Chasing Orion

by Kathryn Lasky

  “She can’t meet me. She has to go with her friends someplace.” This of course was a lie; it was her mother and sister she had to do something with. “She canceled,” I said with emphasis. Canceled described my feelings. It sounded like some sort of execution.

  “You don’t want to go to the library, even if your new friend can’t be there today?”

  “Mom, I’ve only known her for an hour. I can’t exactly call her my friend yet.”

  “OK, OK,” my mom said wearily. “Have you tried Susie?”

  “I’m embarrassed. I didn’t go to her birthday party. I can’t just go call her up now.”

  “What about Carol?”

  “She’s at Bible school,” I replied sullenly.

  “You mean it hasn’t been closed? I thought all summer camps had been closed.”

  “Maybe if you just sit around reading about God and Jesus all day, you can’t get polio.”

  Mom looked at me narrowly this time. Normally she would have really scolded me hard about talking this way. Instead she just said, “It’s not that easy, young lady! If it were, more people would be in Bible school.”

  “Mom!” I stood up, gripping my Popsicle. Those two words, young and lady, just set me off. “I have to tell you something.” I spoke in a very serious voice.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I absolutely hate it when grown-ups call girls my age ‘young lady.’ You know why I hate it?” I didn’t give her time to answer. “I hate it because they never mean it. They use it as a way to put you down. To remind you for yet the millionth time that you, or in my particular case, me, that I am anything but a young lady. That I am a minor and I have no rights whatsoever and exist for big ladies to boss around.” By this time I was standing in a pool of grape Popsicle. I tossed the stick in the sink and stomped out of the kitchen. Mom didn’t say a word. But the look on her face was impressive, as in she was impressed with my little speech.

  “What about Laurie and Wendy?” she called after me. I was already on the stairs going up and yelled back.

  “Mom, stop it. You’re making me feel worse than I already do. Don’t you get it? They’re all on the other side of town. They don’t even call me anymore.” I look forlornly at the telephone. In my previous life — for that was indeed the way I thought of it — I had spent hours on the telephone with friends. It was a major part of my social life. My parents even had put a timer by the phone limiting me to fifteen minutes. But now it was like out of sight, out of mind, and definitely off the telephone line. I had called my old friends a few times but it was as if there was so little to talk about, what was the point? I wasn’t in the thick of it anymore. What I’d ask about was already ancient history. Boring.

  She came to the bottom of the staircase and looked up at me. “You know, Georgie, you act as if we’ve moved to Siberia. We’re less than two miles from our old house. They’re still your friends.”

  “Mom, it might as well be Siberia. I’m going to a different school. They’re all getting ready for the fall festival. I don’t even know if my new school has a fall festival. I was on the planning committee. I was elected to the planning committee for it. You have to be popular for that. And now I’m just gone. I have nothing to plan. I have to start all over again. It’s just all different, and you don’t understand. You’ll never understand.”

  I knew I was going to cry any second. I felt not just my eyes but my whole face swelling up with tears. I raced the rest of the way upstairs to my bedroom, slammed the door, threw myself on the bed, and started sobbing. I heard my mother’s footsteps coming up the stairs and then these timid little knocks on the door.

  “Go away.” I sobbed.

  “Georgie, really!”

  “Really go away!” I yelled back.

  Nothing was fair. Life was so unfair.

  Almost as soon as I thought of the word fair, I thought of Phyllis.

  Phyllis was out on the patio. I could tell when I walked into the grove of trees. Those silver shimmers wove through the green leaves like a bright thread. I wanted to figure out how close I could get before she caught me in the mirrors. I walked slowly across the lawn. The day before, when Emmett and I had come, it was late afternoon, the time when shadows stretch. I had a sense that somehow the interplay between the shadows and the mirror reflections tipped Phyllis off. But now it was late morning, the short-shadow time. I watched my own stubby dark shadow spring to life as I emerged from the grove. I kept my eye on it as it slid across the lawn at an angle slightly to the left of me. That shadow song that Dad always sang began winding through my head. Something about him and his shadow strolling along.

