The Schwa Was Here

12. A Horror Movie Blow-by-Blow, with the Undisputed Queen of the 3-B Club

Unlike my parents, I don’t know much about cook­ing. According to them, the only recipe I know is a recipe for disaster. I actually have a few of them. Here’s the lat­est: Take one blind girl who’s not nearly as insightful as she thinks she is, add one Italian ham, sprinkle generously with Schwa, then put in a pot and turn up the heat.

I asked Lexie out to dinner, and she suggested we go to a movie first. It didn’t occur to me that the movies with her would be an altogether different experience. Since I was no longer her paid escort, I had to shell out the money for it my­self. I didn’t mind. It felt like an accomplishment.

I knew the Schwa would have a cow if he knew about the date—more than a cow, he’d have a whole herd—but I put him out of my mind, for once allowing the Schwa Effect to work in my favor. I forgot him and let myself have a good time with Lexie.

Usually you took a girl to the movies so you wouldn’t have to talk, and so you’d be in a position to put your arm around her shoulder and, God willing, make out. But going to the movies with Lexie was like taking an Honors English class.

“Okay . . . now she’s walking toward the air lock,” I an­nounced. We were about ten minutes into the movie and I hadn’t stopped talking yet.

“How is she walking?”

“I don’t know—like a person walks.”

“Is she strolling, meandering, stalking?”

“Storming,” I said. “She’s storming down the hallway toward the air lock.”

The music flared, the air lock hissed open, and the audience screamed.

“Is that the monster?” Lexie asked.

“Yeah.”

“Describe it.”

“It’s big, and bluish green.”

“Don’t use colors.”

“Uh ... okay. It’s crusty like a lobster, and spiny like a porcu­pine. You know what that is?”

“I’m blind, not stupid.”

“Right.” I had forgotten about “tactile learning.”

“What’s happening now?”

“She tries to run , but the air lock closes. The monster backs her against the door. Its claws move forward. She opens her mouth to scream, but she can’t because she knows screaming won’t make a difference.”

“Shh!” said someone in front of us.

“She’s blind—you got a problem with that?”

The monster did its thing, and the audience shrieked, their voices blending into the squishing, crunching sound effects.

“What did the monster do?” Lexie asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do!” She licked her lips. “Every little detail!”

By the time the movie was over, I felt like I was stumbling out of a day of state testing.

“Don’t worry,” Lexie said as we left arm in arm, “1 won’t ask you to describe the food on my plate.”

At dinner, however, she asked the waitress for a Braille menu.

“Are you kidding?” I told her. “This is just a burger place; they don’t have Braille menus.”

“He’s right,” said the waitress.

“Then I’d like the manager to come out and read me the menu,” she said.

“I can read it,” I told her.

“No, I want the manager.”

The waitress snapped her order booklet closed. “Sure, hon,” and she went off to find the manager.

“You like giving people a hard time, don’t you?”

Lexie grinned. “Only when they’re blind to the blind.”

In a few moments the manager walked out. No—strided out. This was one of those places famous for, like, fourteen thou­sand different burgers on the menu, and Lexie charmingly in­sisted that the manager read every single one of them, like it was his catechism. When he was done, she gave him the phone number of a place where he could order Braille menus.

That’s when I think I fell in love.

“What if he’d refused to read you the menu?” I asked after the manager was gone.

“Then I’d sic the Four-S club on him.”

“Don’t you mean Four-H?”

“No, Four-S. It stands for the four senses other than sight. It’s a club at my school. We have contacts with the mayor’s office and the New York Times, and we organize pickets in front of antiblind establishments.”

“You should call yourself the Three-B club,” I told her. “Blind Ball Busters.”

She laughed.

“I’ll bet you’re the leader.”

She didn’t deny it. “I’m a force to be reckoned with.”

“Just like your grandfather.”

When it came to body language, I wasn’t exactly bilingual, but still I could tell by the way she shifted that she wasn’t too pleased by the comparison. “I meant that in a good way,” I told her. “I mean, it’s like we all get our raw materials from our fam­ilies—but it’s up to us whether we build bridges or bombs.”

