Chasing Orion (6 page)

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Keller said quickly. “Phyllis went to Tudor Hall School for Girls.”
They must be rich,
I thought. I had never met anybody who had gone to a private school.

Now I could never figure out how Phyllis could do the next thing she did, because as far as I could see, my face wasn’t in the mirror, but somehow she must have seen my expression. “You’re surprised, Georgie?”

I didn’t know what to say. So I just shrugged and said, “Only girls?”

“Only girls,” she repeated, and she gave her head a very small shake and the white-gold curls shivered.

“Do they have proms?” I was fascinated by proms. It killed me that Emmett, who was about to be a senior, had never invited a girl to a prom. Emmett didn’t care about anything except basketball and astronomy. His life was nothing like Archie’s and Veronica’s and Betty’s. Imagine a comic book called
Emmett.
People would fall asleep. Emmett was not my idea of a true teenager. He might as well have been forty.

“They call them proms, but they’re pretty pathetic, if you know what I mean.” Instantly I knew she was talking to me. And then my face was in the mirror with hers. Just the two of us! There was a quick flash of blue in the mirror that was like a little secret message to me. She had actually winked at me when she said, “if you know what I mean.” It was that feeling I would get when I would see the first shooting star on a summer night. I wanted it to happen again. There was something so personal about her wink and what she said. It was just like I was her equal and she was sharing a secret. A high-school girl and a sixth-grader sharing a secret! I was actually tempted to wink back at her and say, “Oh, yeah! I know what you mean.” Six little words, but they meant so much. It was as if these six little words had been put in a bundle and tied up with a pretty ribbon. A gift for me — just for me.

Well, I knew what she meant — sort of, even though I had never been to a prom. I felt this deep thrill inside me. I was really being included in a way I had never thought of. This floaty feeling would happen to me when I got really excited about something. I know exactly the first time it happened. I was actually floating. I was in a swimming pool learning how to swim. It happened when I was finally able to pick my feet up from the bottom of the swimming pool and not sink. It was this wonderful, indescribable feeling. Maybe a baby bird felt this way when it first flew. I don’t know, but I definitely felt floaty at this moment with Phyllis, as if I had passed into another element — water, air, and I was part of it, no longer outside it.

When we got home from Phyllis’s, I went in and fixed myself a second lunch — two Popsicles and a slice of ham. I realized I hadn’t read the paper that day. It was still on the counter. I never missed a day reading the reported new cases. They listed them county by county. Marion County was our county now. So far this year, there had been fifty-one cases. I looked at the numbers, and the hospitals where the nameless victims had been admitted. So far only two friends of my parents had contracted the disease. But they had recovered. And neither of them was in an iron lung. But now I knew someone who was not nameless, not just a Marion County statistic. I felt in a weird way special.

I had to call Evelyn.

She answered the phone on the second ring. “The Doctors Winkler residence.”

“It’s Georgie, Evelyn. Guess what?”

“What?”

“I met her.”

“Who?”

“The girl next door. The iron lung girl! She’s beautiful. So beautiful. And you talk to her sort of through mirrors.”

“What?” Evelyn was dumbfounded — this was not a natural state for Evelyn. So I explained all about the mirrors, and all the gizmos that stuck out, and the automatic claw that her mom put the drink in. She was impressed. She said she hoped that I would make friends with her so she could come over and visit her, too. I wasn’t altogether sure I wanted her to meet Phyllis. I mean, now that I had met Phyllis — well, she wasn’t a freak anymore. And I remembered how she had said those six little words — just to me. “If you know what I mean.” It had been so personal — like a gift, and it was one I didn’t exactly want to share. I guess it could be called selfish. Maybe it was, but on the other hand, I didn’t want Phyllis to be a sideshow for my friends either.

Evelyn said just before we hung up that she couldn’t meet me at the library the next day because she had just found out that she had to go someplace with her mom and younger sister.

