Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Training

It must have taken Rob several minutes to notice that the sun was in her eyes. When he did notice, because she was squinting, he moved her sideways a little so she could see better. He felt the padded arms of the chair, where her thin bare arms were kept at rest by the leather straps, to make sure they were not overheated. She should have a hat, they were always being warned about sunburn. So far it had always been sunny during the day, though there had been a thunderstorm the night before. But no hat had been wheeled out with her.

“They forgot your hat,” he said to her. “That was stupid of them, wasn’t it?” Then he offered her another piece of the wooden puzzle, giving her time to consider it and to look also at the half-finished puzzle on the tray.

“This way?” he said. He watched her left hand for the slight movement towards him that would say yes. It was one of the few controlled movements she could make.

He also watched her eyes and face. She could move her eyes, though her head jerked around if she tried to swivel it too fast. But she had little control of the muscles of her face, so he could never tell if she was trying to smile or whether the contortion of her mouth was caused by the spontaneous knotting and unknotting of her jumpy flesh, the body that would not respond to the enormous will he saw, or thought he saw, sealed up in her eyes like some small fierce animal captured in a metal net. She couldn’t get out! She was strapped into the wheelchair, prisoned in her cage of braces, trays, steel wheels, but only because she was strapped into her own body as into some bumpy, sickening carnival ride. Let out of her chair, she would thrash, topple, flail, hurtle through space. It was one of the worst cases they’d ever taken, Pam the physiotherapist had told him.

But everyone agreed she was bright, very bright; it was amazing really what she could do. She could say yes by moving her left hand, and therefore she could play games, answer questions, indicate what she wanted. It just needed more work than usual on the part of the counsellor, and you had to do a lot of guessing. It took time, but after she had beaten him twice in a row at chequers, with no collusion on his part, Rob was willing to spend the time. He wondered about teaching her to play chess. But there were too many pieces, too many moves, a game would take weeks. He thought of her, sitting impatiently inside her body, waiting for him to get to the piece she wanted to move and figure out where she wanted to move it.

She hadn’t said anything. He turned the puzzle piece around. Yes, her hand said immediately, and he fitted it in. It was a giraffe, two giraffes, a funny-animal picture, a caricature. It struck him that she might not know what a giraffe was; she might never have seen a real one or even a picture of one.

“Is this puzzle boring?” he asked her. Yes, she said.

“How about a game of chequers?”

That was fine with her. “Okay, killer,” he said, “but this time I’m going to beat you.” Her blue eyes stared at him; her mouth wavered. He wished she could smile. He wheeled her off to get out the chequers and return the puzzle.

It was her brightness that fascinated him. It was amazing, but it was horrible too, that mind trapped and strangling. Maybe she was a genius; who could ever tell? Surely she knew things and could sense things that would escape other people. When she looked at him with her ice blue eyes, clear and cold, hard like mint candies, it was as if she could see into him, past the desperately cheerful kind-uncle act he knew was only an act. He had to be careful what he thought about when he was with her. She would pick it up, and for some reason it mattered what she felt about him.

Sometimes he thought she would be better off if she were like some of the others. The hydrocephalics, for instance, with their watery pumpkin heads and infant’s bodies; there were three of them at the camp right now, and they could all talk, but they weren’t very bright. Or the muscular dystrophy cases, who looked so normal the first time you saw them, slumped in their wheelchairs, wan and limp as orphans. They would be dead soon; some of them would be dead even before the next summer. Rob found the camp song so painful he could not bring himself to sing it.

The tune was the Mickey Mouse song, which made it worse for Rob by conjuring up an image of the Mouseketeers, those plump, pert children with functional arms and legs who had chosen to use their normal, beautiful bodies for that, for prancing and jiggling and acting on television. He would stand looking down, looking away, looking anywhere but at the rows of doomed children ranged in the auditorium, brought there so Bert the Assistant Director could finger his accordion and generate what he called “camp spirit.” But the children sang the song with gusto. They liked to sing. Those who could clapped their hands.

Jordan could not clap. But on the other hand, she would live a long time. You didn’t die from what she had. She was only nine years old.

GAMES was in the right-hand half of the cabin nearest the main house. The front window had been enlarged and fitted with an awning, a wooden shutter for when it rained, and a counter. Jo-Anne Johnson, who had the shift this week, was sitting behind the counter on a high stool, reading a paperback. She was wearing a white terry T-shirt with an anchor on the left breast and red short-shorts, and she had her legs crossed. Rob looked at the line on her thigh where the tan ended, then switched to the shelves behind her where the volleyballs and baseball bats were stored. She had brown hair, in a pony-tail held with a gold clip, and tortoise-shell sunglasses. When she walked she limped a little. She was one of the former campers who had come back as a counsellor. Rob thought of her as a nice girl; at least she was always nice to him.

