Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

  “It might not be true,” she said. “I feel so bloated. I feel like I’m going to get my period any day now.”

  “That’s one of the signs,” I said knowledgeably. I read all the books, fascinated with gynecology the way an android might be.

  “When Chrissy Messita was pregnant she had to go to Vermont.”

  “I’ll drive you,” I said. I only had my learner’s permit, but I was getting good.

  “I suppose I can get Mike to drive. But thanks.”

  I was quiet, thinking about her and Mike Suprenante and what their baby might look like.

  “What car would you get, anyway?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Whose car would you be able to g—”

  “My parents’,” I said quickly. I was too young myself for a driver’s license, but I thought what I could do was get LaRoue to drive us. “I could wait and catch them on a nice day, when they walk everywhere anyway and wouldn’t miss the car.”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” she said. She leaned over and placed her breasts in the bodice of the dress, cakes in a cup, and then she turned around for me to zipper her. “You have to make an appointment and go when the appointment is.”

  It was then that I realized she meant the abortion clinic, not the unwed mothers’ home. Last year two pregnant girls we knew from school—Mary Mills and Sara Hayward—had gone to the home to live for four months to have their babies, and Mary Mills, afterward, had serrated her arms with a grapefruit spoon. Abortion was newly legal in the state, but in our county no doctor would perform one; you had to go to Vermont.

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s right.” The tinny calliope music started up in the park, and I grabbed my cashier’s box, the one with the money and the thick roll of orange tickets, and headed for register three upstairs, to empty the box into the drawer.

  “Tonight,” Sils called after me. “Don’t forget.”

  “Okey dokes, artichokes.” I actually said that. When I was fifteen I actually said that a lot.

  I phoned my mother late in the afternoon to say I wouldn’t be home for dinner; I got LaRoue instead. She was working at a kennel that summer, cleaning dog cages, and grooming cats, which no one there liked to do except her. “I don’t know,” she said in her strange proprietary way. “I don’t know. Mom won’t be too pleased.” Mom. She always called her that. Now I grew strange and proprietary. “She’ll live,” I said and hung up. I didn’t think about LaRoue, who she was, what she might have wanted in her life or from me, who was not exactly in it, but dancing along at the edge like a bean. I acted fidgety with her, jumpy and busy.

  I was focused on Sils. That night after work we walked to Dairy Dreem for cheeseburgers and milk shakes, sitting outside across from the old Fond du Lac Fort, taken by the British from the French in the 1700s, and recently reconstructed for the tourists. Once in a while a fake cannon went off, and a teenager dressed in eighteenth-century British military garb—red coat, black hat, ponytail wig—would bang a drum, his summer job. The Old Paddle Wheel at the marina would whistle off its steam, and set sail on its dinner cruise. Cars would drive slowly on Route 9, looking for something to happen, or else they would rush, on their way to the beach, or to miniature golf, or to spin painting, or beyond to Montreal. Sils and I sat at Dairy Dreem, at the picnic tables, near the trash cans, eating our cheeseburgers and french fries in wax paper and red plastic baskets. We stirred our milk shakes with long, plastic iced tea spoons. We felt anonymous, Alone Together, like the song; we knew every song there ever was.

  “I’m probably stalling,” she said, “kidding myself.”

  I nodded sympathetically, poured more catsup on the wax paper, like some inadvertent symbol, then quickly mopped it up with my fries. I suddenly felt strange. “How long”—and here I cleared my throat—“how long are you overdue?” I sounded like an embarrassed boy, or a nurse. An embarrassed boy-nurse.

  I thought she would say a week. Instead she said, “Two months.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly. My grasp of basic syntax palsied. “Shouldn’t you try and better hurry soon?”

  Sils let her head fall into one palm. Her hair fell in long lines across her face. “God, I feel sick.” She shoved her food away. “My problem is I guess I just don’t want Mike to know.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “All those years at St. Alphonse’s Academy in Albany,” she said. “He’ll want to keep it. He’ll want to get married. I just can’t.”

