Chasing Orion (22 page)

“Why don’t you two girls go as the parts of a cell for Halloween?” Marge suggested. I was over at Evelyn’s working on our project for the school science fair. My small-world building skills had come in handy. We were constructing basically a diorama that was a cell and all of its parts — the cell membrane, the cytoplasm, the nucleus. Instead of a cardboard box, we were doing it in a clear bowl. We made the cytoplasm out of two quarts of lime Jell-O. Then in the middle of it, we suspended a clear plastic ball that had been a Christmas tree ornament that you could put glitter in. The two halves of the ball came apart. So we separated them and put in more Jell-O, this time orange, and in the middle we suspended a green grape — that was the nucleolus. The best were the chromosomes. We floated little pieces of black thread around the grape. Mom said it was the most complicated Jell-O mold she’d ever seen. It was all very realistic. But the last thing I wanted to go as for Halloween was a human cell.

“No, I always go as a witch,” I replied politely.

“Oh, why’s that?” Marge asked. She always wanted to know the why’s and the how’s behind everything.

“Because I have a fantastic fake wart and a great rubber nose and I just like wearing ’em, I guess.”

“You don’t get tired of wearing the same costume every year?”

“No.”

“Well, Evelyn, what are you thinking about going as?”

“Not sure.”

I knew what Evelyn should go as: either a ghost — she had the whitest, almost see-through skin I had ever seen — or an owl. I had a sudden inspiration.

“A ghost owl!” I blurted out.

“What?” both Evelyn and her mother said at once.

“A ghost owl. That’s what they call barn owls, because they have white faces.”

“Well, I never knew that, Georgie.” Marge said this very seriously, as if I had just revealed a deep scientific truth. “Let’s look it up in our
World Book Encyclopedia.
” This was a very Winkler-ish thing to do. They loved looking things up in books. She went to their sagging bookshelves. In a few minutes she was back.

“What a beautiful bird!” she was exclaiming.

We looked at the page in the encyclopedia. The owl’s face was white and heart-shaped. The rest of the owl’s head was covered with tawny speckled feathers. Everything about the owl except for its eyes, which were coal black, reminded me of Evelyn. I’m not sure if Evelyn and her mother saw the resemblance, but they both agreed that this was a fine idea for a Halloween costume. “My mom’s really good at making wings,” I offered.

“Really, now, how’s that?” Marge asked.

“Well, before I got set on being a witch, every year I was a bat.”

“Oh.” Marge blinked her own pale gray eyes just the way Evelyn did when she was confronted with a curious fact.

I was, I admit, a creature of habit. For three years, the only sandwich my mother could make for me to take to school was cream cheese and jelly. I switched to peanut butter in the fourth grade and was by this time, now in the sixth grade, considering salami. But only considering.

“Look at this, Edith,” Marge was saying. “It’s a picture of a barn owl, and Evelyn is going as one for Halloween.”

“
Tyto alba,
member of the Tytonidae family,” Edith said in a small, whispery voice.

“What’s that she’s talking about?” I asked.

“The Latin nomenclature for the class of owls to which a barn owl belongs,” Marge offered. “Now, Edith, wouldn’t you like to go as a baby one? You and Evelyn and Georgia could go together.”

My heart sank. I did not want to go trick-or-treating with a seven-year-old, even if she could read Latin. “Together, Marge?” Evelyn moaned.

“Now, Evelyn, you only have to take her in this neighborhood for a little while. Dad and I are both on call, but we’ll be back early. Then you can go off with Georgie.”

“I don’t want to go as a barn owl,” Edith said quietly.

“No, dear?”

“I want to go as a gherkin.”

I nearly gasped. “A sweet pickle?”

“A gherkin. There’s a difference,” Edith said, and blinked at me through the thick lenses of her glasses.

Making the owl costume was easy. But it was also left to my mom to make the gherkin costume, which was not so easy. She did it somehow using green felt, onto which she sewed tufts of lighter green fuzzy stuff. Marge was very grateful. The Winklers were nice and all and very, very smart, but they didn’t know all that much about kids and how to do for them — like making costumes, or even really feeding them. The stuff that Evelyn came to school with for lunch was just awful. This led me to the conclusion that it was much better to have a kindergarten teacher for a mother than a gynecologist. I made it real clear to Evelyn, and it didn’t take much convincing, that we should eat Halloween dinner at my house. We could feed Edith whatever disgusting thing Marge had left thawing in the refrigerator and take her little sister out trick-or-treating. Then when her parents came back, we would go to my house and have my absolute favorite dinner, the one mom always made on Halloween — macaroni and cheese (not from a box), an orange-and-black-cherry Jell-O mold that looked like a jack-o’-lantern face, carrot sticks, black olives, and orange soda-pop. You see, when your mother is a kindergarten teacher she thinks about things like that — not just what tastes good, but she color coordinates it for the particular holiday. I’d much rather have a mom who could do that than deliver a baby. I was not planning on having a baby anytime soon, and when I did, I didn’t want my mom delivering it.

