Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

by Lorrie Moore

  But then I got my first boyfriend, a boy named Howie March. I’d met him in the Linen Service line, where we were waiting together to pick up our neat little papered bundles and drop off our old sheets like invalids or mental patients or old people in a home. Howie was on the wrestling team—passionate and obsessive and sweet. He liked me. I would go to his matches and tournaments wearing my funny little black-and-gold hats and smoking my cigarettes outside in the hallway, and afterward he would give me his trophies, little metal men with arms protruding in a starting stance, and I would take them back to my dorm room and hang my jewelry on them. I loved him fiercely, like an orphan, with every newly banished, bereaved, and sexual part of me. I had no idea who either of us was; there was just the thick fog of love and bodies and whispered promises. We were child bride, child groom, each seeking the other’s animal heart. He would make love to me slow, fast, against the wall, standing up. His naked body—its power and vulnerability, the steely arms, his penis with its delicate veins like the veins of a wrist, its rubbery eye like the tip of a mucilage bottle—obsessed me. I developed a blush. Before then, I had never blushed. I didn’t have the body fat, the heat, the hormones, the awareness of myself, the belief in my own visibility that would have created a blush. But now I’d become a sexual creature with all its experience of shame and being watched. The dark, sallow circles beneath my eyes disappeared in a pale bloat, my glance was less direct, and I began to blush easily, daily. I blushed for years.

  In letters to Sils I would write “I miss you!” “How are you, schweetie?” and then I would tell her about Howie: a dunk, half dork, half hunk. “He keeps me busy!” I would write. “Wink, wink.” And then I’d draw a picture of a wink.

  The few times I went home on vacations, I would see Sils, but we were strangely awkward with each other. We looked different. She had layered her hair in a long wavy shag and was wearing a big leather jacket and palazzo pants. I had grown rounded and tall. We would sing in her room, but at the end of a song she’d strum the chords and we’d retreat shyly into silence. We didn’t reprise our repertoire, all the songs we’d learned with Miss Field in Girls’ Choir, or from the car radio, or her brothers’ band. Instead we struggled with talk, though it all seemed to separate us. She had broken up with Mike and was now seeing a boy named Doug, who sold mobile homes. Months before, her brothers had once again fled, with their band, to Canada. Was I going to college? She thought she might not, but might just stay in town and work for the post office or something. Someday she hoped to move to Boston or Hawaii or Santa Fe.

  “Oh,” I said. I’d somehow always thought we’d go to college together, to the same place; I couldn’t imagine being totally without her.

  “There’s just no money,” she said. But she smiled at me encouragingly, like an older sister.

  “No prob,” I said. “No biggie. I can get the cash. I can do this thing with ticket stubs.” I hoped she would laugh. Instead she smiled weakly and ran her fingers through her new hair. She seemed tired and sad and it made me want to run, to be gone, to be back at Mount Brookfield with Howie.

  I was Howie’s girlfriend for a year, before he left, graduated from Mount Brookfield ahead of me, and bucking his parents, set out with two buddies for the Alaskan pipeline, where after three months, I was told later by his mother, he disappeared in the snow, came down with the snow madness that caused men to get into their tractors and just drive off into the blinding white horizon, never coming back.

  I forced myself to go on to someone else after that, then someone else again, never attaching in quite the same ferocious, virginal way, never with that enthralled and orphaned heart, not quite like that, and I missed him for years, years into college. By then my parents had moved from Horsehearts to the east coast of Florida with my grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face. The living didn’t interest her; she grew bored when anyone spoke. In her yawn I could see the black-and-white dice of her filled teeth, the quiet snap of her spit, all gathered in a painting of departure. It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.

  ————

  AFTER COLLEGE, I did go back to Horsehearts, for a class reunion. Ten years. I was invited despite the Mount Brookfield diploma—“a mere technicality,” wrote Susie Vito, the class secretary, who had been in kindergarten with me. Sils wrote me a note: “If you go, I’ll go,” she said. “The reunion’s at a motel. But please stay with me at my house. I’ve got room.” She was still in Horsehearts, renting cheaply, working as a letter carrier and putting in requests for transfers. Her handwriting was exactly the same, jazzy and elegant, with fs that looked like G clefs. Ss like flowers.

  Like so many others, I arrived by car, still smoking cigarettes, my hair shorn, some money and credit cards in my purse. How simple and sweet and nice Sils seemed then, at that befuddled gathering! She ran toward me and hugged me so long I felt abandoned when she let go. Her face was slightly lined—there were deeper folds by her mouth—but otherwise she looked the same. It was her! “Your hair looks great,” she said, and took my hand. How kind she was! She was a lovely and gentle person, and I’d almost forgotten. I had gone out into the world and in it imagined myself sweet and good compared to the jagged acrimony I met everywhere. “I’m just a girl from Horsehearts, what can I say?” I’d murmur, and men would touch my face; New Yorkers, Bostonians, Parisians would smile. But now, returning to Horsehearts, I realized, I no longer knew what sweetness was. By comparison to what I found there, I had become sour, mean, sophisticated. I no longer knew from niceness, was no longer on a daily basis with it. I didn’t meet nice people. I met witty, hard, capable, successful, dramatic. Some vulnerable. Some insecure. But not nice, the way Sils was nice. She was nice the way I had long imagined I still was, but then on seeing her again—strangely shy before me but illumined and grinning, as ever, her voice in gentle girlish tones I never heard anymore—instantly, completely, knew I was no longer.

