Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

  He started calmer conversations with us when it had to do with the crossword puzzle he was doing; he would call us to his side in the den, if he needed the name of a TV show he’d never seen. Once you’d given him the name of the show, he would ignore you again, turn back to the puzzle, and leave you standing there talking about the show a little, the various characters in it, what had happened to them, and what you thought would happen to them next. You’d be standing there talking to no one.

  Nonetheless, we adored him. If he didn’t know us, love us, even recognize us, it wasn’t because he was invested elsewhere in other children. We had no rivals for his affection, except perhaps Brahms, Dvořák, the daily crossword, and our mother—and even then, not often her. In his iconic way our father remained very much ours. And in the long shadows of his neglect, we fashioned our own selves, quietly improvised our own rules, as kids did in America, in the fatherless fifties and sixties. Which was probably why children of that time, when they grew up, turned out to be such a shock to their parents.

  No doubt some part of us, of course, remained obediently reduced and cowed by our lack of a deeper possession of him, by the inattention, no matter how we thought we had resourcefully accommodated it. But these were lessons and deformities perhaps more conspicuous in adulthood than in childhood, where we were often obstreperous and eager for battle; we had faces and jeers and impudent hand signals, our eyes rolling, our hands quacking at our sides when a grown-up spoke. But later, for years, I referred meekly to any strongly felt and informed opinion, or weeks and weeks of my own research, as “my two cents’ worth.”

  C-sharp, C-sharp, C-sharp!

  In public my grown brother muted his own fiercely forged self to a collection of apologies and excuses and if-you-don’t-minds. Somehow we fell back from our original willful midnight constructions into ordinary, passive positions, mysteriously and in no time. Still we believed we could resume the other whenever we pleased, the Hieronymus Bosch, the artful splay, the Zappa arabesques, waiting for someone to walk in and see us like that and at last know who we really were deep down.

  C-sharp!

  Our father was unquestionably an impressive, solitudinous, autocratic figure. He had grown up in a family of cellists, Germanophiles, had even visited Germany in 1930, when he was ten; he had seen Hitler in a hotel lobby and was dazzled. But when all that celebrity and fine music played itself out so badly in history, he retreated with his passions, became a Baptist, listened, transported, to symphonies and tried to remember his children’s names. We loved him, in the inexplicable, snobbish way of children: he was the tallest and most intelligent father in all of Horsehearts—this was generally acknowledged—and that seemed at the time all we or any other child ever really needed of a dad. We took our cues from our mother, who admired him to the point of debilitation; she was “brought up to do that with men,” as she herself eventually came to declare. But we, as kids, did likewise. Sometimes I can still make my eyes well up—like a kid’s game of fainting at will—thinking of how much I wanted him to like me. Though any adult can do that, make themselves wail like babies for the love that as children they had desired so, sought so, distorted themselves so to get but never got. I once rode eighty blocks with a cabbie who kept saying over and over, “And he never hugged me, and he never kissed me,” until by Eighth Street he was weeping and I had to get out. It was unbearable.

  Once, when I was nineteen, I gave my father a Father’s Day card meant for uncles and neighbors. “You’ve Been Like a Father to Me,” it read. His distance from us had become something of a family joke, but to him, staring at that card, it was unutterable and a shock; I don’t know what I was thinking—that he’d laugh too?—I don’t know, but the look of hurt that came across his face stunned me, confused me, sent me out for a striped tie and a different card: one with a demented sort of glitter and the word “Dad” writ large.

  Years later, however, I grew angry; taking inventory of all he’d said and done, I came to think of him, bitterly, as a kind of Nazi. I was studying history. When I married a Jew, I waited for him to say something vague and dark, but he didn’t. He was courteous and formal, not uncharming. My husband, upon meeting my father, encountering for the first time his towering blend of Fred MacMurray, Fred Gwynne, Fred Astaire—all the Freds—whispered to me in a panicked way, “Your father is such a Father. An über-Father. The mother of all fathers.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling. “The mother of all fathers.”

  Sils was not really in love with her boyfriend, Mike, I was sure of it. I could tell it. He was tiring her out. You’d see them together: he all grinning and bursting, all raring to go, like an Irish setter, a tense dog, too much energy shining at the mouth, and she, exhausted from the night before, used up a little, unable to keep pace with this nineteen-year-old boy and his apartment, his revving motorcycle, his plans. Shortly after he met Sils he’d moved from Albany to Horsehearts to be near her. He worked highway construction, and the highway construction, too, had moved north. In the moist cool green of the early mornings, the humidity just beginning to catch the sun and promise heat, she would unstraddle his Harley, out in front of Storyland, when he dropped her off for work, and one could see her attempt to make the shift into day, into light, a Cinderella in reverse. She had a habit, when someone else was around watching, of raising her eyebrows and pointing at him when he spoke, and then in the nick of time returning her face to normal when he looked over at her. Or not. Sometimes he caught the edge of it, a wild bird that had disappeared down her throat, that she had madly swallowed to spare him, and he would stare at her.

