Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

by Lorrie Moore

  “We’ve been examining the numbers on the stubs from this register.” Isabelle was a fierce statue of righteousness, her arm was still hanging in the air, pointing out toward the park. In my quick, flooding fright, I felt puny and liquid, the only remedy for which was disbelief. I filled my head with so much disbelief I became dizzy and mad with it. Stan the security guard stepped impassively into the entranceway—from where? from nowhere—and lit up a cigarette in a sly and fraught way. Stan: it had been him!

  For a crazed moment, with Isabelle locking up the register and Herb putting up the This Entrance Closed sign, I tried to make a break for it. I stuffed the note to Sils in my pinafore pocket, and brushing quickly past Herb and Stan in the now crowded little entrance, I dashed out the turnstile and sprinted toward the far fence near the gift shop, its Storyland thermoses and T-shirts shining in the window. I headed for those, my afternoon shadow beneath me like a puddle, like some strange pair of dark snowshoes fitted backward. I would run through the store, then out Memory Lane into the parking lot. I’d hide behind cars, then hitch a ride. “Hey!” shouted the county cop and Herb. My straw hat flew off me. I ran faster, then something locked in my knee, my ankle twisted, and I fell, the ground flying up in my face. I lay there for a second. What was I thinking of? That I could escape? Become a fugitive? Isabelle and the men were running toward me. I sat up, and faced them, wiping grass and dirt from my elbows and legs. “I’m sorry,” I said. I lifted my hands in surrender, and then in a shrug. Herb and Isabelle yanked me up by the arms and I stood and went with them. People had stopped and were looking, the whole surreal world in a hot, bright leer like an Italian movie. I’d seen an Italian movie once with Sils.

  “Hold her tight,” said Stan to Herb, not unmusically, turning to go back to his post and putting his hat back on. He had, apparently, taken it off in the heat and hubbub. “Don’t ever let her go.”

  On Isabelle’s desk was a picture of her little girl, Gloria Deb. Isabelle had been divorced for years and she had had to work hard. Rumor had it that Frank Morenton gave her a shiny convertible every Christmas as a bonus, plus a trip to Florida.

  Now Isabelle glared at me. So many things were on the line for her. “What did you think would happen?” she shouted.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hello?” She listened for a moment. “Elle a mangé la grenouille,” she said, and then hung up. She has eaten the frog; she has nibbled the cash box. She looked at me, sighed, and scowled. She was momentarily wordless, as if due to a small, cerebral hemorrhage. I felt sorry for her. I decided, with a child’s madness, to help her out. I forced a comical smile. “Well,” I said, with manufactured lightness, “I suppose this is going to go on my permanent record.”

  She glared at me. “We’re going to have to make an example out of you. I’ll have to check with Mr. Morenton as to whether we’ll prosecute. But certainly we will ask for reimbursement. How much have you taken altogether? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand?” Her voice had acquired the fury of the betrayed, the divorced, the tired and working too hard.

  Multiple choice. I always favored A. “A hundred,” I said.

  Herb glowered at me, but one could see he was having an exciting day.

  Isabelle began to straighten the papers on her desk. “Deputy Kerry here, from the Sheriff’s Department, will take you home in his police car. We’ll phone your parents to let them know.”

  I started to cry. I broke and sobbed.

  “Put the handcuffs on her,” said Isabelle to the deputy.

  The deputy gave us all a pitiful look. “I’m sure that’s really not necessary, ma’am.”

  “Put them on her and march her right out the front door. We need this as an example to the others.”

  “All right, I guess,” he said, shrugging. He turned toward me. “You are under arrest. Put your hands behind your back.”

  I was still crying, wiping my nose with the heels of my hands. I had no Kleenex, and no one would offer me one.

  “Wait a minute,” I mumbled, and made some final attempt to clear my face of snot, then stood, turned, and thrust my hands back toward the deputy, who had unfastened his handcuffs from his belt. They were cold and stiff, adjusted tight for my thin wrists. These are the hands that had taken money, the cuffs seemed to say, and we are going to seize them, take them out of commission, chop them off. “Oh, no,” I moaned.

