At Round the World, you could shoot a ball through the sphinx in Egypt or the Eiffel Tower. Evelyn knew more about Egypt than she did about miniature golf, that was for sure. She had no hand-eye coordination, but she was a good sport. And I have to say that she looked even weirder than usual. Evelyn’s clothes were odd, to put it mildly. They often looked too big for her and as if they had been made for someone else. This suspicion was confirmed that night. She was wearing a pair of madras plaid shorts (that was OK, very popular print), but they looked way too big. It turned out that they had once been her mom’s madras skirt, and her mom had cut them up and turned them into shorts. With her mom being a doctor and all, I hoped she was better at cutting and sewing up people than clothes. Her mother, I felt, should give up on fashion and hair and just stick to being a doctor. For it was her mom who was responsible for Evelyn’s disastrous hairstyle.
Evelyn had told me this about the second or third time we got together, when I said that her hair looked a lot shorter. She explained that she cut it every two weeks to get rid of the frizz from the home permanent her mother had given her and botched. Apparently her mom hadn’t left the neutralizer on long enough, so Evelyn’s hair sizzled off her head as if she had stuck her finger into an electrical socket. Again, one would think that a doctor would have known better. After all, it was chemistry and stuff.
We had fun playing mini golf. The hardest shot actually was the Great Wall of China. Evelyn knew about this, too — four thousand miles long, started around 200 BC by the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang — Evelyn was amazing! Dad won, but not by much. His score was fifty, mine was fifty-two, and Eveyln’s was ninety-seven!
After the game, he took us to the Dairy Queen, and I got a vanilla swirl cone dipped in chocolate. Then we dropped off Evelyn. Her dad was a tall skinny man. When he came down the front walk, he reminded me of one of those stick-legged birds that wade in marshes. His head bobbed a bit, as if he were ready to poke in the mud for a tasty morsel. I noticed his shorts were too big. I wondered if his wife had made them out of a coat or something.
“She’s a lovely girl,” Dad said as we drove home.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Just yeah? That’s not very enthusiastic.”
“No, I mean I like her a lot. She’s real nice.” But when your parents said someone was lovely, it seemed as if even they knew she was not very cool. It was a kind of tacit acknowledgment of that person’s weirdness. I tried very hard not to think of my old friends having a slumber party that evening. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that indeed there was a great party going on with my old friends on the other side of town and that if it weren’t for the fact that the temperature was still in the high eighties, I might as well be in Siberia.
By the time we got home, it was just starting to get dark. Emmett had already left for Phyllis’s. Mom had set up a reclining lawn lounger with my sleeping bag spread out and a small table that had a thermos of lemonade. I didn’t make the potato-chip sandwiches. It didn’t seem right without Emmett. He had left me, in addition to the Lancaster telescope, another smaller telescope that I could operate from a reclining position.
Through the trees, I could just catch the gasps of the great insect. I settled back, tipped my face up to the sky, and tried to see what might be happening or about to happen as we humans on our teensy-weensy planet Earth in its orbit around the sun passed through the trash of blown-up comets. See, that’s what shooting stars really are — comet bits. Emmett explained it to me. The bits are vaporized by friction, and what we see as a streak of light is really heated up vapor that looks like a shooting star.
The truly good show wouldn’t begin until close to midnight, because that was when Earth began to turn so that it was facing the stream of oncoming comet bits. But it was a clear night, and Mom and Dad had thoughtfully turned off all the lights on this side of the house so as not to spoil the darkness. One good thing about our new neighborhood was that there were no street lights. So this made it even better to see the sky. Emmett would always talk about people who abuse the night, and he didn’t mean criminals. He meant families and towns and big cities that had so much electricity that they ruined the darkness, the black that allowed the stars to be seen. But nothing was being abused tonight. It was clear and the sky was powdered with stars. The Milky Way arched over me, and I knew that we, our solar system, were no more than a grain of salt in it. So why in this infinity of things did one beautiful teenage girl on the planet Earth have to be locked in that gleaming cylinder, her lungs useless, and life brought to her through a cable and tricks with mirrors?
There was a meteor in the poem, the awful poem that I had read now with a kind of terrible fascination at least four times. The meteor came with the knight Lancelot, and the lady in the tower caught a glimpse of both in her mirror.
All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.
As often thro’ the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright,
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
Moves over still Shalott.
His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d;
On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow’d
His coal-black curls as on he rode,
As he rode down to Camelot.
From the bank and from the river
He flash’d into the crystal mirror,
“Tirra lirra,” by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
That was the beginning of the end for the Lady of Shalott. She left the web, she left the loom, and it was just when I was lost in the hypnotic rhythms of the poem that ran through my head that the first shooting star came by. “Oooh!” I rose up from the lounge chair and let the night swirl around me.