  “Hi, Georgie,” Phyllis called out. “I was hoping you might come by.” I had actually gotten a bit farther this time before she trapped me in the web of reflections. It must have had something to do with shadows, but she still caught me before I could logically be within the range of the mirrors or her vision. There was something magical about it.

  “This is Sally,” Phyllis said. “She’s one of my nurses.” And now my face floated into the mirror with the smiling one of a pretty Negro lady. She wasn’t dressed like a nurse, though. She had on flowered pedal pushers and a bright pink blouse. “Sally, this is Georgie.”

  “Hello, Georgie,” she said. She had withdrawn her hand from a kind of hole in the middle section of the iron lung. She was holding a washcloth.

  “Hi.”

  “Sally, you don’t have to stay out here now. I’ve got company. Stuff I want to discuss with Georgie.”

  I felt that deep thrill again. “All right, I’ll leave you two to yourselves. Send Georgie in if you need anything.”

  As soon as Sally left, Phyllis did something with the mirrors so that we were both crowded into every single one. It was sort of neat. I mean, it was just the two of us, but all over the place. And if you didn’t know that from the neck down the rest of Phyllis was in an iron lung, you would have thought this was the healthiest person in the world. She could have been a Breck shampoo girl. She had that same luminous skin and glistening hair. The Breck girls were illustrations in pastels. And even though Phyllis was every bit as beautiful as a Breck girl, there was really nothing pastel about her. I think it was her eyes that made the difference. The Breck girls’ eyes were always downcast in a very modest, shy way. Not Phyllis. Her eyes were bold. They crackled with a sort of energy, well, maybe a fury — a startling blue fury.

  Phyllis had a kind of wildness. And yet she was caged as no animal had ever been caged. It made me almost weak to think about this. It was as if on one hand I knew what I was seeing. But knowing and understanding weren’t really feeling. And feeling would come in waves, waves that would just engulf me, pull me down into some terrible undertow. It would be Phyllis’s seeming normalness that would pull me back.

  “Now, you’ve got to tell me all about Emmett,” Phyllis said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

  “Me?”

  “Well, you’re his sister, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, but what do you want to know?”

  “Can I ask you something, Georgie?”

  “Sure, anything, Phyllis.”

  “Does Emmett have a girlfriend?” I was stunned and sort of confused. I wasn’t sure why she was asking me this. Maybe she was beginning to like Emmett, and maybe she really did think I was in some way her equal and that it was the most perfectly natural thing in the world to ask me about Emmett’s love life. Love life! I nearly laughed out loud.

  “Are you kidding? No, never.”

  “Never?”

  “Uh-uh.” I could feel my heart beating faster.

  “It’s hard to believe, never. He seems like such an attractive young man.”

  Attractive young man? That sounded to me like something a fifty-year-old woman would say, certainly not a pretty teenage girl, even if she was in an iron lung.

  “Well, he hasn’t, and that’s that,” I said.

  “Why do you say it that way?” She looked
at me slyly. “Come closer.” She moved the mirrors again as if to beckon me.

  “Say it what way?” I moved the stool up a little bit.

  “So final, like there’s not a chance for him ever having a girlfriend.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just hard to imagine. I mean he’s never been on a date, never been to a prom. He’s kind of dumb. I mean in that way. He’s really smart and all in school, but, well, you know what I mean.”

  “But I bet you think about your big brother going on dates. Come on, don’t you think about some of that stuff?” She certainly had my number!

  “Phyllis! Why are you going off and asking me these questions?”

  “Georrrrgie! Why are you blushing?”

  It was kind of odd, but I was actually enjoying this conversation. “Come on, don’t you think about all that stuff? Tell me.”

  “Well, I read Archie comic books.”

  “Oh, I love Archie and Betty and Veronica and Jughead. Have you seen Archie’s dad’s new car?”

  “Yeah, and Jughead wants to borrow it, and you know what’s going to happen!”

