Audrey started it. “If I wasn’t handicapped, you could come home with me and fuck me all night,” I heard her say to a guy with longish blond hair who’d bought her a drink. He must have whispered “Let’s do it anyway,” because she said, “Oh no, believe me, you don’t want to risk falling in love with me! It would be very painful for you because nothing can come of it. A handicapped girl is like a nun.”
I caught up quickly. I wrapped my arm around the arm of the guy who had just handed me a drink and whispered, “Isn’t it a shame I’m handicapped? I could be dancing with you, rubbing my breasts against you…”
“Do you give money to the telethon?” Audrey was asking.
“If you give enough money, we’ll get cured, and then you’ll want us to be your girlfriends,” I chimed in.
We kept the game going all night—or at least until our bladders got too full. Accessible rest rooms were unheard of. When we couldn’t hold it anymore, we had to leave.
“I’m gonna wet my pants in five seconds,” Audrey whispered as we rolled out the door.
There was a ticket stuck under her windshield wiper. She left it there. Once in the car, our chairs folded and jammed into the back, she handed me the jar she kept under the seat for emergencies.
“Don’t you want to go first?” I asked.
“Too late for me.”
I saw her pants were all wet. I peed in the jar, emptied it out the door, and we headed back to her house.
Audrey’s mother had opened the foldaway bed for me. I got undressed quickly, took off my braces, and lay down. I was tired. I needed to get at least a few hours’ sleep. I wanted to drive to St. John’s in the morning and not miss my nine o’clock English class. I unfolded the blanket Audrey’s mother had left for me and got under it.
But Audrey kept moving around in her wheelchair, not at all eager to get in bed. She was still wearing her sexy electric blue sweater but had taken off her wet pants and underpants and sat there bare-assed. From her hips to her knees, her thighs, lacking muscles, formed a soft flattened V against the wheelchair seat. Her skinny legs, lined with pink scars, dangled, her bare feet, not quite reaching the footrests, pointing straight forward from surgically fused ankles. We both made a point of looking at our naked bodies in the mirror only from the waist up, but we were so familiar with each other’s bodies. Looking at Audrey’s legs now was like seeing my own in a mirror.
She was fumbling with her jewelry box, which she had taken out of the bottom drawer of her dresser and unlocked with a tiny key.
“Want to see what I’ve got?” She didn’t sound mischievous, which she usually did when she asked that question.
“Sure.” I was too sleepy to show much enthusiasm.
She took out a pill bottle and held it up to me. There were quite a few pills in it, judging by the sound it made when Audrey shook it.
“What are they?”
She twisted the cap off and let some pills fall into her palm. She smiled as she stuck her hand in front of my face. It was full of red capsules.
“What are they?” I asked again.
“Se-con-als.” She enunciated each syllable.
“Sleeping pills?”
She nodded, still smiling.
“Where did you get them?”
“From my mother. I ask her for one now and then, saying I can’t sleep. And I steal one or two when I get the chance. I’ve been hoarding them for months.” She spread them all out on her bed and started counting.
“How many do you think I’ll have to take to die?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think I have enough yet.” She shook her head.
Though still exhausted, I wasn’t sleepy anymore. “Would you really do it, Audrey?”
“Do you want to live, just to be treated like a leper?” She was good at answering a question with a question.
“The guys at the club weren’t treating us like lepers, Audrey.”
“Did any of them ask you for a date?” She had a point there. “Men notice us because we’re beautiful and act sexy. But that just makes us more freakish, don’t you see? When they’re attracted to us, men feel like they’re not normal, and they resent us for that. I guess if we were homely, things would be simpler.”
She was playing with the pills, scooping them back into the bottle, then making them fall out onto the bed again.
“Oh, come on, Audrey! You make it sound like we don’t have a right to be attractive. The way I see it, if men resent us, it’s their problem.” I pulled the blanket over my shoulders.
She sneered at me. “Oh, yeah? It’s their problem? But we’re the ones who will never have a real relationship, get married, have a family, be happy…”
I’d been learning about the women’s liberation movement, had even read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, so I proclaimed, “I don’t need a man to be happy.”
“Oh, excuse me! Are you going to become a lesbian? I doubt it would be any easier with women.”
“Nothing wrong with being a lesbian, but that’s not what I meant, Audrey.”
“Oh, forgive me; I forgot. You’re going to have a career! You think that when you graduate, they’ll be waiting for you with all kinds of job offers. That’s why you study all the time. Are you going to make the dean’s list?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked again, “Would you really do it, Audrey?”
She had put all the pills back in the bottle and was putting it back in her jewelry box.
“What do you think?” Again she answered with a question. “Do you think I’m chicken, like you?”
I did make the dean’s list. Audrey’s average was barely above a D.
What’s the use? Why waste the time? That was Audrey’s attitude. Was she right? Was I wasting my time trying to get good grades? What job prospects were there for handicapped girls? I had decided to major in English. According to Audrey, I wanted to prove I’d gotten over my “language difficulty.” And I was minoring in Italian—to show some loyalty to my native tongue, again according to Audrey.
My father was thrilled when he got the letter of congratulations. He had it engraved onto a gold-colored metal plate and mounted. He hung it up on the living room wall. Anyone who entered our house was escorted straight to it. “Leggi qua! Read here!” my father ordered. And they had to read the whole letter, couldn’t just read the first sentence, say “How wonderful,” and walk away. If the visitor couldn’t read English, my father translated the whole letter, adding a few superlatives here and there. Though embarrassed, I was happy to see that my father was proud of me.
