Chasing Orion (2 page)

I wondered who the girl looked like — Veronica or Betty. I had this notion that any girl who was a teenager had a very good chance at being beautiful and glamorous — even, I guessed, if she were in an iron lung. Something happened to girls when they became teenagers, I believed. And when I became one, in just two more years, when I would be thirteen, I too would stretch out. My legs would lengthen, my waist would drop, my eyebrows would sweep like minnows swimming in a stream, and my stubs of hair would become glossy locks. In fact, I would be able to flip my hair around with barely discernible yet coy movements of my head. And I would wear real lipstick, and not that awful Tangee orangy stuff that smelled good but looked like nothing.

I was edging closer and closer to that stand of trees between our yards, and as I did so, I could hear a whooshing sound. I moved right into the middle of the small grove, dragging the hose with me and forgetting about the little shrimp of a dogwood behind me. The water began to pool around my feet, but I hardly noticed. What I did notice was that there were not just glints of silver; the trees themselves were suddenly spangled with bouncing light.

I couldn’t imagine what was causing this, but I felt sure that the glints and the spangles were all part of the same thing. It felt as if I had entered some strange borderland. This border didn’t simply separate our yard from theirs; it was a border between two realities, and I was suspended in the fragile space where they met. I began walking with the hose deeper into the grove. I wanted to get closer.

The whooshing continued to pump through the leafy shade. It was as if the grove were inhaling and exhaling. But intermingled with this sound was the hissing sweep of a sprinkler. My eyes adjusted, and I could see now straight through to their yard. There was a big fancy stone patio, and on it was the machine. A long silver cylinder. From its sides, several metal attachments projected that bent every which way like a tangle of arms and legs. In fact, it all reminded me of a huge insect that had been flipped onto its back, helpless and scratching at the sky. The sprinkler suddenly shut down, and now through the whooshing I could hear a voice — a clear, very fine voice that might have belonged to a grand actress:

I heard footsteps behind me. It was my brother, Emmett! He had followed the hose straight into the grove of trees.

I put a finger to my lips to hush him and cocked my head toward the sound of the voice that threaded through the whooshing. The voice was no longer reciting poetry and was harder to hear.

“Georgie,” he whispered, “what the devil are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I whispered back. But I was mad at this interruption. I had been concentrating on the poem. I hadn’t understood half the words, like, what is a
casement
? Still, it seemed beautiful to me. I liked poetry. Miss Gilbert, my fourth-grade teacher, had loved poetry and we had what she called poetry festivals, where we would get up and recite stuff. I won more than once. I wanted to hear more of this poetry, and I deeply resented my brother’s intrusion. He was always telling me to get out of his room and stop butting in. So why did he think he could do that to
me
now? “What does it look like I’m doing?” I whispered.

“Watering your feet?” I looked down and muffled a giggle. I was indeed standing in a spreading puddle.

“Oh, that. I got distracted. Look next door. Squint your eyes like this,” I said. “Doesn’t it look kind of like the Thing?”
The Thing from Another World
was Emmett’s and my favorite movie. It was about scientists at an Arctic station who at first think they’ve just found an unusual plane, but it turns out to be an alien being. Emmett had seen the movie fifteen times. Me, about eight. Not this summer, though. No movies, because there was something worse than the Thing. It was the Polio.

“What is it?” Emmett asked, squinting.

“Iron lung. There’s a girl in it. Kind of like living next to a freak or something!”

“Georgie! Don’t call her a freak! She’s sick.” Emmett seemed shocked.

I felt myself blush. I don’t really know why I said that, except at that moment in my mind, what was next door was really just this monster machine thumping away. I didn’t even connect it with a person. I couldn’t imagine that the voice I’d been listening to could have been coming from inside the machine.

The sprinkler turned back on with a loud sputtering and then the hissing sweep. The grove was flooded with new noise, and I forgot about being quiet. I think to hide my shame, or to distract from what I said, I turned the hose and sprayed Emmett. But Emmett was quick and tall. He played center forward on the Westridge varsity basketball team. That was no small potatoes, as my dad would say, because this was Indiana basketball we were talking about. Indiana produced the best basketball players in the country. Emmett quickly blocked the hose nozzle and turned it back on me. I chased him out of the woods. By the time we were in our yard, I was screaming and trying to tackle him.

Soon enough we were tussling on the ground and water was spraying all over the place and we were laughing our heads off. By the time we finished, we were drenched.

“So I guess you got cooled off,” my mother said, laughing at us, when we came up to the house.

“Not the way I like to,” I replied.

“As I said before, you can always go to the library. It’s air-conditioned, and when we go to Grandma and Grandpa’s, you can swim in their pond. Now, go up and dry off.” There were no humans, of course, in Grandma and Grandpa’s pond. They lived on a farm. Just cows came to drink, and I guessed that there wasn’t any chance of catching polio from a cow. But there were zillions of mosquitoes and worst of all, snakes. I might be a goat person, but I was definitely not a snake person.