  “Who would you rather look like, Veronica or Betty?” Phyllis asked.

  “I keep going back and forth,” I said.

  “I don’t. I’d like to look like Veronica, with all that black hair.” Phyllis sighed. “I guess you always want what you don’t have.” She stopped and looked at the confusion on my face. “I mean in terms of hair, you know, ’cause I’m a blonde, black hair seems like, well, you know, the grass is always greener.” She laughed, a kind of high shrill cackle, then there was a small gasping hiccup. “Oh, dear, I’m mixing my metaphors.”

  Now I was completely mixed up. What in the heck was a metaphor?

  Next she swerved sharply. “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. Don’t you have any crushes?”

  Suddenly Archie, Veronica, and Betty were history.

  “I’m too young to date.”

  “But not too young to have a crush. Come on. There must be somebody.”

  “Well . . .” I said slowly. I couldn’t believe I was saying this. I hadn’t even told Carol or Wendy or anybody. “There’s this cute guy. His name’s Tim, and he and I were both elected to be on the planning committee for the fall festival at my old school.”

  “Well, that’s neat.”

  “No, not really. See, I have to go to a new school now. No fall festival, no planning committee. No Tim.” We both sighed. Well, Phyllis didn’t exactly sigh. It sounded more like a little one of those hiccups. I looked at her. “Phyllis, you promise you’ll never say anything.”

  “Don’t worry, Georgie. Never. Trust me.” She said the words very clearly, with a lot of force. It made me feel so good. It was almost like that wink.

  “Hey!” she said suddenly. “Want to try on makeup?”

  “Try on makeup? I don’t wear makeup.” I laughed.

  “Neither do I. Not anymore. And I got a whole box full of stuff. Come on, Georgie, I bet you wear that Tangee stuff. How about trying on some real lipstick?”

  “You mean it?”

  “Of course I mean it. Go in and ask Sally. She’ll show you where it is in my bedroom.”

  When I walked into Phyllis’s bedroom, I almost gasped. I had never seen such a beautiful bedroom, and yet it was like nothing I had ever even dreamed of. First of all, the color of the walls. No daisy wallpaper. No Victor Franken wallpaper at all. The walls were painted a very pale green, the color of celery, and the woodwork was silver — not shiny silver but a soft, old silver look. There was a four-poster bed with a canopy. But it wasn’t one of those ruffly ones. It was made out of something that looked like very elegant mosquito netting, gauzy, and it was swirled around like clouds. There was a dressing table, but not with a pouffy tulle skirt. It was a stiff fabric, the same celery green as the walls, and it was pleated, hundreds of pleats. How did someone even think up this stuff, something so different, so unique?

  On the wall were pictures of all her friends. It wasn’t a bulletin board, either. Instead, the pictures were arranged in a large beautiful frame with clear glass edges! Where did a person get a frame like that? Everything in the room, from the canopy to the picture frame, were in one sense ordinary yet somehow special. I just stood in the center of the room in absolute awe and suddenly wondered why I was such a boring person. I almost wanted to run home that very instant and tell Mom to not order the stupid daisy wallpaper, and why had I ever thought that a vanity with a tulle skirt that looked like it was made for a two-ton ballerina was neat? Maybe that was exactly the problem: neat, cool, square. Maybe stupid fads, word fads, fashion fads, ruled our lives too much and wound up making us all boring. Not just boring, but like carbon copies or rubber stamps, sort of blurry and not at all distinct.

  I snooped around up there for a while. There were a lot of pictures of a really cute guy, and one of Phyllis sitting on his lap in a bathing suit beside a swimming pool, and another one of them at a prom. She had on a beautiful dress with what looked like a rosebud corsage pinned to her waist, and he was in a white dinner jacket. A lot of teenage girls kept their old corsages. They kept them pinned to their bulletin boards. Not Phyllis! Hers were in a huge glass vase that been made into a lamp! And she must have gone to absolutely squillions of proms because that vase was stuffed with them. Then there was another picture of her with a bunch of really cute girls all piled up on the hood of a car.