“We’d like to exchange this puzzle,” he told her. “We’d like to get out some chequers.”

“Chequers again, eh?” she said. “You must be sick of chequers. That’s the fourth time this week.”

Rob didn’t like the way some people talked in front of Jordan as if she couldn’t hear. “Oh no,” he said. “I’m playing Jordan. She’s beaten me twice.”

Jo-Anne smiled at him as if they shared a secret. Then she smiled down at Jordan, who stared back at her, not moving much. “Yes, I’ve heard she’s a real whiz,” she said. She crossed out the puzzle in the lined notebook on the counter and wrote in the chequer set opposite his name. “See you later,” she said. “Have a good game.”

“Let’s find some shade,” Rob said to Jordan. He wheeled her along the cement pathway, beside the row of cabins. The cabins were white, neat, identical. Each one had a front ramp instead of a doorstep; inside them were the special beds, the special toilets, and the curious smell that was not like the smell of children but was sweeter, heavier and more humid, and reminded him of a greenhouse. A smell of warm earth and baby powder, of things mouldering slightly. Of course there was always a lot of laundry, sitting in bags, waiting to be taken away. Some of the children wore diapers, grotesque when you saw them on a twelve-year-old. In the mornings, before the beds had been changed, the smell was stronger. It took a long time to get everyone ready for the day. The girl counsellors were forbidden to lift the children out of the beds or out of the wheelchairs; only the boys could do that. Rob lifted his own cabin and two girls’ cabins, Number Seven and Number Eight, Jordan’s cabin. With her Dutch-boy haircut and tough wilful little face, she looked out of place in the frilled pink nightgowns they put on her. He wondered if she were ever allowed to help choose her own clothes.

They reached the corner of the walk and turned left. From the open windows of the auditorium, which doubled as a gym, came the sound of recorded music and a woman’s voice: “No, back to your places and try again. You can do it, Susie.” Now they had reached the end of the boys’ side. The girls’ side was across the central field, where there was a baseball game going on, as there had been the day he had arrived. The camp van had stopped in the circular driveway. From the front, the main house could have been a rich man’s mansion, and in fact it once had been. Some figures that looked at first like grandmothers in rocking chairs were placed at intervals along the wide verandah. The Director had greeted them and had deputized Bert to give them the tour for new counsellors. Around the corner was the baseball game, and Rob had thought, Well, it’s not going to be so bad, because from a distance, on the green field, in the full sunlight that seemed to have been shining ever since, the game had seemed almost normal.

The strange thing about it was the silence. Boys that age ought to be shouting, that was part of the game; but games here were played with quiet concentration. These were mostly children who could walk, with the aid of braces or crutches; some could even run. But a few of the players were double, one boy being pushed around the bases in a wheelchair by another. Rob knew from having played that the games were conducted with a politeness and consideration that he found eerie. During baseball games these children behaved as adults were always telling children to behave. The only noisy one at the moment was Bert, the umpire, who was waving his arms and yelling encouragement as Dave Snider, paralyzed by polio from the waist down, knocked the ball straight out past second base. Two outfielders on crutches hobbled after it while Dave spun onto first.

Rob knew he should be volunteering for more sports and supervision, but he wanted to spend the time with Jordan. Besides, he hated baseball. It was his family’s game, the one he was expected to excel at as a matter of course, just as he was expected to become a doctor. His father was the one who insisted on the games, with some echo in his mind perhaps of the golden Kennedys, as featured recently in Life magazine playing touch football. Joseph Kennedy and his three fine boys. His father wore a T-shirt with CHAMP on it, given to him by his mother. His two older brothers were good players, and so were the Miller boys. Dr. Miller was a surgeon too, like his father; they had the place next door. His father did hearts, Dr. Miller did brains, and both of the Miller boys were going to be doctors, too.

They played on the beach, and for Rob the sense of hopelessness and failure that went with these games went also with blue skies, full sunlight and waves breaking on sand. These things, that for other people meant carefree vacations, meant for him an almost intolerable bondage. To refuse to play would have been unthinkable. If he’d been a better player, he would have been able to say he didn’t feel like a game, but, as it was, the cries of spoilsport and poor loser would have been too truthful. No one held it against him that he was so wretched a player, that he could barely hit the ball, because of his bad eyesight perhaps, the sunlight glinting into his eyes from the frames of his glasses, that he would not see the ball when it came hurtling towards him out of the sizzling blue sky like an assassin’s bomb, numbing his fingers when he raised his hands to fend it off, knocking him on the head or neck, or, even more humiliating, ignoring him so completely so that he had to run after it, chase it down the beach or into the lake. His family treated him as a joke, even, and especially, his mother. “What did you hurt today?” she would ask him, as she doled out the snacks afterwards on the patio deck above the boathouse, sandwiches and Cokes for the boys, beers for the men. In the city his father drank Scotch, but at the cottage, which he called his “summer place,” he drank beer. The others would tell funny stories about Rob’s blunderings, his losing duels with the demonic white ball, while he would grin. The grin was obligatory, to show he was a good sport and didn’t mind. “You have to be able to take it,” his father was fond of saying, without being too specific about what it was. He also said, after almost every game, that competitive sports were good for you because they taught you how to handle failure. Rob knew his father was only trying to make him feel better; nevertheless, he felt like answering that he’d had enough practice at that and he wouldn’t mind being taught how to handle success.