  I was marched down the stairs and out through the front entrance, the deputy leading the way, grasping my elbow, and carrying my fallen straw hat, though it was Park Property. I was still wearing my cashier’s uniform—Hello My Name Is Benoîte-Marie—and I was trying to hold back my tears by breathing them into my sinuses. It was four in the afternoon, and the heat of the day had gathered itself thickly, even as the sun—a hot blister of bone—had begun its descent.

  “Oh, my god!” I heard Sheryl, at the left front register, gasp behind me.

  “What happened?” asked Debbie.

  “What’s going on?” queried several Visitors to the Park, as we passed them standing in line. The loudspeakers played the Storyland theme song—now a bunch of oom-pah-pahs gone grim, like the end of La Traviata. Deputy Kerry marched me out in front of him, a light grip on my upper arm, and steered me straight across Storyland’s bright, sunny parking lot, to the back, where his car was parked. In the side of my vision I could see Sils in her stainless-steel tiara and sateen dress, pressed to the wrought-iron fence next to where her Pumpkin Coach toured. She called my name, then kept calling it, but I refused to turn. I was ugly and embarrassed; there was snot dripping down into my mouth and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want anyone else to see me. I didn’t want her to see. I twisted my neck and tried to wipe my nose on my shoulder, but I couldn’t do it.

  The entire way back to Horsehearts—me in the back, Deputy Kerry in the front—Deputy Kerry said scarcely a word. He drove steadily down the lake road, past the tee-pee-shaped gift shops selling their fake Indian trinkets, past the turquoise motels all clutched to the lakeshore as if they were contemplating hurling themselves in. What would it matter? Especially in the long winter when the world abandoned them anyway. My head was full of carcasses and ghosts.

  Deputy Kerry received a call over his radio, and he picked up the mouthpiece and spoke into it. It reminded me of riding with Humphrey in his cab; only this was the sarcastic, perverted version. How much more complicated it was for me, just me, to get a guy to drive me home from the lake. See what great lengths I had to go to! See how much ingenuity and nerve! Ho-ho! Sils had it easy. All she had to do was smile. I had to steal and weep and take on the law.

  “Where do you live?” asked Deputy Kerry as we neared the chipping, weather-beaten old Chamber of Commerce sign that read, tragicomically, Entering Horsehearts: Village of the Future. It seemed strange that Deputy Kerry was only asking me this now, where I lived. What if I’d said, “Oh, didn’t they tell you? I live in Washington, D.C.!”

  “Fish Glen Road,” I said. “Three thirty-six.”

  “Oh, over there,” he said cryptically, and took a left at the next light.

  My parents were on the front porch when we pulled up. To my dim and watery eyes, they looked faraway, two pink and furious figurines, and I realized, slowing up in front of the house, swollen-faced and handcuffed, that I didn’t know my parents well enough to be doing this to them, inflicting such an episode upon their lives. I realized that it was harder to endure the wrath and disappointment of people who’ve been kept from you, and from whom you’ve kept yourself, than it was to endure it from the people whom you knew best. All my stern upbringing was there waiting for me on the porch, its unhappy administrators waiting to administer something final and more—or perhaps, in their failure, to resign altogether, to take their leave of sternness, of administration, of me.

  My mother stood up from the porch glider on which she’d been sitting, rocking herself back and forth with one foot, the other foot tucked up
under her, her arms folded across her chest, her expression stricken and tight. My father turned from where he’d been gazing out into the mountains, rethinking his forestry degree, perhaps, or humming the most tragic Brahms he knew, or once again lamenting the snowmobiles that had wrecked the local wildlife, causing deer, now inured to the sound of motors, to dash out onto the highway and be killed. Perhaps he was making a list of all the ways your children could break your heart. He was not one to let you know what he was thinking, but he let you watch him think it, let you watch him stare into the air in which he constructed his worries and ideas, his eyes transfixed, his lips folded in. Now he turned to look at me, and the sheer height of him, even at that distance, filled me with remorse.