So we took Edith out in her costume. She looked pretty cute, considering she had to wear her glasses and the patch over her eye that night. An intelligent pickle — pardon me, gherkin. When we got back, both the Winklers were there.

“You hardly touched the tuna casserole,” Marge said.

Edith’s eye, the one that didn’t wander, slid over with an almost devilish look. We had actually dumped a portion of the tuna casserole down the toilet, but apparently not enough. Instead Edith had said she wanted to eat canned Vienna sausages and gherkins. What else? Evelyn pointed out that this was like being a cannibal — a gherkin eating a gherkin. I thought that was pretty funny. Then we started discussing cannibalism, which was kind of fun because if there had been parents around, they would have never let you get away with this kind of talk at the dinner table — even on Halloween.

There was just one strange thing that happened when the Winklers came back. Evelyn’s father, Fred, had turned on the television. It was the evening news, and it showed a man in a white coat in a laboratory holding a cute little monkey. “Come here, Marge,” Mr. Winkler called to his wife. The newsman was saying something about encouraging results in the testing of a vaccine against polio. Both the Winklers were standing up, still as statues, looking at the television. Then the picture cut to people in the iron lung ward of a hospital. There was a close-up of a young boy, maybe Evelyn’s and my age, in an iron lung.

“It’s a damn crime,” Evelyn’s mother said.

“What’s a crime?” Edith asked.

“That!” Marge pointed an accusing finger at the television screen. “To allow someone, a youngster, to live out his life like that.”

“They should have never put him in it,” Evelyn’s father said, and sat down in his easy chair.

I felt every hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. I couldn’t believe they could talk so casually right in front of their children about death. But deep down inside me someplace, I think I suspected that they might be right, that putting someone in an iron lung was a kind of murder. I had never thought of this before. I had preferred to think — well, not preferred, but discovered through my research, especially when I looked up all the stuff about the rocking bed and the failures — that people like Phyllis were suffering a very slow death in the name of trying to make them live and breathe. But wasn’t it really another kind of murder — a slow one? Then, like an electric shock, a terrible question sizzled through me: Was it possible that Phyllis wanted a fast one, a quick murder? But for a murder, one needed a murderer!

I felt in one brief instant I had seen too much, learned too much. I didn’t want to think about it. The pieces of a diabolical puzzle were coming together a little too quickly, and what in the world was I supposed to do? What I knew weighed on me. I didn’t want to tell anyone, not even Evelyn, but I suddenly felt years too old. If I had looked in a mirror, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bent over, ancient, gray-haired lady, her shoulders stooped with decades, her back crooked. And I wasn’t even in my witch costume yet.

I was really glad when Evelyn said that we had to get on over to my house. We got on our costumes, and her father drove us. When we pulled into our drive, he turned around to us, in the backseat. “Now, you two go out and do some good spooking. See you later, kiddo.” He gave Evelyn a kiss just like a normal dad would.

But I was in such a hurry to get out of the car that I knocked off my wart and didn’t notice it until I got in the house. Luckily I had a spare wart. Mom had bought one for me at the place she got Halloween stuff. Still another good thing about having a kindergarten teacher for a mom. She thought of stuff like that. Backups. Dad used to say that he could send at least one of us to college on what Mom had given to kids who had forgotten their lunch money. And she even kept a couple of spare Halloween costumes at school for children whose parents were so darned stupid they forgot to dress their kids up for the school Halloween parade.

The dinner was as good as I promised. You would have thought Evelyn had never had a decent meal in her life, the way she tucked into the macaroni and cheese.

“For Lord’s sake, leave some room for candy, Evelyn,” I said.

“Georgia Louise!” Dad drawled out my name.

“Sorry, Dad.”

My dad didn’t like it when we used the Lord’s name in vain. It really bugged him, even though he wasn’t a real churchy sort of fellow.

“Phyllis said that you two should be sure to come over. She wants to see your costumes,” Mom said.

