Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (16 page)

“Your father tells me you’ve been in some trouble,” my grandmother said now.

I was silent. “A little,” I said finally.

“And now they want me to send you to the Mount Brookfield School.”

“Yes,” I said. I’d forgotten my grandmother would be footing the bill. “I guess.”

She looked at me in a vaguely interested way. “Did you enjoy camp?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Did you?” She looked amused.

“It was interesting to meet all kinds of people from all over the state,” I said, like a walking, talking application essay.

She nodded. “We sent your father to camp once,” she said. “He was only five years old. At the time he was a little chatterbox, very cute but a chatterbox, and your grandfather and I wanted a vacation alone in Europe.” She pursed her mouth and sipped some more tea; I waited to hear a slurp but there wasn’t one. “We sent your father to a German summer camp in New Hampshire called Kinder Koop. When he came back, he was stone quiet.” She stopped for effect. “He’d become, as he would remain for the rest of his life, a shy person.”

The wordless moment now between us was long, low, sonorous as a cello note—a mix of catgut and wood, of animal and plant. “Of course, it was a mistake,” she said finally. “It was a terrible, lonely thing we did to such a tiny boy.”

Pity pooled in my throat.
Dad!
I drank more tea. I swallowed and coughed.

She now rose from her seat, in a change of subject, and
walked dramatically around the room, as if she were in a play. My eyes followed her, and in so doing, I realized that she had no pictures of us—her children or her grandchildren—anywhere in this room. Nor did she have any elsewhere in the house, that I knew of. “When I was at conservatory,” she said, “I’d gone there after much turmoil in my life. To go from turmoil to tranquillity is excellent for music. To go from an iniquitous den to a practice room is a respite given to us by God.” She stopped and stared at me. “It is to grow wings. I hope you will find something similar for yourself at the Mount Brookfield School.”

“I hope so, too,” I said. “I mean, I don’t see why not.”

“Well, my dear …” She was still standing; she had already put her teacup down. Now she looked at her watch. “I realize you have many things to do. But I wish you all the best.” I stood up, as I guessed I was supposed to, though I still had half a cup of tea. She shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek. Suddenly I loved her very much.

“Thank you,” I said. I threw my arms around her waist and hugged her tightly. I pressed my right cheek against the pale lapels of her suit and closed my eyes. “I hope I’ll have a musical moment like that, too,” I said awkwardly, and she made a light, humming sound like a laugh and patted me on the head.

At the Mount Brookfield School I wrote to everyone: to Hayden Filo, to Claude, to my parents. I wrote to my grandmother. “Hey, Grams,” I began one letter, but then crossed it out and wrote “Dear Grandmother Carr.” By the cross-out I drew an arrow and wrote “picture of me in a new hat.” She never wrote back.

But my parents did. They said they had given my room to a Japanese foreign student and weren’t sure whether
there’d be room for me to come home either fall break or Thanksgiving, though Christmas was fine.

To Sils I wrote long descriptions of the “precious, pukey campus,” of all my difficult schoolwork, of the dining hall where dogs were allowed and there was unlimited ice cream (the eccentric demands of some benefactor). I described the native attire, the preppie Scottish sweaters I refused to buy, though once I almost hocked one in town but put it back.

I dressed in what I thought was glamorous—black and gold things. Sometimes a cape or a hat or a scarf that sparkled. I arranged my face and hair in a fever of private notions: a theater of one. I wasn’t looking around. I wasn’t costuming myself in any context that was real. If I pushed it too far, if it got too glittery or tacky, I’d say to people, “Hey, at Horsehearts High
this
is
chic
.” I’d send it all up as a joke, a put-on. But if it seemed to work, if people liked it, I would say, “Thank you,” in an earnest, whispered way. I became exotic among the preppies. I hung out with the wisecracking boys.

I got my period. The torrent of it, the bodily upheaval, filled me with happiness and dread. In drugstores I stared at the Modess and Kotex and belts and equipment, obsessed with the paraphernalia. I made directly for the back aisles and hovered there, like a robber, waiting for a slow moment in the store. I remained there in a kind of hypnosis, until something would snap me out of it, and I would wander back out, via the perfume counter, where I would spray all the testers—on my wrists, behind my ears—then step outside and get attacked by bees.

