Who Will Run the Frog Hospital Read online

  “I don’t know how I’m ever going to deal with all this without everyone finding out,” said Sils.

  Everything was getting funny and vague. My records in a pile on the spindle plopped down one by one: the Moody Blues; Stevie Wonder; Billie Holiday; Crosby, Stills and Nash; the Rolling Stones. Every song had the word “Tuesday” in it. “Tuesday Afternoon.” “Tuesday Heartbreak.” “Ruby Tuesday.” Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. Will you come see me Tuesdays and Saturdays?

  Maybe it was Thursday and Saturday. But I preferred Tuesday. A day of twos. Sometimes when I sang alone, sprawled rapturously on my bed, the windows open and the cheeping summer night outside in big warm rectangles, calling, calling, I just made the words be whatever I wanted.

  “I have something to show you,” I said, getting up and handing the joint back to her. I walked over to my record shelf and lifted up my stack of records, the dozens not yet piled on the stereo—Big Brother and the Holding Company, Melanie, Seals and Crofts, a collection of Neil Young concerts lap-recorded by a bootlegger with a cough—and showed her the money, flat and dead, priceless and chloroformed like a flock of butterflies.

  Sils stared.

  “This is for us,” I whispered. “This is all for you.”

  “The money?” She wasn’t comprehending.

  I checked the door again. I closed the window and the shades and then sat at my dressing table on the spinning, plush-covered, vanity stool. I turned on the makeup mirror for light. I turned it to Office, its sickly green, and laughed in a cackly way, though I didn’t mean to. “I took it,” I said.

  “You took it?”

  “I collected it. I kind of—hocked it. I just, I sold stubs and didn’t ring up.”

  She looked at me and then at the money for a long time. A pumpkin into a coach: I hoped that was what she would see. For today, Tuesday, I would be her fairy godmother. I tried to swallow, but the pot had made my throat bitter and dry, my gums drained and astringed. I had to concentrate not to giggle. Or weep. Or sing. I had to concentrate to see.

  At long last she looked up at me. “Don’t they count the stubs?” was all she said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not that I know of.” And then we did laugh. We laughed the laugh of idiots.

  Sils fell into an ironic squawk. “This is going to go on your permanent record, missy,” she said, shaking her finger.

  “We make a dollar sixty-five an hour. Do you think Frank Morenton, who owns half this country anyway, do you think he’d ever notice? He’s too busy opening Santa’s Little Village up in Dalesburg.”

  “I suppose it serves him right for not giving us a raise.” And now she actually reached toward the money to touch it. “Let’s go to the James Gang concert,” she said suddenly. Now she was holding up bills. She plucked up a twenty and waved it around.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The James Gang’s giving an outdoor concert at the arts center at the lake,” said Sils. “God, with this money, we could take a cab.”

  “Maybe I can get LaRoue to drive us,” I said uncertainly. I wanted to save the money. “Let me go see.”

  LaRoue was in the kitchen polishing her riding boots. “We’re thinking of going to a concert,” I said, trying to be kind, lingering, swaying, hinting.

  “And you want me to give you a ride.” She looked disgusted but also a little sad.

  “You want to go with us?” I asked brightly, fakely.

  She looked at her riding boots a long time, as if this were a challenge. The boots were set smack on the kitchen table, on a page of the Horsehearts Gazette. “What concert is it?”

  “It’s the James Gang,” I said.

  “What time?”

  God, she was really going to do it. “At eight. But we want to get there by seven.”

  “What about dinner?”

  “It’s get-your-own night, Mom said.” Every so often my mother refused to cook, calling it, with a festive flair, “get-your-own” night, or “fix-your-own.” One year, in one of her darker huffs, she canceled Christmas and called it “Christmas Is Canceled Day.”

