Grace Lapointe

The Only Way to Travel

One December evening, the main lobby of my posh apartment complex had suddenly been decorated with wreaths and poinsettias. The stuffy air inside was nauseatingly warm in contrast to the briskness outside. Instead of the usual top 40 radio, the piped-in music was “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” Until then, I’d totally forgotten that it was almost Christmas. I felt suddenly homesick. If I’d stayed on campus, I’d be done with my finals and home with my parents for days already. 

I was finishing my college internship at a law firm in Boston. My accessible apartment was ridiculously expensive, but my school paid the difference. The fancy complex had a gym, elevators, a concierge, and security guards. All of this reassured my parents that I’d be safe, but we agreed that it was absurd to have an accessible apartment on the eighth floor, not the ground level. We told the local fire department where I lived, just in case.

I had a walker—an adult version of the one I’d had in kindergarten. It was better for navigating a city than the motorized scooter I used on campus. I used paratransit to commute. An accessible van or car picked me up outside my apartment each morning and dropped me off at the law office, then picked me up again at 5 PM. The internship, which was almost over, had been boring and not worth all the effort I’d taken to arrange it. I’d read case studies and shredded confidential documents, alone in a cramped office for eight hours a day—not exactly educational. Maybe I didn’t want to be a lawyer after all.

Tonight, the apartment concierge was giving free cookies and apple cider to residents of the complex. I was so impatient to get up to my apartment that I hadn’t stopped to think that I couldn’t carry my drink and cookie. If I’d tried to balance, I would have fallen or gotten a muscle spasm, spilling the drink and burning myself. Instead, I locked my walker and sat on its seat. In my peripheral vision, I saw a guy in a bulky coat and a yellow wool cap. I half-waved, not saying hi to him—more like, “No, you go first.” Several minutes later, as I finished my snack, he was still there.

I got into the slow, overheated elevator, keeping to one corner, as I always did. I should have noticed that the man had held the door for me and followed me inside. Even looking at the panel of buttons, I could still feel his eyes on me. 

“What floor?” he asked.

“I’m all set.” I’d already selected my floor, but my finger spasmed on the wrong button, so I pressed that one too, involuntarily.

He kept trying to start a conversation with me, but I wasn’t paying attention. "My mom needs one of those. Where’d you get it?"

I didn’t respond.

“Your wheels! Can I see?” 

“No. It’s mine!” Without thinking, though, I’d turned to face him.

“Aw, come on. You’re no fun.”

I didn’t say anything, suddenly afraid. Then he grabbed the handles and sat his weight on the seat of my walker anyway, splaying his legs out. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t stop him. In a second, I felt everything slipping away from me, even my sense of time and reality. I was afraid to be stuck in an enclosed space, alone, with him—but equally afraid to make him angry.

“Hey, nice ride! The only way to travel!” he said, like it was a joke. His legs barely fit inside the walker.

“I need that back now!”

He stared up at me instead of replying. He had big, green eyes, but he was looking at me lasciviously. I was disgusted to realize that in another context, I might have found him attractive. His behavior made him repulsive. He had a tiny patch of facial hair—a style from music videos years earlier.

“Do you recognize your own beauty?” he asked. He smelled like cigarette smoke—always a turn-off, even at the best of times.

I didn’t agree with him, but I’d heard comments like that a lot before.

He stared rapaciously up at me without blinking, looking my entire body up and down several times. I’m sure the walker—which I couldn’t stop him from taking—gave him a good vantage point. He put his face closer to mine, although I backed away a few steps. He literally licked his lips—gross. “Listen. I’d eat you alive,” he said in a pointed, husky whisper, still staring into my eyes. “Your face—and not just your face. I’d eat it all!” He made a disgusting gesture.

I don’t remember what I said to get him away from me. The rush of adrenaline blurred my memory. 

Those few minutes inside the elevator were like time dilation. The elevator had stopped, on the wrong floor, but I still gripped the handles of the walker, like I was frozen in a game of tug-of-war with him. An older woman whom I’d never met before approached the elevator, so the guy finally let go. 

“Hi!” I said to her in a fake-excited voice, like she was my new best friend. She waited with me for a minute as the guy walked down the hall, and I took the elevator to the right floor.

