny sob and fight for his breath, get up from his chair, run through the living room and outside.
Then she heard the slow, heavy tread of her father coming to her room.
Then he was at the door.
“Catherine,” he said softly. “Are you asleep?”
She closed her eyes and tried to pretend, but her chest was heavy, and the plate was tilting.
“Catherine,” he said, alarmed. “Can’t you get your breath?”
She opened her eyes and said, “How’s Mother?”
He sat down on the bed, and it dipped deeply under his weight. He took her hand. “Catherine, don’t pretend.” He paused. “I tried to pretend your mother would have a miracle. That’s what I prayed for. But I have to tell you and Donny. Dr. Higgins says it won’t be long now. He says we ought to go to the hospital where they can keep her more comfortable.”
Catherine cried till she thought she’d choke and vomit. Her father quietly moved the plate of beans and hot dogs and set it on the plank floor. Then he gathered her into his burly arms.
“For her sake,” he said, “we got to bear up. If we can. That’s about all you can do for your folks, Cat, when they’re dying. Bear up.”
Later her father helped her off with her school dress and into her pajamas. While he undressed and dressed her, he closed his eyes, and he averted his face, too. The slow way her father moved his arms—she could tell how sad he was. Tired to the bone.
THAT NIGHT WHEN the house was sleeping, Catherine slid out of her bed onto the floor. She puddled down onto her knees, slowly and softly. Donny had not come home, she was sure of that. But she knew where he was. He was in the barn, in the hayloft. He was covered with hay and warm and sleeping. Even in his dreams, he knew that she knew where he was. Catherine began to crawl toward the sound of her parents’ tandem snoring.
Crawling was almost as difficult as walking. It was more unfamiliar and slower. But she couldn’t fall when she crawled. She tried grasping the legs of heavy chairs, and she tried to hold on tight and to pull herself toward the chair, but her grip was too weak. In the end, she could do little more than undulate her torso, arch and heave her back forward, like an inchworm.
She heard the mantel clock strike once and knew it was half past some hour.
She was cold on the floor, and wondered, if she could regain her feet, if they might not suddenly work, the way they did sometimes, and if she might not walk like a mechanical doll across the room. But she could not hope to regain her feet. The balancing act of stacking bones on top of bones would be too difficult.
The mantel clock cleared its throat and then struck on and on. It must be the number twelve, she thought, clanging through the night. The clock threw out hoops of sound, widening and large as brass Hula-Hoops as they clattered down to the wooden floor. She stretched her hand out to feel the woolly edge of an area rug. She let her fingers stroke its nap as the last bong clattered down. Slowly she wormed her way forward till her whole body was resting on the rug.
Then she worked her way beyond the rug, first her hands and forearms, then her torso, then finally not even her bare toes were on the wool.
The clock struck twelve-thirty: a single bong.
Ahead was the large braided rug in front of the fireplace. Another island, she thought. And I’m swimming over the boards. Not an island, a continent, and I will reach the shore. The embers in the fire grate beckoned to her. A bonfire on the headland, she thought.
The clock struck once again, but she was fatigued and could not remember if it was one or one-thirty. But her fingers touched the scalloped edge of the braided rug. When she reached the middle of the rug, she lay flat and absorbed some of the heat from the fireplace. Perhaps she dozed a little, but when consciousness returned, the dark stillness of the house welcomed her. It was a welcome—her home at night, but still her home—a mysterious welcome of shades of gray and black.
When she reached the side of her mother’s bed, she saw her mother’s hand hanging limply over the edge. Once she scooted close enough, she reached up easily and took the hand. She could not squeeze but perhaps she could pull. No, her hand slid out of her mother’s. Lifting her hand again, Cat fitted the palm of her hand against her mother’s palm. She butted the relaxed hand, the way a calf might butt its mother’s udder.
Finally, her mother spoke. “Catherine?” she said. Her voice had the texture of a china plate, its glaze crazed with innumerable spider cracks.
“Mama,” she whispered. “I can’t walk.”