I got good grades. I learned to use the words “nebulous” and “juxtaposition,” and tried to use them as often as I could: in essay tests, or just standing in line at the dining hall.

I won an academic prize.

I developed breasts.

For a while I was still telling my flat-chested jokes. But as my own breasts grew larger, so did the disjunction between my body and my jokes, and when I would tell jokes to people, they would look at me funny. I was in a time warp. My breasts had become larger—they were large!—and I was still referring to them as mosquito bites. For a semester, an embarrassing, amphibious semester when I didn’t know who I was, what I looked like, what jokes to tell, moving from water to land, I tried to stop telling any jokes at all. I waited until I’d accumulated enough amusing lines about having
big
breasts, armed myself with enough invented descriptions, amassed enough self-deprecating remarks about top-heaviness—knockers, blimps, hooters, bazooms—to get me through a party, and then I told those. Getting stuck in elevators, toppling forward, not being able to see the forest for the cleavage. Alienated in a grotesque way, I would stagger forward in a kind of list, then rest my breasts on the nearest bookcase. I was doing sight gags. I didn’t care. In not caring, I became the same as everyone else: I was waiting to go far away to a big university, away from this woodsy dumping ground for half-loved kids, off to a big university that would be Relevant and Real.

But then I got my first boyfriend, a boy named Howie March. I’d met him in the Linen Service line, where we were waiting together to pick up our neat little papered bundles and drop off our old sheets like invalids or mental patients or old people in a home. Howie was on the wrestling team—passionate and obsessive and sweet. He liked me. I would go to his matches and tournaments wearing my funny little black-and-gold hats and smoking my cigarettes outside in the hallway, and afterward he would give me his trophies, little metal men with arms protruding in a starting stance, and I would take them back to my dorm room and hang my jewelry
on them. I loved him fiercely, like an orphan, with every newly banished, bereaved, and sexual part of me. I had no idea who either of us was; there was just the thick fog of love and bodies and whispered promises. We were child bride, child groom, each seeking the other’s animal heart. He would make love to me slow, fast, against the wall, standing up. His naked body—its power and vulnerability, the steely arms, his penis with its delicate veins like the veins of a wrist, its rubbery eye like the tip of a mucilage bottle—obsessed me. I developed a blush. Before then, I had never blushed. I didn’t have the body fat, the heat, the hormones, the awareness of myself, the belief in my own visibility that would have created a blush. But now I’d become a sexual creature with all its experience of shame and being watched. The dark, sallow circles beneath my eyes disappeared in a pale bloat, my glance was less direct, and I began to blush easily, daily. I blushed for years.

In letters to Sils I would write “I miss you!” “How are you, schweetie?” and then I would tell her about Howie: a
dunk
, half dork, half hunk. “He keeps me busy!” I would write. “Wink, wink.” And then I’d draw a picture of a wink.

The few times I went home on vacations, I would see Sils, but we were strangely awkward with each other. We looked different. She had layered her hair in a long wavy shag and was wearing a big leather jacket and palazzo pants. I had grown rounded and tall. We would sing in her room, but at the end of a song she’d strum the chords and we’d retreat shyly into silence. We didn’t reprise our repertoire, all the songs we’d learned with Miss Field in Girls’ Choir, or from the car radio, or her brothers’ band. Instead we struggled with talk, though it all seemed to separate us. She had broken up with Mike and was now seeing a boy named Doug, who sold mobile homes. Months before, her brothers had
once again fled, with their band, to Canada. Was I going to college? She thought she might not, but might just stay in town and work for the post office or something. Someday she hoped to move to Boston or Hawaii or Santa Fe.

“Oh,” I said. I’d somehow always thought we’d go to college together, to the same place; I couldn’t imagine being totally without her.

“There’s just no money,” she said. But she smiled at me encouragingly, like an older sister.

“No prob,” I said. “No biggie. I can get the cash. I can do this thing with ticket stubs.” I hoped she would laugh. Instead she smiled weakly and ran her fingers through her new hair. She seemed tired and sad and it made me want to run, to be gone, to be back at Mount Brookfield with Howie.