I got out on my floor, clutching my walker fiercely, made sure no one was following me, and almost ran into my apartment. I locked the door and immediately started shaking and hyperventilating. For several seconds, I kicked my new, cheap furniture and yelled, relieved I lived alone.

Like in string theory, the story splits into several different directions when I try to remember it. In my revenge fantasy, I see everything in slow motion, and I grab the walker back from under him, slamming his head to the floor. His head doesn’t crack on the floor, his neck doesn’t snap—but maybe it knocks him unconscious. Unlike in real life, he can’t retaliate. Sometimes I have a weapon: a canister of pepper spray, a knife, but never a gun, even in a fantasy. Maybe the older woman was his mom, who really did need the walker, and he was ashamed for her to see his actions, I imagined.

In real life, I’d just stood there, motionless. It was like I had a target on my head. My slow reflexes would kill me one day. I was relieved that I never saw that creepy stranger before or since then. Sometimes I doubted myself and wondered if I’d imagined the whole incident. I told myself: this is what happens when you let your guard down, even for a second. From now on, I’d always be ready—hypervigilant, even.

Stella, my once and future college roommate, was the only person whom I told about the elevator incident in any detail. I downplayed it to my mom on the phone, in the vaguest language possible, and never mentioned it again. I didn’t want my parents to worry, and it was too humiliating to divulge. I was too busy to see a therapist, but Stella told me I should. She didn’t get it. Even the idea of explaining my entire life to a professional was daunting. Unless I could find an openly disabled therapist, I doubted they’d understand the first thing about my life. I’ve never liked people who pretend to understand me. I don’t want empathy or worse, sympathy.

I’ve always felt like each phase of my life was a dress rehearsal for the next one. When I got winded walking around the halls of my high school, I’d wonder: If this is too much for me, how will I go to college? I’d always wanted to go away to a good college, but my choices were already limited because so many college campuses I visited were inaccessible. If I found this apartment too stressful, imagine if I was a graduate paying my own rent plus all my other bills. I always felt like I had to outdo myself.

When I returned to campus for the spring semester, my friends told me that I seemed different, quieter, or asked me if I was OK. I always said I was fine. I didn’t think about the elevator incident anymore. My schoolwork was getting more intensive. So, even living with friends, I hung out with them less now than I used to.

People often told me I had a blank look in my eyes. My peripheral vision seemed sharper somehow. When I tried to stare directly ahead, I could feel my eyes shifting to the side. I sometimes stared aimlessly at the computer or TV screen, with my head propped up at angle, and realized that I hadn’t done or even looked at anything for hours.

I now felt like the campus was too small, sheltered, and detached from the real world. I researched pepper spray, frustrated to learn that ordering it via mail and carrying it without a license were illegal in Massachusetts at the time.

I still loved all my English classes, especially the one on Gothic literature. When we read the story “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor, something about it haunted me and made it hard for me to sleep.

The protagonist, born Joy Hopewell (who renames herself Hulga), is a woman in her early 30s with a Ph.D. in philosophy. She prides herself on being a nihilist: “I don’t have illusions.  I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.” She’s also sheltered, though, because she still lives on her mother’s farm. She has a wooden leg. Biologically, it’s not a part of her body, but it functions as one. 

Hulga secretly believes that her wooden leg is what makes her special: “She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away.” That line resonated deeply with me. It’s how I often view my disability: as almost too intimate to contemplate myself, like my sexuality, never mind share with someone else. I sometimes believe it’s the most interesting thing about me.

A naïve, traveling Bible salesman, Manley Pointer, comes to the farm. (Manley Pointer, ha, I thought—no author would get away with giving a character such a phallic name today! As one of my professors would say: “Paging Dr. Freud!”) Hulga has contempt for his religious beliefs, but then he says her disability is what makes her unique. He “had touched the truth about her.” She has no romantic or sexual experience, and she suddenly becomes infatuated with him. He leads her up to the loft to the barn, persuades her to remove her wooden leg, and then steals it. Then, Pointer reveals he’s an atheist too: “You ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”

I found the story bizarre and unsettling but didn’t think about it much until the next day in class. Instead of lecturing or asking questions, the professor asked for our reactions to the story. I usually participated, but I stayed silent this time. Something about it was too intimate to discuss. I could hear my classmates’ voices, but they sounded distant. I felt somehow exposed, as if I’d written the story, O’Connor had written it about me, or my classmates were discussing the events of my life. They didn’t seem to like or get “Good Country People.” It likely didn’t make much of an impression or parallel their lives.

