Rah, Rah When Liza lost her legs, we called it a car accident, not a cheerleading accident. It took the humor away. Despite the seriousness of it, when my mother whispered, “It was a cheerleading accident,” there were sure to be off-colored jokes related to a toppled pyramid, the splits gone awry. We called it a car accident because that’s what it was; the Camry hooked around the tree on the way to the North Ridge football game. She was driving alone —she’d had a dentist appointment —and when the ambulance arrived, peeled her from between the window and the seat, her blue and gold uniform was crusted with blood, stained deep, the fibers retaining the odors. My parents and I, we had already arrived. We were sitting two rows from the top of the bleachers, my father scanning the newspaper for box scores, my mother urging me to call my sister on the cell phone. We were here to cheer on Liza, but also, to cheer Jake, her boyfriend, a friend of mine from school. Jake and I, we’d undergone the grime and torture of summer football practices together, but when school started, I dropped back; blamed it on an ankle injury, though we all knew I’d quit for different reasons. It was my junior year, I had dreams of college, a GPA that needed fixing. Instead of playing, I watched them trot through the empty hallways after school while I fumbled in the library, tried to remember what studying felt like. I listened to them talk strategy between classes, watched them brandish icepacks like merit badges. The worst part was watching the games under lights. I crossed my fingers that they’d lose without me. “Here, give me the phone, I’ll call,” Mom said. She wore the blue and gold Lindenwood Lions sweatshirt that hung low over a pair of jeans. Her brown hair bobbed as she leaned forward to retrieve it. “I’ll call,” I groaned. I dialed those numbers, listened to Liza’s voice as I was taken to her voicemail. She told me to leave a message and I did. I did, but it was the wrong message, and later, after her legs were already taken from her, she’d hear the message, then stare at me as if questioning how I’d guessed. I spoke into the phone, cleared my throat, said, “Okay Liza, Mom’s flipping out here. There better be some kind of wild excuse for this because the game’s about to start and you’re nowhere.” I hung up. After they took her legs, she stared out her bedroom window, the
phone balanced on her rumpled thighs and said, “Derek, don’t worry, I
had a wild excuse all ready for you.” *
We reacted differently. Dad remained hushed, stalwart in his silence, answered the doctors with grunts and nods and never resorted to shrugging. “Mr. Armstrong,” they beckoned, and my father would rise, try his best to answer their questions. He filled out the paperwork, handed over the insurance card, signed, said, “Please! Take away my daughter’s legs! Let me pay you for it!” My mother, she was different, and her hushed whimpers continued for days. Whimpers like hiccups, and she tiptoed around the corridors, searching for drinking fountains, searching for something she could never seem to find. I too, wandered. I spent most of the following day sneaking into other people’s hospital rooms, eyeing them conked out on medication, or with eyes partially closed as they watched television. I watched the old, the weak, the young, the enfeebled, and they all looked the same to me. I apologized each time I entered a room that did not belong to Liza. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry.” But I needed to see them, to gauge their injuries against her own, and I excused myself a dozen times for her. Saturday night, after she woke up and found what she was missing, the police officer offered condolences to the empty spaces beneath her thighs. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” She did mind. She was
dizzy, her body colliding with the air as she rocked back and forth,
back and forth again. The questions, they were endless, and the pale-faced officer nodded, scribbled answers, tried to show sympathy by the frowned expression pasted on his face. He nodded when she spoke and did not question her answers. It was good of him. When the questions ended, he reached inside a trash bag he’d brought along, pulled two blue and gold pom poms from the wrinkled darkness, looked over at my parents and I, and said, “We pulled them from the wreckage. We wanted to return them.” He held them out, and neither my mother nor my father reached out
to retrieve them. I was the one to take those frazzled, shredded
strips, and when he nodded, I uttered thank you. Liza looked out the
window. *
“How’d the game go?” my father asked. Asking was a reflex. His eyes jerked when he said it. “Lost,” Jake said. “13-21.” My father nodded. I nodded. There was no camaraderie to be had, no slaps on the shoulder, no “better luck next time.” “Is she okay?” he asked me, wincing. “She doesn’t have her legs, Jake,” I told him. I knew he knew this, but I wanted to say it again, so he’d understand it fully when he stepped into the room. Jake and I, we’d brutalized each other all summer long: running plays, practicing tackles, spotting each other on the bench press. We’d watched each other sweat, vomit, nearly shit ourselves with pain as too much weight bore down on us from the bar. He’d been good to Liza — they’d been dating since the previous May — and all summer long, when he lifted, when he sweated, when he earned grass stains on his practice jersey, I imagined it was all for her. Jake looked small in his red basketball shorts. He’d worn them often, typically during our Tuesday morning workouts the previous summer. His yellow t-shirt had a soccer ball in the center. It looked juvenile across his shoulders. Blonde hair shaved short, blue eyes small like targets. Together, we walked into her room and Liza turned to face him. “Hi,” he croaked. She sighed, looked him over, sighed again. “There’s less of me to love now,” she said, spreading her hands
before her, pointing to the gauzy balloons patched around her thighs.
