Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (3 page)

And so I told long self-deprecating breast jokes about myself, relying on such analogies as fried eggs, bug bites, bee stings, animals or tin cans run over by a car, pancakes, pencil erasers, doilies, and tacks; breasts were still a curiosity to me. It had been only a few years before that Sils and I would examine at great length any centerfold we could get our hands on, or W. T. Grant underwear ads, or even Land O Lakes butter, cutting out the Indian maiden from the package and bending the knees so that they appeared like breasts through a slot we made in her chest. We’d laugh in a fascinated, obscene way. We were obsessed with breasts. We’d stuff washcloths, teacups, golf balls, tennis balls, cotton balls in our shirts. Once we made her mother, who was long divorced and worked late hours as a receptionist at the Landmark Motel, show us hers. She was a sweet and guilt-ridden mother, exhausted from her older sons (their loud band practices in the basement; their overnight girlfriends; their strange, impermanent, and semiannual treks across the border to Canada to avoid the draft, though their numbers were high; the spaghetti they hung on the porch as a “wind chime”; the snapshots they taped to the inside of the refrigerator, pictures of what the dog had done to the trash). She was fearful that in trying to make ends meet she hadn’t shown enough attention to her little daughter, so when we began to chant “Show us your breasts, show us your breasts!,” strangely enough, she did. She lifted her sweater, unhooked her bra, and shook them loose, looking out at us in a confused way, as we stared at them—veiny, and dark, and amazing.

But now it seemed it was only me. I was the only one still obsessed.

The late spring sun had freckled the upper part of Sils’s chest, and her silky hair, rinsed in cider and beer, was shiny as Christmas foil. “I kept asking her, So what’s your name?” said Sils. “Where do you go to school?—you little twerp—Do you like your teacher? Things no real Cinderella would ever say, but there was a spell on with this girl.”

“That couldn’t be disspelled.” This was the sort of boring cleverness I was prone to, a skinny, undeveloped girl good in school.

“She kept asking me about the prince. She’s not
two
. You’d think she’d get it.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
.” Sils had memorized all the slides from History of Art. “There is no prince.”

I smoked Sobranies down to the poison-gold filter. I exhaled through my nose like a dragon. “
Now
you tell me,” I said. “You’re
not
really Cinderella?” We were never very witty as girls, but we thought we were. Our idea of a funny joke was to refer to our chins as “The Happy Acre Pimple Farm.” In a town where everyone said things like “Jeesum Crow” and “sheeesh,” we said “fuck”—but in a daring, private way. “What the fuck, babe.” Sils liked to say that, with a smirky, smoke-frayed laugh. I would say it, too. Once, in eighth grade, her forehead broke out and she tried to shave the pimples off with a razor. It wasn’t funny at the time—her forehead bled for a week—but when we wanted later to laugh, we would summon it up: “Remember the time you shaved your forehead? What the
fuck
, babe,” and we’d fall on the floor. We looked to secret things. We looked to stories and misadventures and mined them for their narcotic ore. We loved to laugh violently, convulsively, no sound actually coming out until suddenly we’d have to gasp in a braying way for breath.

Now she gave me the finger with one hand and then with the other balanced her lit Sobranie against her thumb. But she smiled. She shrugged. She hummed. She said, “Listen,”
and then belched out the carbonation from her Fresca. She was my hero, and had been for almost as long as I could remember. In being with her—cigarette break to lunch to cigarette break—I got through the dull days.

