Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

  Why did I have to ask? I could always count on Sils; Sils was the way; Sils was our ride home, always.

  Mike only had a motorcycle, but he’d borrowed a car from a friend. He drove slowly to make it last, kept looking at Sils, who sat next to him in the front seat, kept asking her questions like “How’d you get so beautiful?” To which she’d say, “Give me a break,” and then laugh. I sat wordlessly in the back, looking out the window, watching the night trees and the darkened houses float by like boats.

  Mike pulled down to the end of her street, right up into the entrance to the cemetery, and I got out and waited. I walked away from the car, to let them kiss. I had a lot of patience, I felt, for certain kinds of things. I hopped the low fence and roamed around the edge of the cemetery a little, but when I looked back, they were still in the car, kissing, so I walked farther out. I looked for little Estherina Foster’s grave, and then sat there with her in the dark. I listened for a voice that might be hers, some whisper or peep, but there was nothing. I fiddled with a long-stemmed plastic rose that had gotten mashed there in the dirt. I brushed the mud off it, and bounced it around, tracing words in the air—my name, Sils’s name, Estherina’s name. I couldn’t think of other names. I wrote Happy Birthday, Fuck You, and Peace. Then I tossed the flower away, into the shadows. How silent the world was at night, the unbudded trees etched eerily into the sky, the branches reaching as if for something to hold and eat—perhaps the dead and candied stars! The ground was cold, thatched with leaves; the nearby swamp had begun unthawing its sewagey smells. In the moonlight the sky seemed wild, bright, and marbled like the sea. People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before of one’s decisions—it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds—and so people had a tendency to talk to it. I turned away, sitting there, hugging my legs, pulling my jacket close. I plucked my earrings off and stuck them in my pocket, the cool air strangely still and mushroomy. I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees—I swore on Estherina Foster’s grave—that I would. But it wouldn’t be a boy like Mike. Nobody like that. It would be a boy very far away—and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful of songs.

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Sils. She and Mike were now out of the car but leaning against it sexily.

  “For a walk.”

  Mike turned toward Sils. “I should get this car back.”

  “Bye,” she said.

  He kissed her again, in front of me. “I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said. He got in the car and did a three-point turn—I’d been learning those at school, in Driver’s Ed—and then he zoomed away.

  In the kitchen we fixed a quick, late-night breakfast: saltines and hot chocolate made from Bosco. We dipped the crackers in the hot chocolate and let them get soggy and float there, like gunk in a pond.

  “Once in third grade,” said Sils, “I didn’t want to go to school, so I chewed up a bunch of saltines, kept them in my mouth and went upstairs, groaning, and spat them at my mother’s feet.”

  “So attractive!” I said, and we giggled in an exhausted way.

  “It worked.” She was dreamy-eyed, drowning the crackers in her cup with a spoon.

  “Ingenious,” I said. I hoped she would glance up from her drink, look at me, say more. But she didn’t.

  Later, sprawled on top of the covers on her bed, which was a mattress on the floor of her room, Sils let out a long, satisfied sigh. At the foot, in the dim light of the little lamp she kept on when I was there, I lay curled in a sleeping bag and looked at her, beginning with her toes: the rubbery blue nexus of veins on top of her feet, the tendons splayed like the bones of a fan, the discolored sheen of the nails shimmery and vague as mother-of-pearl. The nuts and bolts of her were always interesting. She saw me looking.

  “You’ve got wild toes,” I said.

  She yanked one foot toward her chest. “Did I ever show you these?”

  “What?”

  She examined her foot studiously. “In my toenails you can see Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.”

  “What are you talking about?” I pushed deeper into the sleeping bag and pretended to laugh at her.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “You can see their faces.” She lowered her foot. “I’ll show you tomorrow.” She sighed again, thinking of Mike, I was sure. “Thanks, Berie,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For whatever.” Then she fell completely to sleep, and in the low light for a while I watched my own shadow against the wall, a lumpy mountain range thrusting up peaks and crashing them again to avalanche and rubble, in a long, long restlessness that finally preceded sleep.