Jake looked at me for guidance, and I looked at the floor. *
“So what now?” I asked. Dad didn’t know. Twenty years prior, my father resembled Jake. He’d said it when I first brought him home last spring, when we had a group project to complete for Mr. Mazer’s history class. Together, we built a miniaturized version of Gettysburg, using G.I. Joes to represent the North and dinosaurs for the South. “Looks just like me,” Dad had whispered as Jake started off from our steps. Then, Dad devoted an hour to digging through attic boxes until he found the picture to prove it. It had been reason to go to the high school football games even after his son had quit —to watch a version of his former self score the winning touchdown. We sat in that waiting room, and I asked where Mom was, and he said she’d gone home to change and shower. “Do you want something to eat? I was thinking of going down to the cafeteria. They’ve got pretty good…yogurt.” It was the only solid food I’d been eating. He said no thanks, and I went down alone and nodded to the young girl who worked behind the counter. Her name was Denise and so far, she’d sold me nine yogurts, three slushies, a banana. “Back for more?” she asked. “Cherry, please,” I said, and she pulled the Yoplait from behind the sealed door, charged me a dollar. I thanked her, sat down in an aqua colored booth towards the back, then stared up at the half windows near the ceiling and watched the grass. Minutes later, I heard clip-clopping coming down the stairs, and it was Jake, and I knew it from the sounds he made. “Well?” I asked, putting my plastic spoon down. He came over to
me, sat, put a hand to his head and said, “Listen, Derek, you’ve got to
help us out. You have to help me end this painlessly. Okay?” *
“You’re not going to end it today, are you?” He shook his head. “You think I don’t understand that? Trust me. I feel like a shit, and everyone else is going to think I’m a shit, but I can’t do it.” He stared at me, deadpan, trying to figure me out. “Fine, alright, I’ll help you,” I shuddered. “No. You’re right.” We stared at the nothingness around us, then down into my empty yogurt cup. “She was a pretty incredible cheerleader, wasn’t she?” Jake asked. “You know,” he chuckled. “That yogurt looks really good. Think
I’ll go grab one too.” He rose, walked over to Denise. Again, it was
the wrong thing to say. *
She came home on the first day of November, and the leaves were frozen skeletons, the branches cracked arms, the roots clamped solid beneath the grass. I took the record player from the closet and plugged it into her wall, then overwhelmed her with Christmas records, putting her favorites on top. We spent that night listening to Bing Crosby’s Christmas record three times over. “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” the last song, was her favorite. I crawled into bed beside her, tried to be a good big brother, and when the record ended, I asked her how she was doing. It was a question she hated, but she answered anyway. “The weird thing is,” she said,
reaching her hands to the empty space, “I feel like my legs are still
here. I feel like I can still feel them. You know?” I didn’t, but I
nodded for her, and she pushed back her blonde hair. I smiled as I
watched the familiar motion. *
“Coach wants us to watch some game tape from the season. So we know what to work on for next year.” She had nodded, taken to the window once more, peered out as he said goodbye, kissed her cheek, ran down the sidewalk and off to the film room at school. That same night, along with Bing Crosby’s Christmas, Mom brought us pizza, and it felt like the kind of night we once shared years before —on Fridays when we were young and friendless. There was a warmth there, permeating throughout the room —a warmth from the pizza, from the television, from the record on repeat. Her room remained unchanged. The posters were all in their proper places, so were the scattered clothes. No one had bothered to do a load of laundry since before the accident, and her jeans piled in the exact places where she last kicked them off. We fell asleep that night while watching a Little House on the
Prairie rerun. When I woke, it was 2:00a.m., the lights were off, and I
was foggy in my head. Who turned off the lights? I wondered. I glanced
over at my sister snoring quiet, her nose flaring with the exhales. My
eyes led me to her propped thighs, and I decided it must have been my
mother. I woke, rubbed eyes, then slipped from her bed and walked,
walked so carelessly, all the way from one room to the next. *
“Listen man, I’ve got to end this today. Will you help me?” “How am I supposed to help you?” “Just…maybe you could talk to her after I leave and…” “No man. I’m not going to help like that. You do it. Go in there and break up with my sister if you want, but I’m not going to do it for you.” “It’s…it’s not just her legs, man,” he said, frustrated. I put my hands on his shoulders to steady me, to keep me from doing something wrong. “You’ve said the wrong thing, Jake. You’ve said a very wrong thing.” Jake was more timid than I’d ever seen him, more anxious. He skittered to the bathroom, I heard a flush, then he shook his head and stepped into her room. I didn’t hear the breakup in entirety, only one line. It came from my sister. She said, “I’m sorry I’m not all ‘rah, rah’ anymore.” She said it quietly, just released the words to the air and allowed them to infect. When Jake stepped out, left her bedroom and knocked on my bedroom door, I looked up from my math, and he swung his hands together, relieved, said, “I hope this doesn’t screw things up between us. I just…it was something I had to do, you know? I know I’m a dick. I know that. But I didn’t want to hurt her anymore. Really.” I tapped my pencil against the graph paper, then dropped it. I didn’t speak to him. “Well listen, if you want to hit the gym later this winter, that’d be good. I could use the spot, you know. Coach says I have to work on my strength training before next year. Got to do squats mainly, cuz’ my legs suck.” I told him maybe I’d see him at the gym. He nodded. Downstairs where it was quiet, he said goodbye to my parents, shook my father’s hand, and my father said, “Did I ever tell you that you remind me a lot of myself when I was your age? I don’t think I ever told you that, did I?” From upstairs, I froze, listened, heard Jake’s reply. “Gee, Mr. Armstrong,” he shrugged, managing for the first time to get the words right “I guess I always thought you were a better man than that.” |
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© 2007 prickofthespindle.com |
B.J. Hollars was recently named a finalist in the Mid-American Review's 2006 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, judged by Aimee Bender, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. He has been published in The Summerset Review, The Evansville Review, Ballyhoo, and The Lily Literary Review, among others. He was also awarded first prize in the Davenport Fiction Competition, judged by Ander Monson. B.J. is currently a book reviewer for bookslut.com and will be pursuing his MFA in writing at the University of Alabama in the fall. |