But he had to be careful about saying things like that. “He’s the sensitive one,” his mother was in the habit of telling her friends, half proud, half rueful. Her favourite picture of him was the one in his choirboy surplice, taken the year before his voice cracked. His oldest brother was supposed to be the handsome one, his middle brother was the smart one, Rob was the sensitive one. For this reason it was necessary, he knew, to appear as insensitive as possible. Lately he had begun to succeed, and his mother was now complaining that he never talked to her any more. He found even her moments of solicitous interest painful.

She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn’t trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn’t, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe. How to confess that even the drawings in his father’s medical books, those interiors of bodies abstract as plaster models, made him queasy, that he’d actually fainted—though no one knew, because he’d been lying down anyway—when he’d given blood this year at the clinic and had seen for the first time the hot purple worm of his own blood inching through the clear tube across his bare arm? His father thought it was a great treat for his boys to be allowed into the observation bubble at the hospital while he was doing open heart surgery, but Rob was unable to turn down the offer or admit his nausea. (Red rubber, it’s only red rubber, he would repeat to himself over and over, closing his eyes when his brothers weren’t watching.) He would come away from these ordeals with his knees jellied and his palms scored with the marks of his jagged, bitten nails. He couldn’t do it, he could never do it.

James, the handsome one, was already interning, and the family made jokes at the Sunday dinner table about pretty nurses. Adrian was cleaning up the top marks in third year. Both of them fit so easily into the definitions that had been provided for them. And who was he supposed to be, what had been left over for him when they were dishing out the roles? The bumbling third son in a fairy tale, with no princess and no good luck. But friendly and generous, kind to old women and dwarves in the forest. He despised his own generosity, which he felt was mostly cowardice.

Rob was supposed to go into Pre-Meds in the fall, and dutifully he would do it. But sooner or later he would be forced to drop out, and what then? He saw himself on top of a boxcar like some waif from the thirties, penniless, fleeing his family’s disappointment, heading for some form of oblivion so foreign to him he could not even picture it. But there was no one he could talk to about his knowledge of his own doom. A year ago his father had taken him aside for the pep talk Rob was sure he’d had with both of the others. Medicine wasn’t just a job, he told Rob. It was a calling, a vocation. One of the noblest things a man could do was to dedicate his life selflessly to the saving of others. His father’s eyes gleamed piously: was Rob worthy? (Speedboat, Rob thought, summer place on the bay, two cars, Forest Hill house.) “Your grandfather was a doctor,” his father said, as if this was the clincher. His grandfather had been a doctor, but he’d been a country doctor, driving a sleigh and team through blizzards to deliver babies. They had often heard these heroic stories. “He wasn’t very good at collecting his bills,” Rob’s father would say, shaking his head with a mixture of admiration and indulgent contempt. This was not one of his own weaknesses. “During the Depression we lived on chickens; the farmers gave them to us instead of money. I had only one pair of shoes.” Rob thought of the shoe rack that ran the length of his father’s triple-doored closet, the twinkling shoes arranged on it like testimonials.

He would not be able to take the scene when they found out, he would just disappear. He thought of the final catastrophe as happening in a classroom. They would all be dissecting a cadaver, and he would suddenly begin to scream. He would run out of the room and down the corridor, reeking of formaldehyde, he would forget his coat and the galoshes that were a fetish of his mother’s, it would be snowing. He would wake up the next morning in a greenish-grey hotel room, with no recollection of what he had done.

It was his family who had chosen this job, this camp. They felt it would be good practice for him to spend the summer with crippled children; it would be part of the it he had to learn to take. His father knew the Director, and it was all arranged before Rob was told about it. His father and mother had been so enthusiastic, so full of their sense of the wonderful opportunity they’d arranged for him, how could he refuse? “Use your powers of observation,” his father had said to him at the train station. “I wish I’d had this chance when I was your age.”