  “Yeah, but I was going to make some brownies and macaroni,” said LaRoue. She was hugely overweight, though not even as much as she would be later in life. I blinked.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Come with us. We can stop at Carroll’s.” Carroll’s was a fast-food shack that would soon be put out of business by McDonald’s. But at the time, we liked Carroll’s best, the bright red and turquoise colors, the squared and streamlined script of the name.

  “OK!” she said. And as she said it, I realized again that I never did anything with LaRoue because she was odd and friendless and I was embarrassed by her, in a way that made me feel bad, but in a way that was sad and unshakable.

  I sat in the front seat and Sils in the back, and I kept turning around and all the way up to the lake we kept singing “And When I Die,” in the harmony parts we had learned in Girls’ Choir the past year. Our choir director, Miss Field, had worked up a nice arrangement of it.

  “I’m not scared of dyin’ and I don’t really care,’ ” began Sils.

  “ ‘If it’s peace you find in dying, well then let the time be near.’ ”

  “ ‘All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me!’ ” We practically shouted it. We were best on that line, taking it loud but slow, with some odd intervals, though most of them thirds. We actually didn’t know any songs by the James Gang, or we knew one, the famous one, the one that was a hit, but we didn’t know it very well.

  At Carroll’s we ordered hamburgers and vanilla milk shakes and sat inside at the Formica counter, watching each other eat, or else watching some guy sweep behind the fryer or some guy pull up outside with his car eight-track blaring “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” or LaRoue, watching us, like we were up to something.

  The parking lot at the Lake Arts Center was already full, and attendants were routing people into a spare one in the rear, usually reserved for employees. We parked there, got out, and headed for the entrance, an old blanket over our arm, a six-pack of Coca-Cola, and a pack of cigarettes. All around us were young men in beards and cutoffs, women in peasant dresses, buffalo sandals, and silver bracelets, carting thermoses, ice chests, lawn umbrellas that said “Peace.” Police were stationed just inside the entrance to inspect thermoses and ice chests for alcohol, but besides that there was something wonderful in the air: the loud, crowded, summery feeling of a rock concert, not Woodstock maybe, but we had only been twelve then. This was something festive for us now that we were fifteen; everyone older had been doing this for a while, and they did it with calm and know-how; nothing new or disorganized. Some of them carried babies. We observed them, fell in close to them in line, sat next to them on the lawn. Lawn seats were the cheapest: two-fifty apiece. We paid, got our tickets, headed in.

  Music, for us back then, evoked various exiling and confounded moods, states of hallucination, states of love. A song was the timeless truth beneath the surface of things. It was a standing-still trip to the sea! It was a blow to the chest, like a boy you liked suddenly entering the room. It filled you with excitement and shy, deep knowledge. Two-fifty was nothing. We pushed ahead, fell in with the pace of the crowd. We prepared our hearts for something drenching and big.

  Somehow we got separated from LaRoue. Did we intend to? I remembered a stinginess of hers in the car, how she’d refused us the chewing gum she had four sticks of in her pocket, and as Sils and I moved through the gate, past the ticket takers and off at a slight diagonal, the crowd moved in between LaRoue and us. She was trudging too slowly behind. I thought I heard her voice, but I didn’t turn around.

  “Hey, you guys. Wait up!”

  We kept walking straight for a favorite place on a hill near a concrete piling, the place we usually sat at concerts, leaning up against the cement to drink our Cokes, moving in under the balcony ramp in case it began to drizzle.

  “Where’s LaRoue?” asked Sils.

  I finally turned arou
nd. I couldn’t see her anywhere. And the success of this treachery, of my having used her so completely, stunned me. Where was she? Now I scanned the curving bowl of the concert lawn full of faces and heads and blankets and jackets and ice boxes, and I thought perhaps I did see LaRoue way off to one side, on some dirt, sitting alone without a blanket, looking lost and fat.

  “I don’t know where she is,” I said. “We’ll get a ride back some other way.” I said this breezily. “We’ll hitch.”

