Who Will Run the Frog Hospital Read online

  Storyland, Storyland—

  not a sad and gory land.

  But a place where a lot

  of your dreams come true.

  Books come to life and nursery rhymes do, too.

  Storyland, Storyland:

  Bring the whole famil-lee!

  (And Grandma-ma!)

  The coda about Grandmama, hovering there in some kind of diminished seventh chord, like the comic soundtrack to a cartoon—waa-waa-waa—always made us grimace. We would sing along, our mouths full of sandwich, then open wide to showcase our chewed-up food and our horror at the thought of our grandmothers there, in the park, somehow standing in line at one of the rides. And Grandmama!

  Eeek!

  Sils was beautiful—her eyes a deep, black-flecked aquamarine, her skin smooth as soap, her hair long and silt-colored but with an oriole yellow streak here and there catching the sun the way a river does. She was hired by the Creative Director to be Cinderella. She had to wear a strapless sateen evening gown and ride around in a big papier-mâché pumpkin coach. Little girls would stand in line to clamber in and tour around the park with her—it was one of the rides—then be dropped back off next to a big polka-dot mushroom. In between, Sils would come fetch me for a cigarette break.

  I was an entrance cashier. Six thousand dollars came through a single register every day. Customers complained about the prices, lied about their children’s ages, counted out the change to double-check. “Gardez les billets pour les manèges, s’il vous plaît,” I would say to the Canadians. The uniform I wore was a straw hat, a red-and-white striped dress with a flouncy red pinafore over it, and a name tag on the bodice: Hello My Name Is Benoîte-Marie. I’d sewn nickels into the hem of the pinafore to keep it from flying up in breezes, but besides that there was nothing much you could do to make the dress look normal. Once I saw a girl who’d been fired the year before driving around town still wearing that pinafore and dress. She was crazy, people said. But they didn’t have to say.

  In summer the whole county was full of Canadian tourists from over the border in Quebec. Sils loved to tell stories of them from her old waitress job at HoJo’s: “I vould like zome eggs,” a man said once, slowly looking up words in a little pocket dictionary.

  “How would you like them?” she’d asked.

  The man consulted his dictionary, finding each word. “I would like zem … ehm … on zee plate.”

  That we were partly French Canadian ourselves didn’t seem to occur to us. Sur le plat. Fried. We liked to tell raucous, ignorant tales of these tourists, who were so crucial to the area’s economy, but who were cheap tippers or flirts or wore their shirts open or bellies out, who complained and smoked pencil-thin cigars and laughed smuttily or whatever—it didn’t matter. We were taught to speak derisively of the tourists, the way everyone in a tourist town is. In winter we made fun of the city people who came north to Horsehearts’ Garnet Mountain to ski. They wore bright parkas and stretch pants and had expensive skis, yet could only snowplow. They screamed when they fell, wept when their skis released and sped off down the trail. We would zoom by them in our jean jackets and jeans and old tie boots. We would smirk and hum Janis Joplin songs, descend into the quiet of the trees, with our native’s superiority—our relative poverty, we believed, briefly, a kind of indigenous wit.

  At Storyland, when Sils—Cinderella herself!—came to fetch me for a smoke, I would shut down my register, let one of the ticket tearers watch over it for me, and then go off with her, into the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin, where we’d haul out a pack of cigarettes and smoke two apiece, the Sobranies and Salems that made us feel gorgeous and wise. Sometimes our friend Randi, who was Bo Peep and had to wander through the park carrying a golden staff and wearing white ruffled pantaloons and a yellow-ribboned bonnet (moaning to the children, “Where are my sheep? Dears, have you seen my sheep?”), joined us on a quick break.

  “Have you seen my fucking sheep?” she’d ask, stepping into the alleyway (or Memory Lane if it was raining and lunchtime), hitching up her pantaloons, the elastic to which always itched her. Ten years later Randi would have a nervous breakdown selling Mary Kay cosmetics; she would stop selling them but keep on ordering them, letting them pile up in boxes in her basement; instead of selling, she’d go out, get drunk in the backseat of her car, and pass out. But now, here, a smoking Bo Peep, she was tireless, ironical, and young. “I was hoping I’d find you gals here.” She’d take quick puffs, then walk out, her skirt sometimes still hiked up in the back. “Randi, you’ve got a great ass,” Sils would say, checking her out.