“You can’t walk?” her mother asked feebly, incredulous, displeased.
“Only sometimes.”
Her mother was silent. Catherine waited. She feared her mother might have gone back to sleep. “How are you?” Catherine asked.
Her mother took a long slow breath. It was a smooth breath, and it seemed to Catherine that her mother was pulling air up the slope of a long hill.
“Better,” her mother said.
Catherine couldn’t find her own words. She didn’t know what to think. Finally she heard herself say, “That’s good.”
“Can you climb up here in the bed?” her mother asked.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then I’ll push a pillow off for you. Let’s not bother your father. He’s so tired.”
Her mother paused as though to gather her thoughts.
“I know,” Catherine encouraged.
“Crawl under the bed,” her mother said. “I’ll work the pillow over the edge in a little bit.” She breathed three quick breaths, as though she were panting. “You can sleep under the bed till morning. Then we’ll see what can be done.”
Catherine began a sideways inching toward the bed. When she was parallel to the bedframe, she slowly rolled onto her back. Needing to rest, she lay there beside the long plank of the bedframe and stared at the ceiling. Soon she would scootch sideways till she was under the bed. She wanted to sleep on her back. The soft pillow dropped down on her chest.
“I have it,” she said.
Her mother didn’t answer.
She was asleep, Catherine supposed. She removed the soft pillow from her chest and slid it under the bed. Already her hands told her how pleasant it would be to rest her head among the feathers. She cocked a leg so that one knee thrust up in the air, and the sole of her foot was flat against the floor. She pushed hard, and again. She visualized her head on the pillow, and all at once the back of her head was on the pillow. Cat felt safe under the bed, on her back. It was a house inside the house. A house with a very low ceiling. No one could sit up in such a house. It was for lying down, for resting.
IN THE MORNING, Cat saw her mother’s bare legs hanging over the bed. Her nightgown must have hiked up.
“Harvey,” her mother said, “come help me get up, please. I want to fix breakfast, and then we need to take Catherine to Dr. Higgins.”
“Olivia!” her father said. “Olivia! Do you feel like getting up!” He was excited.
Cat heard his feet hit the floor, and he hurried around the foot of the bed. She saw his pajama legs standing beside her, and his bare feet. Long ago, his little toe had been dislocated and it was reared back in a fleshy curl.
“Just help me,” she said. “I’ve not stood up so long, I’m ’fraid I might fall.”
Catherine watched the tips of her mother’s toes test the floor, and then the balls of her wan feet settled down, and she flattened the arch and her heels on the boards.
“Now pull,” her mother said. “Gently. Not too fast now, Harvey.”
Her mother’s nightgown unwrinkled and fell down around her ankles, a cascade of white flannel with small blue roses printed all over. Flanking each rose were two tiny green leaves.
“Help me to the chair,” her mother said. And she sank softly into it. “I’d like my robe, please.” And he got it for her.
From under the bed, Catherine watched the hem of the robe swish by and the swaying tail of its dark green belt; the robe was the quilted maroon satin one that she and Donny had given Mother last Christmas, and the piping on the shawl collar and the deep cuffs was dark green to match the sash. The robe was very lightweight, as though the white batting of the lining was more made of air than of threads.
“Now,” her mother said, “help Catherine up.” Her father started for the door, but her mother said quickly with a chuckle, “Harvey, she’s under the bed.”
“What?”
“Look under the bed,” and now her mother was laughing a little, as though they’d played a good joke on her father.
Suddenly, his face was upside down, looking at her.
“Well I’ll be durned,” he said. Then he got down on one knee and reached out both arms. “Just like sliding a drawer out of a chifforobe,” he said.
It took two hours, but her mother cooked and they got dressed for town. As they approached the car, Donny came walking from the barn. He slid into the backseat next to Catherine. He patted the back of her hand. She always braced herself now, when she rode in the car: one hand on each side to help her keep her balance.
“I guess we’re going to the doctor?” Donny said.
Cat nodded.
“Soon you’ll be better.”
