Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (12 page)

“Is Sils here?” I asked through the screen.

“Little Sils?” he repeated, mockingly, lightly, as if both she and I were small, amusing mammals. “Sure,” he said, and without opening the door himself, he simply turned and bellowed, “Sils! Your friend’s at the door for you!” and went back down into the cellar, from which came the steady, whining rock of a guitar solo, then the deep beat of the electric bass, vibrating the windows, frame and sash, straining the glass. It was good the Chaussées lived next door to a cemetery.

Sils came down the wide, gray-painted stairs of their house. “Hi!” she said, and out of the blue gave me a hug. “Are you hungry? I’m starved,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, determined, always, to be helpful. We went into the kitchen and hunted around. Her mother hadn’t gone grocery shopping in weeks and there was nothing to make a salad or a sandwich with, and so we did as we often did: contented ourselves with raw potatoes, oleo, and salt—the potatoes cut in quarters and peeled, a meal of sororal resourcefulness. We sprinkled them with salt and spread difficult gobs of margarine along the edges. It was, in fact, a snack I loved: the cold bright fat of the Parkay, the apple-cool of the potato; our teeth gliding silently in, then noisily executing the bite through the potato. The damp crunch held a kind of comfort for me, the salt rubbing grainily against my gums. We ate raw potatoes a lot at her house—both in her room upstairs and at the beat-up aluminum dinette set in the kitchen.

This time we took them upstairs. We sat around a whole plate of them, on her rug, and felt mildly, mockingly bored by our own self-sufficiency. The afternoon was sunny and the light was angled already, spilling through the lattice outside her window, forming diamonds on the wall.

“Diamonds,” I said. “Not my best suit.”

“Hearts. I like hearts.” She looked a little tired.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

Sils lit up a cigarette. “Not so bad. I had cramps, but they’re over.”

“That’s good. Can I bum a smoke?”

Sils handed over a cigarette. A look of anguish passed over her face. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

“What?” I filled my lungs with smoke, but felt it best, most comfortingly around my tongue and teeth.

Sils gulped a little and winced. “A piece of purple skin in my underwear,” she said.

The confused and stricken girl’s face that had spilled
forth this phrase, her eyes grappling with mine in a panicked way, made me moan and turn aside.

“Oh, god,” I said. And then, not knowing what else to say, I said, “When?”

“This morning,” she said. She blew smoke out through her nostrils, then stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, took up a chunk of raw potato, and bit into it.

“Well, at least it’s all over,” I said. Joni Mitchell was keening “Little Green” on Sils’s record player. Sils listened to that song all the time now, like some woeful soundtrack. The soprano slides and
oos
of the the song always made us both sing along, when I was there. “Little green, be a gypsy dancer.” Twenty years later at a cocktail party, I would watch an entire roomful of women, one by one and in bunches, begin to sing this song when it came on over the sound system. They quit conversations, touched people’s arms, turned toward the corner stereo speakers and sang in a show of memory and surprise. All the women knew the words, every last one of them, and it shocked the men.

“Now, where were we?” everyone said when the song was over.

“You don’t really like Mike, do you?” Sils asked now.

I felt caught. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Come on,” she said. “You can tell me.”

“It’s just that … I don’t know. He has no
texture
.”

“He’s got texture,” said Sils. “You’ve just got to beat it out of him.” She lit up another cigarette. “Which, I realize, you shouldn’t have to do with texture.”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

Sils’s eldest brother, Skip, the band’s drummer, pulled up in the driveway, noisy and elegant in his way. Just back from Canada, too, he was in and out of the band; he also popped pills in the kitchen, looking at the clock, glugging white and
red tablets down with beer. He had his girlfriend Diane with him. When the girlfriends were there, they and Sils’s brothers took over the house, lying on top of one another on the living room sofas, kissing and rubbing and napping.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Sils, hearing Skip downstairs. She was working a late shift and didn’t have to leave for an hour. Mike was picking her up. “Let’s go for a walk.” So we did. We left her house and walked around in the park, looking for arrowheads and puffballs, until it was time for her to go.

