The other routine annoyed me, but this one—I have to laugh. I have to laugh because there’s no way to keep calm with that hideous face singing right into mine, that weird knobby leathery hand so alive, so warm, squeezing mine. But I laugh too, to express something I’m just beginning to feel: that walking is something you can mock. Not walking as an ordinary means of getting around, but Walking as a big dramatic idea, Walking as a metaphor for strivings of all kinds. When I gave up my childhood struggle to walk, it felt like a failure of something much greater—a failure of courage, of character, of faith. Yesterday Sara suggested that walking might be a matter of choice. Today it’s a joke. A joke so funny I can’t stop laughing.

*   *   *

I laugh through the ripple of applause for the chorus, laugh through the dispersal of the herd, and laugh as we move toward the cabin. I barely notice that Carole is particularly nonplussed and Sue is looking daggers at Sara.

We stop outside the cabin. Sara and I are parked on the path and Sue sits opposite us on a bench. It’s night now. A big light shines right in Sue’s face. She leans forward and looks at Sara. “Listen. We need to talk about your inappropriate behavior tonight—”

“Oh? Do we?”

“Yes. We do. That group came out to entertain us. It was rude to make fun of them.”

I feel a little sorry, now, but anger sparks in Sara’s eyes. “Please. We have to laugh.”

“Sara, you—”

“I mean, seriously, ‘The Impossible Dream.’ We hear it here every year, and it’s on every telethon, and it haunts us in crippled school. Someone decided it was an appropriate song to inspire crippled folks, and I’m fed up with it. If you tell me I can’t laugh—”

“It’s just a popular song.”

“Not when they sing it to us. Then it’s a put-down; it says we don’t have a real life and certainly not a real future, so we’re supposed to retreat into dreams, and not nice pleasant dreams but pathetic impossible dreams. Like, ‘Someday there may be a cure,’ ‘God bless us every one,’ ‘I’m writing a novella.’”

For a moment, she drops her head and sits in silence. When she looks out again, it’s like I can see pain flare from her face, loop around the three of us, whip past the going-to-bed noises coming from the cabins. Sue hunches down, as if to escape the defiance in that pain and then leans forward, determined to try once more.

“Sara, you—”

“They want us to live in pathetic fantasy, so they can thank God they’re not like us. And, anyway, who the hell do they think they are, these dumb Norm-visiting Philistines? What do they know about Walking Through Storms? It’s shit.”