  We jumped into the motel pool, with our clothes on, laughing and practically drowning. We swam together to the shallow end, and when she stepped out of it, gleaming, her clothes wet and tight as leather, her hair streaming down her back, everyone looked. Though there was weariness in her walk, she was still slender and bold; I could see she was still some kind of sexual centerpiece here. All the Horsehearts boys who had stayed in town, become managers of stores or cinemas or the roller rink, still thought of her at night. In this neck of the woods, she was the neck of the woods.

  We sat in lawn chairs, drying in the sun, and smoked quietly, with Randi, who seemed just the same as always except that, recovered from her Mary Kay days, she had changed her name to Travis, which she’d written on her name tag, with Randi in parentheses underneath. (Could one do that? Could one put one’s whole past, the fact of its boring turbulence, in parentheses like that?) We murmured about how bald all the boys were. “They look exactly like they did in high school,” said Sils, “except that now their hair’s gone and in their wallets instead of condoms they carry before-and-after photos of their home renovations. Welcome back to Horsehearts.” As she held her cigarette, and blew smoke away from me, I looked for the men from U.N.C.L.E. in her toenails but could not find them.

  After the afternoon reception and buffet, we left, went to go drink in a new local restaurant, what Sils called “an-all-you-will-have-eaten place.” There was a long salad bar and a big open grill. One was supposed to cook one’s own steak. “Cook your own mistake,” she called it. I smiled in a way that I hoped wouldn’t seem distant. What did it mean that she had stayed here, in Horsehearts, in one place, like a tree? Though I knew one’s roots grew deep and steady that way, still, one’s lower limbs could fuse, or die, killed off by one’s own stalwart shade. “It’s the coleslaw here,” she said. “I just can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I
think that, you know, watch: the slaw alone will keep me in this town forever.”

  Later, she drove me around the village, to show me it again. The yards seemed emptier and larger than I remembered, the houses farther apart and glum, though pretty. A couple of times we got out and walked. There was no one on the street. The old sidewalks sparkled with quartz until we hit a part that had been repaired or replaced with newer clayey squares. When we drove by my old house, it seemed ungainly and obscene in its strangeness; in my mind the proportions of the house were warmer, different; in my mind it wasn’t this. It seemed alien. It seemed confiscated. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. The roads were country roads, still wooded and full of longing and despair and that search for something, anything going on; they were roads of rumor—curvy, restless roads that seemed for moments to stretch forward but then just turned back in on themselves, like snakes snacking on their own tails.

  Back at her house, in the cool snap of the Adirondack night, Sils and I got into pajamas and collapsed sleepily on her water bed, which was heated and huge, a thing I might have found tasteless somewhere else but here was some perfection of calm and form, a dead man’s float on still water, while she spoke of getting a postal route in Hawaii.

  “You can do that?” I asked.

  “Sure.” She spoke some more of her life here, its trapped routines. Her mother had died. “She slaved away at that motel, and then she just died, without ever even a postcard from my dad.” Her brothers had moved to Texas and formed a band called the Jackhammer Hamsters. “Ever heard of them?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “They’re getting a little old,” she whispered, and offered up a gentle wince.

  She loved Hawaii. She’d been there once—with a guy named Mel—and had bought a big coffee-table book called Hawaiian Song in the airport. She got up from the bed to fetch it, spread it out on the billowing quilt, showed me some of the photographs: bright beaches and skies. Not an Adirondack in sight. “I’ve been on a postal transfer list for three years,” she said.

  “It’s just a matter of time, then.”

  “Probably.”

  “Gee.” I sighed.

  “Yeah.” She smiled in a bittersweet way.

  I browsed through my mind, thinking about all the things I wanted to say, might say, could say. “Guess what?”

  “What? I don’t know!”

  “I’m engaged.”

  “Get out of town! You are?” she exclaimed eagerly. “Where’s your ring!”

  “We’re doing a cheap and easy minimalist thing: no rings, no wedding. Just—marriage.” I sighed.

  “How Modern!”

  “Yeah. Instead of saying ‘I do,’ we’re just going to say ‘Here.’ ”

  “And what’s Mr. Here’s name?” “Daniel Hiawatha Bergman.”

  “That’s his real name? Get out!”

  “I swear to God.”

  “Is he a good guy?”

  A good guy. It sounded so Martha and the Vandellas. But it was Horsehearts. That was the way Horsehearts sounded. “Yeah. He’s a good guy.”

  “Great, Berie, I’m so happy for you. You deserve a good guy.” Now she sighed. “And I always knew you’d get one. I always thought you’d end up with the best husband of all of us.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course. You had no idea. But of course.”