  “You’re too young,” said I, the agreeable sidekick, the Greek chorus of one earnest pip-squeak, though the words were those of my sixth-grade teacher, scolding my lipstick; I’d inadvertently seized them, applied them beyond the lines of my mouth.

  Sils straightened and looked me square in the eye. She was wearing a rhinestone earring and it caught the setting sun—it did!—sending out a flash of light, like a rescue flare. “How can I not tell Mike and also come up with the five hundred dollars?” We earned a dollar sixty-five an hour. It was 1972, and that was minimum wage.

  “I’ll get it,” I blurted.

  “Pardon?”

  “The money. I’ll get it for you.” It was such a daring and preposterous remark that it silenced both of us, silenced us deep into the evening, even when we were at the Sands, dancing and drinking and bringing on the blur, farming the fuzzy foam, the dream edges, feeling our own watery gait and the tough, hard drums of the band, the ride home perhaps from someone we knew this time; I think it was someone we knew.

  And when I awoke the next day, too little, too young for the headache and dry nausea I inevitably had, and too old suddenly with information, the sun cutting through the moist morning already, getting down to business, like a street sweeper, my best friend meditating her abortion, my mother, menopausal and preoccupied, driving me to work and saying nothing, not really, just dropping me off, then adding, “That’s sixty-five cents each way, don’t forget,” so as not to feel used by her children, imposing a lesson about money, how you must pay for everything, nothing is free (“Yes,” I said), charging me daily for the lift to work, a practice that now in memory embarrasses me for both of us; why did we live like that, with all that mean, incessant tallying? And me changing from my clothes into my striped dress and pinafore, having learned furtiveness first here, in hiding my too-thin girl’s body from the others, looking up my number on the chart, picking up my money box and sorting it out in the drawer of my register—tens, fives, ones, quarters, dimes, nickels, all with their own compartments, fitted together in the square of the drawer like a Mondrian or spice cupboard, and no pennies, just a big blank space for twenties; fifties and traveler’s checks under the drawer; it was then I knew what I would do. Of course. I had all A’s in math at school; that’s why I’d been hired. It came to me in an obvious way, like a chambermaid who year after year sees plane tickets on the nightstands of the rooms she dusts, the rooms of the toilets she cleans, and to whom it comes in a snap, a quick vision, like a stroke of genius or perhaps just a stroke, that she must travel, fly: take these and go. And so she does without a word.

  Of course, she is caught.

  But I had it planned differently. What I could do, I could do during lunch, when the other cashiers, Sheryl or Debbie, were on their breaks and I had to both ring up and tear the tickets myself, at the perforation, and hand them back to the customers. Customers who were always right.

  “The customer always sucks,” Sils once said. “Now that’s a great motto for an amusement park.”

  “That’s twelve dollars, please.”

  “But the kid’s under four.”

  “Yeah, right.” I’d roll my eyes, and put one hand on my hip.

  “What are you, the owner’s daughter?” they’d ask.

  The children were always indignant. “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “I’m six. I’m six.”

  “The kid’s not six. Don’t listen to him.”

  “OK. All right. Eight do
llars. Here’s your tickets. Jesus Christ.”

  Sometimes I didn’t ring up. When the other girls were on break, I pressed the No Sale key, rang open the drawer and sold stubs, keeping track on a scratch pad so that later, before closing, I could reclaim this amount from the register, or sneak it from the money box, which I would take to the bathroom with me, “for extra security.”

  “That’s twenty-four dollars. Here are your tickets.”

  “That’s it? That’s all there is to it?” the park visitors (“Visitors to the Park,” according to the P.A. system) would say.

  “Yup.” I would stare straight ahead.

  “That’s all we get? We just show these?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh. OK.” And they would wander off through the gate into the park.

  At first there was never an overage, or a shortage, or a discrepancy of any sort. I would walk across the park with my money box to a snack stand, buy a root beer, and then, heart briefly pounding, go to the bathroom and take out the calculated sum—forty-eight dollars, say, or once, ninety-six—and return the rest to Isabelle, our supervisor, in the office upstairs. It wasn’t that scary to do this, for some reason, because—unlike the time I ran under a truck stopped for a red light, rather than walk all the way around it, and unlike the time I hitchhiked alone at night to the lake just to test myself, to learn the meaning of myself good god whatever that was, and unlike the time I shoplifted from a downstreet store a sweater I had coveted grossly, in a heat (“hocked,” we said; “I like your shirt; did you hock it?”)—I was doing this for Sils and her emergency.