  But the bedroom had a strange quality. It was sort of like a time capsule of a very short life. I had read a book that summer about the lost city of Pompeii. They had described it as a place where time had stopped. Where bodies of people had been found almost perfectly preserved in hardened volcanic ash at the moment of death. There was even a photograph of a chained dog gasping for air as it suffocated in the surge of falling ash and poisonous gases. That is what Phyllis’s room reminded me of — a lost city, like a city we have never seen, nor could imagine, that had been inhabited by the ghosts of a previous life, her life before she got sick, and the ghost of Phyllis herself seemed to fill the room. I found the box of makeup and got out.

  “Did you like my room?” she asked when I came back.

  “Yeah, it’s really pretty.” Understatement of the year.

  “Did you see the pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the ones of me and my boyfriend?”

  “That was your boyfriend?” She nodded.

  “What did you think?”

  “He looked pretty cute.”

  “Pretty cute? Raymond — he’s gorgeous!” Is? I thought. Is he still her boyfriend?

  “Do-d-do —” I began to stutter.

  “Do I still see him?” Her voice was almost sharp.

  “Yeah.”

  “No. He’s got another girlfriend now.” She didn’t even sound especially bitter. But I was shocked.

  “He does?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly surprising, Georgie, now, is it? I mean it’s not like we were married. It’s not like in sickness and in health.”

  “B-b-b . . . but were you going steady?”

  “Yes, but that is not being married, you know.” She spoke in an off hand way.

  “I know,” I said in a low voice. I hoped she didn’t think I sounded stupid.

  “Come on, let’s get out the makeup.”

  It was fun; I have to admit. And Phyllis had every color and brand ever displayed on the drugstore lipstick rack — Hazel Bishop, Max Factor, and on and on. The first one I tried on was called Red as All Get Out! Needless to say, we didn’t have to get a mirror.

  “Overpowering,” Phyllis declared. “The only person who could wear that is Lucille Ball. My mother saw her in person once.”

  “Oh, the I Love Lucy show. That’s my favorite.”

  “Yeah, too bad color television isn’t here yet. She’s got incredibly red hair according to my mother.”

  “But people say color television is coming.
”

  “I’m not holding my breath.”

  I froze when Phyllis said this. She started to laugh in that hiccuppy way. “Don’t look so shocked. It’s a joke, Georgie!” Then she paused and her face became serious. “Of course, I’m the only person who can make breathing jokes. Etiquette, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know — like it’s not polite to make jokes about Jews if you’re a Christian or colored people if you’re not colored.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t quite get it because I had never wanted to make jokes about Jewish people or colored people.

  But in any case, I went on with the makeup. She even let me put some on her lips. There was perfume in there, too. The expensive one called Evening in Paris. But the best thing of all was a lipstick holder that was a little stand with two holes and a poodle in between.

  “You can have that,” she said, casual as anything.

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, and pick out two lipsticks to go in it.”

  I picked out one called Peachy Keen and another one called Cherries in the Snow.

  “I’ll tell you a beauty secret: if you put white lipstick over the Cherries in the Snow, it’s absolutely gorgeous. There’s a white lipstick in there someplace. You can have it, too. Just paw around for it. You’ll find it.”

  When Sally came out, Phyllis asked her to bring down her jewelry box. As I opened it up, Phyllis said, “You won’t find a pop-it bead in there.” I could see that right away and I immediately felt embarrassed. Last year the pearly finished beads that popped together to make strands were the rage for seventh-grade girls, and Susie Grenelle and I both saved our money and bought some. “You must promise me, Georgie”— Phyllis looked at me very seriously in the mirror —“that you shall never wear pop-it beads. They are just so cheesy.”

  “Oh, I promise,” I said solemnly.

  “If there is one thing I had back before I got sick, it was style.”

  Style, I thought. That’s it exactly. That’s what Phyllis had — style. It went way beyond fads or fashion. It was just out there — not for the future, not from the past. It was timeless and completely unique.