Four Spirits (44 page)

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.