  Often when I went over to Sils’s house, she would have the side door unlocked and a salad or a cottage cheese sandwich waiting for me on the kitchen counter. A salad! A cottage cheese sandwich! How odd in memory to conjure it, the dressed cucumbers and celery assembled as if by a wife for her husband; or the sandwich, sweet and sloppy with mayonnaise. I would take it, eat it, then go upstairs to her room and sit next to her, strum the guitar with her, singing harmony to folk songs like “Geordie” or “The Water Is Wide I Cannot Get O’er,” feeling myself a goner in the minor-seven chords, their sad irresolution stirring in me something lost and heartbroken, though how could that be, I was only fifteen. Still, something deeply sad had been born buried in me, stirring occasionally inside like a creature moving in sleep. Often I found myself concentrating on the frog painting, entering it with my eye, as if it were perhaps a dreamy illustration from a real-life fairy tale, or a secret passageway into another secret passageway. A joke into a secret joke into a secret. When we were younger, Sils and I had always looked for caves together, or some small undiscovered duck pond with ducks. We’d go to the Grand Union and cheer on the lobsters who had managed to break free of their rubber bands. We’d build a half-tent out of three open umbrellas and we’d get underneath it and play cards. We’d walk miles to the county dump to see the bears. By the time we were twelve, we’d bike to the head shop and buy wisteria incense. Or we’d go downtown to the Orpheum, say we were sixteen and see an R-rated movie, occasionally a foreign one, which would mesmerize and perplex us. We’d eat Junior Mints and popcorn—each candy a sweet pillow on the tongue; each popped corn as big and complicated as a catalpa bloom. On a dare we might even drink the blueberry punch, which was the color of Windex and shot up the sides of the Jet-Spray cooler like some wonder of nature; no one else in our town had ever drunk it. That’s what the man behind the counter always said. We would wash it down with water from the lobby fountain. Then we would sit in the dark, on the left, to watch the movie from an angle, eyes peeled for flesh. At thirteen, we would hang out at W. T. Grant’s, buying bras and ice-cream sundaes, and trying on men’s sweaters, the bottoms of which, when we wore them at school, stretched out shapelessly, the hem warped and hanging around by our knees: that was the look we wanted. At fourteen, we would claim to be sleeping over at each other’s house, and then we’d stay out all night, go to the railroad tracks, and from old mayonnaise jars drink liquor collected from our parents’ own supply. Then we’d sleep in the family station wagon in the driveway, wake early, get donuts at Donna’s Donuts at dawn when both the raised and glazed ones were still warm.

  But increasingly now I was alone with my outings, wondering what it was like for Sils with her boyfriend Mike, what they did together, what were all the things I didn’t yet even know to ask, and, now that she had gone to a new advanced place I hadn’t, whether she liked me less.

  In some ways my childhood consisted of a kind of wasting away, a wandering dreamily thr
ough woods and illegally in the concrete sewer pipes, crawling, or pleasantly alone in the house (everyone gone for an hour!) chewing the salt out of paper bits, or hiding under quilts in the afternoon to form a new place somehow, a new space that had never existed before in the bed, like a rehearsal for love. Perhaps in Horsehearts—a town named for an old French and Indian War battle, one full of slaughtered horses whose bodies bloodied the village pond and whose hearts were said to be buried on Miller Hill just south—the only things possible were deferment and make-believe. My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song—nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.

  But one can tell a story anyway.

  One can get a running start, then begin, do it, and be done.

  Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft—a whore’s arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind—why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured—for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.

  Before we had renovated our house, it had only one bathroom for the entire family and often I would rush to use it, finding the line three kids deep; there was a mirror in the hall and we used to clutch our groins and hop around, watching ourselves, hoping we wouldn’t explode. There were only two bedrooms for three children—the yellow room and the blue room. For a while my foster sister LaRoue, and my brother, Claude (in Horsehearts, pronounced clod), and I took turns sharing. Because LaRoue had first arrived at our house with another foster child who no longer lived with us—a slow, quiet girl named Nancy who had been beaten retarded by her mother—the two of them shared a room until Nancy went away, and then LaRoue was left with her own. I don’t think I ever actually knew why or where Nancy went; our house was always inhabited by people other than us, all camped out on the Hide-A-Beds. That’s why I’d sought Sils early, when I was nine, found her right there in my homeroom, alphabetized next to me, in the Cs, and attached myself to her.

  One May someone just came and got Nancy and took her away. It seemed scary to me, that that could just happen. That someone could simply come and take you and go.

  But LaRoue stayed and got her own room—the blue one with its deep white windowsills—and called my mother “Mom.” I was three years younger, though only one grade behind her, and I had the larger, yellow room with my brother Claude with whom I was close, being just a year older than he. Claude and I were “bunk-buddies,” a phrase I used laughingly, ironically, bittersweetly, later in life, with lovers, those nights of an affair I’d sleep with a man but sexlessly, feeling tired, the dumb dog of my body too exhausted for love, running all week in the meadows of it, now desiring merely to sleep, beat, next to someone else but close, like a brother, like Claude. “Bunk-buddies: we can be bunk-buddies.”

  There was actually a bunk my brother and I slept in—sometimes he on top, sometimes I, to equalize things, I suppose. While the house was full of strict bedtimes and rules, all posted to the refrigerator with Bryson Paper Mill magnets, little pine trees with BPM stamped on them in gold, we were essentially unwatched children. We could find ways to do what we wanted, though we made a great deal of the moment at night when one of our parents (we were told, we assumed) would come in to check on us before they went to bed. We were never awake for this moment, but we knew of it, believed in it in a religious way, and sometimes, put to bed too early on a crickety summer evening, we’d prepare for it, like the Last Judgment. We turned it into a kind of body sculpture contest, posing in elaborate ways on our beds—standing on one foot, head hanging off one edge, arms lifted in the air and mouths and teeth and eyeballs arranged in astonished grimaces. “This will really surprise Mom,” we’d say, or “Dad’ll get a kick out of this,” and then we’d try to fall asleep that way. In the morning we’d awake sprawled in ordinary positions, never recalling whether we’d glimpsed a parent or not, or how we had finally fallen off to sleep in this more normal way.