“What are you building?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A fast car, maybe.”

“To go where?”

She stumped me for a second, until I sidestepped the ques­tion with this: “It’s the road that matters, not the destination.”

I gotta admit, I impressed myself with how well I could pre­tend to be clever, until she said, “You’re so full of crap!”

I laughed so hard practically my whole Coke sprayed out of my nose.

“Tell me something about you that I don’t know,” she asked.

“Okay, let’s see ...” I scanned through all the things she didn’t know about me, which was about everything.

“I got two webbed toes on each foot.”

“Ooh! A mutant!”

“Yeah, and if you ask to feel them, I’m out of here.”

“Well, maybe when we go swimming someday.”

“Okay, your turn.”

“I’ll tell you about Moxie,” she said. “Most people think it’s for ’moxie’, the word that means ’gutsy’, but it’s not. You see, when I was little and I got sick, that’s what I used to say to my parents—’Moxie! Moxie!’ Because they always gave me amoxi­cillin, and I knew it was supposed to make me feel better. So when they brought me a Seeing Eye dog, I called him Moxie, because from the moment I had him, I felt better about being blind.”

“That’s nice,” I said, avoiding the more common “that’s cool,” because her story deserved more respect than that.

“You know, I wasn’t born blind,” she said. “I fell out of my stroller when I was a year old, and hit the back of my head on the curb.”

Just imagining it made me grimace. “The back of your head?”

“That’s where the visual cortex is. It’s kind of like a movie screen at the back of your brain. Without it your eyes can work just fine, but there’s no place to show the movie.”

“Wow,” I said, wishing I knew a more respectful word for wow.

“I’m lucky. It happened early enough that I was able to com­pensate and adjust. It’s harder the older you are.”

“Do you remember seeing at all?”

It took a while for her to answer that one. “I remember . . . remembering. But that’s as close as I can get.”

“Do you miss it?”

She shrugged. “How can you miss what you don’t remember?”

Whether she liked it or not, Lexie had a bit of her grandfather in her when it came to bending the world to suit her. She could wrap the world around her finger like a yo-yo string and play with it to her heart’s content. She definitely toyed with me on a regular basis, but that was only because she knew I liked being her yo-yo.

She also knew all the right strings to pull once she finally set­tled on how to give her grandfather “trauma therapy.”

“It took lots of money,” she told me, “and lots of favors, but it will be worth it because it’s exactly what my grandfather needs to break him out of his shell.” Then she said, “Of course I can’t tell you what I’m planning, but I promise when it happens, you’ll be in on it.”

This was one of those times I didn’t like being toyed with. I kept no secrets from her, except of course for the secrets I kept from everybody, so why couldn’t she tell me what she was plan­ning?

“Aw, please?” I begged, feeling stupid, but heck, if she could give Moxie a treat when he begged, maybe her compassion ex­tended to two-legged creatures. No such luck.

“It’s no use,” she said, putting her palm against my lips to shut me up. “You’ll find out when you find out.” Then she added, “And don’t ask Calvin, because he won’t tell you either.”

I moved her hand off my face so I could gape in deeply offended disbelief, and it really annoyed me that she was blind, because my deeply offended gape fell on deaf ears.

“You told the Schwa, but you won’t tell me?”

“Calvin can keep a secret.”

“So can I!”

She laughed. “You? You’re like Radio Antsy—all news, all the time. If I told you, even the dogs would be barking it by morning.”

“Very funny.”

So the Schwa and Lexie were sharing things that Lexie wouldn’t share with me. So what. I put my arm around her in a way that only a boyfriend can. That was something she and the Schwa didn’t share. I hoped.

Okay, I admit feeling pretty jealousy about it (that’s feeling jealous and lousy all at once). For a few seconds ... well, maybe more than just a few seconds, I wished the Schwa would really disappear.

Later I’d feel real guilty about that.