The next day at Storyland was slow—a warm drizzle keeping people away—and at about five o’clock Mike Suprenante drove up on his Harley. He took off his helmet and glided his motorcycle up to my register.

“Would you like a ticket,
monsieur
?” I tried to be funny, friendly, but I sounded full of hate, even to my own ears.

“I want to see you alone to talk about Sils.”

I looked at him, trying to let nothing show. I felt secretly pleased. He had, with this request, acknowledged I was her guardian, her confidante, closer to her than he.

“When can we do that?” he asked sternly.

I felt powerful. “I don’t know. Tonight, maybe.”

Herb, the manager, came up and stood behind the ticket tearer’s gate. “Get that thing outta here,” he said angrily, in the direction of the motorcycle.

Mike started to back it up, slowly.

“You’d better move faster than that,” said Herb. “We can’t have vehicles in the main entrance of the park.”

Mike looked at me. “Ten o’clock. Out front here,” he called out.
“Ça va?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice hickish and tough.

Mike glided backward, then turned, started up his bike,
and left. Herb came through the gate, then just stood next to me, frowning. I stood there, saying nothing, shifting my weight from one hip to the other.

“What?”
I said finally, impudently.

“No more pals” is all he said. “No more.” And then he smiled falsely, a grimacing stack of teeth, and walked pompously away.

“Do you want to go have a drink?” Mike asked me at closing time in front of the main gate to Storyland. It had stopped raining and the night sky had cleared. There was a bar down the road called Fort Ress, owned by a guy named Dickie Ress, and Mike liked to go there. Or there was the Sans Souci.

“All right,” I said.

“Wanna go to the Ress?”

“OK.”

“Wanna hop on?”

“No. I’ll walk.” It was a five-minute walk past the public beach to the Ress.

“Whatever,” said Mike. He grinned. “I’ll get us a good table out on the patio. The one with the least bird turd.” He grinned again.

I narrowed my eyes. “Promises, promises,” I said. No matter what the situation, a sarcastic tone was a Horsehearts girl’s best response.

Mike winked and roared off ahead. “The
vroom-vroom
gene,” Sils had said the day the exhaust pipe on Mike’s Harley burned a scar into her leg. “All boys are born with it.
Vroom-vroom
.”

I trudged up the road. It was after ten o’clock at night, and the sky was still a bluish color and peepers sang from the trees in the park. A frog chorus.
The frogs sing for no reason and
so do we
went a line from a poem I had learned in school, and I imagined these frogs now scattered through the woods, their tiny eyes lit like chips of emerald, while their pumping whistle-chant—part summons, part yearning lullaby—piped through the night.
Whoops, wope, who-wopes
. I felt accompanied, guarded, by the throb and thrum of it, as I hiked along the beach road up toward the lights of Marvy’s Miniature Golf, where, when I got there, I could no longer hear the peeping—only bar noise and golfers in wide-lipped hats.

The frogs
. Years later, I would read in the paper that frogs were disappearing from the earth, that even in the most pristine of places, scientists were looking and could not find them. It was a warning, said the article. A plague of no frogs. And I thought of those walks up the beach road I’d made any number of times in the sexual evening hum of summer, how called and lovely and desired you felt, how
possible
, even when you weren’t at all. It was the frogs doing that. Later it seemed true, that I rarely heard frogs anymore. Once in a while a cricket would get trapped on the porch, but that was all. That was different. We would find it with a broom and sweep it off.

At the Ress, I sat outside with Mike on the patio. He’d already brought beers to the table in large waxed cups. Plus two shots of whiskey for himself.

“I know,” he said. He threw back one of the whiskeys.

“Know
what
?” I asked.

“Sils told me. About the baby.” At the word “baby” he threw back the second shot. It was very dramatic.

“What baby?”

“The one you went to Vermont with. Sils told me. She told me she’d been pregnant. She told me everything.”

“There was no
baby
,” I said finally.

The whiskey was doing its work. Mike leaned forward,
hunched over the empty shot glasses, maudlin and drunk, unrolling the waxy rim of his beer cup with his thick fingers. “I would have taken care of it. I would have brought up that kid.” He began to blubber. I was only fifteen, and he was nineteen. But he seemed mawkish and ridiculous to me. Why had Sils told him? I’d thought the whole point had been not to tell him.