  Claude was my first pal, before Sils, and we were each other’s best friend, bunk-buddy, child spouse, until I was nine and he was eight, and we got separated—in a way, for the rest of our lives. We were too old; it was unseemly for a brother and sister to share a room. So the house got renovated, and each of the children got their own room—mine was downstairs, alone, off the first-floor hall. His was upstairs.

  Soon afterward Claude befriended a new boy down the road, Billy Rickey. I stumbled around, then looked and found Sils, and that was that. Claude and I never really saw each other again, not in a true way. Passing each other in the corridor at school, seeing each other at dinner, then years later at holidays, weddings, and at funerals, we couldn’t figure out who the other one was anymore. It was as if one of us had grown flippers or feathers or a strange stripe up the side, our species suddenly unclear.

  But he always remained, for me at least, my first love, my child bride, and in a busy family, speaking in tongues, it was important to be married, somehow, to someone. So I was, had been, for a while, to Claude.

  It was LaRoue who was alone. As little children, Claude and I were all bodies and sleep and play—closer than even adults usually get—and we’d viewed our parents as stern, distant royalty and LaRoue as older, disturbed interloper, visitor, rent-a-girl, but Christianly tolerated. Our family read the Bible every night at the dinner table, my father proceeding chapter by chapter through the Gospels, The Acts, the letters from Paul to Timothy (I imagined Paul Zabrowski at school and his annoying friend Timothy Wilson), through First John, Second John, Third John, all the way to Revelation (“And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia …” Philadelphia? Aunt Mimi lived in Philadelphia!), all the long strange verses, as we watched our food grow cold. And so we learned forbearance.

  (“We used to read the Bible at the dinner table, too,” said my husband when I first met him and we were trading tales. He was Jewish, Socialist, half Hungarian.

  “Really?” I’d asked.

  “Yeah,” he smiled. “Only we would read it in these really sarcastic voices.” I laughed in a loud, honking way. We needed to joke and play. We were nervous, unsure. “What’s also interesting,” he said, encouraged to the point of derangement, “is that although most people called him God, we called him—well, we called him ‘Fuckhead.’ ” Daniel slapped his hand across his heart. “One nation, under Fuckhead.”

  I fell sideways, hysterical, then tried to straighten, relocate my napkin, when our grim waiter began to approach. “At any rate,” I said, stressing the oxymorons, “Bible reading and Peruvians on the Hide-A-Beds. That was my ‘Family Life.’ Be that as it may.

  “Be,” I added uncertainly.)

  LaRoue existed for us as a gently tolerated and lonesome guest. She was fat where we were thin, blonde where we were dark. The thick pelts of our eyebrows shrieked across our faces, some legacy of the Quebec fur trade. Hers were faint and wispy, like an aerial shot of grain. She was older, separate, glum, periodically in some state of convalescence the details of which our parents did not reveal. Claude and I had staked out a separate contract. When people were gone, we explored their rooms. We’d get home from school early, our father still at work at BPM downtown—or “downstreet,” as we used to say; at the mill he was head of the forest management department. Our mother would be at some steering committee meeting for the United Women Proposing the Beautification of Horsehearts—racking up minute notes about petunias and elms
with Hilma Johnston, Thelma LaRose, Betty Dreiser, Lou-Anne Gerard.

  LaRoue, after school, was usually at the Saddle and Riding Club.

  And so Claude and I stepped in and went through stuff: my father’s slacks hung by the cuffs from the top dresser drawer; his old wooden shoehorns like puppets on the closet floor. My mother’s drawers full of sachets and girdles, and in the clutter on the dresser top the bright coral lipsticks and Avon colognes and old tinted photographs of herself when she was in college and had won Ankle Contests. In this way we gathered information about our parents; we were true and successful spies, for our parents never gathered much about us, we believed, nor cared to, in the way that was so often the case in large families of that time. My father could not even recognize me in a group, couldn’t pick me out in the annual class picture—“Dad, that’s not me, that’s Cynthia Odekerk!”—never recognized us on his way to work when he passed my brother or me in a group of children heading to or from school. “Who?” “Cynthia Odekerk!” He walked, hatless and lost in thought, down through the village toward the river, where the mill was—“Hello, hello!” we’d call, and he would wave to us in a general, uninterested way, still moving with his big shoes and long stride, not really even looking up. “There’s your father,” a friend might say. Or, “That’s your father?” as baffled as we.

  I suppose we felt less bullied by his neglect than by his attentions, which tended to take the form of correcting us when we hit a wrong note on a Brahms piano intermezzo. “Aow!” he would yowl. “C-sharp, C-sharp, C-sharp!”

  If we cried, he would say firmly, “Stanch and starch the mush!”