This is a standalone short story in the Shrub universe. It may become part of the sequel. If you’ve read Shrub, this will help hold you over until our next work is completed. An if you’re not yet a Shrubber, Wicker and Glass will give you an peek into the world we’ve created.
In this story, we start delving into the dynamics of disabilities and American culture. In 2019, Americans with disabilities still face many barriers and challenges; barriers and challenges that are often physically and emotionally painful.
Most of these barriers could be prevented if the culture decided to change its relationship with disabled people.
Way back in 1931, of course, the situation was far worse. Disabled people were often scorned, and there was much less recognition of their abilities.
Most of the devices we have today that address specific problems caused by specific disabilities were not even dreamed of at that time. Disabled folks struggled with ergonomics constantly, indoors and out. Their mobility and access to people, places and the myriad artifacts of culture were extraordinarily restricted.
Let us enter The Shrub, then, and sit quietly at “The Bad Table,” the one near the door and farthest from the service, and watch as an interesting scene unfolds in the late spring of 1931.
Wicker and Glass
Friday afternoon. The Shrub. Every seat at the bar was taken; the tables, about half full. The combined conversations were loud, but not raucous.
At 4:17 there was a fumbling at the latch at the front door, which no patron heard.
But when something hard slammed into that door, and the door bounced back into its jam, people noticed.
After about seven sharp bumps and bruises against that venerable portal, a young woman entered The Shrub. In a wicker wheelchair.
For a moment, conversation stopped. Everyone turned around and stared.
She was white-armed, richly tressed, with long straight red hair, parted over the center of her left eye. Her eyes, in direct contradiction to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, were, in fact, quite like the sun. Her face, seen from any angle, a blend of magnificent ovals. Forehead, cheeks, chin, occipitals—each one, an oval for the ages. Summed? That rarest of finds, a flawless human visage.
A delightful upturned nose. The very air was surely pleased to be passing through it.
And if snow be dun, why then her breasts, an insouciant swath of which gleamed unconfined by her neckline, were white. Translucent, quivering, shimmering white delimited by pure, swooping Gaussian curves like no others.
Her legs … too hidden. It was a crime, was it not, to hide them so, even under the rich blue fabric of her dress? Still, their remarkable shapes asserted themselves in spite of being covered. Her left leg crossed over the right as she wheeled across the floor, the top of that left thigh arcing boldly skyward. The flank of that leg, slab-sided; a concavity containing unfathomable allure subtly embedded within. And the underside of that thigh, hinting at itself through her dress, a supple, meandering thing, possessing precisely the right amount of yielding.
She was beautiful in some absolute and unconditional way that defied convention. And yet apparently, her legs didn’t work right. Otherwise, why the creaking wicker wheelchair?
She wheeled up to the right end of the bar where there was no room. No one acknowledged her.
McNeal, down at the other end, glanced left and saw her. He was across from her in a flash.
“Fellas, how about you all slide down, and make some room for the lady?”
Seven grimaces and seven hands fidgeting with drinks ensued, and in the end, seven barstools scratched on oaken floor, shifting left. There was just enough room for the woman to edge up to the mahogany surface of the bar.
“I’m McNeal. How may I be of service?”
The compound curves of her lips danced, lifting slightly. “I’m Jes Sinodar. And I’ll have a Stinger.”
“Excellent choice, Jes.”
As McNeal leaned in to the task of mixing her drink, the two men next to Jes spoke in loud voices.
“Well, Bill, I’ve about had enough of this. What about you?”
Bill replied, “Yeah, me too.” His eyes darted right, to look at Jes. To look down at her legs, now uncrossed. After a moment he turned back to his pal Jim. “I don’t want to get run over by a cripple.”
McNeal responded before Jes could. Hands moving at supernatural speed, he swiped their half-finished drinks away, poured their contents out into his sink, and shattered the glasses on the floor behind the bar, rather than queuing them to be washed later.
“Fellas, you don’t owe me anything.”
“Wha—” began Jim.
“No ‘wha.’ Remove yourselves. You are, as of this moment, persona non grata in The Shrub.” McNeal paused. “That means you are not to darken the doorway of The Shrub ever again.”
Bill and Jim glared at McNeal, glared over at Jes, glanced down the length of the bar at the other patrons, and then heaved off their barstools, turned and left. As they passed through the front door, Jim muttered to Bill, “Any place that puts a stupid bitch like that above us doesn’t deserve our business.”
Jes, for her part, turned her eyes downward to the mahogany surface of the bar and finally started sipping her Stinger, the reason she came here on this day. She let out a long sigh of contentment.
Just then, the next fellow over at the bar, three seats down, moved two seats over to sit right next to Jes. She leaned to the right, distancing herself without looking at him.
“Name’s Otis. You’re pretty for a girl in a wheelchair.”
Jes grabbed the wheels of her contrivance and spun around to face him. “Pretty for a girl in a wheelchair? You idiot! Why can’t I just be pretty?”
Otis, mouth now a minus sign, turned away from her and skulked back to his original barstool, once again leaving the two empty stools between them.
Before she could rotate back to her Stinger, the fellow further to Otis’ left felt he had to chime in. “I’m so sorry, hon.”
Jes flushed bright red. “Sorry? Hon? I’m not your ‘hon’ and I don’t want your pity. What I would have wanted was your respect. You irrelevant gnat’s pizzle!” She paused, drew in a deep breath, scowled at them both. “If only you two were clean enough to spit upon.”
And so Jes Sinodar knew her Shakespeare. The fellas at the bar may not have known what a ‘pizzle’ was when they had come in earlier, but they got it from the context now. The Shrub went silent. Jes turned away from the people who misunderstood her, turned far to her right where there was no one, and lost herself in her Stinger.
McNeal, still close by to her, silent, broke several laws of physics by polishing three Old Fashioned glasses with his impeccably clean bar towel, all at the same time. Minutes passed. Muted conversations started up again, faltered, lurched along. Finally, noting she had finished her drink, McNeal, stepping around the broken glass he had yet to clean up, mixed a second Slinger and brought it over to Jes.
“This one’s on the house.”
They looked into each other’s eyes, bodies unmoving, for a few moments.
“Miss Jes. I’m a happily married man, so I have nothing to gain and, I should hope, nothing to lose by saying what I’m about to say. No axe to grind. And what I want to tell you is this: you are a beautiful woman. You, not parts of you, not with conditions or caveats. And of course, I don’t know you yet, so I’m only referring to the external Jes Sinodar.”
They stared at each other some more.
“There’s an inner Jes, too, like there is with all of us. I’d be pleased to get to know her, if you choose to come into our Shrub again.”
*
The model in the photo is Jessica Snyder. Jessica employs a wheelchair much of the time, though not in this shot. The photographer is Adam Dudgeon of Impression Photographic Design.