“I don’t know. It was weird. Bizarre.”

“Grotesque,” someone offered.

“I don’t get it. It just sort of  . . . ends. What happens after he steals her leg? Does he rape her? Those are old-fashioned condoms he has with him, right? Do the other women find her? Does she starve up there?”

“The wooden leg is, like, a phallic symbol.”

“No, maybe it symbolizes her virginity. Stealing it is a metaphor for rape.”

“Why does everything always have to be a symbol?” I asked, way more loudly and vehemently than I’d intended. I hadn’t even meant to say it out loud. I felt like everyone was staring at me. Now I’ve done it, I thought. Everyone’s going to think I consider myself smarter and better than they are because I’m too opinionated. Just like in sixth grade. I haven’t learned since then.

“Sorry, Kyle,” I said to the student who’d spoken before me. “It could be. I didn’t mean that wasn’t a good interp—”

“Hey, Talitha, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. You OK?”

I was talking too much, like I couldn’t stop, but that wasn’t why he’d interrupted to stare at me with a concerned expression. Somewhere during this barrage of questions, I suddenly felt like I had tunnel vision and couldn’t turn my head at my desk. I was breathing shallowly but audibly, almost hyperventilating. 

“Talitha, are you OK?” someone else asked.

One girl offered me her water bottle. “Thanks,” I said without taking it. What if she had mono? It would be like kissing her.

“Talitha, are you all right? Do you need to leave? Go to the health center?” the professor asked. She seemed concerned but perplexed.

“I’m OK. It’s warm in here. Maybe I’m overheated.” I left class.

As soon as I got out of the classroom, I almost collapsed into one of the upholstered chairs near the faculty offices. No one else was around. I felt dizzy, almost faint, and realized my vision was blurry. Was I crying? I felt disconnected from my body. If I didn’t move within a few minutes, more people would ask if I was all right. Or they’d ask if I had an appointment to see a professor or the mental health counselors around the corner. I’d never had psychotherapy, here or anywhere else, only countless hours of physical therapy. The floors were padded in thick carpet. It seemed suffocating, not a place where secrets could be disgorged but buried even further. I collected myself and drove away on my scooter.

That asshole! He stole her leg! I thought, irrationally angry at the fictional character, like he was a real person. “Give me my leg!” screams Hulga, but it’s too late at that point. Or maybe my classmates were right, and it wasn’t just her leg.

Imagine wanting to give your mind and soul to someone and finding that they only want one part of you, I thought. He takes advantage of her trust in him to trick her. Hulga is so confident in her own cynicism that she thinks she can’t be fooled. She thinks she’s in control and using him, but ironically, he betrays her instead.

I wanted to write an essay on my complicated reaction to “Good Country People,” but that would be much too personal to share with a professor. I was afraid that if I tried to write about the elevator incident, people would jump to conclusions, misinterpreting it. They’d assume that I’d made it up, used it as a metaphor for rape or for Hulga’s disability, or that this was a universal experience. It wasn’t. He’d wanted the walker, me, or both. I didn’t want to get into his head and find out.

Ironically, if I tried to write a story about what had happened in the elevator, people would also probably think that I was trying to imitate the O’Connor story. That was how eerily it paralleled my life. It was like ironic, reverse plagiarism—as if the author had gone forward in a time machine and taken inspiration from my life. That’s impossible, but it made me feel that even my traumas—my darkest secrets—were somehow mundane. That was my story to write, someday, but Flannery O’Connor had written it first. I could control it only by fictionalizing it, and now even that wasn’t worth it.

If my classmates found Hulga and her story bizarre, freakish, or unrelatable, they were really talking about me—even if they didn’t realize it. There were a few other disabled students with mobility devices on campus, but I didn’t know if any other disabled students were in the Gothic lit class. The story had dredged up memories I hadn’t thought of in years.

