I stepped closer to the machine. There were all sorts of dials and gauges.
“You can touch it,” she said.
I put out my hand. It felt hot from the sun reflecting on its shiny surface.
“Is it hot inside?”
“No. There’s a cooling system. My own private air-conditioning.” She laughed, but it sounded more like a hiccup. I looked slowly now over the machine. This was her world. She was the largest thing in that world. Nothing would change within that world. This thought unnerved me plenty. I stepped away. I didn’t want to touch it. I had unthinkingly called it a beast before, but now I realized that it had with my touch become just that to me: a hideous beast. I imagined the mirrors turning into arms like those of a huge, gleaming, panting spider. I could see them reaching out to drag me into that unchanging place.
Phyllis could turn her head a little bit to see us, but she didn’t need to because the mirrors rotated again and tipped down while the sky slid away, and now once again I could see only Emmett’s face filling one of the larger mirrors.
“Are those Spiegelman mirrors?” Emmett asked.
“Yes, how’d you know? No one ever asks that.”
“I’m interested in mirrors.”
This was so typical of Emmett! I know I was getting caught up in the machine because it was the strangest thing I had ever seen in my life. But Emmett should have seen beyond it and seen what had to be one of the most beautiful girls ever! With her shiny blond hair and the bluest eyes and dimples! She was the perfect high-school girl. She was prettier than Betty or Veronica. She could have been a cheerleader. No. She could have been a movie star! She was movie-star gorgeous. But, of course, she wasn’t going to be any of those things.
Emmett just kept studying the mirrors and not really looking into them, where my face and Phyllis’s and some of his face were reflected. He kept trying to sort of dodge out of the mirror. But she caught him! I don’t know how. She did something with those mirrors, tilted them some way, somehow, and then bingo! There was his face filling up the whole mirror. I was out of the picture. But Phyllis had Emmett just where she wanted him.
“An expert in mirrors. Don’t tell me you’re a narcissist! I don’t need any more narcissistic males.”
Narcissistic? Never heard of the word. Did it matter? Not at all. I couldn’t believe how she was zeroing in on Emmett. I guess maybe this was flirting, but it actually seemed halfway between flirting and a guided missile strike. I don’t think Emmett knew that nar word either, but he laughed as if he understood exactly what she was talking about. And that moment, Emmett’s face creased into deep lines that ran from just below his cheekbones to his jaw, and his dark red hair suddenly flashed in the sun, and his deep blue eyes radiated smile crinkles fanning from the corners.
But I saw all this in the mirrors, just the way Phyllis saw it. And for an instant he wasn’t my brother. He had been transformed into someone else. Someone that I didn’t quite recognize, but Phyllis did.
“Naw,” Emmett was saying. “I just fiddle around with telescopes.”
“He’s building a big telescope, and he’s already built three others. But this one’s going to be really big,” I piped up. I wanted to get in on this conversation even if I didn’t know what the word narciss-whatever meant. I sensed that something was happening, and I wanted to be in on it so badly.
But no such luck, because just at that moment the mirrors swiveled and I was cut out of the picture. It was the two of them again.
“I bet you’re good at math, Emmett,” Phyllis said, and narrowed her eyes as if she were thinking about something. There was a kind of sly sparkle behind the incredible blueness.
Emmett blushed. “Pretty good,” he said.
“Ah, come on,” Phyllis said. “I bet you’re better than pretty good.”
“He’s great!” I blurted out. “He got 800 on his SATs, the math part.”
“Oh, good Lord.” More hiccuppy giggles from Phyllis, and I was still not in the mirror. “I won’t even tell you what I got. Let’s just say my talents lie elsewhere.” A cunning look slid across her face.
Poor Emmett got all flustered. “I’m sure they weren’t that bad.”
Wrong thing to say, Emmett. Wrong!
“Oh, yes, they were.” She giggled again. If Phyllis had been a normal girl with a normal body, I could have just pictured her shoulders kind of doing a little shimmy. As it was, the hiccuppy giggle sent a tremor through her blond curls.
