Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

by Lorrie Moore

  The following week Sils went to the local doctor, was given a pregnancy test and a referral. Then we phoned Humphrey, our cabbie, got him to meet us at the rear entrance of Horsehearts Park, near the pond where the heartless horses had reputedly been tossed, and we hopped into our cab to Vermont.

  “Glad to see you girls again.” The drive was along the old Boston Post Road, and then up through farmland, mountains, past little orchards and churchyards with saintly white churches and graves. It was going to cost seventy-five dollars, round-trip, tip included. I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right—wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.

  “Glad to see you, too,” I said.

  Now the countryside rolled by us, in a timeless way, and I felt like Robin Hood within it. Rob, pay, give away: however improvised, there was beauty to thievery; there were also rules. But I felt I understood them. I felt the pure priestly rush of their fulfillment swell and shrink and swell again within me.

  We had the address of the clinic—217 Elm Street, Rutland—and we had six hundred and fifty dollars in fives and tens, a few twenties. Sils was wearing a shirt of mine—a green floral blouse with puffed shoulders and tiny buttons down the front. For some reason she’d wanted to. She’d stood in front of my closet and pulled it off the hanger. “Can I wear this to my abortion?” she’d asked, and, startled, I said, “Sure, if you want,” though the request frightened me and caused me to think too much about blood. I wondered whether I should have said yes at all. But now she sat beside me, wearing it, looking better in it than I ever could, her breasts pushing out at the fabric, whereas mine always shrank and shivered behind the hollow drape of it.

  We passed through Hope, Argyle Hall, Mt. Bliss, and East Creek, the site of the East Creek Doll Hospital, where, when I was little, my mother would take my dolls to be repaired, an old Victorian house filled to the rafters with broken dolls—Barbies and baby dolls sitting bright-eyed all on top of one another in the parlor, on the stairs to upstairs, in the casements of the windows. The old woman who lived there collected dolls for their spare parts, eyes and limbs mostly, and if your doll had anything wrong with it, you could bring it to this woman, and she would fix it, keep it overnight. “We’ll just keep her overnight and give her some tea and some rest.” She was crotchety and doddering but with a magic wink that softened her face so that children could see she wasn’t scary; she wanted that known. Many of the grown-ups in town, the ones without daughters, didn’t know for sure. Her house seemed a witchy one, with spiders on the porch and a skyload of bats flying from her chimney at dusk.

  Now that we were passing the house I wondered whether the woman was still there. Ten years had gone by—how old would she be now? I remembered years before seeing boxes out behind the house, boxes of just arms, or just legs, or just eyes, and I wondered what it would be like to see those boxes now, on this particular errand, from this particular cab. I twisted to see, as the taxi sped past, and could see heads and faces and little dresses in the front window. The house was still white with pink trim; there was still a porch swing, and a wishing well in the yard, but there was now also a gas station and a Qwik Stop next door.

  “There’s the doll hospital,” sighed Sils, “with all its cheap irony.” Cheap Irony was the name of her brothers’ old band.

  “Yeah,” I said. I twisted back toward her, to look at her, but she turned quickly away, leaned up against the armrest, and looked out at the hot road.

  In those days in Horsehearts nothing, no building, had air-conditioning. After a summer rain, humidity soaked into the wood—the moldings, railings. Windows swelled at the sashes and joints. The steps and banisters went pulpy soft, the varnish gummy, the doors sticky and suddenly trapezoidal. The steamy heat fogged the glass, made every cracker in the house go stale. Earwigs roamed and measured the sinks. The hot tar roofs and rubber-lined gutters filled the air with a damp burnt smell.

  But here, in this cab, there was air-conditioning. Things were sharp and clean—a luxury that took all sense of emergency out of what we were doing. It seemed we had won a little prize, and no matter our sadnesses we got to go on our cool, crisp trip. We said very little. Once in a while Humphrey turned on some music—we heard most of “A Horse with No Name”—but the reception wasn’t good through the mountains, and so mostly he’d turn the radio off again. Ordinarily, we might have sung in the silence, but I wasn’t going to unless Sils did first. I kept looking to see whether she would. “La-la-la-la-la-la,” she sang out once in a joky way, and then stopped.

