LITMIR.BIZ

      Four

      The ant is neatly marching along the mortar line on the cement block wall alongside her bed. To Isabel, it appears he is as frantic as she is to leave the hospital. She tugs once more at the lower lip of the window but it will not budge. Windows are nailed shut at Three Breezes. So instead of freeing the insect, Isabel, with miserable resignation, watches it make its way down the wall.

      * * *

      Isabel avoided anthills. In the spring- and summertime, when nature was busy reinventing itself, those telltale signs of ant industry—miniscule pyramids of dirt—multiplied in cracks of buckled pavement, between bricks and along fence posts, and Isabel always stepped around them. She had ever since she was a small girl growing up in Connecticut.

      Her brothers, on the other hand, went out of their way to step directly on them.

      “Don’t!” she yelled at Owen, who was twisting his foot on top of the fourth of twelve anthills along their short front walk. Isabel ran over and pushed her seven-year-old brother away. Too late. Isabel imagined hundreds of suffocating ants under the cement gasping for air.

      “I’m telling Mom if you do it again.” She was on her hands and knees frantically trying to clear a passageway so that the ants could find their way out of the rubble. Her nine-year-old mind realized this was futile so she grabbed a tiny stick to drill a hole into the ground so the ants could get some oxygen.

      “I’m telling Mom if you do it again,” mimicked her brother. “You’re such a tattletale.”

      He was right.

      But Isabel didn’t think of it as telling on her brothers, she just couldn’t stand to see anything or anyone hurt. Even ants.

      “What’s going on out here?” Isabel’s mother called through the top screen of the porch door.

      “Nothing,” her brothers called out, disappearing into their fort in the backyard.

      “Isabel? What’re you doing?” Katherine asked as she approached her hunched-over daughter.

      Isabel was furiously drilling, pausing only to wipe her tears out of her eyes so that she could continue her rescue mission.

      “Is it the anthills again?”

      “I don’t understand why they do this,” Isabel cried as she squatted over the fifth flattened mound. “There’re families under here. Whole families. And they’re dying!”

      “Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous. Look at me for a second.”

      Isabel obeyed as she wiped her nose on her sleeve.

      “They’re going to be okay, the ants. We’ve been over this. They like to burrow out. They’ll be okay.”

      Isabel looked back down. No ants were crawling out of her manmade holes. She looked back up at her mother.

      “You’ve got to let it go. You think this is sad? Wait’ll life kicks you in the rear a few times. No one’s out there drilling holes for all of us, you know. Now, come on inside. Help me sort the Girl Scout cookie orders.”

      As she stood up to go, Isabel looked back at her doomed friends. But she swallowed her tears and forged ahead.

      * * *

      As her childhood advanced, Isabel’s empathy for creatures of all shapes and sizes morphed into a sadness that was difficult to shake. Sadness gave way to isolation. Isabel constantly felt as if she were on the outside looking in. As if she wasn’t quite a participant in everyday life, but a sleepwalker. While she maintained the polished front of an oldest, overachieving child, her true personality had yet to emerge, and that only added to the disconnected feeling she wore like a bulky shroud.

      As Isabel floated numbly through elementary school, her physical appearance was taking a very definite shape. She began to hear over and over again that she was pretty, and soon, perhaps because she felt so empty, the compliments at least temporarily filled her up. Isabel began to crave the attention that was paid to her looks. No one wanted to hear about her sorrow, no one wanted to see her sad.

      She was becoming an expert at reading people. She soon learned that humor got more results than anger or tears, that attention was paid to the attractive, and that people were inherently egotistical. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. So she honed her listening skills. Isabel was learning to survive by playing roles: the curvaceous beauty, the class clown, the intense listener. She was excellent at being whatever someone else wanted her to be.

      * * *

      “Isabel. What can I do for you?”

      Isabel cleared her throat.

      “Um. Mr. Clulow? Um, I was wondering if I could have another chance.”

      The high school drama teacher slightly cocked his head to the side. “Another chance.” It was a statement, not a question.

      “Yeah. I mean, yes. I know I froze up there last week. I totally froze. I blew it. I just wasn’t prepared. For improv. But I’m ready now. I can do it. I’ll act out anything you want me to act out. If you’d just give me one more chance.”

      Mr. Clulow looked down at the papers on his desk. Then he looked back up at Isabel.

      “Why do you want to join the drama club, Isabel? What is it that’s drawing you to drama?”

      “Drawing me?”

      “Yes. You see, some people feel it’s the perfect way to tap into their creative side. Others find it’s the perfect form of self-expression. I’m just wondering what’s driving you.”

      Isabel looked down. Without looking back up she answered.

      “I guess it’s that…well, I suppose I just like the idea of being someone else,” she mumbled.

      Mr. Clulow raised his eyebrows as if he’d caught her in a trap.

      “So you don’t like to be yourself?”

      “No!” she said, too loudly. “I mean, I do. What I really mean is that…” She stammered, aware that he was prepared to pick apart her next sentence. “It’s…um…”

      “Miss Murphy,” the teacher scolded, “I have a class to teach in five minutes. I suggest you get to the bottom of what it is you would like to say.”

      “Please. Just give me another chance to try out. Please?”

      He tapped his pencil impatiently and looked out

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