For the first week Rob had had nightmares. The dreams were of bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and he would wake up with his skin wet from effort. He found the sight of the children, especially the younger ones, unbearably painful, and he didn’t understand how the other staff members could go around all day with expressions of such bluff professional cheer. Except that he did it himself. Though apparently with less success than he’d thought, since Pam the physiotherapist had come over to sit beside him in the staff lounge after the second-day orientation meeting. She had dull blonde hair held back by a velvet band that matched the blue of her plaid Bermuda shorts. She was pretty, but Rob felt she had too many teeth. Too many and too solid. “It’s rough working with kids like this,” she said, “but it’s so rewarding.” Rob nodded dutifully: what did she mean, rewarding? He still felt sick to his stomach. He’d been on shift for dinner that evening, and he could barely stand the milk dribbling from the bent plastic feeding tubes, the chair trays splattered with food (“Let them do as much for themselves as they can”), the slurps and suction noises. Pam lit a cigarette and Rob watched the red fingernails on her strong, competent hands. “It doesn’t do them any good for you to be depressed,” she said. “They’ll use it against you. A lot of them don’t know the difference. They’ve never been any other way.” She was going to do this for a living, she was going to do this for the rest of her life! “You’ll get used to it,” she said, and patted his arm in a way that Rob found insulting. She’s trying to be nice, he corrected himself quickly.

“I know your brother James,” she said, smiling again with her solid teeth. “I met him on a double-date. He’s quite the boy.”

Rob excused himself and got up. She was older than him anyway, she was probably twenty.

But she’d been right, he was getting used to it. The nightmares had gone away, though not before he’d aroused the interest of the boys in his cabin. They nicknamed him “The Groaner.” They had nicknames for everyone in the camp.

“Hey, ya hear the Groaner last night?”

“Yeah. Uh. Uh. Getting his rocks off good.”

“Ya have a good time, Groaner?”

Rob, blushing, would mumble, “I was having a nightmare,” but they would hoot with laughter.

“Oh yeah. We heard ya. Wish I had nightmares like that.” They were the oldest boys’ cabin, fourteen– to sixteen-year-olds, and he’d had trouble with them from the first. They weren’t like the younger children, polite, eager to enjoy themselves in whatever way they could, grateful for help. Instead they were cynical about the camp, about the Director, about Bert (whom they nicknamed “Bert the Nert”) and about themselves and their lives. They drank beer, when they could get hold of it; they smoked furtive cigarettes. They kept girlie magazines hidden under their mattresses, and they told some of the foulest jokes Rob had ever heard. They divided the world into two camps, the “crips” and the “norms,” and for the most part they accepted only the crips. The norms were seen as their oppressors, the dimwits who would never understand, who would never get it right, and whom it was their duty to war against and exploit. It gave them a bitter pleasure to outrage norm sensibility whenever possible, and they’d found Rob an easy target.

“Hey, Pete,” Dave Snider would start. He’d be sitting in his chair, wearing one of the T-shirts with the cut-off arms that displayed his overdeveloped biceps to advantage. He had a Charles Atlas set at home, Rob knew, and subscribed to bodybuilding magazines.

“Yeah, Dave?” Pete would answer. They both had classic ducktails, which they wore covered with grease. They found Rob’s private-school English-style haircut ludicrous. Pete was paralyzed from the neck down, but he’d somehow gained second place in the cabin’s pecking order. Dave combed his duck’s ass for him.

“What’s black and crawls and catches flies?”

“Roy Campanella!”

Raucous laughter, in which the rest of the cabin joined while Rob blushed. “I don’t think that’s very nice,” he’d said the first time.

“He doesn’t think it’s very nice,” Dave mimicked. “What weighs two thousand pounds and twitches?”

“Moby Spaz!”

They called these jokes “spaz jokes.” What bothered Rob most about them was that they reminded him of the kinds of jokes his brothers and their medical-student friends would tell, having a game of pool in their father’s rec room, to relax after classes. (“Bring your friends over anytime, boys. You too, Rob.”) Except that theirs were supposed to be true stories. They played endless practical jokes on each other, most of them involving parts of cadavers they would cut off during dissection: eyeballs in the teacup, hands in the coat pocket.

“Hey, we were doing this old guy, and I thought, What the hell, and I cut off his tool, it’s all brown and shrivelled up, like they get, and I slipped it into my briefcase. So I go down to the Babloor, and I have a few beers, and I go into the can and I open my fly, but I stick this old guy’s dork out instead of my own. So I stand there like I’m pissing, and I wait till another guy comes in, and I shake it and it comes off in my hand. So I throw it down and I say, ‘Damn thing never worked anyway.’ You should’ve seen the look on his face!”

They related rumours from Emergency at the hospital, most of which seemed to involve women with broken Coke bottles stuck in them or men who had been masturbating with the hot water tap. “Had to get a plumber to saw him out. Came in with the tap still on and two feet of pipe.” “I heard of one with a crayon. Got stuck in the bladder. He came in because he was pissing blue and he couldn’t figure out why.”