  “Loo-loo,” I sang. “Lee-lee.”

  We passed charred old farmhouses, orchards, and cornfields. “We could all do a frog chorus,” I suggested loudly. A frog chorus was where each person said the name of a vegetable over and over, everybody doing it at once, at differing pitches, to create an amusing din. Potato, potato, potato. Carrot, carrot, I don’t carrot all.

  Sils gave me a dismal, withering look, one that said, “Don’t be pathetic.” Then she turned back toward the window.

  God, how life was full of moments that should have gone differently but didn’t.

  “Rutland! We’re here!” called out Humphrey. “What’s the address again?”

  “Elm Street,” said Sils quickly, looking a little pale. “Two-seventeen.” She had memorized it like a combination to a lock. When the cab pulled up in front, she got out quickly, swung her shepherd’s bag purse over her shoulder, and walked fast.

  “Wait here,” I said to Humphrey, wondering how it felt to be bossed around by two girls.

  “Whatever,” he said. I handed him thirty-five dollars, then I too got out fast and followed Sils, and my green shirt, to the sign that said Clinic Entrance.

  Inside, after Sils signed in, and I handed the nurse all my money (except two twenties for the cab ride back, in the front pocket of my shorts) and the nurse counted it out on the reception desk in front of us, we sat in old brown leather chairs, waiting for Sils’s name to be called. I’d brought a deck of cards, and we played honeymoon bridge for at least twenty minutes, me winning, and then Sils winning, and then basically a tie.

  “Silsby Anne Chaussée?” read a nurse off a clipboard, though there was no one else in the room.

  “Bye,” I peeped.

  “Bye,” Sils squeaked back.

  I waited there for a while, reading pamphlets—“Contraception,” “Venereal Disease and You”—the heat of the room beading in the philtrum of my lip. Then I headed back outside to sit in the air-conditioned cab with Humphrey.

  I climbed into the backseat and slammed the door. The air was icy and startling in a nice way. “Hi,” I said. What must he think of us, of what we were doing? He didn’t say. He simply stared out the front windshield and occasionally looked into the rearview mirror.

  “Thought I’d wait in here,” I said.

  “That’s fine.” He shifted in his seat a little.

  “Do you want to play honeymoon bridge?” I asked.

  He shifted, twisted around slightly, and smiled in a lopsided, ungainly way. “How’s it go?”

  I hoped he wasn’t going to be perverted. You never knew. “I’ll show you,” I said in a teacherly way, and I climbed out with my cards and got into the front seat with him, dealt out the hands, and explained.

  After ten minutes, he was shifting excitedly in his seat. “I think I’m getting the hang of this,” he announced. His short legs thrashed with joy.

  “It’s a great game,” I said, though I was losing, too timid in the bidding.

  After about forty-five minutes there was a knock at the window. It was Sils looking hot and annoyed, and I leaped out to greet her. I put my hand on her thin tan upper arm.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I came out here
where it was cooler.”

  Humphrey reached around to unlock the back door and we both piled in, Sils a little gingerly, I with a kind of rushed efficiency, still clutching my bridge hand. Humphrey handed me the rest of the pack. “All set? Time to go back?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Can we stop for a Coke somewhere on the way?” Sils asked a little absently.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No problem,” added Humphrey and I simultaneously, like a frog chorus after all.

  Through the whole drive back I kept trying to steal glances at Sils to see if she looked any different. She had now gone through so many things that I hadn’t, I wondered more than ever whether she could still like me, be the same as she had been, or even remember things we’d done together. Was there a ghost, an amphibious baby ghost, flying out behind us, above us, all the way home like a kite? Under Sils’s arms there were dark circles of perspiration on my green shirt. Her hair had grown oily and the front had separated into strands. I leaned over to loosen the buckle of my sandals, and when I turned to look up at her, from that angle, I could see a small, golden bugger floating in the dark of her right nostril like a star—odd and alone, speaking dizzily without words.