  “What?” he’d say. This was a demand for an explanation.

  “Yeah, what: What do you mean, ‘What?’ ” She would then look to me, or whomever, for an audience, and smile. It was a sweet smile, and almost always resulted in her kissing him afterward. Nuzzling a little. She was a high school girl and this was the first sex she’d known. It drugged her with secrets. It had stolen her away, left her smile deranged, her hair a mess.

  “How you doing today?” I asked, petting one of her shoulder blades on the way into the employees’ entrance.

  “You still wanna go to the Sands tonight, I hope,” she said. The Sands was a divey shack on the lake, a tavern called Sans Souci, which had gotten corrupted by the local accent into “the Sands,” as if it were some Las Vegas nightclub. We had been going since the previous summer. We could get into all the bars. Though we were minors, we had working papers and hitchhikers’ thumbs and the fake IDs we’d made at the library, which had the only photocopy machine in town. We’d borrowed one of Sils’s brother’s driver’s licenses, photocopied it, then retraced our copies, substituting our own photos and names. We did not think of any of this as a crime. Crimes weren’t crimes; laws weren’t really real; nothing applied. Nothing applied to us. We were set apart by adolescence and geography; the country was in upheaval, there was Vietnam and draft dodging and rock music and people setting themselves on fire. Laws seemed to be the enemy. So we dispensed and dispatched, ceased and desisted: we made up our own rules, and they were loose. We were inventing things, starting over, nothing was wrong. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Everything was a ticket out; everything was merging, proceeding, leaving home—all the different forms this took. Love. Peace. Smile on your brother everybody get together.

  And we were the sensible girls. We were known as such. We baby-sat. We scored high on Iowa Tests. No matter that sometimes at night we were at the railroad tracks, drunk on 7-Up and whiskey. That we enticed each other out to dance bars by holding the phone next to a stereo playing Deep Purple or Maggie Bell or Grand Funk Railroad until the other said, “OK, OK, let’s go!” The truly wild kids had already left for the pipeline in Alaska or for Boston or Broadway or the med units of Da Nang.

  “Oh, yeah. Let’s go,” I said. She had the next day off.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “I feel like I never see you anymore.”

  Later, as an adult, when
I was wonderfully used to long, important conversations in restaurants or bars—books, love, politics, science—talk that licked about like a flame, talk that traveled like roads into the night, guided, or urged, I suppose, by drink and hunger, or some chaos of the heart, it seemed to me strange that I had ever enjoyed spending those nights at the Sans Souci with Sils, because I don’t recall what we ever talked about. I don’t think we had real conversation. We were guitarless, without our music books, we couldn’t sing. But we didn’t really talk, either. We drank and bantered and remarked and gazed around and once in a while when the music got too loud we shouted something at each other and laughed. We smoked cigarettes, the strange brazen dare of it never abating for us, even though it was only one of so many dares we made, over and over. We ordered gin and tonics and held each one up to the black lights on the ceiling to marvel at the spooky blue and then to drink it. We had no idea what life had in store for us; not a clue, not a thoughtful thought. Inevitably a guy—older, drunker—came over to try to pick up Sils. Almost sixteen, she was the sort of fifteen-year-old who looked twenty. I, to my own shame and uncertainty with the bouncer, was the sort who looked twelve.

  “How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?

  Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.

  But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.

  They didn’t seem to mind, these men. I swear: often they just didn’t seem to mind. They were half in love already; they were wishing. They wanted servitude to Sils, to get close to her, the prettiness, the breasts, the elegant neck, the long hair fragrant with a girl’s shampoo. We’d dash back to the corner to meet up, and the guy would still be there and we’d climb in, Sils in the front, I in the back, and we’d head up to the lake again and I’d watch the guy’s right arm go slowly up, stealing up behind Sils on the car seat, making its way around her, a cheap stole, and I’d pray there wasn’t a gun. I was a Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns. Once, the year before, there had been a gun, a pistol fetched from the guy’s left boot and waved at us in a wobbly way with his right hand. Our hearts beating and the doors unlocked, when he stopped at a Stop sign, we pushed open the car doors and flew out.

  Here he was, a man with spurs and a cowboy hat, wildly pointing a gun at two fourteen-year-old girls, yet stopping, carefully, at all the Stop signs. And so we leaped out and made a dash for it along the road, into some trees, but he got out too, leaving the car running, and chased us with a flashlight, firing his gun once into the air.