“I heard about one with a snake.”

“Why do you tell those stories?” Rob asked them one night when he felt courageous.

“Why do, you listen to them?” James grinned.

“You’ll do it, too,” Adrian told him. “Wait and see.” Then, after the others had gone home, he said, more seriously, “You have to tell them. I know you think it’s pretty gross, but you don’t know what it’s like. It’s real life out there. You have to laugh or go crazy.” Rob tried to reject this, but it haunted him. Real life would be too much for him, he would not be able to take it. He would not be able to laugh. He would go crazy. He would run out into the snow with no galoshes, he would vanish, he would be lost forever.

“What weighs two thousand pounds and has an exploding head?”

“Moby Hydrocephalic!”

“That’s enough!” Rob said, trying to assert his authority.

“Look, Groaner,” Dave said. “You’re here to see we have a good time, right? Well, we’re having a good time.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “You don’t like it, you can beat me up.”

“Sure, go on,” Dave said. “Do your Boy Scout good deed for the week. Kill a cripple.” Bullying him with his own guilt.

It didn’t help that the other counsellor, Gordon Holmes, encouraged them. He smuggled beer and cigarettes into the cabin for them, ogled their girlie magazines, and told them which of the girl counsellors were “easy outs.”

“Hey, make out last night?” Dave would ask him in the morning.

“Not bad, not bad.”

“She go down for ya?”

Gordon’s secretive smile. Patting Old Spice on the back of his neck.

“Who was it, Pammer the Slammer?”

“Every time she pounds my back I get a bone on.”

“Hey, was it Jo-Anne?”

“Naw, she’s a crip. Gord wouldn’t take out a crip, would ya, Gord?”

“You got to go along with them,” Gordon told Rob. “Kid them a little. They’re frustrated, they got normal emotions just like you and me.” He punched Rob on the shoulder. “Take it easy, man, you think too much.”

Gordon went to a public high school in East York. His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom he called “the old lady.” He’d got the job with the camp through the Big Brothers. He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, and Rob could think of many good points about him, but he couldn’t bear to be around him for long. It did no good for Rob to tell himself that Gord would probably end up as a garage mechanic, that the kind of girls he talked about so freely were what his own mother would call “cheap,” that he would get one of them pregnant and have to get married and end up in a dingy, overcrowded apartment, drinking beer in front of the TV while his wife nagged him about the laundry. He was envious anyway, listening despite himself to the sagas of back seats and forbidden mickeys at the drive-in, of heavy petting, forays into undergarments by Gord’s daring fingers, triumphs over hostile elastic straps, conquests of breasts. He resented this sleazy freedom even though he knew he wouldn’t enjoy it himself, wouldn’t know what to say or where to put his hands.

He himself had never taken out anyone but his mother’s friends’ daughters, pallid little girls who needed to be escorted to their own private-school dances and didn’t know anyone else to ask. He bought them wrist corsages and steered them swiftly, correctly, around the floor in their dresses like layers of pastel toilet paper, their small wired bosoms pressing lightly into his chest, his hands against their backs feeling the rows of hooks that might conceivably be undone; but no, that would be too embarrassing. Though he’d sometimes felt his crotch tighten during the joyless foxtrots (he stood out the few chaste rock numbers the hired band would attempt), he hadn’t liked any of these girls, though he tried to make sure they had a good time. He had even kissed one of them goodnight, because he felt she was expecting it. It was three years ago, when he was still wearing bands on his teeth. So was the girl, and when he’d kissed her harder than he’d intended, their teeth had locked painfully together, at her front door, in full view of the entire street. Anyone watching would have thought it was a passionate embrace, but he could still remember the panic in her eyes, though he’d repressed her name.

Rob turned Jordan right, onto the Nature Walk that ran in a meandering oval through the small woods behind the boys’ cabins. It was paved, like all the other walks. The trees were labelled, and there was a little glass case at the far end of the oval where Bert the Nert, who was a nature buff, put a new exhibit every day. He’d taken Jordan on the Nature Walk several times before, stopping to read the labels on the trees, pointing out chipmunks and once a stray cat. Hardly anyone else seemed to go on it. He liked to wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn’t shy about his voice when there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert’s repertoire that stuck in his throat when the assembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his energetic accordion.

“Your name is the name of a famous river,” he told her. He hoped she would be pleased by that. He wondered if her parents had known about her, about what she was going to be like, when they named her, and whether they’d felt later that the expensive-sounding name was wasted because she would never match it, never sip cocktails on a terrace or smile like Grace Kelly in cool lipstick. But they must have known; it said in her file that it was a birth defect. She had one brother and one sister, both normal, and her father was something in a bank.