  Deputy Kerry unlocked my handcuffs by the car but still clutched my elbow, pushing me along in front of him like a little cart. It was a long march during which I understood that, for all the unusualness in their lives, all my parents had ever wanted was to be average, normal, useful, ordinary. They could not bear the full force and chaos of their own eccentricity, could not bear the full life of it, the complete course, all the stuff and ramifications. To see something out of line in their own children must have reminded them of all that they were and could not hide from. It must have reminded them of the deep and sorrowful loneliness of themselves, which they had tried so desperately not to suffer.

  Deputy Kerry handed me my hat.

  “Go to your room,” my mother said coldly, and I stepped obediently into the house, staring down at my own steps as I took them, like a cartoon of a shamed person.

  “Whoa,” said Claude, from inside the kitchen, seeing me. He was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “What did you do?” he asked.

  “Just—shush,” I said miserably. I went into my room and flopped on my bed. I dashed the straw hat to the floor.

  Claude came to the bedroom doorway. He bit into his sandwich. “Don’t worry,” he said with his mouth full. “I’ll spy for you; I’ll let you know what’s going on. I can check it all out from the front porch.”

  “Great,” I said indifferently.

  LaRoue came up from the cellar. “Tsk, tsk,” she said at my doorway. And then added, more consolingly, “Don’t worry.” She looked sorry for me, for the first time in her life. “Don’t worry. I heard them talking. They’ve decided not to yell.”

  What they’d decided to do was to send me to church camp for the rest of the summer. They told me this after they’d thanked Deputy Kerry and shaken his hand (for a job well done?), and after they’d suddenly, briefly entertained a visit from Frank Morenton himself, who, Claude later told me, came flying up in his white convertible, leaping out to apologize to my parents for the public display at Storyland. He was also bearing my rope purse, which I had left at the Lakeside entrance. (How strange to imagine him with my purse!) “Let’s keep this whole thing with your daughter just between us. Here, this belongs to her.” He thrust the purse at my mother. “The park’s a nice family place,” he added. “I’m getting to be an old man. I’ve seen a lot. I came to this country with no money, and I worked too hard now to have my efforts be the site of scandal and commotion. I believe in America.” I was being treated with the same anxious hands as the Lost Mine crash. I was the Lost Mine crash. I was the same thing. All that is mine won’t be lost.

  Saved by America.

  “What country do you think he’s from?” I asked Claude.

  “Indonesia,” Claude replied. “Or maybe France. How should I know?”

  Later I heard that Frank Morenton had fired Isabelle for her bad judgment, only to hire her back again the next day; I also heard she still got her car and her Christmas trip to Florida and that he bought Gloria Deb a bright red moped.

  “Your daughter, of course, is fired,” he said to my parents. “But as for the money, let’s just call it even-steven.” Horsehearts was the sort of place where even a person of prominence might say things like “even-steven.” It was the sort of place where if you stayed too long, you might add or subtract syllables; you might ask for “ham burgs” or “cheese burgs” or “cream de mint.” After twenty years, you could end up saying “bingo” for “yes.”

  “We greatly appreciate that,” murmured my father.

  “Would you care to come in for some ice tea?” asked my mother.

  “No, thanks,” said Frank Morenton. “I just wanted to hurry down here and tidy up, let you know that although I could, I’m not going to prosecute. Now we can just move on, put things behind us.”

  “Yes,” said my mother.

  “I hope you will do as I intend to do and not mention this to people.”

  After that my parents said nothing Claude could discern.

  “Now I’ve got to get back,” Morenton announced, and then he was gone, fast in his beautiful car, like a shiny, shiny god.

  That’s how Claude described it later. I’d stayed in my room, as told. I’d stared at my Desiderata poster. Go placidly amid the noise and the haste.…

  Go placidly.

  What a crock.

  The camp was a Baptist one a hundred miles away in the mountains on Lake Panawauc, said my parents, standing in my bedroom not long after Frank Morenton had left. I would be sent there until the end of August. Then I’d come back and pack for fall and winter. They were sending me away to boarding school.

  “A military academy?” I asked, and no one in the room, myself included, knew whether I was joking.

  “The Mount Brookfield School,” said my father. I was astonished that in my fifteen-minute ride from the lake to Horsehearts they had planned my future so specifically. “The financial arrangements we may have to work out with your grandmother. It would behoove you to pay her a visit and explain yourself.”

