Louise (11 page)

Louise roams the place happily, dragging herself along the walls. “Look, all the rooms are painted different colors! The bedroom is bright pink and the kitchen is electric blue! There's a closet, and over here a little shelf!”

Warner, Elizabeth, and Janet look at each other. Janet whispers, “What a dump.”

Warner has brought books for Louise that he stacks on a sticky shelf: a self-budgeting workbook and pamphlets on home repair and personal safety. Elizabeth has pulled some items from their basement: towels, framed pictures, rugs. Tom carries the heaviest ends of mattresses and boxes. There isn't much to carry: a friend's couch, a lamp, some plastic dishes with roses on them. Janet puts on rubber gloves and cleans under the kitchen sink. Of course she finds mice turds and cockroaches.

No one wants to leave. They stand around in the little main room and talk, their voices echoing off the walls.

As Janet gives her a good-bye hug, she asks Louise if she has any food.

“We just ate,” Louise says.

“I mean in the cupboards,” Janet says. She takes Louise to the grocery store and they buy organic everything, cartons of eggs and bags of bright fruit. Once they are back and it all is put away, Janet has no choice but to go. Her new boyfriend tries to comfort her on the way back to their small town, but Janet just rests her forehead on the window. She keeps thinking of Louise sleeping in that place, and having to get up in it in the morning, alone.

•

Warner spends most of the moving day putting up blinds, touching up grout in the bathroom, checking the smoke alarm. He walks around the place with a large ruler, making sure all the pictures hang right. He still doesn't understand what Louise will do, really, or how she will do it. He feels as if Louise is a teenager leaving home for the first time, only worse. Warner does not really remember the first time Louise left home for college. She suddenly was just gone, and he'd never had to worry about her at all, not about drinking or smoking or grades or boys. Why is that? Why hadn't he worried?

As they drive away, he and Elizabeth glance through the rearview to see Louise bent over a box. Warner feels he is doing the wrong thing but keeps on driving away. He does not know what else to do.

T
om's scholarship house is a ten-minute walk away from Louise's new place. He often rides his bike to see her, propping it on the communal porch that's trashed with watery puke stains and soggy paper bags. Girls in tight jeans and pastel fleeces slam doors and run up and down the stairs, which are outside, like a fire escape. Sometimes, in the small, dead yard, a few guys without shirts grill hot dogs and drink from red plastic cups while a football game plays on the radio.

He remembers when Louise was a senior in college, and he was a freshman, living in a skyscraper-like dormitory full of guys who did things like blow pot smoke through dryer sheets. He didn't smoke, or drink, and wasn't making many friends. His roommate had a girlfriend, and they always were in the top bunk and under the covers together. Louise rarely called Tom, but one day she invited him over to her place for dinner. Tom was so happy that for once he did his homework without letting the sounds of sex distract him.

He'd been late. Spanish Club had run over, and he had to bike a long way with a giant bag of tortilla chips balanced on the handlebar. No one answered his knock. The door was open, and he ran up the stairs calling out, Sorry, sorry! but still no one answered. The place was huge—the largest room had a pool table, fluorescent lights, and a black-and-white checkered floor. In the kitchen piles of dirty dishes were everywhere. He had missed it. He'd checked his cell phone. No call.

The people in her new place are just like her old friends. But Tom cannot see his sister with any of these people now.