Sometimes, thinking of the catastrophe ahead of him, his failure and his flight, he thought about taking her with him. That was her clinging to his neck as he scrambled up the boxcar (but she couldn’t cling!), she was with him in the hotel room when he woke up, sitting in her chair (how had he got her there?), looking into his eyes with her icy blue ones, her face miraculously still. Then she would open her mouth and words would come out, she would stand up, he would somehow have cured her… Sometimes, very quickly (and he would repress it immediately) he would see both of them hurtling from the top of a building. An accident, an accident, he would tell himself. I don’t mean that.

Rob crooned. He was heading for a bench, there was one up ahead, where he could sit and they could have their game of chequers.

“Hey, look at this.” It was Bert’s glass case. “Shelf fungus, “ he read from the typed card. “There are several species of shelf fungus. The shelf fungus is a saprophyte which feeds on decaying vegetable matter and can often be found growing on dead trees. You can write your name on the bottom with a stick,” he said. He used to do that at the cottage, without removing the fungus from the tree, and it gave him pleasure to think of his name growing in secret, getting a little bigger every year. It was hard to tell whether or not she was interested.

He found the bench, turned Jordan to face it and unfolded the board. “I was red last time,” he said, “so you get it this time, okay?” There was one chequer missing, on her side. “We’ll use something else,” he said. He looked around for a flat stone, but there wasn’t one. Finally he pulled a button off his shirtsleeves. “That okay?” he said.

Jordan’s hand moved yes. He began the laborious trial-and-error process of determining how she wanted to move. He would point at each chequer in turn until she signalled. Then he would point to each possible square. They could get through a game a lot faster now that he was used to playing this way. Her face would fold and unfold, screw itself up, twitch, movements he found distressing in other CP children still, but not in her. Concentrating made her worse.

They had hardly gone through the opening moves when the bell sounded from the main building. That meant the Play Period was over and it was time for the afternoon group activities. Jordan, he knew, had swimming with the rest of her cabin. She couldn’t swim, but someone held her in the water, where her movements, they said, were more controlled than on land. He himself was supposed to help with Occupational Therapy. “Mud pies,” the boys in his cabin called it. They liked making obscene statues out of clay in order to shock Wilda, the OT instructor, who wanted so much to be able to tell them they were being creative.

Rob put his shirt button into his pocket. He took out the notebook they used and marked down their respective positions. “We’ll finish it tomorrow,” he told Jordan. He wheeled her along the path in the same direction they’d been going, which would get them back sooner, since they were three-quarters of the way around the oval already.

To the north side of the cement path there was a clearing, a stretch of grass and across it the silver of water: the stream that was always there, usually a sluggish trickle but swollen now by last night’s rain. Rob thought, She’s probably never felt grass before, she’s probably never had her hand in a real stream. He suddenly wanted to give her something that no one else ever had, that no one else would ever think of.

“I’m going to take you out,” he told her. “I’m going to put you down on the grass, so you can feel it. Okay?”

There was a hesitation before she signalled yes. She was looking into his face; perhaps she didn’t understand. “It’s fun,” he told her, “it feels nice,” thinking of the many times he had sprawled on the lawn of the back garden, eight or ten years ago, chewing on the white soft ends of grass blades and reading the almost-forbidden Captain Marvel comic books.

He unbuckled the straps that held her in and lifted her thin body. She was so light, lighter even than she looked, a creature of balsa wood and paper. But tough, he told himself. She could take it, you could see it in her eyes. He put her down on the grass, on her side, where she could see the flowing stream.

“There,” he said. He knelt beside her, took her left hand and put it into the cold stream. “That’s real water, not like a swimming pool.” He smiled, feeling magnanimous, a giver, a healer; but she had closed her eyes, and from somewhere a curious sound, a whine, a growl… her body was limp, her arm jerking; suddenly her leg shot out and her foot in its steel-crusted boot kicked him in the shin.

“Jordan,” he said. “Are you all right?” More growling: was it joy or terror? He couldn’t tell, and he was frightened. Maybe this was too much for her, too exciting. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her up to put her back into the chair. The grass had been damper than he’d thought, and the right side of her face was streaked with mud.

“What the hell are you doing with that child?” Pam’s voice behind him. Rob turned, still holding Jordan, who was thrashing her arms like a propeller gone crazy. Pam was standing on the cement walk, hands on her hips, the posture of an accusing mother coming upon the children playing Doctor in the bushes. Her face was red, her hair mussed, as if she’d been running. There was a twig dangling above her ear.

“Nothing,” Rob said, “I was just…” She thinks I’m some kind of a pervert, he saw, and felt himself blushing. “I thought she would like to see what the grass felt like,” he said.

“You know that’s dangerous,” Pam said. “You know she isn’t supposed to be taken out. She could hit her head, injure herself…”

“I was watching her the whole time,” Rob said. Who was she to be bossing him around like this?

