weekends. I do not know what all of the disabilities are. I do not want to think about all the things that can be wrong with someone.
Some are friendly and speak to us, and some do not. Emmy comes right up to me today. She is nearly always there. She is shorter than I am, with straight dark hair and thick glasses. I do not know why she has not had eye surgery. It is not polite to ask. Emmy always seems angry. Her eyebrows bunch together, and she has tight little wads of muscle at the corners of her mouth, and her mouth turns down.
“You have a girlfriend,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“Yes. Linda told me. She’s not one of us.”
“No,” I say again. Marjory isn’t my girlfriend—yet—and I do not want to talk about her to Emmy.
Linda should not have told Emmy anything, and certainly not that. I did not tell Linda Marjory was my girlfriend because she is not. It was not right.
“Where you go to play with swords,” Emmy says. “There’s a girl—”
“She is not a girl,” I say. “She is a woman, and she is not my girlfriend.” Yet, I think. I feel heat on my neck, thinking of Marjory and the look on her face last week.
“Linda says she is. She’s a spy, Lou.”
Emmy rarely uses people’s names; when she says my name it feels like a slap on the arm. “What do you mean, ‘spy’?”
“She works at the university. Where they do that project, you know.” She glares at me, as if I were doing the project. She means the research group on developmental disabilities. When I was a child, my parents took me there for evaluation and for three years I went to the special class. Then my parents decided that the group was more interested in doing research papers to get grant money than in helping children, so they put me in another program, at the regional clinic. It is the policy of our local society to require researchers to disclose their identity; we do not allow them to attend our meetings.
Emmy works at the university herself, as a custodian, and I suppose this is how she knows Marjory works there.
“Lots of people work at the university,” I say. “Not all are in the research group.”
“She is a spy, Lou,” Emmy says again. “She is only interested in your diagnosis, not in you as a person.”
I feel a hollow opening inside me; I am sure that Marjory is not a researcher, but not that sure.
“To her you are a freak,” Emmy says. “A subject.” She made subject sound obscene, if I understand obscene . Nasty. A mouse in a maze, a monkey in a cage. I think about the new treatment; the people who take it first will be subjects, just like the apes they tried it on first.
“That’s not true,” I say. I can feel the prickling of sweat under my arms, on my neck, and the faint tremor that comes when I feel threatened. “But anyway, she is not my girlfriend.”
“I’m glad you have that much sense,” Emmy says.
I go on to the meeting because if I left the Center Emmy would talk to the others about Marjory and me.
It is hard to listen to the speaker, who is talking about the research protocol and its implications. I hear and do not hear what he says; I notice when he says something I have not heard before, but I do not pay much attention. I can read the posted speech on the Center Web site later. I was not thinking about Marjory until Emmy said that about her, but now I cannot stop thinking about Marjory.
Marjory likes me. I am sure she likes me. I am sure she likes me as myself, as Lou who fences with the group, as Lou she asked to come to the airport with her that Wednesday night. Lucia said Marjory liked me. Lucia does not lie.
But there is liking and liking. I like ham, as a food. I do not care what the ham thinks when I bite into it. I know that ham doesn’t think, so it does not bother me to bite into it. Some people will not eat meat because the animals it came from were once alive and maybe had feelings and thoughts, but this does not bother me once they are dead. Everything eaten was alive once, saving a few grams of minerals, and a tree might have thoughts