  Sils froze. I stopped and saw her standing there and so went back, and he burst upon us, crashing through the underbrush, waving the gun. He backed us up against a row of pines and shouted at us to take off our clothes. Sils started to, so then I did too, what else could we have done? I stripped to nothing and stood there in the woods, bare feet on the pine needles and bony roots, one hand behind me clutching the branch of a buckthorn bush, the night sky an eerie, muggy slate, not as dark as it should have been because the moon, though fuzzy from rain, was full as a coin. He looked at me first, shining the light up from my feet, along my scrawny legs and hips and chest to my face and then he laughed coarse and bemused and moved away to flash on Sils, starting from her face, moving down along her shoulders and woman’s breasts and girl’s tight stomach and legs. “That’s right,” he said, moving toward her, and then he put the gun down, “that’s right,” and in the light of the flashlight he still awkwardly held, the beam zigging and zagging, he began to take off his own clothes, not just his pants and spurred boots, but his shirt and his watch and hat, and that’s when I looked at Sils and cried out, and then we both twisted and ran, bolted, naked, tearing our already tough feet, bruising the arches on stones, going fast and blind the three miles it took to get us through the woods, making our way toward one group of trees and then another and another, until we were out the other side, over the new highway overpass and down the Bay Road to Dix, then home, back in through the window before dawn. We sank down, catching our breaths. We lay in bed, next to the pillow bodies, not knowing what we felt; we reminisced our lost outfits.

  No dude-ranching man ever got hold of us like that again. We were more careful from then on. We studied the eyes, and the backseats, to make sure there wasn’t anything strange in them. We were fools, but we wanted things: summer, night, drink, air on our arms, the swell of music, the achy swell of music, or the quiet of the lake roads with no cars, past the parking lot, asters and seeding grass on the side, and us walking, smoking joints, letting the smoke burn and prick our lungs, our legs languid, our eyes stained calm, our legs in a matched pace before we turned and went back inside to dance. Conspirators. Emotional business partners. That’s what we were.

  Years before, when we were eleven, we’d already begun our myriad personal rituals of assertion and disguise. We’d pretend we were teenagers, put on our “baby doll” dresses, a style briefly popular in the sixties: puffy sleeves and epaulets through which you could thread the chain of a color-coordinated change purse. We’d smear our lips with Yardley lip gloss, plastic pots of strange, sticky pink, which we applied and devoured and which would probably later cause an array of small, inoperable tumors, but from early on it was what we required. Applying thick, distracting tints to my lips was a habit I retained into adulthood, though sloppily, headed for a middle age of hasty, shiny red leaking outside the lines of my mouth, like modern art only scary. As early as sixth grade my teacher had pulled me aside and said, “Benoîte-Marie, what are you wearing on your lips?”

  “Nothing,” I replied, my first lie to an institutional figure, but I’d felt cornered.

  She looked all around my face. She looked at my earrings, which were silver cake decorations I’d glued on with Elmer’s.

  One of the candies had fallen off in recess and now I had a big scab of glue on my ear. I reached up and picked at it.

  “Are you wearing one color on your top lip and a different one on your bottom?” she asked, incredulous.

  I was. I thought it looked better that way. Why did she have to be so harsh, with her widow’s eagle eye? I had once brought her lilacs, and she’d sent me straight to the principal’s office. She knew they were from a neighbor’s bush and not my own. Our yard had no lilacs.

  “You don’t need that stuff,” she said. “You’re too young.”

  “What stuff?” I said, and she sighed and let me go. (Decades later, in my one lone year of Housewife’s Bathrobe Disease, my husband at work but not me, I would roam through the house, still in slippers and a robe, my face unwashed, my hair unbrushed, but I’d put on lipstick, a bright Indian Red or Scarlett O’Hara, and schluff through the house like that, sort through papers, vacuum.) Our mothers let us do this—wear makeup, and stockings and garter belts, and go off—because they had other concerns. Sils’s mother had a job and sons in a rock band. Mine was at a meeting or church or some information fair for foreign students, and at home, when she wasn’t mimeographing committee memos from a metal box of brownish jelly heated on the stove (pages and p
ages of purple lettering produced this way from a single typed sheet), she was chatting with Mrs. LeBlanc, or curled on the couch beneath a raincoat, napping off a depression. Sils and I would go downstreet and lurk. Look for “cute guys,” we said. Though when we actually came upon a band of them, my heart always sank.

  But it was those times mostly that bonded me to Sils, and made me able later to spot the slightest thought working its way across her face, like a bit of weather, and that is how I knew that morning, my mother dropping me off in front of Storyland, and me glimpsing Sils arriving at the same time with Mike, and slipping bowlegged off his bike and scraping her ankle on the hot exhaust pipe, a loss of agility peculiar for her, that she was pregnant. It was the spaciness of her worry, the slight separation both from Mike and from me, whom she seemed to try to reach via quick bolts of light and dark she threw into her eyes and then yanked away, put in storage, her eyes becoming a snowman’s coal. She’d throw, yank, turn away in loneliness. At home in her room she played E-minor 7 to E-major, over and over on her guitar, saying nothing. Then she’d look at me as if I’d only just arrived and say, “What?”

  She wasn’t telling me, because she thought I was a child. A child with a cottage cheese sandwich. That’s what I believed she thought. I was sure.

  And so that is why, when she finally did tell me, days later—“I can’t believe this, Berie, but I may be pregnant”—I leaped like a hired hand to respond.

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  Though some part of me also hung back, shocked and disbelieving, unable to proceed through the moment, the information. No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots. We were in the Storyland employees’ lounge, getting dressed, she as Cinderella, me as my usual striped goof in a pinafore and hat.