Chasing Orion (9 page)

From the pantry, I heard them talking in their low kitchen voices. These were not the voices they used when they were talking about a disobedient Jell-O mold that had failed to unmold perfectly or how you could hardly whip cream with all this humidity. These were their other voices. The ones that children were not supposed to hear. I heard the words
iron lung,
and I had a feeling they might have been talking about Emmett and Phyllis.

We were out at Grandma and Grandpa’s farm for Sunday dinner. I stayed in the pantry to listen and pretended to study the Holstein breeders’ calendar that Grandpa had hung up there. For August they had a picture of an immense stud bull called Elandor of Eckbow. A caption underneath the picture read:

But I was really just listening and not concentrating on Elandor. “That is so sad. But at least she gets to be at home. Not in a hospital,” Grandma was saying while admiring the three-flavored Jell-O mold with fruit suspended in the green part that had just exited most perfectly from its enamel fluted dish. They talked some more, and then Mom said, “You’ll never guess what.”

“What?”

“Velma’s daughter is pregnant!”

“Oh, my word!” Grandma exclaimed in a loud whisper. “And she’s captain of the Hoosier Twirlers!”

“Yes,” Mama said.

“Well, she won’t be twirling for long!” Grandma sort of snickered. “Babies do get in the way of a baton.” My mom was well into her thirties when she had us, thank the Lord! I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having a teenage mom. Some girl who hadn’t even made it through algebra one. No matter how much teenagers impressed me, I did not want one to be my mother. And it would probably be a dumb teenager who would put Coca-Cola in my bottle, blow cigarette smoke in my face while she fed me, and never change my diapers. Ick! The whole idea made me nauseous. In fact, it gave me real bad malaise.

I was standing in the pantry thinking about all this when Grandma sailed in to get the dish for the butter beans.

“What’re you doing, Georgia?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’ve got a funny look on your face. It’s just a stud bull up there on the calendar.” She guffawed. “Why don’t you go out and practice baton?”

“Too hot.”

“Not under the beech tree, it isn’t. Junior high’s coming faster then you think. Got to be ready when tryouts come up for the Hoosier Twirlers. Can you do an arm roll yet?”

“Almost,” I lied. Was she already thinking of a replacement for Velma’s pregnant daughter?

“You’re going to look so cute in those new skirts the girls wear now.”

I was not going to look cute at all. The whole idea of me in the short sparkly skirt made me want to puke. I had very skinny legs and knobby knees and of course the stubby hair and let’s not forget the nose that turns east. But it was especially when I thought of myself as a Hoosier Twirler that I began to have doubts about my legs lengthening and the other mysterious transformations that I dreamed about, most specifically my hair. All the twirlers wore their hair in either glistening pageboys that fell in straight orderly sweeps to their shoulders and then curved under perfectly or in wonderfully swingy ponytails. Stubby hair does not swing. It doesn’t fall. It will not curve. It springs. I couldn’t even make a part in my hair — that is how confused it was. To get rid of the cowlicks, I would have had to start all over with a new scalp, a new arrangement of hair holes in my scalp so the hair could grow in a straight, orderly fashion. What we were talking about was major scalp surgery. Once I had suggested to my mom and grandma that I could go down to the colored part of town and get the Madam Walker hair-straightening treatment. When I said this, you would have thought I had asked them if I could smoke a cigarette and a take a shot of whiskey on the side. In any case, I didn’t argue with Grandma. I went to the closet and selected one of about a dozen batons and headed for the beech tree. I wasn’t really going to practice. I’d just climb up to one of the low-spreading limbs that joined the trunk at an angle that was perfect for reading. Of course, I didn’t have anything to read. Well, I would just think. Maybe about that poem I had heard Phyllis’s mom reading the first day I wandered into the grove and heard her voice threading through the mechanical breaths of the Creature. I wanted to find that poem. I had meant to ask Phyllis the name of it. But when she started talking to me about liking Emmett and could I find out, I was so excited I just forgot. I climbed up in the tree and reclined against the trunk. I looked up through the deep copper leaves as pieces of sky floated overhead. I was trying to remember some of the words from the poem, but other words, not the poet’s, came to me instead.