When I went to bed, I felt a little bad about my selfishness — wanting to keep Phyllis just for me. It seemed wrong. When Phyllis winked, she had reached out to me in one of the very few ways she could, and I was hoarding that wink. The way a miser would hoard gold. Was I going to dole out Phyllis to my friend Evelyn in little small snippets told over the phone?

I closed my eyes tight and saw the gleaming carapace of the Creature. I could hear its mechanical inhalations and exhalations. Phyllis had called it a monster, but it was a miser as well. And the realization made me shudder. It doled out the breaths to her in a monotonous rhythm. It had locked her into a single position for the rest of her life. Change it, and she’d die. Her eyes always had to look up. But the worst thing of all was that for Phyllis and any person inside of an iron lung, nothing would ever change. On the most basic level this was true. You’re not getting taller in there. If anything, you might be shrinking because you never use a muscle for anything. Phyllis’s life was totally changeless, and that to me was the most frightening thing imaginable: to know you are never going to change, ever!

But then I thought of how Phyllis had been with Emmett, and I began wondering what would happen if maybe Emmett and Phyllis started liking each other, just a little bit. Could this make for a change in a life doomed to never change? This could be good for Emmett as well because he’d never been on a date or anything. I mean it would be like training wheels. I giggled to myself. Then I felt a little bad comparing Phyllis to training wheels. But then again I thought it could be nice for Phyllis too in a way. I mean, her life must be pretty boring.

As I lay in bed that night, Phyllis’s voice came back to me, the six words in their pretty package of a smile and a wink. I tried to recapture that floaty feeling. But I couldn’t. I guess there are certain feelings, sensations that you only get to experience once in life and only at the time when they happen. And now I couldn’t even exactly picture Phyllis. I tried to imagine us both in the mirror, but the details of her face just kept slipping away or there would be something slightly off about the way I remembered her. It was like pieces of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit.

When I got up the next morning, I began work on my small world. I first washed out the aquarium and then measured out the second level where the sky part would go. The aquarium was a rectangular glass box, but I wanted the sky to be a vault that would fit on top. I had fiddled around with trying to draw what I wanted. It didn’t look that great. I had this idea that maybe I could use mirrors in some way and create a kind of optical illusion so that the figure of Orion could actually be reflected onto the sky. I couldn’t help but wonder if Phyllis’s beast had in some way been the inspiration for this. There was a lot to work out. I got bored with making the clay seascape. I had picked up some moss in the grove on our way back from Phyllis’s. I have to say, it looked pretty good stuck in the swirls of green-and-blue clay that made up the sea floor; however, I decided to save most of it to use for the forest floor when Orion became the mighty hunter. I wanted this small world to look really fabulous. I had never tried lighting before, special effects! This should look as good as a movie set. I couldn’t quite figure out what to do next.

Emmett could help me, but Emmett, I suddenly remembered, wasn’t here. He was at dumb preseason basketball practice. Lucky Emmett. Emmett not only had friends, he had a whole team! He didn’t have to change schools. Life was easy for him. He could do what he loved — basketball. Basketball courts, unlike swimming pools, were not considered breeding grounds for polio infection. So I went downstairs to get a Popsicle and feel sorry for myself. “A Popsicle now, Georgie? You’ll spoil your lunch,” Mom said.

“This is my lunch,” I answered grumpily.

“That’s not very healthy,” my mom said as she read the paper. Something just ticked me off about the way she said this. She didn’t even look up from the newspaper. “What, am I going to get
po-li-o
? Huh?” There was a high sass level in my voice, and you better believe it, Mom put down the newspaper, took off her glasses, and blinked at me and then opened her eyes very wide. Maybe this was threat behavior. Wolves open their eyes when they get angry and try to show rank. Mom was definitely pulling rank here.

“What in the world is wrong with you?”

“Everything! I hate this house. I hate this neighborhood. I have no friends.”

“What about that lovely girl you met at the library? I thought you were going back to meet her there.”