But Dr. Higgins said he really couldn’t tell what was wrong. “Neurological disorder,” he said. “Or a different strand of polio.”
He advised them to drive on to Carraway Methodist in Birmingham, and he would phone ahead.
“What do you make of Olivia?” her father asked. “Ought she check in, too?”
“See how she feels when you get there,” Dr. Higgins answered. He surveyed her through his rimless spectacles held on with slender silver wires that ran from the lenses to curve around the backs of his ears. “Looks to me like Olivia’s in a remission.”
SO THE BIRMINGHAM DOCTORS began their tests to determine the cause of Catherine’s debilitating weakness and lack of balance. The family sold the farm after a few months and moved to the city. Don was going on nineteen; he graduated from high school in the country and then started college in Birmingham. “I’ll borrow the money,” he quietly told his father. “They’ll let me.” He spoke with enough emphasis to cause his father suddenly to focus again on his son.
Cat was fourteen. They tried resting her in an iron lung. They tried hydrotherapy.
With her new silver crutches, she walked in the front door of Phillips High School, her brother and her father on either side of her, walking slowly. At home, Mother studied the house to make things more and more convenient for Catherine. “Why don’t you saw the legs off the bed?” she asked Don, “and then Cat can get in by herself.” And Don had said, “I’ll hang a trapeze from the ceiling, too, for her to hold to.” Their father worked all night at his night watchman job and slept most of the day. On Sundays, sometimes, they would drive back to the country and visit with family or friends they used to know.
A month before their first Birmingham Christmas, the Cartwright men left the females in the car to ask the board of their old church to help them buy a wheelchair for Catherine. Not that she would use it all the time, but just when they had a distance to cover. Cat could imagine what they had said almost as if she had been present and listening.
“So she can go shopping,” her father would have said wistfully to the minister, just as if they had enough loose money for the daughter of the family to shop for fun.
The minister would want to know what was wrong with Catherine, and what they would do with the wheelchair when she got better.
Donny would speak up and say, “She’s not going to get better. She’ll get slowly worse.” He would tell the truth.
“Why what’s wrong with her?” the minister would ask.
Father would look helplessly at Donny, who would explain, “They don’t understand it, but it has a name—Friedreich’s ataxia.”
“It’s rare,” their father would add.
(Later, Don told Catherine, with just a whiff of irony in his voice, that their father took strange comfort in that fact. “He told the minister,” Don said, “ ‘She has a rare disease that’s got a name and that’s all. They don’t have any cure yet.’ ”)
When Christmas was only a week away, Mother told Cat and Father that she didn’t want to give Don but one thing for Christmas, and it would be in the toe of his stocking. She asked if they could guess what that gift might be. Catherine was shocked by the question, but she knew if she just sat in the wheelchair and waited a moment, from deep in her psyche the answer would come. “Wait,” she said to her mother. “Let me think.”
She thought about the essence of her mother, and the phrase “the bowels of compassion” came to her. She thought of Donny, and the term was “self-sacrificing.”
Suddenly she reached down and released the brakes of her chair. In case she broke down and cried, before she cried, she wanted to be able to make a fast getaway.
“It’s a key,” she said. “A key for a little apartment all his own. Let’s do it.” And she wheeled away.
“He can’t afford any apartment,” their father was saying.
“Yes, he can,” her mother said. “I’ve found one, and it’s close by. It has a Murphy bed in the wall, so it’s just one room and a kitchenette and a bath.”
Catherine made it into the kitchen, where she took deep, long breaths to try to control her panic.
Faintly, she heard her mother’s continuing explanation. “Don’s going to get an after-school job, and he can use the money to pay the rent. After we get him started, help him just one month.”
“I thought he wanted to save for a car,” the father said.
“No,” she answered. “He can ride the bus. He needs a place of his own. I won’t have him sacrificing his life to us.”
