Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

by Lorrie Moore

  “Get off it,” I said. “Get on with things.” Get a life, I might have said, but it wasn’t an expression yet. Instead I repeated the words of my sixth-grade teacher the day she’d spied my lipstick. “You’re too young,” I said, getting it down, slowly, like a chant.

  “Ha!” he cried out. But his teariness subsided a bit, and he began to smile a little awkwardly and try to flirt with me. He rubbed my head with one of his big hands like a paw. “You’ve got a lot on the ball,” he said. “Plus, you know what? My friend Arnie thinks you’re cute.” He grinned again, with this hot, funny news. “What do you think?”

  I couldn’t even remember who Arnie was. “I’ve gotta get going,” I said, finishing my beer. I didn’t want to remember who Arnie was. I didn’t want to meet Arnie, or talk to him, or have him try to touch me. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. There was nothing to touch.

  “You’re a good friend,” he said. “You’re Sils’s best friend. So, in a way, I’ve always considered you mine as well.”

  I felt revulsed.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” His speech was slurred and his grin now snaked across his face in a demented way that someone somewhere had probably told him was fetching.

  It was ten miles back to Horsehearts.

  “I’m calling a cab,” I said.

  “Oh, the cab guy?” Mike piped up gleefully, to let me know he knew. “With your little moola?” He held his hand in the air and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. God, had Sils told him everything?

  “Sure, sure.”

  I went inside the Ress and used the phone.

  “Oh, you again,” said Humphrey. “How the heck are you?”

  “I’m up at the lake, corner of Beach and Quaker is how I am.”

  “Need a ride?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I checked my wallet. I was running low. Perhaps I’d have to do more money at work tomorrow. Just once more, and then that would be it. Then I’d stop forever.

  I went back and sat at the table across from Mike, waiting for my ride. The Ress had strung chili-pepper lights above and across the patio section of this place, but there was no one sitting out here in the buggy night but us, and the forced exuberance of the lights seemed mocking and depressing. Steppenwolf blared from the jukebox inside.

  “Are you going to stay here or go back in, or what?”

  “Aw. Are you concerned?” he asked.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Arnie’ll probably show up later,” he said teasingly.

  “Where’s Sils tonight?” I asked.

  “Ha! It only took you an hour to ask. I must be having some success with you. Do you realize I never used to be able to say two words to you without you twisting around going ‘Where’s Sils?’ ”

  Now I just looked past Mike out toward Beach Road. I stared out into the night, in silence, until I could see Humphrey driving slowly past in his cab, looking for me.

  “Gotta go,” I said. I waved. I patted him on the hand, squeezed his shoulder. Nobody kissed cheeks then; it would have been a joke.

  “Yeah, go,” said Mike, some new blame in his voice. “Yeah, go on in your expensive little Killer Cab.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, and turned on my heels and left, trotted out toward the intersection, waving a hand to signal Humphrey, who was now turning around and driving back toward the Ress parking lot.

  “Where’s your friend?” he asked when I got in.

  “It’s just me tonight,” I said. At last I had a man driving me, waiting down the street just for me, though of course I had to pay him.

  The next morning it was eighty degrees by seven o’clock. We were in a heat wave; all the fans my parents owned were on and swirling the thick air around our house. At seven-thirty the phone rang, and I stumbled out into the hallway to get it.

  “What did you tell Mike last night?” It was Sils. Her voice was chilly but edged with hysteria.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I told him anything. What did he tell you? What did you tell him?”

  “Arnie just called. He said last night you and Mike met for drinks and afterward he was drinking and yelling loudly. He took off half-cocked and got into an accident on his motorcycle.” Here Sils began to cry in a light, shell-shocked way. “He’s in intensive care with tubes and everything. He might die.”

  Mike: what a stupid jerk. “Oh, my god,” I said instead. The car and motorcycle accidents of the local Horsehearts boys were the staple of the community news and drama. Yet I had never known anyone who had been killed, or anyone who had died, not really, not well. My grandfather had died when I was three, but I couldn’t remember it.

  “Is he conscious?” was all I could think of to say.

  “No.” Now something caught in Sils, something realized, and she began to cry in an insistent, bleating way. “I’ve got to go see him.”

  It was a three-mile walk to the county hospital. “I’ll call Humphrey,” I said. “I’ll have him meet us by the park pond at what—nine o’clock? That way we won’t have to walk in this heat. You won’t be all sweaty and gross when you see Mike.” I don’t know why I said the last part; I just threw it in.

  “Berie, he’s unconscious,” she said sternly.

  “I know that,” I said. Nothing anyone said that morning made any sense to me.

  Thus began a two-week period when, every other day, either before or after Storyland, and always on our days off, in the sweltering heat, we took Humphrey’s cab to the county hospital, stayed for an hour, then phoned Humphrey again and had him come pick us up. This let my mother off the hook a bit (“I’m getting a ride to work with Sils and her brother,” I’d call from the front door), but it took money. So I managed to acquire a little extra at my register.

  After two days Mike had returned to consciousness, “or his version of it,” I said to Sils, and in her relief she actually laughed; by the second week he was giving Sils come-hither looks, saying things like “Gedover ’ere, you,” wanting her to snuggle next to him amid the tubes.

