Chasing Orion (21 page)

I began to feel as if pieces of my world were slipping away, were being inhaled one by one in the thousand breaths per hour of the iron lung. The velvet ribbon continued to lace its way through my dreams. And now I kept thinking about it against the backdrop of Phyllis on her last night as a healthy, walking American teenager, driving a sporty convertible through a drive-in restaurant in the wake of a handsome guy. A guy she could have gone to a prom with. He would have worn a tuxedo, or maybe a white dinner jacket if it had been May, with a carnation in his lapel. And she would have worn a prom dress with layers of tulle, a crushed bodice, maybe even strapless — who knows? — with a corsage, a gardenia corsage pinned to her waist and a small beaded clutch bag. In the clutch would be a five-dollar bill, mad money, that she would never have to use because her date would be perfect, so no need to escape, call a cab, or whatever. There would be a pocket-size comb, a small atomizer of perfume, a scent that would go with the gardenia and not clash, a tube of lipstick with a fabulous name like Hot Pink Cha-Cha-Cha or Mango Evenings, and two breath mints.

I had to try and stop thinking about stuff like this. I had to stop worrying about Emmett. September slipped into October, and I spent more time with Evelyn. I didn’t much like going to her house. Her mother was a lousy housekeeper. Maybe that was because she was a doctor. But you would have thought that with two doctors in the family, their house would have been more sanitary. There were dust bunnies all over the place, and the kitchen counters were greasy. Often when we went to get a snack from the fridge, we’d find some disgusting moldy thing. Her parents were hardly ever there. But two days a week we had to be there for Edith, Evelyn’s seven-year-old sister, who was about twice as weird as Evelyn. Edith was even paler than Evelyn. Mercifully, their mother had not given Edith a permanent. She had some natural curl in her hair, and it fuzzed in a soft, dark fog around her face. She wore very thick glasses and sometimes had to wear a patch on one eye.

“Strabismus,” Edith explained, pointing to her eye patch the first time I met her.

“Huh?” I said.

“Wandering eye,” Evelyn offered.

“It’s not so bad,” Edith said. “They caught it in time. I just have to do these boring eye exercises, and the worst is that I can’t read for more than fifteen minutes without taking a break and doing three sets of them.” She held up a timer. Edith read very fat chapter books way beyond her grade level. She was reading
Little Women,
for Lord’s sake, and I had only read it this past summer when I was bored out of my mind. I didn’t think that Louisa May Alcott could hold a candle, as Dad would say, to Ray Bradbury.

That particular afternoon I had come over to see the ant colony project that Evelyn had done for the science fair the year before. She had pictures of it, not the whole thing anymore, because it took up too much room. Her grandfather had transported the colony in its aquarium down to Indiana University, but I had a feeling a few of the ants had hung around. I was always finding ants in their kitchen when we went to make snacks.

“You can stay for dinner,” Evelyn said as we were going down the stairs. “Mom is coming home early.”

“All right, I’ll call my mom. I’m sure she won’t mind.”

Evelyn led me to a wall near the washer and dryer. There was a huge pile of clothes in a basket on top of the dryer with a note pinned on it with the word
CLEAN
. “Oh, finally!” Evelyn said. “I desperately need clean underpants. Down to my last pair.” She burrowed into the mountain of laundry and pulled out several pairs of underpants that had daisies on them, along with some socks.

“How come the clean laundry is down here and not up in your bedrooms?” I asked.

“Sorting laundry — borrring,” Evelyn said. “We just come down and grab a few things at a time as we need them.”

My mother would have had kittens if we ever decided to live with unsorted laundry.

“But what do you put in your drawers?” I asked.

Evelyn shrugged. “Well, I try to take an armload back up with me each time I come down to the basement. Come on, I want to show you the ant project.”

Propped against one wall were large sheets of white cardboard. She turned them around.

“Wow!” I exclaimed.

“This is a cross-section drawing of the architecture of the colony — the tunnels, all that stuff.”

“But how did you see it? I mean, it was all sand in the aquarium, wasn’t it?”

“Nope. I got clear plastic tubes and I built some little ramps and stuff like that, but then I let them have plenty of space to build their own stuff, too. I put out some sugar lures so they would build near the glass walls. They made walkways, subterranean tunnels, secret chambers. My grandfather gave me my starter set of ants — a few males and a queen.”

“The one with the big ovaries?”

“Yep. Soon as I put the males in, she went to town. Babies all over the place. Some were minor workers, some major workers, some soldiers.”

“But who tells them what to do?”

“Nobody. It’s weird; they just know it. There’s no real boss.”

“Not even the queen.”

“No, she’s just an egg-laying machine. They are very well organized. They all work for the good of the whole.” Evelyn dropped her voice. “It’s a lot like communism. Except my grandfather warned me not to say anything about that in my science project.”

I opened my eyes wide with alarm. “Gads, Evelyn! Senator McCarthy might get you.”

“It’s not that bad. Don’t be ridiculous. These are ants, not atomic bomb secrets. You’re paranoid.”

“What’s
paranoid
?”

“Crazy scared. Crazy with fear. That’s what my mom and dad say Joe McCarthy is — paranoid.”

Just at that moment Evelyn’s mother called downstairs. “Hi, Evelyn, I’m home. Early dinner. Is Georgie staying?”

“Yes.”

“What do I call your mom, Evelyn — Mrs. Winkler? Dr. Winkler?”

“Marge.”

“Marge? Why Marge?”