  “Maybe,” said Sils cautiously. “I wish I’d brought a joint.” She lit a Salem instead, and offered one to me, which I took.

  Linda Ronstadt opened for the James Gang and everyone talked all the way through it, as if she were just some local girl who’d managed to crawl up there and fill time. When the James Gang finally appeared the crowd stood and cheered. The sky had darkened, and the stage shone bright as fire in a hearth. Everywhere in the air was the ropy smoke of pot. The boys next to us offered us some of theirs, and we took it, in turn, placing our own mouths where theirs had been on the wet paper, then passing it along, like a communion plate or a petition of ash and saliva: a large, smoking spitball shot out at all the teachers of the world. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” The crowd roared, and the band started up.

  For the next hour electric guitars wailed and keened in protest of all that we were forced to be in this life. “Man, oh man,” murmured the people around us. Four boys climbed up on the second-tier railing and swayed back and forth to the music, their limbs occasionally jolting and spazzing. It was a dance style I’d seen before. It was acid—something that scared and fascinated me. “Do you want to take a trip, a sugar trip, a trip to sugar mountain?” I’d been asked that before at bars. “No thanks,” I’d said. For all my recklessness, I feared chromosome damage. I feared accidentally starting a brand-new species. I believed all the talk about damage to your very genetic material—though it turned out later not to be true.

  I could have been up there with those boys.

  There was a slight snap in the air from the lake, and Sils and I huddled under the blanket for warmth. Feeling the heat of her so close, I thought about how seldom we slept over these days, me in that sleeping bag at the foot of her bed, or she at the foot of mine, the routine intimacy of that, our talking out into the dark of our rooms, the cemetery quiet out the window and us with our jokes and sighs and then our sleep, side by side in duet, our breaths staggered like a round. Only once had we ever had a fight—she accused me of having deliberately developed a laugh like someone else, someone named Leslie Fish. She accused me of wanting to hang out with Leslie and be like Leslie, which summoned up such outrage on my part that I struck Sils in the arm and then rushed home in tears, waiting the week out until at last we were friends again.

  It had been true about the laugh, and I never laughed like that again.

  Now everyone on the lawn stood and so did we, in our large blanket cape, and the whole audience lit matches for an encore, the ground around us like some fantastic birthday cake in the dark, but the band refused to come back. So we packed up and made our way toward the exit with the crowd. I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

  I looked toward the lot where we had parked, but the car seemed not to be there.

  “Let’s call a cab,” said Sils.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With the money,” she said. “Let’s take a cab back home.”

  “There’s probably someone here we know.” I was reluctant to spend the money like this.

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Markie Russo and those guys,” I said. Markie Russo had once had a crush on Sils and I was sure he would have given her a ride home in a second. But everyone was heading purposefully toward their cars and I recognized none of them. We were still walking with the blanket around us, like medieval orphans.

  “There’s a phone,” said Sils, and so we called a cab. Hiller’s Cab Company. “I’ll be there as soon as possible,” said the voice at the other end. We waited right there by the phone booth, smoking cigarettes, tapping our feet, watching the dispersing crowd.

  The cabbie who came for us was a strange dwarf of a man: balding, shiny head; fingers fat as wursts; his body squat and globular; his legs so short and misshapen there was some apparatus constructed on the pedals of the cab so that he could drive.

  We got in, gave him my address, and he pulled out of the parking lot. The traffic was heavy from the concert and jammed at the next corner near the main light. In his rearview mirror he could see us sorting our money. We had brought forty dollars with us and were counting what was left.

  “Where you girls work?”

  I didn’t say anything. I looked out the window, past the traffic, toward the lake.

  “Storyland,” said Sils. There was something brazen and high from the pot in her voice. “I’m Cinderella there,” she added. I could tell she wanted, just for the fun of it, to shock him somehow.