“There’s a surprise in your bedroom,” Mom called out after me.

When I walked into my room, I saw it immediately. A brand-new princess vanity dressing table with the heart-shaped mirror! I couldn’t believe it. I knew how much it cost: fifty dollars! It had been advertised in the newspaper from Block’s department store. And it came with this pouffy pink tulle skirt with silvery dots on it that hung down to the floor. There were two little built-in compartments on either side of the mirror, lined with purple velvet, that you could put jewelry or barrettes in. I had a million barrettes, but fat lot of good they did me. Terminal cowlicks was my problem. You could hardly figure out which way to put a barrette in. If I parted my hair in the middle — a near impossibility — and put them on either side of the part, the barrettes sort of looked like warring troops lined up on a battlefield. The battlefield being my hair. But still it was something that Mom and Dad had bought the vanity for me.

“What do you think of it?” My mom was leaning against the door to my bedroom.

“It’s great, Mom. I can’t believe you and Dad bought this for me.”

“It’s not like we’ve never bought you a present.”

“I know, but still.” I was thinking that they must really feel sorry for me.

“We had to take down the Thing and
Revolt of the Zombies
posters because the mirror got in the way.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I can move them over to the left side,” I said.

Mom did her little crooked smile, which meant she was perplexed.

“Somehow it seems funny — horror movie posters with the princess vanity.”

“Bride of Frankenstein!” Emmett called in as he went past my door down to his own bedroom. Mom and I both laughed at this. Emmett was so quick. He didn’t talk all that much, but he really got off some funny ones.

“And maybe we’ll think about the daisy wallpaper.”

“The daisy wallpaper!” I was so excited. My friend Carol’s teenage sister had daisy wallpaper. In fact a lot of girls had it, or the forget-me-not wallpaper. It was beautiful and made your room look like a spring garden all year round. It was made by an Indianapolis wallpaper company, the Victor Franken Company, and it was sort of expensive. But it was so beautiful.

“Well, you have a real boudoir now,” Mom said.

“What’s a
boo-dwar
?”

“Sort of a fancy place for a lady to get dressed in, do her makeup.”

I was not going to bring it up — or as they say, look a gift horse in the mouth — but I didn’t have any makeup. Just that awful Tangee orange lipstick that didn’t show. So when you really thought about it, I wasn’t much of a candidate for a boudoir. So I might get very bored in my boudoir at my princess vanity dressing table. It didn’t matter. I still wanted it. Maybe I would make it sort of like a desk too, even though I already had a desk. And the mirror was really good. It had little teeny-weeny light bulbs outlining the heart-shaped frame. I could keep a sharp lookout for pimples. That was my one beauty blessing so far. No pimples.

I was finally cool after my hosing down by Emmett. So I decided to have the perfect afternoon in my boudoir, even if it meant that I had no real equipment to boo with. It was just when I had this thought about nothing to boo with that I thought of a great joke: a boo-dwar — a dressing room for witches!

I went full throttle into the Georgie Mason heat-reduction program. This meant putting on just my underpants and an old undershirt of my dad’s that came down to my knees. I lowered the blinds, turned on the fan, and went downstairs and got the ice bucket that my parents used for cocktails. I filled it with ice and stuck in four Popsicles — two orange and two grape. Those were my two favorite flavors. I hated green, and so did Emmett. But they always came in the package, and Mom said it was wasteful to throw them out. So she ate them, even though I knew she didn’t like them. I often thought how I would most likely grow up to be a lousy mother, because I was pretty sure that I would never eat a green Popsicle and give up the grape and orange ones for my kid. Maybe you got less selfish with age.

Anything beyond being a teenager sounded very old to me, and getting old didn’t sound so great. I mean you had to be selfless and economical, you got age spots — Mom had a couple — and worst of all, you got sick. Heart stuff, joints freeze up on you, all that. But then I suddenly thought of the girl next door. She hadn’t even gotten a chance to use up all her selfishness tickets yet. Polio had changed all that. She hadn’t even had a crack at age spots before she got polio.

I sucked on my Popsicle some more. I had brought up the newspaper to see what movies were playing that we were not going to be allowed to see. There was a ritual, however, to the way I read the newspaper. First I went directly to the community news page. I checked the list of all the hospitals and the newly reported polio cases. This was so scary to read. But I sort of had to do it. Saint Vincent’s had had four cases in one day. That was a lot. Then I read the box called
SYMPTOMS ALERT!

Phase 1: Mild symptoms occur in most cases:

Recovery within 24 to 72 hours

Most patients do not progress to Phase 2 symptoms.

Phase 2: More severe symptoms including
meningitis
may occur after several days: