I am ignoring a woman in a wheelchair. I’m not proud of myself for doing it, but it’s what I’m doing. We’re at Rite Aid, she’s in a wheelchair and I’m ignoring her. That’s how it’s going down. Yes, I know. I’m a horrible person.
I’m not ignoring her because she’s in a wheelchair, I don’t think so, at least. Maybe I am, I don’t know. I just have a feeling that she’s trying to get my attention. Is it a situation where she wants me to reach something up from a high shelf? I can’t tell. Although I am tall and I get that all the time from women who aren’t in wheelchairs. (And it is always women. Can you imagine a man asking? Me neither.) Why am I ignoring her? Maybe it’s just this whole situation. First, I hate Rite Aid. But I forgot to pack a razor, so I just thought I would walk over here, pick one up and be back at the hotel before my wife even woke up. When I get here, I’m enraged by the prices. It’s like $22 for four cartridges. That’s not even counting the stupid razor.
I’m also enraged by the in-store music, the same music that you hear in every chain drugstore in America, which is classic rock. Why? Because chain drug stores are managed by late middle-aged, baby boomer white men, with their short-sleeved shirts with ties, sad moustaches and carpal tunnel braces, who are completely unabashed, dare I say proud, when it comes to imposing their generation’s repugnant earnoise on everyone in “their” store. “Slow Ride” by Foghat was bad enough, but now I’m hearing the granddaddy of classic rock abominations, the sonic war crime that is Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”. At 9:20 a.m. on a Tuesday. 9:20 a.m.! This is not “Stairway to Heaven” time. Not at all. Of course, as far as I’m concerned, no time is “Stairway to Heaven” time. Is it any wonder that I’m blatantly ignoring a woman in a wheelchair?
Even as Robert Plant warbles about a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, I hear the woman in the wheelchair, across the main aisle and one down, over in cosmetics. I glance over there. Now I hear her saying ouch ouch ouch in a wheezy voice. I glance again. She is now officially difficult to ignore. That chair so big and laden with gears and levers and at least six wheels, but I keep ignoring her because I sense that she is trying to get my attention and I don’t like it when people try to get my attention without just asking for it. Just say something. Hey! or Could you please help me? That’s what most people do when they want the tall guy to get something off a shelf. Am I just avoiding her because she’s in the wheelchair? Absolutely not. It’s just that I don’t like people asking for my attention in a weird passive way. It’s manipulative. This is one of my hot buttons, as my wife would say. (I say to her, The reason they’re hot is because your fingers are always on them.) Should I have different rules for differently-abled people? I don’t think so. Like everyone, people in wheelchairs just want to be treated equally. I would be ignoring anybody in this situation. Keep your judgments to yourself.
Yet this woman is in a wheelchair, for god’s sake. So what if she’s manipulating me. What am I? A heartless, soulless creep? A monster? It’s starting to feel that way.
Ouch ouch ouch.
Despite the rasp in her voice, it is a very well-articulated ouch and I realize that I don’t usually hear anyone say this: ouch. I have found that, when in pain, people generally proffer a more freeform articulation: a yelp, a wince, a gasp. There’s definitely a more animal quality to the noise one makes. Not ouch. Ouch is like saying ach-choo when you sneeze. Who articulates at a time like that? Air is being exploded out of your face. No one actually says ouch! or ach-choo! except in comic books.
The really weird thing is, the woman in the wheelchair is ouching just as Robert Plant is singing the ooh ooh ooh part of “Stairway to Heaven where he apparently forgot to write some stupid faux-mystical, pagan gibberish lyrics. Why aren’t I walking away from this whole thing? Rite Aid, Led Zeppelin, Ouch. Maybe I should’ve just grown a beard over vacation.
I glance at the woman in the wheelchair again and ignore her for a little while more, until I can’t do it any longer. (All signs now seem to indicate that I am indeed a monster.) I still don’t really want to go over there, except now she has seen me look over at her and I don’t have any choice. So instead of fleeing, I walk over to the aisle where she is parked in her wheelchair. I see now that she is not in the cosmetics aisle exactly. She is surrounded by the other, more banal accoutrements of the cosmetic world – hairbrushes, eyelash curlers, nail files, blow dryers. Though these objects surround her, she herself is not tidily composed. The woman in the wheelchair is in her late twenties or early thirties, with mid-length pink hair greasy in some places and wisping out from her head in others. Her Amy Grant concert T-shirt is stained with what looks to be red Kool-Aid. Her eyes are dark, the flesh around them olive and oily. She has a glass amulet around her neck that seems to contain stones or crystals, suspended in some sort of bluish liquid. Her faded jeans have a skim coat of grime that gives them a greenish tint.