That night, Catherine lay in her bed and listened to the city noises. She liked it when a siren shrieked. Maybe it was for her. Maybe it was coming to save her. The tears rolled out of her eyes. That her brother needed to leave home, that he had to leave home! She felt ashamed. She felt the cup of herself filling with loneliness. Never for a minute did she want him not to have his own place. For the first time, she thought, I hate my body, I hate it. Then she told herself, It’s not me. It’s not the real me. The real me is my mind and my spirit.
She knew how it would be on Christmas morning. Don would go to his red-and-white peppermint-striped Christmas stocking. (Her own was winter-green and white.) He would see that it was mostly limp, but with a pointy weight in the toe. When he reached in, he would not believe what his fingers told him without seeing, but when he drew out the key, he would know, he would know immediately, and his face would ignite into the happiest smile she had ever seen.
There was a fire someplace in the city, and she heard the clanging of a bell added to the howl of a siren. Keep them safe, she prayed. Staring at the ceiling, she wondered where God was in her life. The ceiling promised nothing for them, for her. She felt that she needed an afterlife; that after this thwarting, she deserved to have something and not nothing. All her life she would be robbed, increasingly, of her power. Then she thought in biblical terms, not to God, but to her body, I will contend with thee.
When the real Christmas Day came, Cat saw a mysterious, loopy bulge in her own stocking. It seemed ridged like a skein of stiff rope or starched yarn. Mother unhooked the stocking from the mantel and handed it to her. She drew out an extension cord, looped like a figure eight, tying itself in the middle.
“It’s the electric cord to your new typewriter,” her mother said.
“Look, Sister,” Don said, holding the brass door key in his hand. He gestured toward where their father was standing. Father whisked off a Christmas tablecloth, and there near the window was a low, handmade table. It had a stained and varnished plywood surface with a large cutout, so a person in a wheelchair could drive right into her desk. And on the tabletop sat a big electric typewriter. Electric! How she had labored to form legible letters for her essays. On an electric keyboard, you barely had to push down.
“You can write your school papers on it,” her mother said.
AFTER THEY WERE SETTLED in the city, after both Cat and Don had finished their freshman years in high school and in college, their mother suddenly and unexpectedly died in her bed.
Looking for comfort, his face bathed in tears, her father said, “She had her remission. She got that. She got her remission.” Then he asked Cat to phone Donny. “You’ve got to tell him,” he said. “I can’t.”
AFTER HER MOTHER’S DEATH, Catherine tried again to love her body—her mother had. She tried to believe that human beings were a holy trinity—body, mind, and soul. It was easy to believe in the last two, but was she really this person who spilled things and lost her balance, who bumped into things, who couldn’t get up without a heroic effort, who dreaded the ordeal of getting on and off a toilet?
Murmuring compliments, she tried to bribe her body. Not only to appease it with lotions, but also to value and flatter her good points: her nice eyes, after all, were a part of her body. And her lips were nice—pleasantly full. Her hair could look shiny, if not curled in the latest flip style. She had tried the pink plastic cage curlers; she had tried the soft blue sponge ones with the white clip bar, but neither type was manageable. Her ears were small and delicate—“like seashells,” her mother used to say. And she was a straight-A student—but with that consoling thought, she was slipping away from the body inventory into the realm of the mind. Well, she had a fine brain for thinking, if haywire in the motor control department.
In her bedroom, each morning, she sat before the long dime-store mirror hung low on the wall and started again: “You have nice eyes, bright blue, and the eyebrows are arched naturally in a pretty peak.” She smiled at herself. “Keep your lips closed, so the slight gap between the front two teeth doesn’t show.” Rolling closer to the mirror, she inspected the mossiness on her teeth near the gum line and wished they made electric toothbrushes.
Even in college, she kept up the ritual of addressing herself in the morning, of saying something positive to her body to start the day. The day of graduation, she told herself, “You did it, you gorgeous woman! You earned a college degree.” And Stella would come over to help her put on the black robe over her dress. When she and Stella got jobs teaching at the night school, she told the mirror, “You are a gainfully employed human being. You are an adult.”