I was Howie’s girlfriend for a year, before he left, graduated from Mount Brookfield ahead of me, and bucking his parents, set out with two buddies for the Alaskan pipeline, where after three months, I was told later by his mother, he disappeared in the snow, came down with the snow madness that caused men to get into their tractors and just drive off into the blinding white horizon, never coming back.

I forced myself to go on to someone else after that, then someone else again, never attaching in quite the same ferocious, virginal way, never with that enthralled and orphaned heart, not quite like that, and I missed him for years, years into college. By then my parents had moved from Horsehearts to the east coast of Florida with my grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face. The living didn’t interest her; she grew bored when anyone spoke. In her yawn I could see the black-and-white dice of her filled teeth, the
quiet snap of her spit, all gathered in a painting of departure. It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.

————

AFTER COLLEGE
, I did go back to Horsehearts, for a class reunion. Ten years. I was invited despite the Mount Brookfield diploma—“a mere technicality,” wrote Susie Vito, the class secretary, who had been in kindergarten with me. Sils wrote me a note: “If you go, I’ll go,” she said. “The reunion’s at a motel. But please stay with me at my house. I’ve got room.” She was still in Horsehearts, renting cheaply, working as a letter carrier and putting in requests for transfers. Her handwriting was exactly the same, jazzy and elegant, with
f
s that looked like G clefs.
S
s like flowers.

Like so many others, I arrived by car, still smoking cigarettes, my hair shorn, some money and credit cards in my purse. How simple and sweet and nice Sils seemed then, at that befuddled gathering! She ran toward me and hugged me so long I felt abandoned when she let go. Her face was slightly lined—there were deeper folds by her mouth—but otherwise she looked the same. It was her! “Your hair looks great,” she said, and took my hand. How kind she was! She was a lovely and gentle person, and I’d almost forgotten. I had gone out into the world and in it imagined
myself
sweet and good compared to the jagged acrimony I met everywhere. “I’m just a girl from Horsehearts, what can I say?” I’d murmur, and men would touch my face; New Yorkers, Bostonians, Parisians would smile. But now, returning to Horsehearts, I realized, I no longer knew what sweetness was. By comparison to what I found there, I had become sour, mean,
sophisticated. I no longer knew from niceness, was no longer on a daily basis with it. I didn’t meet nice people. I met witty, hard, capable, successful, dramatic. Some vulnerable. Some insecure. But not nice, the way Sils was nice. She was nice the way I had long imagined I still was, but then on seeing her again—strangely shy before me but illumined and grinning, as ever, her voice in gentle girlish tones I never heard anymore—instantly, completely, knew I was no longer.

We jumped into the motel pool, with our clothes on, laughing and practically drowning. We swam together to the shallow end, and when she stepped out of it, gleaming, her clothes wet and tight as leather, her hair streaming down her back, everyone looked. Though there was weariness in her walk, she was still slender and bold; I could see she was still some kind of sexual centerpiece here. All the Horsehearts boys who had stayed in town, become managers of stores or cinemas or the roller rink, still thought of her at night. In this neck of the woods, she was the neck of the woods.

We sat in lawn chairs, drying in the sun, and smoked quietly, with Randi, who seemed just the same as always except that, recovered from her Mary Kay days, she had changed her name to Travis, which she’d written on her name tag, with Randi in parentheses underneath. (Could one do that? Could one put one’s whole past, the fact of its boring turbulence, in parentheses like that?) We murmured about how bald all the boys were. “They look exactly like they did in high school,” said Sils, “except that now their hair’s gone and in their wallets instead of condoms they carry before-and-after photos of their home renovations. Welcome back to Horsehearts.” As she held her cigarette, and blew smoke away from me, I looked for the men from
U.N.C.L.E
. in her toenails but could not find them.

After the afternoon reception and buffet, we left, went to
go drink in a new local restaurant, what Sils called “an-all-you-will-have-eaten place.” There was a long salad bar and a big open grill. One was supposed to cook one’s own steak. “Cook your own mistake,” she called it. I smiled in a way that I hoped wouldn’t seem distant. What did it mean that she had stayed here, in Horsehearts, in one place, like a tree? Though I knew one’s roots grew deep and steady that way, still, one’s lower limbs could fuse, or die, killed off by one’s own stalwart shade. “It’s the coleslaw here,” she said. “I just can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I think that, you know, watch: the slaw alone will keep me in this town forever.”