Then she whispered something to Emmett. But I couldn’t hear. And he couldn’t either. “Come over here. I’ll tell you,” she said, meaning Emmett and not me. Emmett walked over to where her head poked out of the machine. He had to maneuver around some of the things sticking out from it. “Now bend down,” she said. “Put your ear close to my mouth.”
Oh, my word! I thought. What was I about to see? Emmett was blushing right to the roots of his red hair. There was now absolutely no difference between his hair color and his skin color. I was too afraid to look, so I studied a small ant colony that I had discovered emerging from between the stones of the patio. I wondered what would happen if an ant got into the iron lung. Would it live? If a male and female ant got in there, could they reproduce? Could the female lay eggs in an iron lung, or would the concentration of the eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air crush everything somehow? Then Emmett backed away. He looked incredibly pleased with himself, and I don’t think it was just because of his SAT scores.
Then suddenly she swiveled the mirrors and I was caught.
“Tell me about Nubian goats, Georgie.”
“What?”
“Your T-shirt.”
“Oh,” I said.
But then Emmett interrupted. “Hey, how come you can read that? How come it’s not backward?”
“My special reading mirror! My dad invented it. But he’s made improvements. A whole new model that will make it even easier for me.”
“Wow!” Emmett whispered.
“Come on, tell me about the goats,” Phyllis urged.
I stood up and came a little closer to her head, sticking out from the machine. It was weird to talk to someone this way. It felt as if her head were just sort of floating there, attached to nothing.
“Uh, I just like them, that’s all.”
“Why do you like them? Tell me all about goats. I know nothing.”
“Well,” I began, “you’ve got your dairy goats, your pygmies, your Nigerian dwarf goats, and dozens of others.” I paused and looked at her in the mirror. She still seemed interested. So I continued. “It’s my true belief that there is a goat for every kind of person. And goats are very affectionate. They love it when folks scratch them. They are the most companionable of farm animals — that’s what my grandma says.”
Phyllis made another little hiccuppy sound. It sounded like a sputtering waterfall, except instead of water, it was air.
“Now, turn around,” she said. “I caught a glimpse in the mirror of something on the back of your shorts.”
“Oh,” I said. “My mom sewed a cut-out poodle on them.”
“So you like poodles and goats, I see.”
“I don’t really like poodles that much. I think they’re kind of silly. They just make a nice decoration, you know.”
“They are supposedly among the smartest of dogs,” Phyllis said. I kind of shrugged.
“Maybe, but goats aren’t nearly as dumb as people think.”
Just then Mrs. Keller came out with a tray of lemonade and a plate of cookies.
“Now, let’s see,” she said, setting down the tray. One of the glasses was special and had a straw in it about a foot long. She set this glass into a metal claw that stuck out from the iron lung, then put the straw into Phyllis’s mouth. I was fascinated as Mrs. Keller put the glass in the claw and then somehow the claw automatically brought the glass, straw and all, closer to Phyllis. Mrs. Keller had been talking while she was doing this stuff with the glass and the straw. I was thinking about
how beautiful Phyllis was, and I was thinking that when her face and Emmett’s had been trapped in the mirror together . . . well, they looked really nice. If that mirror had been heart-shaped, it could have been like a Valentine card.
“Georgie! Georgie!” Emmett gave me a nudge.
“Yeah!” I jerked back to attention.
“Mrs. Keller was asking you where you are going to school.”
“Oh,” I said, and straightened up. “I used to go to Peter Stoner Elementary School, but now I’ll go to Crooked Creek since we’ve moved into this neighborhood.” I wanted to tell them how this was a stinking rotten deal that I had to change schools and Emmett didn’t.
“And you’re going to Westridge, I assume,” Mrs. Keller was saying to Emmett.
“Yes ma’am, I’ve been there all along.” Then he turned to Phyllis and leaned forward a bit. Both their faces crowded into the mirror. “Where did you go, Phyllis? North Tech?”
“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.”
Chasing Orion Page 4