As I approach, I smile in a way that I’m sure looks completely insincere. Why does this woman confined to a wheelchair terrify me so? Why am I suspicious of her? What is wrong with me? The monster approacheth.
“Do you need some assistance?” I say to her.
Her neck swivels up and she looks at me with angry basalt eyes. “Took you long enough to get over here.”
“I wasn’t sure if you were talking to me.” I cannot say this without stammering. A sure sign that I am lying, according to my wife.
“Who else would I be talking to?”
I may be a horrible person, but my instincts are right on. I know the right people to be afraid of.
Her voice is strained, almost atonal in a way that clashes with Robert Plant’s Tarzanian yawp. I’m not sure if the rasp came from whatever put her in the wheelchair, the stress of it or maybe it’s just naturally that way, but it puts me in mind of the mannishly gravel voice of a long-gone movie actress. Thelma Ritter, I believe was her name. A very funny woman who, because she was not conventionally attractive, was condemned by Hollywood to repeatedly play the same spunky old maid roles. This one here though, with voice of Thelma and black pit eyes, she is not so funny. Granted, what does she have to be funny about? She’s in that wheelchair, having to scold horrible people like me that ignore her for unseemly amounts of time.
God help me, I cannot stop thinking, I’m not fast, but I can outrun a wheelchair easy.
I notice an electrical cord running from her wheelchair, the plug for it flopped over one of the higher shelves, below a display of hairnets and bobby pins. (Hairnets and bobby pins? Why are these outmoded implements of hair care here at premium eye-level shelf position? I wonder. Does this Rite Aid have a sizable nun and elderly waitress clientele?)
She points to the cord with a slightly rubbery arm. She is tremoring now and I feel not only like a jerk and a monster, but also bad for her. Why did this take me so long?
“Is that thing plugged in?” she says.
I walk behind her wheelchair and realize now that it is some sort of charger plug for her wheelchair. Without thinking, I shake my head at her question.
“Are you deaf or something?” she yells at me after a moment. She is still looking up at the cord and apparently did not see my response.
“No, it is not plugged in,” I say. Except I don’t really say it, I yell it. Maybe I’m overcompensating because of the background music, maybe it’s some absurd part of my brain that thinks that I need to yell because she’s in a wheelchair, none of which makes any sense, I realize, but I am flustered. “Do you want me to plug it in?” I say, still yelling like an idiot.
It is at this moment that the manager of the Rite Aid suddenly appears, to witness yours truly essentially screaming at a woman in a wheelchair. This Rite Aid manager, this bringer of the Classic Rock, is not exactly how I predicted, yet pretty close. There is a sad moustache, but a polo shirt instead of the short-sleeved dress shirt and tie. His nametag reads: DALE. Just by looking at him, I can see that in his salad days, when Led Zeppelin was still actively punishing eardrums and despoiling underage groupies, Dale had a proud billow of dark, center-parted, blow-dried hair. It has since been reduced to a craggy, thinning ash heap of split ends. He angrily glares at me as if I just noticed a bustle in his hedgerow.
“Is there a problem here?” Dale says to the woman.
Before I can say anything, she says, “He won’t plug in my wheelchair.”
“Of course I will,” I sputter. “I just didn’t understand what she wanted.”
“I’m right here, you know,” she says. “I’m not the deaf one.”
Dale shoots me the stink eye as he plugs the charger cord into a socket between two rows of Spornette Deville oval brushes. He straightens the rows and says, “You take as much time as you need, miss.”
Dale then walks away, with not a thought as to the out and out weirdness of a woman charging her wheelchair in the middle of his store. Why? Because Dale doesn’t sweat the details. Dale gets things done. Dale helps people who need help without trying to avoid them, because Dale, despite his shitty taste in music, is a good person. Which is to say, Dale is not like me.
“Thank you,” she says to him as leaves, the first sign of civility from her. Her voice turns lighter and less strained. The gravelly chill in it returns as she faces me. “Will you find my prescription in my backpack?”
“You mean, look inside your backpack?”
“Yes!”