“She can’t meet me. She has to go with her friends someplace.” This of course was a lie; it was her mother and sister she had to do something with. “She canceled,” I said with emphasis.
Canceled
described my feelings. It sounded like some sort of execution.

“You don’t want to go to the library, even if your new friend can’t be there today?”

“Mom, I’ve only known her for an hour. I can’t exactly call her my friend yet.”

“OK, OK,” my mom said wearily. “Have you tried Susie?”

“I’m embarrassed. I didn’t go to her birthday party. I can’t just go call her up now.”

“What about Carol?”

“She’s at Bible school,” I replied sullenly.

“You mean it hasn’t been closed? I thought all summer camps had been closed.”

“Maybe if you just sit around reading about God and Jesus all day, you can’t get polio.”

Mom looked at me narrowly this time. Normally she would have really scolded me hard about talking this way. Instead she just said, “It’s not that easy, young lady! If it were, more people would be in Bible school.”

“Mom!” I stood up, gripping my Popsicle. Those two words,
young
and
lady,
just set me off. “I have to tell you something.” I spoke in a very serious voice.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I absolutely hate it when grown-ups call girls my age ‘young lady.’ You know why I hate it?” I didn’t give her time to answer. “I hate it because they never mean it. They use it as a way to put you down. To remind you for yet the millionth time that you, or in my particular case, me, that I am anything but a young lady. That I am a minor and I have no rights whatsoever and exist for big ladies to boss around.” By this time I was standing in a pool of grape Popsicle. I tossed the stick in the sink and stomped out of the kitchen. Mom didn’t say a word. But the look on her face was impressive, as in she was impressed with my little speech.

“What about Laurie and Wendy?” she called after me. I was already on the stairs going up and yelled back.

“Mom, stop it. You’re making me feel worse than I already do. Don’t you get it? They’re all on the other side of town. They don’t even call me anymore.” I look forlornly at the telephone. In my previous life — for that was indeed the way I thought of it — I had spent hours on the telephone with friends. It was a major part of my social life. My parents even had put a timer by the phone limiting me to fifteen minutes. But now it was like out of sight, out of mind, and definitely off the telephone line. I had called my old friends a few times but it was as if there was so little to talk about, what was the point? I wasn’t in the thick of it anymore. What I’d ask about was already ancient history. Boring.

She came to the bottom of the staircase and looked up at me. “You know, Georgie, you act as if we’ve moved to Siberia. We’re less than two miles from our old house. They’re still your friends.”

“Mom, it might as well be Siberia. I’m going to a different school. They’re all getting ready for the fall festival. I don’t even know if my new school has a fall festival. I was on the planning committee. I was
elected
to the planning committee for it. You have to be popular for that. And now I’m just gone. I have nothing to plan. I have to start all over again. It’s just all different, and you don’t understand. You’ll never understand.”

I knew I was going to cry any second. I felt not just my eyes but my whole face swelling up with tears. I raced the rest of the way upstairs to my bedroom, slammed the door, threw myself on the bed, and started sobbing. I heard my mother’s footsteps coming up the stairs and then these timid little knocks on the door.

“Go away.” I sobbed.

“Georgie, really!”

“Really go away!” I yelled back.

Nothing was fair. Life was so unfair.

Almost as soon as I thought of the word
fair,
I thought of Phyllis.

Phyllis was out on the patio. I could tell when I walked into the grove of trees. Those silver shimmers wove through the green leaves like a bright thread. I wanted to figure out how close I could get before she caught me in the mirrors. I walked slowly across the lawn. The day before, when Emmett and I had come, it was late afternoon, the time when shadows stretch. I had a sense that somehow the interplay between the shadows and the mirror reflections tipped Phyllis off. But now it was late morning, the short-shadow time. I watched my own stubby dark shadow spring to life as I emerged from the grove. I kept my eye on it as it slid across the lawn at an angle slightly to the left of me. That shadow song that Dad always sang began winding through my head. Something about him and his shadow strolling along.