  I kept the money under my stack of records at home—Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Bread—and at the end of the week I had five hundred and fifty-two dollars, pressed flat as envelopes from the weight of all that music.

  Sometimes with Daniel I argue about the sixties. He is nine years older than I am, and knows that time better than I, or differently.

  “There’s a real age difference between us,” he says.

  “Age-schmage,” I reply.

  “Unfortunately, there’s also a real schmage difference. We made the sixties,” he says, speaking in a generational “we” that excludes me. “We made the counterculture. You were twelve years old.”

  “But we inherited it,” I say, “and as children we made ourselves around it, with it. We hung our own incipience on politics. The counterculture got on the ground floor with us, as children; it was the wood we were built with. We used to watch you guys, the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, on LSD at the public beach, or playing Duck, Duck, Goose in Horsehearts Park with your beads and long-flowing Indian smocks. But then we got to be that age, and we went to the park, or to the lake, and there wasn’t a Duck or a Goose or a hit of acid anywhere. There was only Ford pardoning Nixon.”

  “Christ,” snorts Daniel.

  “But once upon a time it had been all we knew,” I say. “Rebellion, revolution, and all those songs that went with them. We ice-skated to ‘Eve of Destruction.’ ‘The western world, it is exploding,’ and we’d do these little spins and turns.”

  Or something like that. I say something like that.

  “But still it was ours,” he says. “It came from inside of us, not you.”

  “Yes, you made it, but as a result it was a thing outside of you. You could walk away from it. And you did. We couldn’t, you see. It was in us. And when it was no longer out there in the world itself, it left us stranded, confused, betrayed, masturbating and doomed little outlaws.”

  “Masturbating and doomed little outlaws?”

  “Sure.”

  “What are you talking about? You can’t use the sixties like this. You can’t use the sixties to explain yourself to yourself.”

  Of course that’s what I want. I think of the lies and theft that cultivate the provincial heart. I had been beyond questioning authority. I’d felt unseen by it. But now, looking back, I want to fudge and say it was the time, not the place. “But which is more powerful, what you make or what you inherit? Which is more permanent?” I ask. “I realize that we’re talking ridiculous generalities here, but let’s face it, a discussion is always more fun that way.”

  “It’s a sign,” he says, “of a person looking for excuses. A hoodlum seeking politics.”

  “Perhaps a hoodlum is already politics.”

  “You’re no hoodlum.”

  “That’s true,” I say, sighing. And in this lie I feel close to him, so grateful to him, so full of pity.

  It goes like that. Our talk goes something like that.

  It was on a Tuesday, my day off, that I planned to show Sils the money. I cleaned my room. I vacuumed the purple shag carpet, put new Scotch tape on the back of my Desiderata poster so it didn’t billow or droop. Be yourself.… You are a child of the universe.… Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. “Where’s the part that says, ‘Don’t run with scissors in your mouth’?” Claude once asked, studying it. The previous school year I’d also taped up a Let It Be poster, a Spiro Agnew poster (on which I’d inanely scrawled, in eyeliner, “Yeah, right, Spiro Baby!”), and a psychedelic poster that said, in flameglo, swirling script, “Life Is a Gas at 39 Cents a Gallon.” But this summer I had taken them down and left only the Desiderata. Now I dusted the shelves and the dressing table with its loosening, fake-wood contact-paper top and its skirt assembled from an old dyed curtain and some tacks. I had a row of colognes from the drugstore downtown: Eau de Lemon, Eau de Love, Oh! de London (Odekerk! Dad, Odekerk!). I had a small stack of articles from Seventeen, articles that advised you how to prepare for a date in one hour, in fifteen minutes, in five minutes, in thirty seconds. (He’s striding unexpectedly up the walk! What should you do? Quick! Brush your hair and tie a freshly ironed kerchief around it!) I had an electric makeup mirror with three settings: Day–Evening–Office. The Office setting was greenish and particularly lurid, and now I leaned into it, hunting in the wilds of the looking glass, examining my skin, not good, not bad, scouting for swellings and clogs and squeezing where I could the watery flan from my pores. Then I swabbed them red and pure with rubbing alcohol. I put on makeup in a large, theatrical way—dark and bright—as if my face were meant to be seen at a great distance.