But the morning after the bullhorn man had threatened, she looked in the mirror and said, “You are a sniveling coward.” It was morning, but she knew she could not go back. Not that night. Yes, she got her period, but she wasn’t flooding, as she told Stella she was. She was afraid. “You talk big,” she told her seated self. “But you are trembling, and it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. You’re afraid not that you’ll be shot through the window but that you’ll wet yourself.”
She stared hard at herself and at the objects in her bedroom reflected in the narrow mirror. The room was very sparsely furnished, because she needed so much room to maneuver. Even if she had a comfortable, overstuffed chair in the room for reading, it would be too much trouble to get in and out of it. Though she never used them anymore, she looked at her crutches over in the corner. She decided to ask Stella to take them out, to replace them in the corner with a nice vase, and to put peacock feathers in the vase.
She missed her mother and thought of her grave near the little country church she had always loved. They had chosen a grave site near the cemetery driveway, so Catherine wouldn’t have to get out of the car to visit it. Viewing the nearly vacant room, she missed her mother ferociously. Her mother wouldn’t want her to risk her life to educate what she called “coloreds.” For all her loving kindness, her mother had thought the races were different and should be separate, except where “necessity” dictated otherwise. “You can’t hardly build two separate cities,” her mother had said. “You’ve got to share electricity and water and things.”
The room was full of sunshine, but it wasn’t too hot yet. Donny had given her a new kind of blanket—a thermal blanket for fall—and it was very lightweight. In the mirror, Cat contemplated the bed. She used the loose-woven white cotton blanket as a spread, and she loved how modern it was. That it could be tossed into the washer and dryer and never needed to be ironed.
When she looked again into her own smart and mild blue eyes, she knew she saw fear. And it was not fear of wetting. She wanted to live. Suppose this was all there was to life? Sunshine and an almost empty room, a bed with a new-washed thermal blanket, smoothly made up. If that was all there could be to life—a certain domestic beauty and convenience—it was enough, and she would keep it as long as she could.
I will contend with thee, she promised the image of her seated self, the young woman in the wheelchair filling the lower third of the long mirror. Neither disease nor danger will rob me of what’s left.
Then as clearly as though he were there, she heard Donny saying, “And what is life without honor?” In her mind’s eye, she saw him walking the beach of his South Pacific island; he was wearing a sarong, his chest was bare, held high, covered with golden hair. So clear was the image, it seemed as though she were watching a movie. Donny had a walking staff in his hand, the kind you could cut in Alabama, one shaped by a twining vine into a baroque spiral, and she wondered where her old walking stick was, the one her father had brought to her when he had first noticed and yet denied the onset of her clumsy disease. With the beach sand in the background, Donny stopped walking, and skeptically said, “And what is life without honor?”
I’ll go back tomorrow night, she promised herself. Not tonight, but tomorrow night. A little compromise with death. I promise you, she told her image, I’ll go back tomorrow night.
And she would spend the day as an activist in her own cause and in the cause of people like herself. She rolled herself toward the living room and the typewriter. She would type a letter to the managers of each movie theater in town suggesting that they remove a few seats (perhaps in the back?) so that wheelchair patrons could sit in the row in their own chairs, so that two women could go to a movie together and not need a brother or father to lift one of them into a seat. She would write to the three city commissions (racists all, of one stripe or another) and suggest they not discriminate against wheelchair users of the public streets downtown, that at the busiest corners they make cuts in the curbs, little ramps, so that, unaided, people in wheelchairs might roll themselves from the corners of Pizitz or Loveman’s to other stores across the street.
She would tell them that she was the president of a new group; she named it Access Available. As she laboriously rolled the typing paper into the platen, she thought that there really could be such a group. She would talk to handicapped people she’d met at Spain Rehab. Once the roller grasped the paper, she could press the Load button. She could go to the waiting rooms of hospitals and recruit other handicapped persons. And I’ll bet nobody would want to shoot us, she thought. And none of us would be packing switchblades or guns.
With her hands suspended over the keyboard, she suddenly remembered her father had brought her a gun of her own. If she went back tomorrow night, she need not go defenseless. She could carry her gun.