“Get off it,” I said. “Get on with things.”
Get a life
, I might have said, but it wasn’t an expression yet. Instead I repeated the words of my sixth-grade teacher the day she’d spied my lipstick. “You’re too young,” I said, getting it down, slowly, like a chant.

“Ha!” he cried out. But his teariness subsided a bit, and he began to smile a little awkwardly and try to flirt with me. He rubbed my head with one of his big hands like a paw. “You’ve got a lot on the ball,” he said. “Plus, you know what? My friend Arnie thinks you’re cute.” He grinned again, with this hot, funny news. “What do you think?”

I couldn’t even remember who Arnie was. “I’ve gotta get going,” I said, finishing my beer. I didn’t want to remember who Arnie was. I didn’t want to meet Arnie, or talk to him, or have him try to touch me. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. There was nothing to touch.

“You’re a good friend,” he said. “You’re Sils’s best friend. So, in a way, I’ve always considered you mine as well.”

I felt revulsed.

“Can I give you a ride home?” His speech was slurred and his grin now snaked across his face in a demented way that someone somewhere had probably told him was fetching.

It was ten miles back to Horsehearts.

“I’m calling a cab,” I said.

“Oh, the
cab
guy?” Mike piped up gleefully, to let me
know he knew. “With your little
moola
?” He held his hand in the air and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. God, had Sils told him
everything
?

“Sure, sure.”

I went inside the Ress and used the phone.

“Oh, you again,” said Humphrey. “How the heck are you?”

“I’m up at the lake, corner of Beach and Quaker is how I am.”

“Need a ride?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I checked my wallet. I was running low. Perhaps I’d have to do more money at work tomorrow. Just once more, and then that would be it. Then I’d stop forever.

I went back and sat at the table across from Mike, waiting for my ride. The Ress had strung chili-pepper lights above and across the patio section of this place, but there was no one sitting out here in the buggy night but us, and the forced exuberance of the lights seemed mocking and depressing. Steppenwolf blared from the jukebox inside.

“Are you going to stay here or go back in, or what?”

“Aw. Are you concerned?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything.

“Arnie’ll probably show up later,” he said teasingly.

“Where’s Sils tonight?” I asked.

“Ha! It only took you an hour to ask. I must be having some success with you. Do you realize I never used to be able to say two words to you without you twisting around going ‘Where’s Sils?’ ”

Now I just looked past Mike out toward Beach Road. I stared out into the night, in silence, until I could see Humphrey driving slowly past in his cab, looking for me.

“Gotta go,” I said. I waved. I patted him on the hand, squeezed his shoulder. Nobody kissed cheeks then; it would have been a joke.

“Yeah,
go
,” said Mike, some new blame in his voice. “Yeah, go on in your expensive little Killer Cab.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, and turned on my heels and left, trotted out toward the intersection, waving a hand to signal Humphrey, who was now turning around and driving back toward the Ress parking lot.

“Where’s your friend?” he asked when I got in.

“It’s just me tonight,” I said. At last I had a man driving
me
, waiting down the street just for
me
, though of course I had to pay him.

The next morning it was eighty degrees by seven o’clock. We were in a heat wave; all the fans my parents owned were on and swirling the thick air around our house. At seven-thirty the phone rang, and I stumbled out into the hallway to get it.

“What did you tell Mike last night?” It was Sils. Her voice was chilly but edged with hysteria.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I told him anything. What did he tell you? What did
you
tell
him
?”

“Arnie just called. He said last night you and Mike met for drinks and afterward he was drinking and yelling loudly. He took off half-cocked and got into an accident on his motorcycle.” Here Sils began to cry in a light, shell-shocked way. “He’s in intensive care with tubes and everything. He might die.”

Mike: what a stupid jerk. “Oh, my god,” I said instead. The car and motorcycle accidents of the local Horsehearts boys were the staple of the community news and drama. Yet I had never known anyone who had been killed, or anyone
who had died, not really, not well. My grandfather had died when I was three, but I couldn’t remember it.