“I think you spend far too much time with that child,” Pam said, less angry now but definitely not convinced by his explanation. “You should spend more time with some of the others. It’s not good for them, you know, forming… attachments… that can’t possibly be kept up after camp.” Jordan’s eyes were open now; she was looking at Rob.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Rob said, almost shouted. “How do you know, you don’t know…” She was accusing him, in advance, of betraying Jordan, abandoning her.

“Don’t get your girdle in a knot about it,” Pam said.

“But I think you should have a word with Bert, after Staff Lounge tonight. I’ve discussed this problem with him already.”

She turned away from him and walked quickly off towards the main house. On the back of her Bermuda shorts there was a small patch of wet mud.

Rob buckled Jordan back into the chair. This problem, Why was it a problem? There wasn’t much time, he would be assigned to other children, discouraged from seeing her, and she would think… What could he say to her, how to convince her? He knelt in front of her, resting his arms on the chair tray, and took hold of her left hand.

“I’m sorry if it frightened you, being on the ground,” he said. “Did it?” Her hand did not move. “Don’t pay any attention to what Pam just said. I’m going to write you letters after camp, lots of letters.” Would he? “And someone at your house can read them to you.” But of course they might forget, or lose the letters. In Pre-Meds, dissecting corpses, would he have time to remember her? Her eyes watched his face. She could see through him.

“I’m going to give you something special,” he told her, casting around desperately for something to give. He searched his pocket with his free hand. “This is my button, and it’s magic. I wore it on my shirt cuff like that just to keep it disguised.” He placed it in her hand, folded the fingers around it. “I’m giving it to you, and whenever you see it…” No, that wouldn’t do; someone was bound to find it in her pocket and throw it out, and she would have no way of explaining. “You don’t even have to see it, because it’s invisible sometimes. All you have to do is think about it. And every time you think about it, you’ll know I’m thinking specially about you. Okay?” He’d tried to make it as convincing as possible, but she was probably too old and too bright, she probably knew he was just trying to reassure her. In any case, she moved her hand yes. Whether it was real belief or embarrassed kindness he could never know.

After OT Rob went back to his own cabin, to help with the pre-dinner change into clean clothes that Bert felt was good for morale. The boys were unusually boisterous, but it was probably only his own anxiety and need for peace that made them seem that way. Or it might have been the show that was being put on that evening, by a number of the seniors. All of these boys were in it, even Pete, who was going to be the MC, with a mike strapped to his shoulder near his mouth. None of the ordinary counsellors were involved; they and the younger children were to be the audience, while Scott and Martina, Drama and Dance respectively, ran the show. Rob knew the boys had been practising for two weeks at least, but he had not been interested enough to ask them what the show was about.

“Lemme borrow your zit cream.”

“Wouldn’t do you any good, pusface.”

“Yeah, he’s got pimples on his pimples.”

“You spaz!” A scuffle.

“Cut that out, prickhead!”

Rob wondered if he would be transferred to another cabin. He was helping Dave Snider into his clean shirt, a pink one with charcoal stripes (“Cheap,” his mother’s voice said), when Gordon strolled into the cabin, late. Rob suspected him of thumbing into town for a quick drink in the beer-parlour, which wasn’t choosy about your age. He had been late a number of times recently, leaving Rob to attempt control of the cabin single-handed. He looked very smug; he didn’t reply to the admiring mock cheers that always accompanied his entrances, but dug into his pocket and, very casual, very cool, draped something over his bedpost. A pair of black panties, with red lace edges.

“Hey! Wow! Hey, Gord, whose are they?”

Out with the comb, patting the blond pompadour into place. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Hey, come on, Gord, eh Gord?”

“Hey, no fair, Gord! Bet you stole ‘em from the laundry!”

“Take a look, smart boy. They’re not from any laundry.”

Dave wheeled over and grabbed the panties. He stuck them on his head and circled the cabin floor. “Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse,” he sang. “Forever let us hold our whammers high… Hey, Groaner, you wanna try ‘em on? Bet they’d fit, you got a big head.”

Other hands snatched at the panties. Rob left the room, went down the hall into the washroom. They must have been in the woods, near him, near Jordan. Her outrage, lecturing him like that with the twigs still in her hair, what gave her the right? Mud on her rump.

His face, his nice face, bland and freckled, framed in neatly trimmed sandy hair, watched him from the mirror. He would have preferred a scar, a patch over one eye, sunburned wrinkles, a fang. How untouched he looked, like the fat on uncooked bacon: nobody’s fingerprints on him, no dirt, and he despised this purity. At the same time he could never be like the others, gloat over some woman’s musky underpants. Maybe I’m not normal, he thought with gloomy pride.