We set out into the crisp October night. I could feel the light breeze curl around my witch’s hat. I was really pretty excited. This was a new neighborhood for me, and with rich people around like the Kellers, there was no telling what good loot you could rake in.

“I hope no one gives out raisins or apples.”

“Agreed.” Evelyn nodded.

“In my personal opinion, I feel that anyone who gives out healthy treats should get a trick. They deserve to a) have their windows soaped, b) have their head examined, c) be arrested.”

“It’s a crime,” Evelyn said. “Not the soaping, the raisins and apples.”

I wished Evelyn hadn’t said that word
crime.
I remembered what her mother had said standing there in front of the television pointing her finger at the people in the iron lungs, saying it was a crime.

We finally wound our way back to our street and went over to the Kellers’. Mrs. Keller had made the best treats of all — caramel-and-chocolate-dipped marshmallows, and they were tied up in pretty cellophane wrappers. “Now, go out onto the patio, girls, and show Phyllis your costumes.”

The first thing that caught my eye was not the creature but a filmy wisp floating out from the machine itself. Then I saw that it was attached to a pointy hat, like my witch’s hat, only it wasn’t black; it was pink with silvery glitter. It was one of those hats like medieval princesses wore. But Phyllis was wearing it with earmuffs!

“Welcome, Saint Georgie, welcome to my court. Come to slay the dragons?”

“I’m a witch, not a saint,” I said.

She rotated all the mirrors until they caught our reflections. “Oh, you both look great. Great owl costume!” Multiple owls and witches now appeared in the mirrors, and occasionally the wisp from Phyllis’s veil floated across our faces. We made an odd assortment out there on the patio. Of course, Emmett wasn’t wearing anything special, just his jeans and a heavy jacket. He was fiddling with the telescope that he had finally finished building.

“OK, I got Pegasus. Want to see it, Evelyn?” This was very polite of him to include Evelyn. “See?” he said to her as she pressed her eye to the scope. “It’s an almost perfect-shaped square formed by four stars.” The square was the reason Emmett built this new telescope. Other astronomers, he said, used the Square of Pegasus just like a signpost or way point in the grid they had placed on the sky, and it guided them. But for Emmett it was much more. For Emmett the Square of Pegasus was a treasure chest, and he just had to pry it open with his scope. The square, Emmett said, was more like a window to the very edge of the Milky Way galaxy. Through the window and beyond the edge, Emmett thought there were not just stars but maybe new undiscovered galaxies and other things I didn’t half understand. It was very hard to imagine all this. I never knew how he did it.

Now Emmett looked through the telescope.

“What are you seeing out there, Em?” That’s what Phyllis sometimes called Emmett, and he called her Phyll. Em and Phyll. Sounded like an old married couple to me, kind of fat, sitting in lounge chairs watching television or doing crosswords. “Grand and mysterious wonders?” she asked.

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true.” Emmett took his eye away from the telescope and winked at Phyllis. “I’m quoting — not original at all. The physicist Michael Faraday’s words, not mine.”

“Say them again, Em,” Phyllis whispered.

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true.”

“Like death,” Phyllis whispered.

“Huh?” I said.

“Like breath,” she said.

But I had heard the word
death.
I was sure. I looked over at Emmett. He had heard only what he wanted to hear; his face was tipped up toward the starlight, seeing everything and yet nothing.

That night after Evelyn went home, I got out the diorama. I had almost finished the second level, the earth level. I had made the islands that Orion walked across to the island of Chios out of small rocks that I had found in the grove. He was on Chios now and looking pretty angry because all the dead animals were lying around, and guess what? — no Merope! I rotated the lazy Susan to start the next scene, where he would try and abduct her and the king would put out his eyes. I worked carefully. Mom had some little toothpicks that were like mini swords. She used them for hors d’oeuvres. So I carefully put one in the king’s hand and one in Orion’s. But there is no way to really show fight-scene action in a diorama. So I laid Orion down on the ground as if he were dead, or rather gravely wounded. I placed one of his hunting dogs near him and the other staring at the eyes that had been plucked out by the king’s sword and lay on the ground. I had de-eyed an old doll of mine that I never played with anymore. The scale wasn’t exactly right, but it sure did get the point across, and it looked very eerie. I was just looking at the eyes in a little patch of moss that I had brought from the grove, and I started crying. I wasn’t sure what I was crying about, but everything suddenly seemed so sad. It wasn’t about a new school or old friends or our stupid new house. “I can’t believe it,” I murmured. “I’m crying on Halloween! Halloween, my favorite holiday!”