Vanishing and Other Stories (32 page)

That is, until one September—it was her final year, my penultimate—Mary Louise came back from her cottage in a wheelchair.

There were different stories. She'd slipped off the dock. She'd been thrown from a horse. She'd been drunk. She'd been
sober. Eventually we found out the truth: she'd climbed the steep rock that lined the lakeshore—I could picture her scrambling up, her arms reaching and her legs strong—and she dove into water that was too shallow. She'd done what all our mothers had cautioned us against, and she'd suffered the consequences our mothers warned us about too. Mary Louise had injured her spinal cord. She couldn't move her legs. She would never walk again.

When I first saw her, I was sitting on the floor outside my homeroom with my best friend, Sylvia. Syl was using a blue pen to draw a butterfly onto the knee of her jeans, and I was braiding and unbraiding my hair. We were talking about
The Bell Jar
, because we were sixteen, and we wanted to be depressed in New York. We would have even settled for being happy in New York. It was the first day of school and we wanted to be anywhere but where we were, and then Mary Louise rolled past us in her chair. I let my hair unravel, and Syl looked up from her butterfly. We stopped talking, as did the other students. The hallway had the kind of hush you find in churches.

It wasn't that we'd never seen a girl in a wheelchair before, and it wasn't just the wheelchair, either. It was that Mary Louise's face seemed to have gone still, along with her legs. Her head was bent forward, her eyes focused on the floor, and she seemed to wish she were invisible. I remember the soft noise the wheels made on the polished floor.

For the first time, I was aware of luck—that flimsy, moody thing. We existed in a world that seemed to hold to a pleasing pattern: we took the bus to school each morning, and every afternoon the same bus returned us to our safe streets. We lived in a city
that was always booming, or about to boom, a city that was sunny even in winter. And we existed in a world of rules, some imposed by our parents and teachers, but more by our own sense of social boundaries. Some people were deemed attractive and some were not, some were popular and some were not. If this was unfair, at least it was unchanging.

But suddenly we saw that life was not the still water we'd believed it to be. Mary Louise had been going about the same middle-class, suburban, privileged existence that we led—except that hers was even more privileged than ours. She must have had our same unthinking confidence in the future, until her destiny swerved like a canoe caught in a current. She'd once possessed something elusive and unmistakable, something beyond even beauty—maybe charisma, maybe grace—and that something had been wrenched from her. Fortune's wheel had turned. I found this terrifying. I found it comforting.

 

 

I DON
'
T MEAN THAT
Mary Louise was no longer pretty. But she was more ordinary. Instead of being a goddess, far above us mortals, she had become the Divine who moves among us. As she rolled past, she was both Leda and the swan. She was the Holy Ghost and she was a broken Christ.

Is this what we thought at the time? Probably not. Most of the girls, myself included, probably felt pity and a secret sense of triumph. And I can't speak for the boys. Maybe they instantly betrayed their queen and struck her from their hearts, removed her from their sexual fantasies forever. Or maybe, in her new
incarnation, they found her even more desirable than before: a pretty girl who couldn't run away.

 

 

TO THE RELIEF OF MY PARENTS
, I was an ordinary kid. I did my homework, played defence on the field-hockey team, and listened to the kind of music that got played on the radio. I had plenty of friends and had never been seriously teased or ostracized by my peers. I never got cavities, though once I had mono. And any beauty I possessed belonged to youth, not to me: I wore my hair in a ponytail, got freckles in the summer, and was of average height. This ordinariness was probably what Mary Louise liked about me, for those five minutes that she liked me.

Of course, being no different from most girls, I didn't love my body. I was annoyed by the late development of my breasts, my bad posture, and the stretch marks that scarred my hips and abdomen. But I liked what my body could do. I could easily run the laps required in gym class, and enjoyed the adrenalin of field-hockey games. When I wasn't at school, I liked to ride my bike around with Syl. We could ride and ride and feel like we hadn't gone anywhere, because in our neighbourhood each street looked like every other street: double garages, aerated lawns, pastel stucco. We never got tired, so we biked for hours and talked about moving to somewhere like Venice or Paris, somewhere we'd only seen in magazines, somewhere that was instantly recognizable.