  I got in a wheelchair and for fun trundled up and down the corridors. Mike and Sils shared an understanding, newly worked out in Mike’s hospital bed, amid the sheets and TV and bad fluorescent lighting, that the accident had been caused by a combination of her abortion and a truck.

  I didn’t say a word. I zoomed up and down the hallways in the wheelchair, nodding good morning to everyone. I smiled in a cheerful but authoritative manner. One time I accidentally backed into an elevator and went all the way down to the lobby. Once I was there, I decided to see how far I could go. I pushed through the revolving door. I hit the street.

  No one stopped me. I wheeled myself halfway downtown—past the hospital gardens, past the guest houses and the Grand Union and the junior high. I even tried a wheelie off the curb, which spilled me out into the street and scraped my knee, but still no one was looking. Finally, I turned around and pushed the thing back. I stopped at the Grand Union and got a Coke.

  “Your father’s worried about you,” my mother said to me one night, in her nightgown, standing over me in a looming way.

  “Dad?” I was clipping my toenails, sending hard yellowed crescents flying through the room with each clip.

  “Will you stop that while I’m speaking to you? Have you no respect for anything?” She stepped in from the doorway and swatted my thigh.

  “What?” I looked up. Her formerly bleached blond hair was now a tigerish mix of black and white; she was getting a mustache. Her hazel eyes flashed with hate.

  “When I bring you to or from work, you’re sullen in the car, half the time we don’t see you at dinner, you haven’t spoken to your father or brother or LaRoue for weeks, or been to church in months, and how about your grandmother? Have you taken the time to go visit her? She doesn’t have that much longer to live, you know!”

  My Grandmother Carr lived in a large Victorian house in the middle
of Horsehearts. It was a house full of what my grandmother called “davenports” and “chesterfields.” “Don’t put your feet on the chesterfield, dear.”

  “You mean the couch,” my brother, Claude, always said, to be rude.

  There were three cellos in the house; one had belonged to my grandfather. The other two belonged to my grandmother, who often gave lessons in town, and whenever we visited she got out one of the cellos and played a piece for us, while we sat on one of the davenports, squirming and pinching each other when she couldn’t see. Later, when I was older, I realized how beautifully she’d played. But when I was little, most of the interest such an event held for me was in watching such a formal woman—“a true Victorian lady,” as my father worshipfully described her—place this large woman-shaped object between her legs and hold it there with her knees, her finger vibrating along the neck in an insectlike movement up and down, the bow in a slow saw across the strings, angling this way or that, gently, to find the note. My grandmother always gazed down upon her cello, like the Holy Mother upon the Holy Child, or perhaps like one woman beholding another at her knees.

  “Are you done?” Claude was often the first to ask, and my grandmother would smile with a kind of wan forgiveness and say, “Yes. I’m done.”

  “I’ll go see her soon,” I said now to my mother. I’d made such a promise before, but what the heck: I made it again.

  “And,” my mother continued, “Mrs. Lollick at church would like you to come help in the nursery again.” The year before, every third Sunday, while my parents attended the service, I had helped baby-sit in the Baptist church nursery—a large pink room with cribs at one end; at the other hung an enormous gold-framed painting of Jesus, whose upward gaze and caramel-colored locks gave him the look of a dewy Kenny Loggins. This alone made helping in the nursery better than sitting out in the sanctuary listening to the service, surrounded by old women in wool felt hats with fish-netty little veils, long furry animals draped heads and paws and all around the collars of their coats. During the sermons, I had always stared at the bright stained glass—Jesus as Shepherd—and, in my mind, recolored it, in head shop blacks and mauves. My parents had become Baptists after they had married, leaving the Catholic and Episcopalian churches for something they’d felt was more suited to them. Now they never missed a week. They sang in the choir. They ushered. They prayed.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll phone her.”

  “And that’s not even my main point here,” said my mother. “The main point is that you seem drifty and unfocused.”

  “What?” I grinned up at her and crossed my eyes. It was the sort of response I might have made to Sils, whom it would have cracked up, but to my mother it was only impudence.

  She leaned over and slapped me hard across the face. “You heard me,” she said, and slammed the door.

  Once, I went too far with the wheelchair; I went all the way downstreet, stopping and staring in the store windows. It was early morning, and no one was there. By the time I got back to the hospital, Sils had already left.

  “Sils left,” said Mike. “She didn’t know where you’d gone.”

  “I was outside, fooling around with the wheelchair.”

  “She thought maybe you got sick of waiting.”

  “Oh, well.” “Yeah. Oh, well. She didn’t know. She had to go to work.”

  “So do I,” I said. Now I’d have to call my mother. Or a cab. “So, I should go myself.” Mike looked recovered to me. Confident and condescending in that boy way, that way that illness and injury usually eradicated. But now it was back. He was off the glucose drip. He was watching a lot of TV. “I’m glad you’re better,” I said.

  “Are you?” He grinned, in, that strange lopsided style he had.

  “Sure. What do you mean?”