•

Tom takes Louise to the public indoor pool, which she hates by now. He knows this, but she at least goes—she won't go anywhere else to work out. Janet and Warner keep telling him that Louise needs to exercise every day, but she says walking outside on the sidewalk is humiliating, the gym is crowded, yoga class is too quiet. But at the pool Tom doesn't think she tries hard enough. She gets stiff and impossible after a few minutes and sinks to the bottom if he tells her to lie back and float. Her arms are thin but flabby, her tummy soft. She needs muscle, Janet and Warner say. Make her build it. It's the only way her walking is going to get better, the only way she'll get rid of that cane. Tom tries to show Louise the strengthening moves that are illustrated in her physical therapy binder, the strokes. His limbs are smooth and slow, as if swimming through gel. He demonstrates a Soccer Kick, a Bicycle, a Mermaid. He does the Boxing Punch. Louise's swimsuit—bright blue with skinny straps—looks bad. It was last used on a spring-break vacation to Jamaica where she paraded down the beach with her girlfriends. Now it sags and puckers. She holds a kickboard across her chest like it is a stuffed animal and sits on the gutter. Tom swims back and forth down the lane, hoping he is being a positive role model.

On the way home she doesn't look out of the car window. Not at the fraternity and sorority mansions with Olympian pillars, not at the man on a street corner meditating on a bed of nails, not even to see the people next to their car at any stoplight. She keeps her eyes on her hands. Tom notices that Louise now always wears sweatpants and bright T-shirts. Stretchy shorts. He wonders where all her real clothes went.

He asks her what's wrong, and she tells him about how, on her first night in town, after everyone left, she wanted to
go out, but couldn't think of anyone to call except a guy she knew from the school newspaper who almost died from a bacterial infection. He had lost almost all of his fingers and toes and had prosthetics. In his specially outfitted car, they drove downtown to a bar and talked about how hard life was for them. Louise says they depressed each other, and that she hasn't called him since.

Tom doesn't know where Louise falls on the disability scale. She is not as bad as that guy, is she?

•

Janet and Warner call Tom early in the mornings, when he is still under his Mexican blanket, the room a dreamy dark. They ask questions about Louise, so many questions. They mail him checks so he and Louise can eat at tablecloth restaurants. Janet mentions she bought an air mattress for a weekend trip up. Tom isn't used to all this attention, all these gifts, all this contact with his parents. He tells them there's no need to visit. He has it under control. He is Louise's brother. He was there when she crumpled on the grass in Alabama. He can help now.

•

Tom's girlfriend, a short, motivated girl who is a teaching assistant for a human sexuality class, wants to meet Louise. She and Tom are both members of an experimental church called The Center. It is close to downtown in an old community rec center. Tom's girlfriend has cropped hair and does not wear bras or use deodorant. Tom has always liked how sweet his girlfriend is, how she gives everyone hugs and cheek kisses and remembers birthdays, but he is not sure she should meet Louise. Louise does not like to smile—because it makes the paralysis more noticeable, she says, which Tom supposes is true. Tom thinks that maybe, though, the three of them could watch a movie, or make some goals for Louise, write them on a marker board. They could get frozen yogurt.

Tom brings his girlfriend to Louise's place. They bring bags of vegetable juices, vitamins, and essential oils. The gifts seem to upset Louise—she leaves them, unopened, on the kitchen counter. Louise has prepared some sort of salad for dinner, and the conversation goes okay, Tom guesses, but honestly he was too nervous to remember what was said. They try to decide what game to play after dinner. His girlfriend suggests Pictionary. Tom says okay.

“Okay?” his girlfriend asks. “You hate Pictionary.”

“I want to play what you want to play,” he says.

“Don't be such a pushover,” Louise says.

“Seriously,” his girlfriend says. “Stand up for yourself.”

Glad you're getting along, he thinks.

After the game, Tom tells Louise he has been seeing a therapist. Louise asks what they talk about. “A lot of things—school, my relationship—you,” he says.

“Really? What does your therapist say about me?” Louise says.

“Nothing.”

“Tom. Come on.”

His girlfriend reaches for his hand.

“She says I shouldn't be afraid to tell you no. And to be honest with you about how self-pitying you are. Sometimes, I mean.”

She starts petting her cat. “Tom. You don't know what real problems are.”

He about flies out of his seat. “You have no idea what I do for you,” he shouts. “How I defend you to my friends. How many parties I miss so that we can hang out!”

“You don't go to parties,” Louise says.