  I set my hair on mist rollers plugged in under the vanity. I put on a scoopneck leotard and my Wrangler shorts, which I had unhemmed the bottoms of in March and carefully combed to form a fringe of paler blue. I looped my macramé belt through the belt loops. I put on some records, Laura Nyro, Carole King, my life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue. I dabbed vanilla extract and Jean Naté Friction pour le Bain on separate wrists, then rubbed them together, my own particular mix. I wanted to be original. I wanted to be me! I removed the rollers and brushed the bobby-pin ridges out of my hair. I fell down on my bed and waited. Actually it was only a mattress, frameless on the floor like Sils’s, which is how I wanted it, and I had covered it with a bright orange and pink Indian print spread, a “tapestry,” we called them, which I had bought at the Macy’s mall in Albany the year before with my mother. “Are you sure you want that?” she had asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Well, it’s your room.” The Albany mall was an amazing, bursting palace to me, and I bought badly there, tastelessly, my head dizzy.

  I lay on my bed and looked up. I had a pink floodlight in lieu of the regular ceiling fixture and I had affixed a paper beehive-shaped shade to it; probably a fire hazard. What did I care? I owned nothing of value. Everything would turn out fine. Or else—hell—it would burn. I only wanted my body to bloom and bleed and be loved. I was raw with want, but in part it was a simple want, one made for easy satisfaction, quick drama, deep life: I wanted to go places and do things with Sils. So what if the house burned down.

  I heard her bicycle crunch up the driveway then stop. She scratched at the screen with a key, and I got up and went to the window.

  “Hi,” she smiled, looking up into the house through the rusty grid of our screens. She wa
s wearing her best blue jeans, and her white sleeveless shirt under a jean jacket. I knew her clothes by heart.

  “Come on in the front,” I said. “The door’s unlocked.”

  “Your parents home?”

  “Ehm … just LaRoue and my mother.”

  “Brought along a little something,” she said, patting the breast pocket of her jacket. “Leave open the windows of your life, babe.” I watched her wheel her bike off to the front and waited to hear the doorbell ring. LaRoue answered.

  “Berie,” LaRoue shouted gruffly, perhaps even angrily, but why? I never asked. “It’s for you. Silsby Chaussée’s at the door.”

  “Let her in,” I shouted back.

  “You,” replied LaRoue, who pounded off to her own room.

  “Girls, stop yelling!” called my mother from upstairs.

  I met Sils halfway, in the dining room, already coming in, and I grabbed her jacket cuff, turned, and led her back into my room.

  “Typical afternoon at the Carr house,” said Sils.

  “I hate this family,” I said, and closed and locked the door. We had old doors in our house: keyholes with skeleton keys we were required to leave in the hole.

  Still, I turned the key, locked the bolt in place, and once the door was shut I watched Sils’s smile dissolve to a mumble and a stare. “Fuck,” she said, fumbling for the joint in her pocket and lighting it with Sans Souci matches. She inhaled and held the smoke deep inside, like the worst secret in the world, and then let it burst from her in a cry.

  “Here.” She thrust the joint at me and I headed for the back window with it, on my rug-burned knees before the screen, blowing out the smoke.

  “I keep thinking about what’s inside me,” Sils said. “The beginning little Tinkertoys of a kid. But I don’t feel anything.”

  I turned to look at her, but we were sitting too close, so I turned my head back toward the window, looked toward the middle distance, then farther, looked out past the trees, at and through the leaves, and I again remembered that night last year, the one with the man and the gun springing up like a jack-in-the-box, the light summer midnight just beyond and past the branches. We had run, always heading for the next group of trees, and then for the next and then the next, like an enactment of all of life.