“Okay?” is all I can get out. I do not like this idea at all, for any number of reasons. Me rummaging through her backpack seems like a bad idea for everyone involved. I also can’t help but think, was a backpack strapped around the headrest of her wheelchair the best choice? If she can’t reach things in it, why would she or whoever helped her get ready today, choose a backpack? I fight the urge to extol to her the many sensible virtues of the fanny pack. (Something I have never dreamed of doing before.) Hesitantly, I unzip the front compartment of her backpack. Have I mentioned that it too is grimy, but also covered with various patches for bands like The Misfits, Black Flag and Bad Brains, and pins that say things like Eat Shit and I ❤️ Subversive Crochet and Punk’s Not Dead, You Are. I don’t know how to reconcile the backpack with the Amy Grant T-shirt. Is there an underground Christian Riotgrrrl movement here in Portland that I don’t know about?
Inside, the backpack is all that I feared it would be. It is filled with many things I do not wish to touch. Rumpled and snot-stained tissues, a wad of filthy singles, a used Band-Aid that must have come off while she was reaching for something, an old flip-style cell phone and a opened pack of Marlboro Blacks. I keep searching, my hands feeling detached from the rest of me. There is a comb in the pack too, not unlike the ones on the shelf in front of me. This one has a few draggled pink hairs stuck to it.
Through my revulsion, I am thinking the following things:
– Isn’t she afraid that I will take the money? Then I remember that she has no choice but to trust me. Though it has been established that I am a monster, I am for the most part, a trustworthy monster, yet the idea that she is forced to trust me makes me sad.
–Why does she smoke? Doesn’t she have enough problems? Then I think, why the fuck not smoke? Maybe it makes her feel better. Who the hell am I to deprive a tremoring woman in a wheelchair of a small comfort? Jesus, I am the worst.
–Was that flip phone bedazzled? Another peek reveals that it is indeed.
“What’s taking you so long?” she says, perturbed.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not finding a prescription,” I say to her. I stop looking, relieved that I wasn’t bitten by her pet scorpion or jabbed by a filthy contaminated syringe that she has planted in her bag simply to punish horrible, able-bodied people like myself. (“Now you’ll be like me!” she’d say, laughing diabolically.)
“Did you look in the other compartment?”
“No,” I say.
She sighs loudly. “What are you, blind?”
“I’m sorry!” I say. “I didn’t know there was another compartment. I now see it at the back of the backpack. I open the second compartment and gently separate the sides to look inside. There is only a book there, a used copy of Bukowski’s The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain.
“Do you like Bukowski?” I say, excited that we may have something in common. “I’ve never heard of this one. Is it any good?”
“He’s a fucking pig,” she says.
So much for that. “Yes, that’s probably true,” I say, sighing. “But you can’t deny that he was a sensitive pig.”
She has nothing further to say on the subject. On the store PA, Jimmy Page is getting all worked up, just about to launch into his goddamned self-indulgent double-necked guitar solo. There is nothing else in the second compartment of the backpack.
“No prescription. I’m sorry.” I start to unzip another smallish pocket in the backpack. “I’ll check the little pocket in front.”
“Don’t look in there!” she barks.
“Okay! I’m sorry!” I zip it right back up.
Now all I want to do is look in that little pocket. What could possibly be in there to elicit such a response?
“Did you see my cell phone in the front compartment?
I nod, then catch myself. “Yes!” I say. “Yes. I saw it.”
“Get it,” she says. “I want to call Jason.”
“Okay.” Back I go, into the front compartment. After sifting through dirty tissues and newly unearthed loose tampons, I grab what I think is the phone, but is really just a large box of orange Tic Tacs, with only a few left. “Shit,” I say.
“Don’t swear.”
“Sorry.” Finally, I find the phone. Sure enough it is off, so I hit the power button.
“What’s going on?”
“I have to turn it on.” I push the button and it seems to take forever. “Stairway to Heaven” gradually builds, the jangly power riffs making me even more anxious. Finally the phone powers on. In the meantime, she is tremoring even worse now. I decide to make it as easy for her as possible. “Should I find Jason in your address book?”
“Yes.”
“Jason M or Jason S?”
“Jason M!” she screams.
“How am I supposed to know?” I push the call button on Jason M.
“Hold it up to my ear.”
I do what she says. It’s so loud that I can hear it go to voicemail.
“He’s supposed to pick me up,” she says into the phone. I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or Jason M or maybe some person who checks Jason M’s voicemail.
I am long past wondering what the hell I have gotten myself into. I fear that I will never extricate myself from this situation. I will die here at Rite Aid. My wife will head back to Detroit to start a new life without me. I suspect she’ll do fine. She’ll flourish, in fact.
“My foot hurts. It’s down.”
I look down and see that her left sneaker (a purple Reebok) is on a footrest, but the right one (a pink Reebok) is dangling off the side of her wheelchair. I bend down and gently lift it back up onto the footrest.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
When she speaks, I don’t quite catch all of it. “Sheila?” I say.