  “I mean, here’s me, all laid up in the hospital, and there’s you—probably with your lezzy fantasies—”

  “What are you talking about, you pig?”

  “I’m talking about you with Sils, how you act like … I don’t know. I’m just wondering. Thinking out loud.”

  I picked up my big rope purse, which I’d left by the nightstand, and walked out.

  “Oh, come on,” I could hear him saying behind me. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  Isabelle, Herb, my mother, now Mike Suprenante getting on my nerves. My life like an old turnip: several places at once going bad. The next night it was Isabelle again. She called me up to her office, a large, polka-dotted room above the main entrance. I sat down in the card-table chair in front of her desk.

  “What’s going on with your register?”

  “What do you mean?” I was tense and held my back straight as a board.

  “Sometimes you’re short, sometimes you’re over. Are you locking the register and taking the key on your lunch hour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you emptying the drawer and taking the money box with you on breaks?”

  “Mostly,” I said.

  She looked at me sternly. She wore spike heels and nylons, even in the direst heat, and I could hear one of her legs swing scratchily back and forth. “Don’t do that anymore,” she said about the money box. “We’re not going to do that anymore.”

  “OK.”

  “We’re going to put you over at the Lakeside entrance tomorrow.”

  The Lakeside entrance was unknown to most of the tourists, and so it was always slow there. The times I’d worked there before I’d spent the whole time writing Sils a long note on a spare roll of orange ticket tape. The note had been full of jokes about Stan the security guard and Mary at the gift shop having an affair.

  But there was no one to tear tickets there—you tore them yourself—so it was the easiest place of all the registers to sell stubs.

  I sat out there by myself that day, writing Sils a note. Hey, bébé, it began, in the same imbecilic way as all the others. What you say we meet for a smokin’ good time tonight?

  “Is this an entrance to the amusement park?” asked a middle-aged couple with a young boy.

  They read the prices on the board outside. “He’s only two,” said the woman, pointing at the boy. “And he’s only what, eleven?” She pointed to her husband.

  “You’re only two?” I studied the boy, who was at least eight.

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “And how about me?” asked the man. He was wearing white shoes, a white golf shirt, and sky-blue pants. His neck and arms were sunburned and corded with veins. “I’m only two, too.”

  “Mentally he’s only two,” said his wife.

  Once you had seen enough people go through your register you realized everyone was the same: they looked the same, said the same things; they were all the same.

  All the same, I scribbled large on my current ticket-tape note to Sils, right in front of them; full of the stupidities that obviously keep their marriage going. I wrote in a careful, loopy script, waiting as they tried to figure out how old they were.

  I looked out through my window at the boy. “If you’re not as tall as that sign and at least nine years old,” I said, “you won’t be able to go on the rides alone. It has to do with the park’s insurance policy.” No doubt he’d be back for a “grow-up,” a system Herb had devised to let kids come back to the cashier and pay the difference in admission so they could ride the rides alone. “We’ve got a grow-up here,” he liked to say, ushering some boy to the register. “We’ve got a boy here who suddenly, magically grew up.”

  There was money in grow-ups. When no one was looking, you just wrote “grow-up” on a stub, stuck it in the register, and took out the price of a child’s ticket.

  “I know,” said this boy now, looking unhappy and trapped.

  “Two adults and an under-six,” the couple said to me.

  “That’s twenty dollars forty cents,” I said, not pressing any numbers, just pressing No Sale and letting the drawer pop out with a brrinnng.

&nbs
p; “How much?” the man asked. He kept looking past the Plexiglas window, trying to get a view of the register total. But the numbers only said “0.00.”

  “Twenty dollars forty cents,” I repeated. He gave me the exact change, which I temporarily placed in the register, shutting the drawer. Later, I would take it out.

  “There you go,” I said, handing them three ticket stubs. “Keep your tickets for the rides.”

  They frowned and waved and pushed their way through the turnstile, then turned the corner into the park and disappeared.

  I waited a while before I rang the drawer open to take out the money. I waited to see if I heard anyone, someone just inside the entrance, someone crouching in a bush, someone lurking behind the cashier’s booth, perhaps, where I couldn’t see: someone with a walkie-talkie, or maybe just Stan the security guard on a cigarette break. But there seemed to be nobody, nothing, just the usual distant happy cries of kids, and so I rang the drawer open and then when I looked up over the register I saw Isabelle out of nowhere in her angry clicking spike heels, rounding the corner by the Baa-Baa Black Sheep Petting Pen and walking briskly toward the entrance. She was followed by Herb, who looked red-faced and vexed, and a policeman looking bored but stern—in a professional way. Isabelle pushed through the exit turnstile and knocked on my glass with her knuckles.

  “OK,” she said, “close up this register. We’re shutting down this entrance.” Then she came to the side of my booth, unlocked the door, and pulled it open. With a sweep of her arm, she ushered me out. I pushed the register drawer shut and did as I was told. My chest was pounding. I was in trouble. That family, I thought. They were spies, plants, part of some in-house detective scheme. The nausea of all the rides—the spinning teacups, the whirling Black Widow—entered me, and I turned momentarily away in a sweat. My heart beat in a loud panic, and I struggled to breathe normally.