  “Is that right?” He looked in the rearview mirror again, to check her out, I supposed. But instead he looked mostly at me. As if I were the guard or the interpreter. “I used to work there myself as Humpty Dumpty—before they got that ceramic, mechanical one.” Now he turned hopefully to look at us both in the backseat.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Should we call you Humpty?” asked Sils.

  “Sure.” He smiled.

  “We can’t call you Humpty,” she chided. “We’ll have to call you, um—Humphrey!” and we burst our laughing, in a stoned, mean way, but he laughed with us, and we all just sat there in the night traffic laughing in the uncontrolled, hysterical way of people who rarely got what they wanted in life though they also didn’t try very hard.

  We didn’t stop. The laughter built—especially his—to tears and gasps. Three fools from Horsehearts—how funny! We

  couldn’t stop. Even after our cabbie grew quiet, Sils and I sank against the cab doors and snorted, while he sighed and cleared his throat, silently taking the correct turns and driving us the ten miles back to my house. I thought of the time in fifth grade when our science teacher had made some of us be planets and positioned us in town according to where the planets would actually be, relatively speaking. The downtown library was the sun, and Jerry Murphy, who was Mercury, was positioned right there on the library steps. He was dressed in red and carried a little sign with the name of his planet on it. Sils had been Venus and was made to stand by the Civil War monument, two blocks away, draped in gauzy material meant to resemble clouds. But I was Pluto, and had to stand several miles outside of town, in the middle of the countryside. The teacher drove me there herself. And I stood there all afternoon, in black leotards, next to a dairy farm and a cornfield, with my little sign that said Pluto. The local paper came by and took my picture and Sils’s older brothers drove past in their car and honked and hooted. Despite the humiliation, I felt close to Sils then. Because of her brothers. Because we were in outer space together, and her brothers had come by to see me.

  Which for some reason was how I felt now in the cab, with the cabbie, and our all laughing together. I felt, perhaps because of the pot, like we were all planets in the same solar system—which was all I had ever wanted or asked from people, anyone, ever.

  “Thanks,” we said when we got out. And we tipped him twenty dollars, “just to blow his mind,” Sils whispered.

  “Do you think we did? Do you think we blew his mind?”

  He hadn’t looked to examine the bills. He’d just stuffed them into his pocket.

  “He’ll look. He’ll see,” said Sils.

  When we went inside, only Claude was still up. He was sprawled on the couch, under a blanket, watching TV like a sick person. In the last six months he’d been growing in the pale, dispropor
tionate way of adolescents and leggy plants—his limbs and feet sending themselves out past his cuffs like antennae. But he was still a little boy and self-conscious. I always suspected him of having a crush on Sils.

  “Hi,” he grunted, turning his head just slightly to see us, then he blushed and turned back to the television.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi, Claude,” Sils said a little flirtatiously.

  “Hi,” he said again.

  “Did LaRoue already come in?” I asked, suddenly worried.

  “Yeah,” he said absently. That was all. We tiptoed back to my room, trying not to squeak the floorboards and bring one of my parents down to lecture us for staying out late and being generally inconsiderate what was it with us girls.

  When later in life she would appear—in a dream with a group of people, or in a thought about friends I never saw anymore, those I’d consented to lose and live without—she often appeared, in sleep or pensiveness, as she did the next morning when she awoke, dashed to the bathroom, and threw up. She came back to the room gray and perspiring, and I gave her my bathrobe to wear. It was a white seersucker robe, and her hair fell to the inside of the neck of it, making a kind of pageboy, a frame, like the hood of a cape around her face. It was the way she often looked in winter, when she wore a coat: her hair tucked inside, looking as if it had suddenly been bobbed. I knew all the hairstyles and looks of her; there were a dozen or so, and I knew them all. Each time I saw one again, I would say to myself, “Oh, yes, that one.”

  “I’m going to have to make an appointment and just go,” she said.

  I brought her orange juice and ice water and toast buttered so hard it had ripped the bread.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. “We’ll call Humphrey, and we’ll go.”

  Which is what we did.