We’d started working at Storyland in May, on the weekends, through the Memorial Day rush, until school let out in early June. Then we worked six days a week. Up until then we had met during the school week in the cemetery to smoke. Every day we would have what we called a “cemetery lunch.” I would clamber up over the hill, past the blue meadow of veronica and flax, past the broken stick-arbor and the Seckel pear, down the gravel path, into the planked swamp and on up to the gravestones, where Sils would be waiting, having arrived from the other end. She lived on a small oaky street that dead-ended into the cemetery (next to which she lived). “Is this street symbolic or what?” Sils would say to anyone who visited. Especially the boys. The boys adored her. She was what my husband once archly referred to as “oh, probably a
cool
girl. Right? Right? One of those little hippettes from Whositsville?” She could read music, knew a little about painting; she had older brothers in a rock band. She was the most sophisticated girl in Horsehearts, not a tough task, but you have to understand what that could do to a girl. What it could do to her life. And although I’ve lost track of her now, such a loss would have seemed inconceivable to me then. Still, I often surmise the themes in her, what she would be living out: the broken and ridiculous songs; the spent green box of Horsehearts; the sad, stuck, undelivering world.

That spring we usually met at the grave of Estherina Foster, a little girl who had died in 1932, and whose photograph, tinted with yellows and pinks, was fastened to the stone. There we would shiver and smoke, the air still too
cold. We’d list against the other gravestones, lean forward and brush hair from each other’s face. “Hold still, you’ve got a hair.”

Were we just waiting to leave Horsehearts, our friends, enemies, our airless family lives? I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

But what do I mean “they”? Perhaps I mean only Sils. I was invaded by Sils, who lives now in my vanished girlhood, a place to return to at night, in a fat sleep, during which she is there, standing long-armed and balanced on stones in the swamp stream, stones in the cemetery, stones in the gravelly road out back. How I resented the boys coming, as they did. I resented it early, even the hint of it. They were sneering and injurious and uninterested in me. They hooked their thumbs through their belt loops. More obsessed even than we with the fluids and failings of the body, they told long ugly jokes, ones with loud refrains like “plugging in” or “coming in handy.” They owned BB guns and shot the frogs in the swamp, not always killing them right away. Sils and I, stupid and young, would bring tweezers from home and, pushing through the cattails and the gluey pods of the milkweed, would try to seek out and save the poor frogs—digging in through their skin, pulling the BBs out, then bandaging the squirming, bleeding animals with gauze. Few of them lived. Usually, we would find the frogs dead in the watery mud, the gauze unraveled about them, tragically, like a fallen banner in a war.

The week she was hired as Cinderella, Sils made a painting of this, what we’d done with the frogs those years before. She painted a picture in deep blues and greens. In the background, through some trees, stood two little girls dressed up as saints or nurses or boys or princesses—what were they? Cinderellas. They were whispering. And in the foreground, next to rocks and lily pads, sat two wounded frogs, one in a splint, one with a bandage tied around its eye: they looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs. She framed it, hung it in her bedroom, and titled it
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

By that time, Sils had a boyfriend—a boy named Mike Suprenante from glamorous, forbidding Albany—and the painting’s meaning had become larger, broader, funnier; it had become everything.

She’d met Mike in late March, up at a lake bar called Casino Club, where we’d gone dancing. We had fake IDs and on weekends during the school year it was a good place to dance. Sometimes we danced with each other—boyless and defiant, with a tight, parodic pout. We would do the twist in a deeply satirical way. We would jitterbug, twirling under each other’s arms. We then waited for the men to buy us drinks. The dance floor was large and platformed; the bands were loud, winking, and friendly; the drinks were cheap on Ladies Night, and sometimes we would see our student teachers there, young and handsome in navy sport coats. Sometimes one of them would ask Sils to dance, not recognizing her immediately, and then in the middle of the song realize who she was and give her an embarrassed “Hi” or a sheepish shrug or point his fingers like a gun her way or else at his own head.