  “Yup,” I said drily, “I guess it would.” We were all standing in my pink and purple room, with the Desiderata poster and the beehive shade and the records and the makeup mirror. I started playing with the dangling string of the light switch, turning it on and off, watching the beehive shade fill up with pink, and then empty again to white, watching the pink when it threw itself across my parents’ faces like a veil of embarrassment, then vanishing again like a passing fever, or the patrolling light from a squad car.

  “What is wrong with you?” asked my father in a disgusted way, and I started to cry again because I didn’t know.

  He turned angrily and walked out of the room, and my mother hesitated, then followed, though she cast me back a look that in another story might have turned me to salt or caused me to disappear entirely. Instead, in this one, it just left me there with the pink light, a large black moth banging at the screen, the sound of the Naval Reserve officers unit during the supper hour marching down the street, performing their summer exercises with low hums and scuffs and heps, to save our country, our world, our freedom! I threw myself on the bed, weeping. I dreamed a disinformation dream of Cuba.

  That August the Republican convention renominated Nixon; he was “winding down the war,” like a kind of path.

  Watergate was breaking.

  Patty Duke got married.

  A storm on the sun briefly remagnetized the earth.

  I heard about these only in faint broadcasts from my counselor’s radio during rest hour. I lay in the bunk above Monica Hyde, a fourteen-year-old from North Syracuse. When I couldn’t hear the radio, I talked to her. Her biggest sin, she said, had been tearing the zipper off the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover so she could see what was underneath.

  “Oh, I did that,” I said. “You were supposed to do that.”

  “No, you weren’t,” she said. And I would contemplate my tanned arms, or the previous night’s vespers held in the cricket-chorused chapel (a cleared area of shore with log benches and Lake Panawauc itself as the pulpit). I passed the time being alternately bored and outraged by boredom, seeking new means of self-forgiveness and penance for my crimes. I fell slightly in love with the camp director’s son, a boy my age named Hayden Filo who h
ad been a thalidomide child and who had only three fingers and six toes. After vespers we would sometimes walk through the woods together and he would talk about God, never Jesus, never the Son! Just God, and what God wanted—in ways that sometimes made God seem as gorgeous and enveloping as the violet dusk in which we roamed, and other times like a spoiled and faraway child vexing all his relations.

  Sometimes we stopped, by trees and rocks and forks in the path, and kissed. Tree crickets and katydids sang with the ceaseless squawk of a clothesline pulley, all that endless hanging of laundry in the night. Please! We don’t want to hear about it! We lifted our hands and held each other’s faces. We closed our eyes, then oddly, without warning, opened them again. We stayed up late and watched for the northern lights, which came a lot now because of the storm on the sun. They looked like car headlights flashed across the sky, and sometimes failed to impress us. Other times they seemed as miraculous as the angels and we could feel ourselves under their spell and full of kindness and light, our dark, accidental pasts far away.

  I won a sword drill competition. I knew the Bible like my own closet (Leviticus 14:10! Green knit crochet vest!). Somehow it was all the same, all paraphernalia my brain had seized and catalogued in a kind of heartless, automatic way. My brain sought always to make the strange familiar, available, not scary. It built railings, ways to get around, maps and roads. It farmed and planted with a panicked, compulsive, mechanical energy. And so I won the Bible drills.

  I came in second in a back-dive contest.

  I sang “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” in a solo, in front of everyone, at Sunday service. At the end no one clapped, but you didn’t at a church service. That was one of the things that was too bad about church.

  I wrote long letters to Sils, making up grotesque but harmless accounts of the other girls in my tent—“They eat dirt!”—but not telling her about the three-fingered boy I was kissing in the woods. At vespers I actually prayed hard to God and on several occasions believed I felt the Holy Spirit enter me then silently cry out and flee. One day after lunch I made an appointment to see Reverend Filo, the camp director. I sat in his office in the back of the main lodge and regarded him steadily. “I want to be baptized,” I explained. I didn’t know whether he knew about the walks I was taking with his son.