There were at least three more in the next quarter of an hour. I was waiting for another one and had set up the Lancaster to look at the dark regions, the “ditches” is what Emmett called them, in the Milky Way. The ditches intrigued Emmett. He thought there was stuff, cosmic stuff in them that we just didn’t have the technology to discover yet. That’s what he wanted to do — discover a hidden universe.
The moon had risen and was really full. It made it harder to see any shooting stars now. So I decided to go around to the driveway and try to shoot some baskets myself. I really wasn’t that bad. Emmett had taught me a few things. I had pretty good aim if I just stood still and shot. But he had been teaching me layups, and maybe one out of twenty times I actually did get the ball through the hoop.
When I came around I could hear music coming from the house and a voice like a velvet ribbon sliding through the night. It was Frank Sinatra.
My parents were dancing! Their silhouettes glided across the drawn shades of our living room. They periodically did this. It was terminally embarrassing to me. But tonight I wasn’t embarrassed. I was just once again engulfed in that feeling of loneliness and utter insignificance as I stood there in the middle of our driveway holding a basketball. It just seemed that of the four people in our family, I had to give up the most of anyone. I looked up at the hoop. The moon sailed right over it. What was I supposed to do — slam-dunk the moon?
It was the morning after THE DATE. I was in my room working on the diorama. The first level was almost complete. This was the undersea part, and if I do say so myself, it was beautiful. I had ripped out the old green-and-blue clay and put in this clear gel stuff that came in two colors, aquamarine and turquoise, that I found at a craft store. My mom had found me a teeny-weeny pink rubber baby that was used for decorating packages for baby showers. This was Baby O., as I called him, son of Poseidon, the sea god, and Euryale, the daughter of the king of Crete. I had whole boxes of miniature figurines that I had either made or found in the dollhouse secti
ons of toy stores. So his childhood and youth took up one half of the bottom level of the diorama. I was planning on mounting the entire thing on a lazy Susan, one of those spinning trays for serving food. My mom had one and said I could use it. But Dad had cut me a bigger platform to put on the spinning base so I would have more room to develop the story. You turned the tray to see the scenes in his life, and this first level was his subterranean life, which would transition to a slightly higher level, that of his terrestrial life. The third level would be the stars. But he doesn’t get there until he dies. I had the three levels all worked out. It was a kind of spiral from sea to sky.
Due to Orion’s marine heritage, he had this knack of being able to walk on waves. He would do this to get to land, where he became the mighty hunter, followed by a big dog and a little dog, or, as they are known in astronomy, Canis Major and Canis Minor. I was right now building the waves that were really steps to land when the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Georgie. It’s Phyllis!” Mom shouted.
I had not seen Phyllis since the weird spasm thing in her leg had happened, but seeing as it was the morning just after THE DATE, I was certain that this was what she wanted to talk to me about. I was dying to know how things had gone but was afraid to pry. To my delight, she was eager to talk.
“Come over here, Georgie,” she said as soon as I set foot in the sunroom. She rotated the mirrors so they all caught my reflection. I didn’t even have to walk over. She had me. When Phyllis asked someone to come close, it was really just her way of being polite. They didn’t have to move an inch to speak to her. She caught them in her web of mirrors. Sometimes I thought of Phyllis like a spider. She sat in the middle of this web of light reflected from all those mirrors and drew us in. The beams of light were like the silk threads of a spider’s web.
“You got scared here the other day.” It was not a question. Phyllis, unlike most people, never asked questions that she knew the answer to. Perhaps that’s what happened when you were hooked to a mechanical creature that doled out one thousand breaths per hour and eight-and-a-half million per year. You didn’t waste air. “Look, Georgie,” she continued. “I’ve been lying in this machine for over a year. Things happen to your legs, your arms, everything, when you can’t move them. My spine is a tangled mess. Probably looks like a cross between a fishhook and a corkscrew. When I got sick, I weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. I think I weigh about seventy-five now. My body has changed. No muscle mass.”
I know this! I know so much! I wanted to say. I had read about it. The March of Dimes reports. The articles Evelyn and I found at the library. All of it.
“I can’t move. My motor nerves are destroyed but not the sensory ones. So I can still feel things. Mostly pain, unfortunately.” Her voice lowered. “The thing that I am supposed to say now is that I haven’t changed. That my mind, my brain, is still the same. But that’s just a lie, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or don’t believe it if they do.”
I had wanted to ask her what she was like before, before these awful things had happened to her and twisted up her body and crumpled her lungs. But I never did. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this now except that there were no lies between Phyllis and me, and she wanted me to know the truth about her and the disease. And I wanted to know. I wanted to know it all.
“What happened when you got sick? Were you just well one minute and then sick the next?”
“Not minutes, more like hours. But it was still fast. It was in August, August fifth, 1951. I had gone to a party the night before with a bunch of kids and then me and Melinda and Betty had wound up at Northview, the drive-in restaurant. We were in Betty’s new car — two-tone blue Chevrolet convertible with the top down.” Phyllis gave a little hicuppy laugh. “We were actually following a really cute guy who we all had a crush on. He had just moved to town. . . . Well, not exactly following him, but you know.”