After the chaos and mess of dinner had been endured, Rob went to the auditorium with the others. The stage, which was like a school stage except for the ramps at either side, had its red curtains closed. There were no chairs. Those in wheelchairs didn’t need them, and the others sat on the floor, wherever they liked. Rob sought out Jordan and moved closer to her. He prepared to applaud, dutifully, whatever was set before him.

The lights in the room dimmed, there was some fumbling behind the curtains, and Pete in his chair was pushed out by several pairs of hands. The audience clapped, some cheered. Pete was quite popular.

“Don’t push me off the edge, you spaz,” he said into the mike, which got a laugh from some of the older boys. He was wearing a vaudeville straw hat with a red crepe-paper band, and someone had glued a false moustache unevenly to his upper lip.

“Ladies and gents,” he said. He made his moustache wiggle at one side, then at the other, and the younger children giggled. At that moment Rob almost liked him. “This here is the Fair-Eden Follies, and you better believe it, anyways, we all did a lot of falling down practising it.” His voice went serious. “We’ve all worked hard to make this a good show, and I want you to give a big hand to the first number, which is—a square dance, by the Fair-Eden Wheeler Dealers. Thank you.”

Pete was jerked backwards, became briefly entangled, and disappeared. After a pause the curtains parted haltingly. In front of a brown-paper backdrop with a poster-painted apple tree and a cow, four boys and four girls faced each other in standard square dance formation. They were all in wheelchairs, without the trays.

The girls were two polio cases and two paraplegic CPs. They were wearing lipstick and had red paper bows at the necks of their white blouses; their emaciated legs and braces were hidden by long printed cotton skirts, and one of them, the one without the glasses, was astonishingly pretty. Dave Snider was the front corner boy. Like the others, he had on a Western string tie and a cardboard cowboy hat. The dancers looked self-conscious, but proud. None of them was smiling.

Martina was off to the side, with the primitive record player. “Now,” she prompted, and the scratchy fiddle music started up. She clapped her hands in time. “Honour your partners,” she called, and the two lines bowed to each other from the waist. “Honour your corners!” Then the two opposite corners shot forward, met each other in the centre of the square, passed, and by quick hand-turnings of their wheels executed a perfect do-si-do.

Jesus, Rob thought. They must have practised for hours. He saw the concentration in Dave Snider’s face and thought for a brief second, He cares about it, and, triumphantly, Now I’ve got something on him. Immediately he was ashamed of himself. The dancers whizzed out again, locked wheels and arms, and swung, careening dangerously. They seemed to have forgotten about the audience: their attention was held entirely by the rhythm and by the intricate manipulations of the wheels needed at such close quarters.

Rob looked over at Jordan. She was sitting almost still, her arms moving slightly, aimlessly, under the leather straps. He wanted her to turn her eyes so he could smile at her, but she was gazing straight at the dancers, her eyes shining with what he saw, with a quick jolt of his heart, were tears. She had never cried before: he hadn’t known she could, he’d thought of her as a little changeling, not quite human. What was wrong? He tried to see as she was seeing, and, of course, it wasn’t anything he could give her that she wanted. She wanted something she could imagine, something almost possible for her, she wanted to do this! A square dance in a wheelchair. She longed to be able to do just this much, this particular dance, that would be wonderful. And it was wonderful. He had wasted himself, his body, why couldn’t he have moved with such abandon, such joy in precision, during those interminable formal dances when his legs went stiff as wood, his feet compressed themselves to clumsy blocks inside his polished shoes…

But it was grotesque, he saw also, he couldn’t help seeing. It was a mockery, of themselves and of the dance; who had ever allowed them to do it? All their effort, their perfection even, amounted to this: they were ludicrous in their cumbersome machines. They danced like comic robots. They danced like him.

Rob felt something inside him, coming up, bursting out. He doubled over, his hands clenched to his mouth. He was laughing. He tried to hold the laughter back, stifle it, turn it to coughing, but it was no use. He was red with shame and shaking all over; he couldn’t stop. He crouched towards the door, hands across his face, stumbled through it, and collapsed onto the grass of the baseball field. He hoped they would think he was being sick to his stomach. That’s what he would tell them afterwards. How could he, how could he have been so incredibly callous and rude? But he was still laughing so hard his stomach hurt. And she had seen him, she had turned her wet eyes and seen him just as it happened, she would think he had betrayed her.

Rob took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Then he pressed his forehead into the grass, which was damp and cool with dew. From the open windows of the auditorium the tinny music ground on, to the rumble of wheels. I’ll have to leave, I can’t explain, I’ll never be able to face them. But then he realized that nobody had really seen but her, and she couldn’t tell. He was safe. And who was that, in the bright room at the back of his room, that man in the green gown and the mask, under the glass bubble, raising the knife?