Louise is walking carefully down some campus steps with a hot lunch and holding on to the railing. She sees a blind woman coming up with a guide dog. They are taking the steps quickly. Louise tries to move over, shuffling sideways across the concrete until she can get a hand on the railing on the other side, but before she can make it the dog leaps up like a wolf and knocks her down. Then the dog steps on her as it goes on up the stairs. The dog does not bark, its tags just clink. The woman goes around. Louise’s lasagna has spilled on her shirt. She feels like she should say something, but what would she say? I’m handicapped, too?
Sometimes Louise goes back to that same stairwell around lunchtime. She stands in the corner, waiting, and sure enough, close to noon, there they are, the woman and her seeing-eye dog, practically racing up the steps. Louise imagines lying down in their path, horizontal, making her body pencil-straight so she fits on a single stair. The dog’s paws would punch her stomach and the woman would plant a shoe in her chest. Louise would get some satisfaction out of this. She would let them do it again and again and again. Thinking of this makes her think of Claude for some reason. It makes her laugh.