I sat there, and in every mirror there was a reflection of my mouth hanging wide open listening to Phyllis. This story was an Archie comic book come true. Phyllis had been having the perfect Archie evening. Cute girls with ponytails swinging, one even named Betty, driving around town in nifty cars — a two-toned blue Chevy convertible, she had said — plotting how they were going to meet this new guy!
“Well, the next morning,” Phyllis continued, “I was just exhausted. I had never felt so tired in my whole life. I thought it was just from staying up late, but still it seemed a little strange. At the breakfast table, I got sort of dizzy. I remember trying to hold on to the edge of the table, actually, and then I just excused myself and went upstairs to my room to lie down. That was the last time I ever walked. That was one year, eight days ago.” She looked at the clock mounted on the ceiling over her head. “Seven hours, fourteen minutes ago. Within a half an hour of lying down, I couldn’t move my legs. I called to my mother, and she called my dad at work. He got an ambulance. In the ambulance, I started to have trouble breathing. They called ahead on the radio phone and told the Saint Vincent’s Emergency Room to prepare an iron lung. I nearly died that night. If it hadn’t been for the iron lung, I would have.” She bit her lip when she said this, and the color drained out of her face. “If it hadn’t been for you!” There was a hiss that lashed the air, and it was not the taunting mechanical hiss of the machine. It was human and purely malevolent. And all the mirrors snarled with the reflection of Phyllis’s twisted face. “If it hadn’t been for the Creature.”
Something inside of me began to cave in. She didn’t look fragile anymore. Deep inside me, a sense of danger welled up. Except this time it was a little different. It wasn’t just some vague danger. It was Phyllis who looked dangerous.
Emmett was going over there every night. They were officially dating — at least in my mind. One evening Phyllis asked that I come over, too. Emmett seemed sort of surprised and not entirely enthusiastic. But I suddenly realized that maybe she was including me because she had told me so much about the day she got sick, maybe even more than she had told Emmett. It was as if the barriers had come down. She knew that she could be truthful with me about everything now.
Emmett was already there, and when I came up on the patio, she was looking up at the sky. The mirrors did not even swing to catch me. “I want to know if something is real, or if I am just hallucinating. You know that they have me on all these drugs, and sometimes they have side effects.”
“OK, what do you want to know?” Emmett said.
“Well, is that star in the beak of the swan sort of blue?”
Emmett froze for a couple of seconds. An expression washed over his face that I had never seen before. He was very still. For the first time he was not simply looking at Phyllis’s reflection, but directly at her. “Goddamn, Phyllis are you really seeing blue?”
“Yeah, am I crazy or what?”
Emmett and I were both amazed, amazed almost beyond belief. There is a sort of trick to seeing colors, and the trick is to use contrast. So if you pick out a white star next to one rumored to have color and flick your eyes back and forth between the two you can sometimes pick up the color of one. It’s a talent really, a gift. Phyllis had that gift. She saw both the blue and the gold of the stars in the beak of the swan Cygnus. It was a binary star, a double star.
“You’re not crazy,” Emmett said. “But there’s a definite knack to it.”
“Well, I must have it. ’Cause I think I see other colors, too.”
“Where?” He came over and crouched down next to her. His eyes were following her eyes. Her blond curls shimmered, and I saw his left hand trembling slightly. It was as if it were in a fight with itself. He wanted to touch her head, but he was afraid to. I couldn’t take my eyes off either of them. Binary stars! That’s what Phyllis and Emmett looked like. With interlocking gravitational fields, the two binary stars orbit each other. It is like a slow dance in the night sky. They were whispering now. I could barely hear them.
“Over there. What’s that constellation that
’s rising, I don’t know, sort of to the right near the swan?” Phyllis asked
“Arcturus?” Emmett said. There was real excitement in his voice.
“Yeah, yeah, looks kind of purple — like neon grape,” Phyllis said.
“Neon grape!” Emmett spoke in a hush, an awed hush.
It was so extraordinary that he wheeled the scope over and adjusted the eye cup to her eye so she could see the colors better. I watched his fingers lingering on her cheek and around her eyebrow. Their heads were so close together, one blond, one dark red, that their hair grazed. And once Phyllis began looking through the scope, she just went on and on naming colors. She wasn’t a primary color type of person. She would never just settle for red, white, or blue, or yellow. No, it had to be a “creamy ruby,” a “dusty emerald.”
So that night, as the stars rose in the sky and sorted themselves into constellations, Phyllis became the namer of colors. And she named them, hues that no one had ever thought of but were in fact their true colors if you took the time to really look. I’ll never forget Emmett’s face that evening. When he wasn’t looking at the sky, he was looking at Phyllis. She might as well have been a star, a star that had fallen straight down into this backyard in Indiana.
So together they wandered the constellations until morning when the black of the night faded to gray and the first of the morning stars began to rise and tremble in the dawn.
Chasing Orion Page 11