  We had to be on the lookout for Herb, the park manager. (What did all these little children think when Cinderella and Little Bo Peep turned out to have nicotine stains and so much cigarette smoke on their breath? my husband, a medical researcher, asked me once, and I shrugged. Different things, I mumbled. Different times. Everybody smoked. Their parents smoked.)

  “You haven’t seen my sheep? Why, I’ve lost them and don’t know where to find them!”

  Randi’s voice trailed off, and Sils and I hummed songs we knew, ones we’d learned in Girls’ Choir at school—medieval Christmas carols, a section of the Brahms German Requiem, the duet from Lakmé, the theme from The Thomas Crown Affair (Miss Field would be so proud!)—or songs we’d heard on the radio that week, ones we learned from songbooks, lots of Jimmy Webb. Sils liked “Didn’t We,” Dionne Warwick’s version, and at home was learning the chords on her guitar. “ ‘This time we almost made our poem rhyme.’ ” She made the chord changes in the air, like weaving, with her left arm stuck out like a neck. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Et cetera, et cetera.” But I sang, too, warming to its prettiness.

  I did the alto harmony. That was always my part. Rummaging about beneath the melody, trying to come up with something low and nice, something supportive—decorative but deep.

  Afterward I’d light a cigarette and say nothing.

  “I had a girl this morning who kept petting the glitter on my dress, staring up at me all agog, you know, like this.” Sils slumped her shoulders, dropped her jaw.

  “Did you swat her?” I asked.

  “I beat the shit out of her,” she said.

  I laughed. So did Sils, and when the low bodice of her dress moved a little, I tried not to look toward her breasts, which as they sometimes rose into light or fell back into shadow fascinated me. I was flat, my breasts two wiener-hued puffs, and I had to avoid all dresses with darts, all nylon shirts and plunging bathing suits. Though I pretended otherwise, I hadn’t even menstruated yet, though I was already fifteen. The words “developed” and “undeveloped” filled me with dread and loathing. “When you develop,” my mother might begin a long, embarrassing prophecy, or the school nurse would come to talk to us in Science, and I would freeze in my chair, not moving a muscle, trying to disappear. It seemed a mortifying truth that no one but I could admit to that I was never going to “develop.” But I tried to manage my disappointment: I hadn’t wanted to be a freak, mostly I’d just wanted to grow breasts so I could look at them. I’d wanted to study them, powder and perfume them. Now I had to accept facts: I’d been bypassed by Mother Nature, the garlanded and white-robed figure whom I sometimes saw on margarine commercials, summoning thunderstorms. I’d been overlooked by her.

  And so I told long self-deprecating breast jokes about myself, relying on such analogies as fried eggs, bug bites, bee stings, animals or tin cans run over by a car, pancakes, pencil erasers, doilies, and tacks; breasts were still a curiosity to me. It had been only a few years before that Sils and I would examine at great length any centerfold we could get our hands on, or W. T. Grant underwear ads, or even Land O Lakes butter, cutting out the Indian maiden from the package and bending the knees so that they appeared like breasts through a slot we made in her chest. We’d laugh in a fascinated, obscene way. We were obsessed with breasts. We’d stuff washcloths, teacups, golf balls, tennis balls, cotton balls in our shirts
. Once we made her mother, who was long divorced and worked late hours as a receptionist at the Landmark Motel, show us hers. She was a sweet and guilt-ridden mother, exhausted from her older sons (their loud band practices in the basement; their overnight girlfriends; their strange, impermanent, and semiannual treks across the border to Canada to avoid the draft, though their numbers were high; the spaghetti they hung on the porch as a “wind chime”; the snapshots they taped to the inside of the refrigerator, pictures of what the dog had done to the trash). She was fearful that in trying to make ends meet she hadn’t shown enough attention to her little daughter, so when we began to chant “Show us your breasts, show us your breasts!,” strangely enough, she did. She lifted her sweater, unhooked her bra, and shook them loose, looking out at us in a confused way, as we stared at them—veiny, and dark, and amazing.