  For a fleeting moment, as anyone can, I imagined I felt the poverty of my future, all its unholdable surfaces; I felt inexplicably ungrateful and sad. It was a moment of stillness in which one looks around and ruefully sees only the rocks and searing sun and cheap metal. “You wanted an adventure and instead you got Adventureland,” Sils herself used to say. I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed—I wanted it back!—those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.

  Pièce—French for room, I remembered, the strangeness of night and this one upon me like a drug.

  “You guys going to have kids?” asked Sils. She wriggled her way under the covers.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  “That’s great,” she said. But something haggard suddenly entered her face. “That’s great.” She gave a yawn. “I suppose we should go to sleep.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Good night, Berie,” she said, turning out the light. In the dark she added, “Congratulations! Thank you. I love you.” She paused. “Is there anything I missed?”

  “Good luck,” I said. “Drive safely. Wipe your feet. Happy Birthday and Have a Nice Life. There’s a lot you forgot.”

  “Many happy returns,” she said sleepily. “And Good Fate. That’s the real one.” She turned with the sheet clutched to her breastbone, the water beneath us rolling gently. I lay in the dark next to her, feeling like a creature that had entered through a damp cranny or a bad shingle in the roof: a bat that could swoop silently about in her house. Why not? Bats, I knew, were sentimental. They returned to where they once lived, even when shut out; they sought their own smell. I couldn’t sleep. I was lying on top of the covers, which made it easy to get up. I rolled out of bed, stepped ashore, out into her house, and roamed through the rooms, touching things. I couldn’t really see what they were, but I could feel them: a needlepoint pillow, a pile of newsprint shoppers, little ceramic statues of cats—discovering these cats, I felt less shocked than puzzled and disappointed—a large, foil-wrapped chocolate egg, a basket of hair ties and barrettes.

  I went into the bathroom. I touched the towels and towel bars and washcloths. I flicked on the light and opened the medicine cabinet: Q-Tips, nail files, and dark beeswax soaps. I opened the pill bottles and took an aspirin and a Tylenol. I dabbed cologne on my wrists, stripped naked, then got into the shower, where I washed my hair with her shampoo—an apricot-walnut one that smelled like her. I stayed there for a long time—used her back scrub brush and her creme rinse and let the bathroom fog up with steam. I lathered myself with a muddy scrap of beeswax soap I clawed out of the shower caddy. I felt close to her, in a larcenous way, as if here in the shower, using her things, all the new toiletries she now owned, I could know better the person she’d become. All evening I’d been full of reminiscences, but she had seldom joined in. Instead she was full of kindnesses—draping her own sweater around my shoulders, bringing me tea. How could I know or hope that she contained within her all our shared life, that she had not set it aside to make room for other days and affections and things that now had all made their residence and marks within her? Of course, I knew there were no reassurances. Or, there were only reassurances. She had offered them. “This place is just not the same without you,” she had said twice that afternoon. But I was greedy. Three was the magic number. I’d wanted her to say it one more time.

  I got out, wrapped a towel around me, and went back to bed, where she lay still asleep, curved in a pale paisley, the sheet about her like an old tricot curtain. I slipped quietly under the covers, my hair wet, feeling the water bed give slightly beneath me like something gelatinous and alive.

  “Did you just take a shower?” Sils suddenly murmured, surprising me.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  She kept her eyes closed, and simply readjusted her pillow for sleep. “You were always a weird girl,” she said dreamily.

  “I was?” I said. “I was not.”

  She gave a lazy laugh. “You should invite me to where you live someday and see all the wacky things I’m going to do.”

  “I will,” I said. “I will.” Though I already imagined that by the time I got back to my new job and life, with all its distractions and busynesses, that I wouldn’t know how. Or why. Desp
ite all my curatorial impulses and training, my priestly harborings and professional, courtly suit of the past, I never knew what to do with all those years of one’s life: trot around in them forever like old boots—or sever them, let them fly free?

  Of course, one couldn’t really do either. But there was always the trying, and pretending. And then there was finally someplace in between, where one lived.

  I curled next to Sils and closed my eyes. I slept the light, watery sleep of a sick person who has already slept off the day and then awakened to night, not knowing what to do.

  In the morning, she brought me coffee. She brought me a salad.

  “This is the best salad I’ve ever had,” I said. For a brief moment, I decided, I would defeat nostalgia with caffeine. “This is better than all the others. This is the best salad of my entire life.”

  “It’s the dressing,” she said. “A kind of breakfast recipe: it actually has bacon and eggs in it.” She shrugged and smiled.

  I set my coffee aside. “Do you play the guitar anymore?” I asked.

  “Only some,” she said.

  “Do you still paint?”

  “Naw.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Well, oh, I painted one thing,” she said, and she went out on the sunporch and brought back a small canvas on which she’d painted a bowl of fruit. In the painting of the bowl, which was silver, she’d included a reflection of a tiny figure of a woman, head into the wind, hair blown back. “That’s me getting ready to face middle age,” she said. And we both laughed in a loud, delirious way.