When we got bored of biking, we'd go to Mac's and buy a bag of five-cent candies. Then we'd lie on the patch of grass beside the parking lot and talk about boys. The boys we talked about were not
actually the boys who talked to us. We worshipped the ones who were older than us, or far above us in the intricate social atmosphere. The Jordan Burkes and Dan Houstons and Ryan Watkinses of our world.

Syl believed in destiny, and she would say things like, “Ryan and I will probably meet again when we're, like, twenty-eight. And he won't remember where he knows my face from, but he'll have this sense that we met before, like maybe he knew me in a past life or something. He'll feel like he's finally come home.”

I was less trusting of fate, so sometimes I'd say, “What if he's bald when he's twenty-eight? Or a crack addict? Or you're already in love with someone else who's really awesome?”

But usually I let her fantasies stand. I understood them. Syl and I were devoted to boys who didn't know our names, boys we'd practically invented. We wanted them to notice us and recognize our worth. And this was just part of the larger fantasy: that one day the whole world would see our worth. We dreamed—as all ordinary, despairing teenagers do—of distinction.

 

 

THAT YEAR, IN GRADE ELEVEN
, I got a boyfriend. His name was Jay, and he was nice and almost cute. He had knotty, pubescent muscles along his arms, and brown hair that he kept short. He worked part-time at Dairy Queen and he knew how to skateboard. We didn't have much to talk about, but that was okay. All we wanted to do was make out.

Our parents always seemed to be home, so we had to be inventive to find privacy. The gym equipment room at school was pretty
good. So was the parking lot behind the Dairy Queen. Movie theatres. Empty parks. The best place was the Planetarium. We'd been there for a field trip, and had discovered its manifold advantages. It was only a bus ride away and it cost less than the five-buck admission if you were under eighteen. And there was the Sky Theatre, a dark room where images of the night sky were projected on a domed screen above us. We went there on Friday afternoons, when school got out early and the Planetarium was nearly empty. On Fridays, I chose my outfits strategically. I wore shirts with buttons, the only bra I owned, and sometimes—when feeling brave—a skirt.

Jay and I always pretended to the man at admissions, and to each other, that we were at the Planetarium for proper educational reasons. We'd waste precious minutes wandering through the exhibit rooms, reading about dark matter and supernovas, and neither of us dared make suggestive jokes about the Little Dipper or the Big Bang.

This was before a telecommunications company sponsored the Planetarium, so its exhibits had not yet lost their charm to technological innovation. The place smelled of cleaning products and plastics, and the walls were covered in graphs and posters and telescopic photographs. After a few visits, the informative panels became like well-loved poems.
The sun and planets were formed approximately five billion years ago, from a cloud of gas and dust left by dying stars
.

My favourite part was the model of the solar system. The planets looked rickety and seemed to be made of papier mâché. One of Saturn's rings—which I'd always imagined as a brilliant halo—had cracked. Some of Jupiter's gassy surface had been
chipped away. The solar system, in this incarnation, was small and flawed. Maybe that's why I liked it.

Jay and I held hands and made our pilgrimage from one planet to the next. We started at Pluto, as this was before it was demoted.

“If you were a planet,” said Jay one afternoon, “which planet would you be?”

This was the kind of shy conversation we made while we waited for the appropriate amount of time to elapse before we could go into the Sky Theatre.

“I'd want to be the sun. It's so bright and beautiful.”

I wanted Jay to tell me that I was the sun. That I was bright and beautiful. But he replied in the sweet and patronizing way he must have thought guys were supposed to talk to their girlfriends. “The sun's not a planet, baby. It's a star.”

“Yeah, I know that. Fine. Then I would be Mercury, since it's closest to the sun.”

“I think you're the Earth.” He put his arms around me. “You're familiar and comfortable.”

I nudged him away. “What about you, then? What would you be?”

“I'd want to be Jupiter.” Jay took my hand and led me toward the Sky Theatre, toward its darkness and mystery. “It'd be nice to have all those moons around. That way you'd never be lonely.”

So there was that too, that held us together. A fear of being alone.

 

 

WE THE STUDENT BODY
—that reluctant community, that dysfunctional family—got used to seeing Mary Louise in her wheelchair. After a while we didn't stare at her, though we did talk about the fact that she and Jordan had broken up. We assumed he'd dumped her because she could no longer use her legs, and he was unanimously viewed as selfish, superficial, a total dick. How else could we explain that when Mary Louise could walk, he had proudly paraded through the halls with her? And that now, she wheeled herself to her classes alone?