  But now it seemed it was only me. I was the only one still obsessed.

  The late spring sun had freckled the upper part of Sils’s chest, and her silky hair, rinsed in cider and beer, was shiny as Christmas foil. “I kept asking her, So what’s your name?” said Sils. “Where do you go to school?—you little twerp—Do you like your teacher? Things no real Cinderella would ever say, but there was a spell on with this girl.”

  “That couldn’t be disspelled.” This was the sort of boring cleverness I was prone to, a skinny, undeveloped girl good in school.

  “She kept asking me about the prince. She’s not two. You’d think she’d get it. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Sils had memorized all the slides from History of Art. “There is no prince.”

  I smoked Sobranies down to the poison-gold filter. I exhaled through my nose like a dragon. “Now you tell me,” I said. “You’re not really Cinderella?” We were never very witty as girls, but we thought we were. Our idea of a funny joke was to refer to our chins as “The Happy Acre Pimple Farm.” In a town where everyone said things like “Jeesum Crow” and “sheeesh,” we said “fuck”—but in a daring, private way. “What the fuck, babe.” Sils liked to say that, with a smirky, smoke-frayed laugh. I would say it, too. Once, in eighth grade, her forehead broke out and she tried to shave the pimples off with a razor. It wasn’t funny at the time—her forehead bled for a week—but when we wanted later to laugh, we would summon it up: “Remember the time you shaved your forehead? What the fuck, babe,” and we’d fall on the floor. We looked to secret things. We looked to stories and misadventures and mined them for their narcotic ore. We loved to laugh violently, convulsively, no sound actually coming out until suddenly we’d have to gasp in a braying way for breath.

  Now she gave me the finger with one hand and then with the other balanced her lit Sobranie against her thumb. But she smiled. She shrugged. She hummed. She said, “Listen,” and then belched out the carbonation from her Fresca. She was my hero, and had been for almost as long as I could remember. In being with her—cigarette break to lunch to cigarette break—I got through the dull days.

  We’d started working at Storyland in May, on the weekends, through the Memorial Day rush, until school let out in early June. Then we worked six days a week. Up until then we had met during the school week in the cemetery to smoke. Every day we would have what we called a “cemetery lunch.” I would clamber up over the hill, past the blue meadow of veronica and flax, past the broken stick-arbor and the Seckel pear, down the gravel path, into the planked swamp and on up to the gravestones, where Sils would be waiting, having arrived from the other end. She lived on a small oaky street that dead-ended into the cemetery (next to which she lived). “Is this street symbolic or what?” Sils would say to anyone who visited. Especially the boys. The boys adored her. She was what my husband once archly referred to as “oh, probably a cool girl. Right? Right? One of those little hippettes from Whositsville?” She could read music, knew a little about painting; she had older brothers in a rock band. She was the most sophisticated girl in Horsehearts, not a tough task, but you have to understand what that could do to a girl. What it could do to her life. And although I’ve lost track of her now, such a loss would have seemed inconceivable to me then. Still, I often surmise the themes in her, what she would be living out: the broken and ridiculous songs; the spent green box of Horsehearts; the sad, stuck, undelivering world.

  That spring we usually met at the grave of Estherina Foster, a little girl who had died in 1932, and whose photograph, tinted with yellows and pinks, was fastened to the stone. There we would shiver and smoke, the air still too cold. We’d list against the other gravestones, lean forward and brush hair from each other’s face. “Hold still, you’ve got a hair.”

  Were we just waiting to leave Horsehearts, our friends, enemies, our airless family lives? I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

  But what do I mean “they”? Perhaps I mean only Sils. I was invaded by Sils, who lives now in my vanished girlhood, a place to return to at night, in a fat sleep, during which she is there, standing long-armed and balanced on stones in the swamp stream, stones in the cemetery, stones in the gravelly road out back. How I resented the boys coming, as they did. I resented it early, even the hint of it. They were sneering and injurious and uninterested in me. They hooked their thumbs through their belt loops. More obsessed even than we with the fluids and failings of the body, they told long ugly jokes, ones with loud refrains like “plugging in” or “coming in handy.” They owned BB guns and shot the frogs in the swamp, not always killing them right away. Sils and I, stupid and young, would bring tweezers from home and, pushing through the cattails and the gluey pods of the milkweed, would try to seek out and save the poor frogs—digging in through their skin, pulling the BBs out, then bandaging the squirming, bleeding animals with gauze. Few of them lived. Usually, we would find the frogs dead in the watery mud, the gauze unraveled about them, tragically, like a fallen banner in a war.