“Remember what I said, Georgie: you’ve got all the air in the world, the whole sky up there. I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world.”
What had she meant exactly? I didn’t want to ask Emmett, although I was sure he understood. But Emmett had been kind of weird ever since we met Phyllis. It was going to be hard asking him what he thought of her. I think he’d been back over once or twice since we met her, but I wasn’t sure.

Emmett was late now to dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s. He had said he had something to do and would drive himself out. I was getting hungry, so I hoped he came soon. I jammed my hand down into my shorts pocket and found a Tootsie Roll. I was just rearranging this big wad of Tootsie in my jaw when I saw something flapping in the air. I stopped chewing and looked straight ahead. Damn if that didn’t look like a flamingo had slammed into Grandma’s clothesline. A flamingo in central Indiana? Impossible. I scrambled down the tree and began to walk toward the line.

“Oh, Lordy!” I whispered. It wasn’t a flamingo. It was Grandma’s corset, this pink contraption flapping in the breeze, snapping its elastic straps, silver garter buckles winking at the sky. I just blinked and thought,
What a fool I am,
and swore I would never ever wear one of those things in the dead heat of an Indiana summer no matter how fat I got or how much I began to sag and bag.

“Whatta ya staring at?” Emmett had sneaked up behind me.

“Grandma’s corset.”

“Is that what that thing is?”

“Yep.”

“What’s that next to it? They look too short for Grandpa.”

There was a pair of pale pink satin chopped-off pants. “Of course they’re too short for Grandpa.” I giggled. “It’s a girdle.”

“How do you know about all this?” Emmett asked me. “Comes with the territory, I guess.”

“What territory you talking about?”

“Being female and all.”

I wasn’t sure if I should take this as a compliment or not. I had almost decided not to, but then I realized that this was my opening for talking to Emmett about Phyllis. I thought for at least half a minute of a good way to get into it. “So what do you think about Phyllis?” I blurted out.

“What do you mean, what do I think of her?”

“I mean what do you think of her?”

“I hardly know her. She seems nice enough. Why are you asking me?”

“Uh . . .” I didn’t know what to say. “Well, don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s beautiful!”

Beautiful! He didn’t have to say that. He didn’t have to go that far. I could see he was turning bright red again.

“I think . . . I think maybe she likes you a teeny bit.” Emmett was pulling up clumps of grass and tossing them up toward a limb as if he were shooting baskets.

“You do?” He looked genuinely confused.

I hurtled ahead. “Emmett, you’re so . . . so . . .”

“So what, Georgie?” His eyes turned hard.

“W-well,” I began to stammer. I was so excited and the next thing I said was really a mistake. “She could be sort of like your starter kit.”

“Starter kit. Jesus Christ, Georgie!” He turned and stomped off.

I shook my head. How could I have been so dumb? I was only trying to help. Starter kit! As if Phyllis were some crafts project!

“Wait up, Emmett,” I called after him. “I didn’t mean it that way! I really didn’t!” I ran to catch up with him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it that way.” I reached out and grabbed his hand. “Stop walking, Emmett.” He stopped and looked down at me.

“So what exactly did you mean?”

“She told me she liked you.”

“She did?” He was surprised, I could tell.

I was not going to blow this. I nodded. “Yes, she really did.”

“Hmm,” was all he said.

I was ready to snore off during Sunday dinner. The conversation was incredibly boring unless you were a basketball star applying to college, hoping for a great basketball scholarship.

“So how many scouts been sniffing around so far?” Grandpa asked.

“None,” Emmett said. “School hasn’t started.”

“But what about roundup? Don’t they usually hang around for that?”

“Canceled,” my dad said.

“Everything’s getting canceled,” I said.

“What else?” Grandma asked.