  We found a drive-in—Custard’s Last Stand—five miles past the Vermont state line, and there we all got out for Cokes, all three of us sitting awkwardly on one of the picnic tables outside. We gave Humphrey the money, and he got out of the car, limping from the hip, and fetched the drinks. We had commandeered this round, broken egg of a man—the human omelette!—but he seemed to like it. Back beside us, he sipped his own Coke slowly, expectantly. He looked happily around at us to see what we’d say next, as if we were the source of unending amusement and surprise. The Green Mountains were to the back of us, the Adirondacks to the front, and although the sun set sooner in the mountains, it was still only five o’clock, the very summit of a long summer afternoon, and it wouldn’t be dark until nine. Four more hours of sun and heat and this day—which I was starting to experience with the vertigo of the sick, the way the sick fall beneath the slats of each minute, looking up at things from the spaces in between, the world faraway and in stripes of light—would be over. I felt not myself. I felt beneath somewhere, in a pool of breath and gas.

  I had to work at Storyland that night, the seven-to-ten shift, strange for me, but I was taking over for another cashier who needed the night off for a party, she said, though she’d told Isabelle her aunt had died and she had to go to the wake.

  “You girls take care” was all Humphrey said, before he dropped us both off at Storyland, where Mike was waiting to pick up Sils.

  “Where’ve you been?” Mike yelled over his revving Harley, and I saw her weakly, automatically, get on his motorcycle and forget to wave to me until they were halfway down the road and then she looked back and waved.

  Inside, Storyland was mobbed with people, but the dressing room was empty, and I changed into my ludicrous uniform in an open, careless way, no longer hiding myself, no longer letting my shirt form a large wreath around my neck to hide my chest but just letting my whole body briefly live in the air of the room as I never really had, in my shame at looking so little. Seeing my reflection in one of the mirrors on the side of a row of lockers I could see how lanky and thin I was, skeletal; there were dark circles under my eyes, bug bites on my sticklike arms, bruises on my shins. But my hair was in a cloud, bushy in the heat, wild and wavy, and it alone caused me to feel that I was starting to bloom, that I was a blossom bursting out the top of myself, through the skull, like an anemone the very heat of whose thoughts caused appendages to sprout searchingly in water: I was no longer just a girl with nothing to think or do. For a moment, before I walked out with my straw hat and uniform and money box to stand mechanically in the muggy night, I was something else.

  THERE IS a joke about a middle-aged woman who happens upon a frog in the woods. “Kiss me! Kiss me!” says the frog, “and I’ll turn into a handsome prince!”

  The woman stares, entranced, but doesn’t move.

  “What’s the matter?” asks the frog, growing impatient. “Don’t you want a handsome prince?”

  “I’m sorry,” says the woman, “but at this point in my life I’m actually more interested in a talking frog.”

  “I get it,” says Daniel. “That’s funny. That’s good.” I take his hand, lay it across my mouth, press it there. In travel one’s husband’s body becomes yours; you become united, merged, and you have the same arguments with it that you would with your own. Travel, at those times, becomes love, possession, the second wedding—not just an excuse an unhappy person can use to wear the same clothes every day. Which is what it could be, otherwise.

  The gurgling coo of pigeons awakens us each morning. “Wake up and eat the daisies,” Daniel whispers to me. We watch the pigeons leap winglessly from the ledges, as if in sailor dives, only spreading their wings at the last minute.

  “Is that for aerodynamics?” I ask. “Is that to work up momentum?”

  “It’s laziness,” says Daniel. “They’re just being lazy.”

  Here in the Marais we wake early in the mornings and are in bed early at night. We miss National Public Radio. We miss recycling, as silly or meager as that sounds. Everything we use here must be thrown away, and it bothers us, robbed of our rituals of composting and reclamation, our daily treks out back to the rot-heap, where we offer the Earth scraps of itself, returning nature to nature! Expediting the Global Easter, when all shall rise again! Though we mean it, and mean to, we’ve never actually used the compost: it is merely an act of apology.

