Mon amie américaine by Michèle Halberstadt Page B

the sun. You’re sitting in the back of the Volvo in a gray, shapeless sweatshirt, and it enrages me to see you forgo your usual interest in your appearance. You look like you’re in a good mood, and you smell the peonies as if you were going to bite into them. I’m thrilled that my being here has made you want to go out.
    When the car enters a giant parking lot, I understand my mistake. I’d forgotten that the expression
go out for a walk
means ambling through a shopping mall where you can do everything: eat Italian or Japanese, buy candy or a TV set, go to the cosmetician or a hairdressing salon, or fill a shopping cart while your ears are drowned in the voices of the latest hit singers. What could be more depressing than moving through aisles turned freezing by air-conditioning while pushing your wheelchair?
    But you seem happy to see some people, to feel yourself in a familiar world, designed so that a wheelchair can roll absolutely everywhere, from the parking lot elevator to the restrooms of the restaurant. You do seem livelier this morning. You make caustic remarks about ill-manneredchildren who yell without their parents objecting. You’re interested in the shop windows. You buy a new eau de toilette, let me get you a silk scarf in a blend of blues that soften your coloring. Impulsively you let yourself be made up at a stand and leave with a kit containing an array of products. We stop to admire an exhibition of black-and-white photos. You smell nachos very near, and you want some. We head for the Mexican restaurant nearby, where you enjoy a bowl of guacamole and a chocolate ice cream.
    We’re waiting for the check when a pretty, very pregnant brunette breaks away from the group passing in front of our table and stops there as she lets out a shout. “Molly, is it you? I don’t believe it. It’s me, Lisa! Do you recognize me? We studied ballet together in grade school!” Suddenly she stops and turns red. She’s just noticed the wheelchair. Molly gives her a faint smile. “I remember very well. But I’m not sure that a tutu’s still right for me.” The arrival of the waitress gives poor Lisa a chance to slip away.
    Dora decides that we shouldn’t linger because of traffic holdups, and you allow yourself to be pushed to the car without saying a word. The wayback passes in a silence that the country music station isn’t enough to make up for. When your father helps you back into your bed, it’s already four p.m. I can’t stay any longer or I’ll miss my flight. I bend over the flowered comforter and hold you against me with all my strength. I don’t want to stay, but I’m in despair at the prospect of leaving you. I feel as if I’m abandoning you, letting you down. From your gray sweatshirt you take out a yellow sheet of paper folded in fourths, with my name on it. “Here, this is my new motto. Promise me you’ll think of me every day.” I promise, choking back tears, kiss you as if I’ll never see you again. I’ve never left anyone with such a feeling of defeat, futility.
    I wait for the taxi to turn the corner of the street before I unfold your message. It’s scathing, appalling.
    Enjoy while it lasts. It doesn’t
.

YOU SPENT THE SUMMER AT YOUR PARENTS’ . Then, in the fall, things had to be organized; in other words, what your life was going to become had to be put into place. That beautiful apartment with its terrace and its southern exposure near Columbus Avenue, where you were planning on spending, as you would put it, “a life with a view,” was reimagined with the functioning of the wheelchair in mind. You can no longer live alone. At night, in the day, during the week and weekend, nurses, massage therapists, and home health aides take their shifts assisting you.
    You don’t describe your day-to-day life in the rare emails you send me. Your messages are typed text-style, something