by Sandra Lambert
Ivy had never seen a king-sized bed before, except in the movies. It sat kitty-cornered in the room with an expanse of bedspread whose pattern matched flowered wallpaper strips running along the top of the red walls. The furniture was dark and glossy, and there were pretty lamps on pretty end tables.
"Lovely, isn't it? On the table here we have a list of attractions and restaurants. You know, Everglades City has fabulous seafood. And right next to you is the downstairs bathroom. Isn't that convenient?” Permed curls bounced on the bed and breakfast woman’s shoulders as she twisted her wrist and fingers in a motioning gesture. Ivy turned her wheelchair and followed the woman down the hall.
“Breakfast is at eight, right in here. See, isn't this a sweet dining room? Oh, look at that. The door is too narrow for you.”
Ivy backed the footrests of her wheelchair away from where they had hit on the door jambs, chipping the paint.
“Now don't you worry, that's not a problem. We'll be glad to serve you in the living room.”
Ivy thought back to the day at her store when she had set aside the orders that needed to be placed before closing, avoided the part-timer that needed to be fired, and had forced herself to stop reliving that morning’s argument with her business partner, who was also her recently ex-lover. Ivy couldn’t remember what the argument had been about. Overstock, scheduling, bill paying – it didn’t matter. They were all about the breakup. Instead, she had pulled an accounts payable sheet from the back of the ledger and used it to budget out a month away from the store. She had never stayed in a B&B before, but splurged on the reservations, imagining that it would be a treat after weeks of camping in the back of her van.
Chirpy words concerning the breakfast menu and what this house used to be and who had restored it floated through the hallway. Ivy mentally sorted her loads as she followed the woman to her office – pillows, suitcase, books, snacks – maybe this type of place helped people carry stuff. Ivy paid an amount she noted was worth two weeks at a state park and discovered that they didn’t help you with your baggage. After five trips out to the van, every item Ivy thought she might need was spread over the bed, still leaving more room for her body than she was used to. The space, along with a bedside light, air-conditioning, no bugs, and breakfast served in the morning, had a seductive appeal. Ivy shut the bedroom door.
2.
Ivy drove onto a road surface of crushed shells from an ancient seabed. It changed her tire sounds to a rhythmic rasp. She passed swaths of bulldozed land, brush piled at the edges, littered with many ton chunks of concrete leaning at odd angles with lengths of pipe scattered like pick-up sticks for giants. She passed rusted trailers listing on uneven stacks of concrete blocks, top heavy with television antennas indifferently bolted to their sides. Surrounding each homestead, one to four dogs lay belly down in the sand. Sand was all there was, except for a single potted red geranium perched on a tree stump next to the water-stained front door of one of the trailers. A ten-foot chain link fence enclosed the only built-in-place house. Looming satellite dishes, one rusted, one shiny, filled the yard and pit bulls staked on chains were positioned at separate ends of the property. They lunged at the van as it went by.
Paranoia? Drug dealer? Reasonable safety measures for the area? Ivy was still wondering when, with one length of the van, the road cut through the middle of a swamp. The water on either side wasn't trapped in stagnant ditches but spread through a forest of bottom-heavy cypress trees. Attached along the branches, trunks, and old stumps, air plants hung like green grass, like twisted birds' nests, like red pine straw, like potbellies, like strips of plastic. Velvet-orange anchors, half hidden behind the rough splits in palm trunks, fastened sprays of philodendron-shaped leaves and on oak trunks, splayed roots spread away from a center of pale-green bulbs. The air plants burrowed into crevices, nuzzled and overlapped, and the still water below was their mirror. Staring out the window, Ivy kept losing the water line, losing the difference between real and reflected.
The road made an almost imperceptible rise, and dry ground formed on one side. At a gated, padlocked path that angled deep into the trees, Ivy slowed and then turned off the van. She sat in the quiet, listening to the engine ping as it cooled. The path, even through binoculars, looked grassy, smooth, and easy, but posts narrowed the pedestrian pass through too much for her wheelchair. Ivy laid her binoculars on her lap and looked away. She sensed movement and looked back in time to see a distant, dark, big-butted shape hump across the trail. She threw the binoculars against her eyes and twirled the focus knob, but it was gone.
Ivy stared at the posts. She'd get on the ground, fold her chair partway, drag her body and it through, and get back in. Ivy inspected the dirt around the poles with her binoculars and the piles she'd assumed were left over from the posthole digger were anthills. She reconsidered. She stared again. If she braked her chair right alongside she could lift out and sit on top of a post, keep steady by resting her feet in the chair seat, lean forward, half-fold the chair while at the same time still using it for balance, roll it through the posts, spread it open again, and drop into it. In the middle of making a contingency plan for if she fell that included remembering to roll quickly away from the ants, her good sense reluctantly asserted itself. If you fall, it admonished her, how about when you fall.
Thinking you can balance on top of that skinny pole – what family of circus performers did you grow up in? What's next, elephant trainer? Trapeze artist? The image of a woman in a spangly silver leotard poised on a tightrope imposed itself between Ivy and the swamp.
3.
A polite voice asked if she wanted breakfast. Ivy threw herself up out of sleep sure that she was in a campground and someone had broken into her van. She heard knocking. Light shone around the edges of the bedroom door where it didn’t fit properly. When the voice knocked again, the door rattled loosely, bumping against the chair Ivy had dragged in front of it the night before after discovering that the B&B door didn’t have a lock. In a hoarse voice, Ivy said that she'd be right there and rolled to sitting. She flipped into her wheelchair and pulled on a dress, lifting her butt into the air to shake the material into place.
She dragged the chair away from the door and paused to scratch her fingers through her hair before opening the door. Cutlery clatter and cheery conversations came from the dining room at the far end of the empty hall. She was halfway there, closing in on the voices, when she remembered the inaccessible dining room doors. The owner emerged from the dining room carrying a tray of dirty dishes.
"Now, there you are. We thought you'd forgotten us. Just follow me – everything is set up for you in the living room. See right there on the coffee table – there’s your juice and coffee. Get started on the fruit cup, and I'll bring you a serving of casserole."
Ivy bent over the low table, picked up the fruit, and poked at it – canned in heavy syrup. She took a bite and put it down in favor of the orange juice.
"Sorry for the wait. I popped it in the microwave to reheat. I think you'll like it, it's my own recipe. We aren't licensed to cook on site, so I've invented these breakfast casseroles that I make at home and heat up here. Well, enjoy. I'll check on you later."
Surrounded by two couches and four chairs, all upholstered in matching paisley brocade, Ivy was alone in the big room. She maneuvered the plate onto her lap and smelled the stiff square of eggs, ham, cheese, and colored chunks of something before forking an experimental bite into her mouth. It was leathery after its third heating and didn't lack for salt. Ivy rated it better than her campground meal of Ramen noodles with chicken and much better than the one of canned tuna. She ate every bite as she listened to morning sounds from the rest of the house – toilets flushing, feet ascending and descending stairs, and the outside doors opening. After breakfast the hallway was deserted and the house silent as Ivy reorganized for a trip to the bathroom. When she finished bathing, a cleaning cart was halfway into her room.
"Oh, my. I thought you were gone for the day. No problem, let me back this right out of your way. Take your time. There's no lack of chores to do around here."
Ivy went into her room, shut the door, and sat among the furniture. Images formed behind her closed eyes. A white orchid bloomed in the fork of a tree branch, a ledger sheet floated in the swamp, water stains blurring the columns of numbers, and then a glittering figure moved into the sunlight high above the forest and somersaulted from palm to palm.
This story originally appeared in Conta 2.4, December 2006