“Che-la,” she says, now more annoyed at me than ever.
“Hey Chela,” I say. “I’m Brad. Nice to meet you.”
She just narrows her eyes at me, as if to say, Is it? Is it really? You look pretty uncomfortable to me. Then she starts coughing. It is hard to watch someone with a tremor cough. I try not to think about the Marlboro Blacks.
“Do you need something to drink?” I say.
“Yes.”
She has a white plastic bottle of something tucked under the seat belt that is holding her into the chair. I decide to ignore it. “I’ll go get you a bottle of water.”
She in turn, ignores me as she gestures downward with her head. “I can’t get to this one. Will you pull it out?”
I sigh very quietly. “Yes. Of course.” The bottle is tucked against her stomach and breasts, very near her clenched right hand. It feels like a complete invasion of her personal space. She is again completely without a choice, left to trust a stranger.
“Get it,” she growls, so I just get in there and pull the bottle out for her. From her T-shirt, Amy Grant stares up at me, judging me in her Modern Christian Country way. I think of my wife back at the hotel asking me “What took you so long?” and me telling her that I was just out, you know, trying not to touch the breast of a woman in a wheelchair that I just met.
“Give it to me,” she says.
I hand it to her. Tremoring still, Chela is able to take a sip of what I now see is fruit punch, but she spills much of it on her shirt. I now understand why all the stains. As she gets splashed, Amy Grant shakes her head at me. You’re such a dick.
“I have an idea,” I say, no idea what this idea is. “Why don’t I let you charge up for a little while? I’ll do my shopping, then we’ll try Jason M again.”
She looks at me like she knows what I’m up to, yet I don’t even know what I’m up to. I’m just about to head back over to the razors, when she says in a voice suddenly clear, “Could you pick up some things for me too?”
“Um. Yes. Of course.”
“I have a list. Just hand me my backpack. I need to get my meds too.”
I un-Velcro the pack from back of the wheelchair and hand it to her. I can’t help but to think, why didn’t she have me just do that in the first place? She hands me a long rumpled list, the paper softworn and quivering in her hand.
“All this?” I say.
“I’ll be here charging.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s it. Go.”
Meanwhile, in “Stairway to Heaven”, something makes Robert Plant wonder. I mean, it really makes him wonder.
I head back over to Men’s grooming aisle, guilty for feeling so relieved by the respite from Chela. When I peek back at her she is furiously texting on her bedazzled flip phone. Her tremor seems to be somewhat better. It must be the meds. I pick up a pack of Rite Aid disposable razors and a travel-size can of Edge shave gel, then I start shopping around for all the other items. It’s almost all junk food, along with a few canned goods. As I shop, “Stairway to Heaven” mercifully winds on down the road toward its sweaty, bulgy-pantsed, ear-bleeding climax. By the time Robert Plant yodel-screeches the final verse, I actually feel as though my shadow has actually grown taller than my soul, whatever the hell that means.
The good news is it’s finally over.
The bad news is…Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise”.
While I wait in line with my shopping cart, I pick up a box of orange Tic Tacs like the ones I saw in Chela’s pack. I throw them in with everything else and charge it all.
I’m not going to say that I did not consider leaving her three plastic bags of Little Debbies, Slim Jims, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, 2-Liter Mountain Dew Code Blue, Theater-Size Twizzlers, Birthday Cake flavor M&Ms, Beanee Weenees, Spam With Cheese, and SpaghettiOs, with the cashier, then just walking out that door and hightailing it for my hotel. I seriously considered it.
When I walk over to where her wheelchair is parked, Chela’s eyes are closed and she looks strangely at ease, more so than I’ve seen so far. It amazes me that someone can nap in the middle of a Rite Aid, but she seems to be managing it. I think if you’re in a wheelchair, people just tend to leave you alone.
“Chela,” I whisper. Her eyes snap open.
“What took you so long?”
“I’m sorry.” I hold up the bags. “You had a lot of stuff on your list. You want to try Jason M again?”
She pulls the phone out of her backpack. She doesn’t need my help this time as she hits the redial button. No Jason M.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” she says.
It’s the first time she’s looked scared to me.
“What can I do?” I say.
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you need to go?”
“It’s been almost an hour since Tina dropped me off.”
A new character makes an appearance. Who’s Tina? Is she the one responsible for putting the unreachable backpack on the wheelchair? “Can she come back?”