His girlfriend puts her arm around him. She kisses his fingers. She rubs the back of his neck. Louise is staring with her one eye. He knows he shouldn't be doing romantic things in front of Louise. She always used to have a guy around who would lift her up and kiss her hard.

But he does not pull back.

T
om takes me to an acupuncturist. It was his idea. He thinks my facial nerves might regenerate if the right spot is stimulated, if a needle worries it just right. I go along. Tom's optimism makes me want to believe it will work. We pull up to a renovated Victorian. It smells like a spa. Tom waits in the lobby with a plug-in fountain. The acupuncturist has me strip to my underwear and lie on my back. He puts little needles in my earlobes and pinkie toes and other places. After 30 minutes, he takes the needles out.

In the car, Tom asks me if I feel any different. “I feel buzzed,” I say. Tom and I laugh. We decide to treat ourselves to whipped-cream coffees.

On the way I tell Tom that I still call Claude. There is silence. He guns past a spot. “Tom—” We swerve, and one wheel ends up on the curb.

“No more, Louise. No more Claude.”

“I just want him to say he's sorry,” I say. “I can feel that he is, I just want him to say it.”

“Well he's not,” Tom says. “You are not feeling that. What you are feeling is something else.”

L
ouise calls Davy, her old boyfriend. He doesn't answer and she leaves a message. She sits on the floor and blares the music Davy used to listen to, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. She wears headphones. Tom visits, and she tells him she's working. “On what?” he shouts, but she turns up the volume until the sound is screaming, until her whole world is this. Tom leaves.

She thinks about a pink and white striped dress Davy picked out for her at a thrift store. It was made in the 1950s and had a full skirt and a tight bodice with thick straps. She wore it to classes with flip-flops. Davy used to wear old, slim-fit jeans and thin cowboy shirts with pearl buttons. They used to go to a bar made of cinder blocks on the edge of the county line. People in there had bare feet and shouted. Louise and Davy talked to everyone, sat with strangers. On quiet nights, they would sit on the futon in his apartment and look at art books. Davy's favorite artist was Hieronymus Bosch. He lived in the third floor of a run-down house. They called it the Tree House.

That summer, Louise had grown a Magic Garden in a shoe box. The display was paper cutouts that grew crystals when liquid was added. Overnight, it became an upright scene of trees and flowers with a prickly, tissue paper texture. They accidentally left the window open one morning, and when they returned that night, only skeletons of the trees remained. The tiny colored leaves and petals were scattered on the floor like real ones would have been after a storm.

Once Davy said to Louise, “I will never hurt you.” She had thought it was a strange thing to say. She had never thought he would.

•

Davy gets back to her. He feels bad for her, she can tell by his tone, even though she dumped him for a guy named Claude. Davy says he'll take Louise to one of his guitar-playing gigs, that he'll come and pick her up in the camper.

•

Louise remembers the camper—she'd gone with Davy to pick it up at his father's place out in the country. It was parked between a bunch of four-wheelers and a wooden swingset. His dad was on his second round of kids.

She is nervous before their date. Her scar runs from the top of her scalp to the nape of her neck, so she wears her hair down, hoping it doesn't show. She waits on her building's steps.

Louise would sometimes drive the camper. The steering wheel was the size of a pizza and the seat was huge and leather, a captain's chair. They called it a spaceship. On weekend trips to Missouri or Arkansas, through national parks and hill country, they slept on the second story, in the cubby above the front seats. They'd leave the air-conditioning on all night. Once, they visited some friends of Davy's in Little Rock, a married couple who lived in a trailer with quilts and clipped coupons tacked on the walls. The woman had served baked chicken that was pink and bloody inside.

•

Louise shouldn't be drinking yet, but this is her first party since the Incident, and Davy is playing. He moves his body the way guitar players do, thrashing. He and the other musicians make bad jokes into the microphone and drink from the same bottle of whiskey.