“That’s her name. That’s what I call her.”

“You call your mom by her first name?”

“Sure, why not?”

This had to be the strangest family ever.

Marge, even though her hair looked fried, was very pretty, and this gave me hope for Evelyn. They actually resembled each other quite a bit. So maybe Evelyn would eventually grow into her looks. I had heard my mom use that phrase — that some people grow into their looks. Some grow out of them, too. There were some Hoosiers Twirlers who mom said had been real beauties in their day, and they looked like absolute dogs now.

Dinner, however, was an unqualified disaster. I sincerely hoped that Marge delivered babies better than she did dinner. It seemed that Marge had forgotten to take the casserole out to thaw. So she tried immersing it, wrapped in foil, in hot water, and some water seeped into it and it got kind of mushy. So then Marge decided to stick it all back together again by putting American cheese on top and popping it in the oven. The top got scorched. But the worst was yet to come. When it was time for dessert, she set down unmatched bowls of — oh, good Lord, I could hardly believe it — prunes! And if that wasn’t bad enough, she said they did this because Edith had been constipated. She actually used that word at the dinner table. If my mother ever announced anything about my poo at the dinner table in front of guests, in fact in any place other than the bathroom, I would disown her. But this didn’t faze Edith. Not in the least. Edith, seven years old, started talking about fiber, and how she had this fiber and that fiber today. “Cheerios are fiber, Marge. I took them for snacks to school in a plastic bag.”

I tried to mush my prunes up so it might look as if I had eaten some. But it didn’t work. Marge turned to me. “You don’t like prunes, Georgie?”

“Uh . . . I . . . I . . . I don’t have that problem.”

“Oh, I’m sure we have a cookie someplace around here.”

She jumped up and went to a cupboard. A package flew out from a crowded shelf. “Mallomars!” she exclaimed.

I loved Mallomars. These were a little stale.

“I have got to straighten out these shelves one of these days,” Marge muttered.

It was all so strange: bureaus empty of clean laundry, kitchen shelves stuffed to the breaking point. If I had gone to Alaska and had dinner with Eskimos in an igloo and eaten fried seal and whale blubber parfaits, it couldn’t have been more foreign.

But Marge was very sweet. I liked her despite her lousy housekeeping. We played Scrabble and then we watched this new series that had just started called
Ozzie and Harriet.
Edith curled up on her mother’s lap with a book and hardly looked at the television, but Evelyn and I thought Ozzie and Harriet’s sons, Ricky and David, were so cute. David was too old for us. But Ricky was just our age. Marge wasn’t interested in the boys. She just kept saying how Harriet always looked so “nice and put together.” She liked Harriet’s hair. “Maybe I should get a permanent like that.”

“Marge, get it done professionally. Don’t do it at home,” Evelyn said.

“Suppose you’re right,” Marge replied, and drew a strand of hair in front of her eyes to examine it.

“You don’t like women to have babies at home. You like them to get to the hospital. Same thing. Go get a professional to do your hair
and
mine!”

I giggled. I liked the way Evelyn and her mom got on. They were fun even though they were kind of sloppy. And I realized that for the first time in a long time, I had not thought for one second about Emmett and Phyllis. I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

I still went over when Emmett and Phyllis were star watching, or if it was too cold outside, I’d sit on the sun porch with them, but mostly it was when Emmett had to babysit me because Mom and Dad were out. I can’t exactly say they invited me; however, I would definitely show up. Because by no means had I given up on anything. My mission had just changed. Ever since I had come to the conclusion that Phyllis had in some way hijacked the Beautiful Place, that it had become dangerous, I felt that it was more important than ever for me to figure out why it was so dangerous. It wasn’t simply a question of reclaiming my lost small world. There was something much greater at stake. You see, I was beginning to suspect that Phyllis did not have dibs on being the victim. Emmett might be every bit as much of a victim himself.

Once when I came over in the evening, I think that Emmett had been holding Phyllis’s hand through the port because I heard a little popping sound just as I came up on the patio. I had heard this sound before when Sally or Marie, the other nurse, had been washing Phyllis. The pop was the sound of the airtight seal shutting.

“Hi, Saint Georgie,” Phyllis said. I heard that popping noise, and Emmett stood up a little too quickly.

“Hi, Georgie. Guess what we’re waiting for?”

“Pizza?” I asked, and Phyllis laughed.

“No, Pegasus, not pizza. We should have a fair shot at it. No clouds.”

How was I supposed to know it was Pegasus and not pizza? Lots of times they ordered in a pizza, and Emmett would hold it up while Phyllis took small bites. She had to eat in small bites because she was flat on her back. She was pretty good at eating, though, unlike some polio people. She didn’t have choking problems, but in case of an emergency, they did have something called an aspirator hooked onto the iron lung that could suck anything out of her if it went down the wrong way. Emmett knew how to work this, too. Phyllis looked very pretty tonight. It was chilly and she had a fuzzy knit cap on her head and her cheeks were nice and rosy. Emmett was busy moving the telescope up to her eye and fiddling with the focus. “OK, first star you’re going to see — well, I can actually see it now with my naked eye.”

Naked
— the word flared in the night. Would Emmett and Phyllis ever see each other naked? What would he think when he saw her twisted spine? When they took her out of the iron lung and tried to wean her, she had had clothes on. But naked! Suddenly there didn’t seem to be enough air, or maybe I was intruding on it. I knew I didn’t belong there. The night was simply not big enough for the three of us.