For one thing they’re ugly. Their aggressive complaining personalities might be bearable if their persons were acceptable to the eyes or ears. Barbara seems to think her blindness is an excuse to pay no attention to her appearance. It’s bad enough that she’s at least fifty pounds overweight and that her thin dirty blonde hair is scattered sleep-flattened around her face. What’s really striking is the way she actively and publicly chews her fingernails to the quick and beyond, often drawing blood. Lecturing us around saliva-slimed fingers. It’s about as pretty as picking her nose in public, or masturbating. And it’s not like she’s stupid or chemically unbalanced. She’s just bitter. She’s angry at not having more control over her life. Too busy being bitterly angry to assume the control that’s available to her.

Carol and Carol aren’t much better. They’re both in chairs and now sufficiently obese that it appears their fat is what’s tying them to the chairs (in fact, Carol B. is so large she does have to be tied into her chair; she has no lap). Carol J. and Carol B. wear raggedly clothes and their graying hair is long and scraggly. They have fat pasty faces lined downward with frowns and sneers. They smell stale. They generate uninhibited body noises. I’ve tried reaching out to them but I sense their resentment; they hate my face. All I feel when I imagine being them is impatient desolation. Their only moods are angry; their only pleasures are food. Their fingers are fat and grasping.

By contrast, Lisa and Debra and Walter are delightful. Sure Deb’s voice is a little funny – the timber that she’s never heard is nasal and throaty – but her vision isn’t tunnel. She reminds us of the needs of the deaf without hammering on us. Lisa is our newest commissioner; she’s still feeling her way in and trying to find consensus. She seems to be as sensitive to the good in people as to the bad in environment. And Weird Walter is sweetly weird. He can be scary-weird when he doesn’t take his meds, but he is following his program now. No matter what, he is always handsome.

When it’s quiet like this I can hear my pregnancy. Fluid like my digestion. I swear I am listening to my baby swim in me.

I’m bothered about the Commission meeting. We were unaccommodating to Linda’s group, and I like Linda. I need to think about it. Realize it wasn’t all of us. Make Carol and Carol and Barbara take responsibility for themselves. Ignore their screaming whispers, and maybe they will hear themselves.

I’ve met Linda twice before tonight and I was impressed both times. She’s warm and direct and open. Her group wants to build inclusive affordable housing: talk about shooting for the moon. Communities where everyone, no matter their physical condition, can move around and visit and interact. She has the right attitude; it’s obvious to me she’ll get the job done. How can we do anything other than support her? But no: first Barbara and then the two Carols attack the plan from their too-little-too-late position!

“Will the manager be disabled?” Barbara craned her edgy face toward the presenters’ table. Linda was trying to discuss universal design as a fairness issue for everyone, and Barbara kept bringing it back to disability.

“Well, I don’t know. We haven’t even bought the land yet, let alone tried to staff the place.”

“If you want my support then you’d better find a disabled person for the job,” Barbara harrumphed.

“Who’s this universal design consultant you plan to bring in?” Carol B. asked the question with a tone of challenge. Her mouth looked ready to argue.

“Her name’s Ruth Silberman.”

“Is she disabled?” from Barbara, while her teeth tore the skin at the end of her left index finger.

“No, but…”

“If she’s not disabled she can’t be a specialist in access.”

“But she’s redesigned several schools and playgrounds for children with – ”

”We’re not children,” declared Carol J., and I wanted to spit at her there beside me. If it weren’t my custom to keep my voice low, I would have yelled at my commissioners then.