“Let’s see.” I sighed and leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes as I tried to remember the listing in that morning’s paper. “The annual fish fry of the Order of the Eastern Star at Saint Joseph’s Church, the Job’s Daughters and Rainbow Girls summer picnic, the city swimming meet at the Riviera Club, the father-son golf tournament at Highland Country Club —”

“What in tarnation!” my grandfather blurted out. I stopped my recitation. Everyone was looking at me like I was some sort of freak.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Does she do this every day?” Grandma turned her head slowly toward Mom.

“Well, Georgie likes to keep up with things.”

“Things like polio,” Emmett whispered. “It’s a little weird.”

“Dorothy Jean.” Grandma only called my mom by her full name when she was very serious. “Do you think this is healthy?”

What was not healthy in my opinion was people talking about you as if you were not there. Now I was really mad. “First of all, I am not dead. So quit talking like I’m not even here at the table. And second, it is unhealthy to go to public swimming pools, to go to the state fair, to go to movies, to not wash your hands after peeing or pooping.” Everybody froze when I said this. “But it is not unhealthy to read about polio in the newspapers.”

Grandpa now looked at me. “Georgia Louise, would you like to excuse yourself for a few minutes until you can behave at the dinner table?” I started to speak, but Dad gave me a fierce look.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and got up from the table.

When I returned after about two minutes, my mom was talking. “The basketball roundup is just delayed until after October. After polio season. But Emmett’s getting lots of letters — Indiana University, Purdue, Michigan.”

“When are the commit dates?” Grandpa asked.

“End of November,” Emmett replied. “But because I’m asking for more scholarship money, I don’t really find out until spring.”

“But Emmett can do what they call a C.C.,” Mom said.

“C.C.?” Grandma asked.

“Commit with contingency,” Emmett said. “If I get the full scholarship I ask for, I’ll go. If not, all bets are off. That kid from South Tech, they say he’s already been offered a thousand-dollar scholarship to Notre Dame.”

“A thousand dollars! My goodness,” Grandma said. “Mercy.”

“No mercy about him,” Emmett replied. “Cyril James. He’s a beast on the court. He’s seven feet tall.”

“Tall, but short on brains,” my mom said.

“Dumb as a box of rocks, but he’s fast. He can shoot. But nothing compared to this freshman at Crispus Attucks,” Emmett said.

“Who’s that?” my grandfather asked.

“Kid named Oscar Robertson. He plays real smart. Great all-around player.”

“But he’s just a freshman,” Grandma said. “Where’s anyone seen him play?”

“Oh, Lil!” Grandpa said. “Where have you been all these years? This is Indiana. You don’t wait until high school.”

Even I knew this. Boys who liked to play basketball played anyplace. It didn’t even have to be a real court. It could be a dirt lot as long as there was a hoop stuck to something.

“You mean down on the south side of town,” Grandma said, and pressed her napkin to her lips in a nervous gesture.

“Yep,” said Emmett. “We all go down there and have pickup games with those guys from Attucks.” I knew what Grandma was thinking. Those guys from Attucks were colored boys. Crispus Attucks was the all-Negro high school. So Grandma thought they might be playing in a rough part of town. “He’s just a plain great player. He can snap a ball like I’ve never seen. He invents moves. He does this head fake that leads into a driving layup that is phenomenal. And he can think midair like no one else.”

“Sounds like he’ll be getting a thousand-dollar scholarship.”

“By the time he’s a senior, it could be ten thousand dollars,” Emmett said.

Ten thousand dollars! It was unimaginable. “Hey, do they ever give scholarships for baton twirling?” I asked. If they did, I might have to rethink my future as a twirler. For ten thousand dollars, I might manage to overcome my dislike of twirling. There was a sudden silence. Everyone looked at me, and then they started howling with laughter. You would have thought I had said the funniest thing in the world. You would have thought I was Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Lucille Ball rolled into one. The answer was no. Scholarships were not given to baton twirlers. But nobody could stop laughing long enough to tell me this until about five minutes later.

“Look!” I complained. “All I did was ask an honest question. And what? Suddenly I’m the laughingstock of the whole family? Har-de-har-har-har!”

Being eleven was indescribably awful. It’s as if you’re never really in on the joke. Not only that. You are the joke.