The night Sils met Mike, she was wearing a fake peony in her hair and a long sleeveless tunic and jeans. She wore all her rings and bracelets on one hand, one side, skipping the
other, leaving it bare. I danced a lot. Every time a guy headed our way to ask Sils to dance, Mike (a “handsome nondescript person,” I said of him later), who had just walked over and introduced himself earlier that night, would swoop down with extra drinks and take possession of her, steer her back out onto the floor—he’d claimed her, “gotten dibs on her,” and she’d let him. On fast dances with him, she did her intensity dance: she sank deeply into each hip and held her fists up in front of her (one ringed, one naked) like a boxer. Her face—with its long nose cut like a diamond, her cheekbones flying off to either side in a crucifix—looked stark and dramatic in this light. And so, by the time the other guys got to the table, finished swashing their gums with their beer, finished gulping, there was no one there but me. “Well, would
you
like to dance,” they’d say, looking gypped. I didn’t care. I understood. I’d worn my white earrings that glowed in the black light of the bar; I’d circled my eyes with shadow. I’d brushed my hair over my head and then thrown it back so that it was wild and full. I’d checked myself out in the ladies’ room mirror: I was too skinny, and I wasn’t Sils. But I was of the conviction—a conviction I held on to naively, for years—that if somebody got to know me, really know me, they’d like me a lot.

On the slow dances, like “Nights in White Satin,” I let the men—construction workers, car salesmen—hold me close. I could feel their bellies and their sweat smell, their hard groins, their damp shirts, their big arms around me. Sometimes I’d rest my hands on their hips, my eyes shut and pressed into one of their shoulders while we danced.

“That was nice,” they’d say at the end, shouting it over the band’s next song.

“Thank you,” I’d say. “Thank you very much.” I always thanked them. I was grateful, and I let them know.

“How we getting home?” I yelled into Sils’s ear—the standard question on our nights out. I was staying overnight at her house, one of the few ways I’d have gotten to remain out so late. Her mother had night duty at the motel, and her brothers were staying with their various girlfriends or else were in Canada again, Sils wasn’t sure these days. She looked at me in a bemused way, shrugged, and pointed discreetly at Mike. He was tapping his foot, smoking a cigarette, and looking at the band, but he had his arm around her chair.

Why did I have to ask? I could always count on Sils; Sils was the way; Sils was our ride home, always.

Mike only had a motorcycle, but he’d borrowed a car from a friend. He drove slowly to make it last, kept looking at Sils, who sat next to him in the front seat, kept asking her questions like “How’d you get so beautiful?” To which she’d say, “Give me a break,” and then laugh. I sat wordlessly in the back, looking out the window, watching the night trees and the darkened houses float by like boats.

Mike pulled down to the end of her street, right up into the entrance to the cemetery, and I got out and waited. I walked away from the car, to let them kiss. I had a lot of patience, I felt, for certain kinds of things. I hopped the low fence and roamed around the edge of the cemetery a little, but when I looked back, they were still in the car, kissing, so I walked farther out. I looked for little Estherina Foster’s grave, and then sat there with her in the dark. I listened for a voice that might be hers, some whisper or peep, but there was nothing. I fiddled with a long-stemmed plastic rose that had gotten mashed there in the dirt. I brushed the mud off it, and bounced it around, tracing words in the air—my name, Sils’s name, Estherina’s name. I couldn’t think of other names. I wrote
Happy Birthday, Fuck You
, and
Peace
. Then I tossed the flower away, into the shadows. How silent the
world was at night, the unbudded trees etched eerily into the sky, the branches reaching as if for something to hold and eat—perhaps the dead and candied stars! The ground was cold, thatched with leaves; the nearby swamp had begun unthawing its sewagey smells. In the moonlight the sky seemed wild, bright, and marbled like the sea. People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before of one’s decisions—it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds—and so people had a tendency to talk to it. I turned away, sitting there, hugging my legs, pulling my jacket close. I plucked my earrings off and stuck them in my pocket, the cool air strangely still and mushroomy. I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees—I swore on Estherina Foster’s grave—that I would. But it wouldn’t be a boy like Mike. Nobody like that. It would be a boy very far away—and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful of songs.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Sils. She and Mike were now out of the car but leaning against it sexily.

“For a walk.”