One day in high school, I was walking to the elevator when a group of boys I barely knew followed me. This was alarming because I was the only student with the elevator key. The guys shouted, “Talitha has DSL! DSL! DSL!” 

I thought it was totally random that they were yelling about Internet speeds, but maybe they were sarcastically yelling a sports term at me. When I got home, I looked up “DSL” on one of those online slang dictionaries. 

DSL: dick-sucking lips. Of course.

After that, I developed a strange obsession with my own lips. Before that, I’d always kept Chapstick or lip gloss in my purse. I threw them all away. I used to stare at my lips in the mirror, afraid they looked too full. In the winter, they became so chapped that they developed little lines, then split and bled. I bit them and tried to hide them when I talked. Finally, they looked thinner and turned almost as pale as the rest of my skin. Good. The goal was to have no lips.

Then, years later, during my college orientation weekend, all the incoming freshmen explored the campus in a huge group. We were dozens of potential friends who immediately added each other on Facebook. Someone hosted a party in their temporary dorm room. The dorms—well, residence halls, as the RAs always said—were virtually empty. Parties felt secretive and conspiratorial, in a way they never would again. College wasn’t even school yet, more like summer camp, or throwing a party in a cheap hotel room. I awkwardly tried to dance to the music—probably pirated mp3 files—from the tinny laptop speakers.

 “Oh my God, she’s so drunk!” a girl from another orientation group yelled. I’d never met her before. She was holding an energy drink.

I was completely sober that night. I’d just turned 18. I’d only rarely tried sips of beer or wine, or cloyingly sweet peach Schnapps, but wouldn’t start drinking regularly for years. I wouldn’t have drunk alcohol here, surrounded by strangers. It could make my balance and coordination even more unreliable than usual.

“I’M DISABLED!” I screamed over the music. “I’M NOT DRUNK! THIS IS JUST HOW I WALK!” People were staring now.

“Oh my God! I’m so sorry, hon! I thought you were normal until you started to move!” Her voice had taken on a high, condescending tone that I’d heard from many non-disabled people.

“I am normal! Everyone is normal! I have cerebral palsy!” I’ve always told that to anyone I wanted to tell. But it still felt ridiculous to yell my medical diagnosis over Rihanna songs to strangers. 

When some people were drunk, their real thoughts came out. Non-disabled people found me unsettling and uncanny. Now, after reading the story and seeing Hulga’s sense of her own freakishness, I was sure of that. “I thought you were normal until you started to move!”—like I was a robot. 

Ironically, though, I often was sexually harassed anyway. I’d thought I’d made a bargain with God when I still believed in Him. If my disability made me unattractive to some people, couldn’t it protect me from unwanted sexual advances? 

“The only way to travel.” Sometimes that creepy guy’s voice repeated in my mind, like a song getting stuck in my head. What did that even mean? He was just riffing. It was nonsense. I tensed up whenever I heard “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” but only the version that had played in the lobby that day. Non-holiday songs by the same singer also set me on edge. I’d always detested the stale odor of cigarette smoke, but now, it could trigger a panic attack.

I almost never went to the gym on campus, thinking it was rarely worth the effort. Someone tried to cut in front of me while I was waiting for the exercise machines. She stepped over me like there wasn’t a person in her way, just my walker. 

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Oh. Are YOU waiting for a machine?” Or maybe I’d only imagined the surprise or hostility in her voice.

I shrugged. “Of course. Aren’t you?” I swung my legs onto the stationary bike. It’s the only exercise machine I regularly use because it doesn’t require balancing while standing. Supposedly, exercise improves mood, but maybe not, if it’s so frustrating just to use the gym. I needed to try something else.

So, weeks after I read “Good Country People,” I scheduled an appointment at a mental health counselor’s office on campus. In the waiting room, there was a black-and-white drawing of an intimidating-looking staircase. I had to look at it more than once to realize that the steps were supposed to lead out of a dark tunnel. It was probably some type of symbolism, but all I could see was how inaccessible the stairs were. Ironically, they became even steeper as they reached the light. It took me a minute to realize what this might symbolize to a non-disabled person: maybe overcoming adversity, or something corny like that. 

“The only way to travel?” No, that didn’t make any sense, I thought as the counselor called my name. There were an infinite number of ways, at least one for each person.