“No. I was supposed to call Jason, now he’s not picking up. I need to get to the bus station.”
Dread pools in my stomach.
“I don’t know where that is. I’m a tourist,” I say.
She looks at me, her eyes searching for something. “It’s the far away one. I may need a push.”
Oh god.
“I could take a cab. But I don’t have enough money.”
“What about the money you saved by letting me buy all your junk food?” is what I want to say, but my walking-around-on-two-legs guilt won’t let me.
“Could you spare me some money? That would help.”
“Uh. How much do you need?”
“I have to call a medi-cab for my chair. And the bus station I need to go to is far away.”
I think about the money that I saw in her backpack, the cigarettes, the fact that this is progressive Portland, with barrier-free access everywhere and accessible-to-everyone mass transit, but I push it from my head.
“Of course,” I say, looking in my wallet. There is only one single, but a number of twenties. I am just old enough and still foolish enough to travel with cash. “How about forty? Would that help?”
“Twice that would be better.”
I inhale and hand her four twenties.
“Thanks,” she says, nicer than she has sounded all morning.
Chela looks down at an indicator dial on her wheelchair. “I have three bars now,” she says, excitedly.
“So you don’t need a push?”
“Nope. You can go.”
I try very hard not to seem happy that she will no longer require my services. Yet for some reason, I say, “You sure?”
She looks at me, whatever glimmer of friendliness in her eyes that was once there is now gone. “Yes, I’m sure you can leave,” she says, her voice gone flat. “Why is that so hard for you to understand? You’ve been wanting to leave ever since you got here.”
Wincing, I don’t say anything to this. Apparently monsters like me can be read fairly easily. Perhaps too easily.
“No, I didn’t,” I lie.
Chela looks at me and says nothing.
“On second thought,” I blurt, “why don’t you let me give you a push? How far is the bus station? It can’t be that far. I’ll have to call my wife if I’m going to be gone more than a couple of hours.”
“I don’t need your help,” she snaps, now her old hostile self.
“That’s not what you were saying a minute ago.”
“Would you just leave?”
“Come on. Let me push. It’ll be a good workout for me.”
Chela narrows her black tar eyes at me. “Get away from me or I’ll scream.”
I don’t know what else to do at this point, how to un-say what I just said. “I’m sorry.” I pull the little square box from my bag. “Want a Tic Tac?”
“Go fuck yourself, asshole.”
I storm out of Rite Aid, seething and sorry, carrying my bag of razors, shaving cream and Tic Tacs. Down SW Alder Street, I happen to notice a beat-up Ford transport van, mostly primer gray, but with a green front fender that looks pulled off some sort of public transport. Next to it is a black kid in his late twenties, in skin-tight black jeans, a striped shirt and heavy black boots. His hair is cut close to the scalp, but dotted with black and gold spots like a leopard. There is a cluster of stickers on one of the side windows – Bad Brains, The Exploited, and one that says, I Wasn’t Born with Enough Middle Fingers. One of the side doors of the van is open and inside I can see that there’s no back seat. Tucked inside is also what could be a ramp of some sort. The safety flashers are on because he’s parked illegally in a loading zone. He is looking at his cell phone, reading a text. He avoids eye contact with me.
I pass him, go a little farther, then turn into an alley down the street and hide behind a dumpster. After a minute, I see him look up to make sure I’m gone. He starts texting again. I watch as he keeps checking his phone. Before long, I see Chela come out of the Rite Aid, scooting along, the three bags of groceries piled in her lap. He runs up to her to grab the bags. As he pulls them off her lap, she grins at him. I almost don’t recognize her as the same person.
Jason M reaches into the van to put the bags on the front seat, then opens the other side door, unfolds the ramp and sets it up over the curb. Front wheels now up on the ramp, Chela opens her backpack and shows Jason M the twenties. She smiles again and holds her hand in the air. They share a small high-five. After which, he kneels next to her and kisses her with such tenderness that I abandon all thoughts I have of confronting the two of them.
There in my place in the alley, behind the dumpster, I watch as Chela rolls up into the old van. Jason M whispers something in her ear as he secures her wheelchair, then stows the ramp in the back and closes the doors.
Michael Zadoorian is the author of The Leisure Seeker—basis for the Sony Pictures Classics film starring Helen Mirren. His other books are Second Hand, Beautiful Music, The Narcissism of Small Differences, and The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, American Short Fiction, Witness, Great Lakes Review, North American Review, Literary Hub, The Millions, Belt Magazine, HuffPost and others. His work has been translated into over twenty-five languages worldwide.
Eunoia Review 