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The Wheelchair Beauty
By Paul Luikart Monday night I was sitting at the coffee shop--my coffee shop, as I’ve come to call it, though it’s actually called, somewhat tongue-in-cheekily, “Mama Earth’s.” (Everything now is tongue in cheek, isn’t it?) I was sipping something South American—I think. It had citrus notes—and reading Fitzgerald. I’ve already read all of his short stories, and am now working my way through his novels, starting with everybody’s favorite, The Great Gatsby. Hemingway was before Fitzgerald, Dos Passos before Hemingway. (Lookee me, Ma! I’m the Lost Generation!) At some point, I happened to glance up and saw through the window, approaching my coffee shop, three young people—hipsters. A woman/girl, a man/boy, and another woman/girl nearly identical to the first, except that she was in a wheelchair. Sisters, maybe twins. But Mama Earth’s has no wheelchair ramp. There is a small step from the sidewalk to the door, so the ambulatory female held the door open (Some clever Mama Earth’s staffer had rigged a door chime which tinkled through the opening riff of The Pixie’s, “Where is My Mind?”) and the man/boy tipped the bound girl back, then up, then over the step and shoved her inside. They took a table near me. They, all three of them, acted like it was nothing. The girl in the wheelchair sat straight-backed, hands folded in her lap. What was wrong with her? No white plaster casts, her legs were firm, shapely even—this I could see through the faded-indigo fabric of her jeans, which conformed to every ripple of her flesh. She had neither the telltale turned in toes nor the muscular atrophy of somebody with a more serious condition. I don’t doubt that she needed a wheel chair, mind you. All I mean to say is that whatever her malady, the necessity of a wheelchair was not evident to me. The man/boy began a conversation with some droll line at which they all laughed, including himself, perhaps he the hardest. I could not make out what it was, but I’d imagine it was something slathered in irony. As soon as the laughter died away, he arose and went to the counter, returning with three cups of coffee. I tried to get back to my book. The woman/girl in the wheel chair sat facing me. Her sister (I presumed) sat to her right, in profile to me, and the man/boy to her left. His profile included a gentle slope from protruding lower lip all the way down to his Adam’s apple. Essentially, he was chinless. Once, when he frowned, I saw a slight bump in the line, the nascent hump of a chin, but it disappeared as soon as his countenance changed. I saw a future for him, and it did not look good. Perhaps, if he were lucky, he’d be the last proprietor of a thing already on its way out: The independent bookstore. Likely named: The Naked Eye. Alternative Pages. Or some such gobbledygook. Maybe Gobbledygook would be the name of it. “Please, sir, buy a book. Buy a book for the poor, please, sir?” Yes, that was him. Or would be. The sister, the one who could walk, probably 20 years old, maybe 21 but, she held her face all wrong. It appeared that inside of her head, just under the thin layer of fairly pretty skin, were the muscles and skull of a mean old woman who controlled the girl’s face and was intentionally misusing it. There were too many wrinkles around her lips—from too much smoking already? Too much ironic smiling? (To smile ironically, one simply purses one’s lips as hard as one can possibly purse them. That’s it. And this is what it means: “Love me, I hate you, love me, make me laugh, make me laugh NOW damn you. I hate you.” Ah, the banter of love. What a racket.) The wheel chair woman looked at both of her companions, bright eyes darting back and forth, back and forth. They seemed to amuse her, these friends or family or whoever they were. She did not say very much, though clearly understood all, and she never spoke first. Every now and then, her eyes turned toward the ceiling, brief little glances that I’m sure only I saw. Had she noticed the brown blooms of water stains in the drop ceiling panels and did they disturb her? Maybe she saw immaculate angels climbing to heaven. If she could climb, would she have climbed to heaven with them? And once her eyes met mine, a demure glance, but surely not an invitation (They’d only just gotten here!) Her mouth was a delicate plum. The lips were smooth and evenly wetted, with glints of light like blazing cat scratches upon the lower one. Her smile forced her freckled skin back in little mounds over her high cheekbones. And there were dimples. Two of them. I forced my eyes down, back to my book, but could not keep them there for more than a paragraph, a few lines of dialogue. Eventually, my eyes could not stay on the page for the length of time it takes to read a comma or a period. So I pretended. When she spoke, she often touched her fingertips to her white cheeks, both cheeks sometimes. When she laughed, it was a high-pitched giggle tinged with a just-so perfect amount of womanly remorse. She talked and laughed and nodded and on and on like a little geisha flapper girl and the sound of her laughing and talking rose from the table like a bunch of multi-colored balloons. Perhaps I fell in love. I don’t know how much time passed, but it can be measured in two ways: Since she and her party had entered Mama Earth’s I’d read a total of one half of one page. Obviously that should take seconds. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” And why not? When I first saw her, I’d admitted to myself that she was beautiful, something many men could not do. Would not do. But, suddenly, it seemed they had completed their business, whatever that business was, even if that business was simply weighing down the chairs. That is, of course, the business of her friends. Her business, it seemed, was to enchant me. Their conversations were finished. Their cups of coffee (and each with a refill), drained. This was the second way, an anomaly of time, the passing of it literally as on the faces of clocks, but oh how the faces of the beautiful spin the hands of clocks with unnatural speed! Her friends stood. My girl stood in her spirit, much taller. Her friends moved toward the exit, but she, finding a convenient bypass to an array of splayed chairs from another nearby table, wheeled around and found her path to the door, which lead directly in front of my table. “Good night,” I risked. She stopped and looked at me. “What?” she said. “Just good night.” I could not help it, my smile, so wide. She stared at me and my heart soared. “Why are you—” Her voice trailed off. “Pardon?” “Did you just tell me goodnight?” she asked. “Yes.” I could barely even say this tiny little word. “Uh, goodnight? I guess?” she said, and then was gone, wheeling to the door and over and down the step by herself, a clattering bump, her companions trailing after her. The boy, the bookmonger, glanced over his shoulder at me, his best attempt at a withering glare a misfire. It was the look one wears at the height of a calamity in the bowels. I swallowed the dregs from my mug. I didn’t—couldn’t—return to my book, so until the man/boy (another one) at the counter announced, “Ten minutes till closing,” I watched a girl dressed in black draw with children’s markers in a Hello Kitty notebook. |
Paul Luikart's MFA is from Seattle Pacific University. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughters, and Paul Luikart looks like a dork in author bio photos.
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