  The week she was hired as Cinderella, Sils made a painting of this, what we’d done with the frogs those years before. She painted a picture in deep blues and greens. In the background, through some trees, stood two little girls dressed up as saints or nurses or boys or princesses—what were they? Cinderellas. They were whispering. And in the foreground, next to rocks and lily pads, sat two wounded frogs, one in a splint, one with a bandage tied around its eye: they looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs. She framed it, hung it in her bedroom, and titled it Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

  By that time, Sils had a boyfriend—a boy named Mike Suprenante from glamorous, forbidding Albany—and the painting’s meaning had become larger, broader, funnier; it had become everything.

  She’d met Mike in late March, up at a lake bar called Casino Club, where we’d gone dancing. We had fake IDs and on weekends during the school year it was a good place to dance. Sometimes we danced with each other—boyless and defiant, with a tight, parodic pout. We would do the twist in a deeply satirical way. We would jitterbug, twirling under each other’s arms. We then waited for the men to buy us drinks. The dance floor was large and platformed; the bands were loud, winking, and friendly; the drinks were cheap on Ladies Night, and sometimes we would see our student teachers there, young and handsome in navy sport coats. Sometimes one of them would ask Sils to dance, not recognizing her immediately, and then in the middle of the song realize who she was and give her an embarrassed “Hi” or a sheepish shrug or point his fingers like a gun her way or else at his own head.

  The night Sils met Mike, she was wearing a fake peony in her hair and a long sleeveless tunic and jeans. She wore all her rings and bracelets on one hand, one side, skipping the other, leaving it bare. I d
anced a lot. Every time a guy headed our way to ask Sils to dance, Mike (a “handsome nondescript person,” I said of him later), who had just walked over and introduced himself earlier that night, would swoop down with extra drinks and take possession of her, steer her back out onto the floor—he’d claimed her, “gotten dibs on her,” and she’d let him. On fast dances with him, she did her intensity dance: she sank deeply into each hip and held her fists up in front of her (one ringed, one naked) like a boxer. Her face—with its long nose cut like a diamond, her cheekbones flying off to either side in a crucifix—looked stark and dramatic in this light. And so, by the time the other guys got to the table, finished swashing their gums with their beer, finished gulping, there was no one there but me. “Well, would you like to dance,” they’d say, looking gypped. I didn’t care. I understood. I’d worn my white earrings that glowed in the black light of the bar; I’d circled my eyes with shadow. I’d brushed my hair over my head and then thrown it back so that it was wild and full. I’d checked myself out in the ladies’ room mirror: I was too skinny, and I wasn’t Sils. But I was of the conviction—a conviction I held on to naively, for years—that if somebody got to know me, really know me, they’d like me a lot.

  On the slow dances, like “Nights in White Satin,” I let the men—construction workers, car salesmen—hold me close. I could feel their bellies and their sweat smell, their hard groins, their damp shirts, their big arms around me. Sometimes I’d rest my hands on their hips, my eyes shut and pressed into one of their shoulders while we danced.

  “That was nice,” they’d say at the end, shouting it over the band’s next song.

  “Thank you,” I’d say. “Thank you very much.” I always thanked them. I was grateful, and I let them know.

  “How we getting home?” I yelled into Sils’s ear—the standard question on our nights out. I was staying overnight at her house, one of the few ways I’d have gotten to remain out so late. Her mother had night duty at the motel, and her brothers were staying with their various girlfriends or else were in Canada again, Sils wasn’t sure these days. She looked at me in a bemused way, shrugged, and pointed discreetly at Mike. He was tapping his foot, smoking a cigarette, and looking at the band, but he had his arm around her chair.