  While here for three weeks we live in unapologetic sin. Touristic waste, native presumption. The Parisian meanness makes us despair, so grounded in opinion as it is—unlike the meanness of Americans, which is all careless ego, selfishness, the stuff of spoiled, stupid children.

  At night, Daniel is tired from the medical conference he is here at the Institut de Génétique to attend. As a researcher he is mostly, recently, interested in the Tay-Sachs gene we both carry—what Jews and French Canadians have in common (“We’ll simply tell our daughter we got her retail rather than wholesale,” says Daniel, after we investigated the difficult procedures of adoption, the empty room upstairs we call the “Maybe’s Room” still empty, our desires becoming courteous, less determined, discerning the hoops and circumstances). Now this conference seems to him bogged down with squabbles about who should be in charge of the institute itself, research ownership, other such infighting. “All the lying and coffee it takes to get anything done at all,” he says, have exhausted him. “Quick, a bonbon!” he exclaims.

  “Well, you’re fighting the good fight,” I say.

  “I’m crying the good cry.” He sighs.

  “You’re doing fine.”

  I teach him a version of honeymoon bridge, the same version Sils and I used to occupy ourselves with. We don’t keep score, but we each try to win. When he gets a bad hand, he falls forward, sighing, “This hand is a foot!,” a line from some dissolute uncle of his. That—along with our Chez Stadium, mais oui/may we jokes, and Pépé LePew imitations—somehow keeps us amused, a brief contentment; it is a respite from out petty quarrels and brittle looks, arguing, as tourists do, about where we’re going, where we are, the questions no longer just metaphorical but literal, replete with angry pointing and some disgusted grabbing of maps, right out of the other’s hands.

  By Wednesday morning Daniel decides to go to a gymnase club before his meeting. He’s up promptly, with the throaty rumble of the pigeons, the sky-whitening sun, the garbage trucks trolling along the curbs, and the Siamese cat on the roof of the neighboring building, the slight honk of baby in its cry, scratching at a window to be let in. Daniel’s grown restless and irritable. “This would be a great town,” he says at breakfast over café crème, “if only everyone spoke Spanish.” His voice is full of rue. “Also, why does everyone in the whole city have to touch the bread? You go to buy bread, and the b
aker touches it, the cashier touches it, the assistant hands it over to you, then finally you yourself just tuck it under your armpit and go out and bump into other people on the street with it. How can we have a medical conference in a town with such unsanitary bread?”

  This is not simple, joky Ugly Americana. This is Daniel’s way. It is like at home when he complains about emptying the dishwasher: “This is not a time-saving device. Why has no one invented something that will just wash these things right in the cupboard?” It is his habit to locate all the lapses and betrayals of the modern world. Yet it is also his habit to want to believe what he reads. He heads for places with signs that say On parle anglais ici. “But On is never there. Have you ever noticed that?”

  “You’re doing fine here,” I say. “Think of it this way: the French love Jerry Lewis. They probably adore you.” The world in italics. “Think of this as a kind of Doctors in Paris thing. A musical.” But even the italics, it seems, are losing their italics: standing tall, passing themselves off as literal and real. Straight shooters.

  He gives me a look, then turns. “I like the weather,” he adds enthusiastically. “You need a jacket, but you don’t have to zip it!” Then he adds darkly, “It’s that Deportation Monument. That tells you who the Parisians really are.” The Deportation Memorial, in the shadow of Notre-Dame, is something we stumbled upon two days before and it left us dumbstruck. “And another thing: have you ever noticed what the supreme Parisian compliment is? ‘Oh, you speak French so well, without any accent!’ ”

  “It’s horrible,” I agree. “It’s rude.”

  “It’s more than rude,” he says. “It’s genocidal.” And he is right, I think. He is right.

  With my middling French and leather jacket—unzipped!—trying to seem residential, I go with him to the gym, to get him settled there. We pay the money and I ask the woman at the desk if there is anything else, any rule or requirement. She smiles. She looks at Daniel. “The only requirements is that you be happy man,” she says. She is tan from sunlamps and is wearing an orange leotard.