Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

by Lorrie Moore

  “And bad blood.”

  “That’s right. Bad blood. And on my side there’s, well—”

  “There’s arrogance and not listening,” I say.

  “Arrogance and not listening.” He laughs in a sighing way. “Did you have a good day with Marguerite? What are you thinking about?” he asks. “Was it fun? Don’t worry. I can have this whole conversation by myself. You can just watch.”

  “I really like Marguerite,” I say.

  “I know you do.”

  I sigh, clutch the covers up under my chin.

  “That’s it? That’s all that’s on your mind?”

  “Also Manon Lescaut,” I say. Last week we saw a production of it at the Bastille.

  “Manon Lescaut?”

  “I’d like to die like that,” I say. “All my jewelry on, and singing about madness.”

  “You would?”

  “With all my jewelry on? Sure.” Probably, in real life, I would die in a bathrobe, the telephone cradled in my neck.

  “Do I know you?” asks Daniel. “You don’t even wear jewelry.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “A watch. You wear a watch. Lots of lipstick and a watch.”

  “It’s a nice watch.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” Daniel says now sleepily. The air in our room is damp from the rains; it has turned my hair strumpety and full, but has made Daniel’s skin moist and pale, color in his cheeks coming only in the day, outside, in the hurried pace to and from drier destinations. He seems delicate and young beside me.

  I keep talking. “You know, that’s one thing Manon wasn’t wearing: a watch. You don’t see a lot of watch wearing in the soprano world. Have you ever noticed that? Tosca? No watch. Madame Butterfly? Again, no watch.”

  He is no longer paying attention, but it doesn’t stop me. We have traded places. “If in La Bohème you gave everyone wristwatches, you’d have a happy ending.”

  “You would?”

  “Sure,” I say. “You wouldn’t have that guy singing about his coat. He’d look at his watch and go ‘Yikes!’ ”

  “Now that’s what I’d like to hear. A nice aria with the word ‘yikes’ in it.”

  Daniel has never really liked opera. “What I like is philosophy,” he said to me once. “Philosophy’s great. Except I don’t like the whole Existence thing. Do we exist? That really pisses me off. But I like Good and Evil. I like What is Art. But just a little of What is Art. If you get too much it circles back around again to Do we exist?, which pisses me off.”

  “I’m not really looking forward to going home,” I say now.

  “Really?”

  “I feel disconnected these days, in the house, in town. The neighbors say, ‘Hello, how are you?,’ and sometimes I say, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little empty today. How about you?’ ”

  “You should get a puppy,” he says sleepily.

  “A puppy?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like the cat. A puppy you can take for walks around the neighborhood, and people will stop and smile and say, ‘Ooooh, look—What’s wrong with your puppy?’ ”

  “What is wrong with my puppy?”

  “Worms, I think. I don’t know. You should have taken him to the vet’s weeks ago.”

  “You’re so mean.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not what you bargained for,” Daniel murmurs.

  I stop and think about this. “Well, I’m not what you bargained for, either, so we’re even.”

  “No,” he says faintly, “you are. You’re what I bargained for.”

  But then he has fallen over the cliff of sleep and is snoring, his adenoids a kind of engine in his face, a motorized unit, a security system like a white flag going up.

  THE FIRST few days of July Isabelle began to show up at odd times and just stand at my cash register, watching. She would do this for five minutes, then leave, go back to her office.

  It was making me nervous. The park was crowded. The lines were long. I had stopped doing any money, except, well, once in a while, when Sils and I would decide to go out to dinner someplace fancy—the Lafayette Café, the General Montcalm Inn—where we would order surf ’n’ turf and stingers and baked potatoes with sour cream.

  Then, the second weekend of the month, something happened in the park, and Isabelle seemed briefly to have disappeared with her new concerns: the Lost Mine crashed.

  The Lost Mine was a roller-coaster-style ride through a dark tunnel up in the Frontier Village part of the park: lighted mannequins dressed as old miners made snarling robotic noises as the little five-car train you were in zipped by them. I had taken the ride twice that summer: once early on, with Sils, and then another time, only just the week before, by myself, on a break, what the heck. You weren’t really supposed to do that, as an employee, but mostly no one was watching, and the guys running the rides didn’t care. I don’t really know what the thematic point of the ride was except to plunge you into darkness alongside a narrative involving people who had gotten lost in that same darkness, stuck there in time: If you entered the Lost Mine (all that was Mine is Lost!), you, too, could become a trapped ghost, the worst kind of ghost, though of course the most common. Somehow I liked it. It made me feel that I was availing myself of whatever excitement there was in the world.

  At dusk on the seventh of July one of the cars derailed inside the mine. From the main gate I first heard the dull banging sound, and five minutes later one of the other cashiers came rushing back from her break to tell me. “The Lost Mine!” she gasped. I took my break right then, emptied the drawer into the box, locked the register, and lugged my money box, went up there, along the Jack and Jill path, arriving in time to see a flashing ambulance in front of the entrance to the ride, long streaks of blood being hosed out of the wrecked train by the grounds crew, and the owner—the legendary Frank Morenton himself—standing there in his white hair and white shoes, his presence startling in the deepening dusk. He was quietly writing someone a check.

  The small crowd that had gathered was being asked by some of the cowboys (the ones who staged the bank robbery every noon, the romance of theft and sun, how I knew it!) to disperse, please. Everything was fine, they said firmly, bowlegged in their chaps, their hats pushed to the very back of their heads. Everything was under control. One of the cowboys was Markie Russo, the one who’d had a crush on Sils last year.

  Since I had five minutes left to my break, I went and lay on the grassy hill near the Shoot-Out Corral, where there were pony rides for the children. Cashiers were not supposed to sprawl about on the grounds like that, wander into sections where they were out of context, out of character, but once in a while you could get away with it. You could saunter aimlessly into the wrong story—a situation that, in real life, I thought, actually happened all the time. There was Randi, as Little Bo Peep, constantly going over to Jungle Safari to talk to a boy there she liked. There was Sils, who one day had to flee the palace grounds to mooch a cigarette from Alice in Wonderland. And there was me: I got to take this money box wherever I went; I got to hang out with Sils, and change in the ladies’ locker room; I briefly got to feel that all that mattered was here and now in Horsehearts, though I was a worrier, a candy eater, a getter of canker sores.

  I turned my head to read the fake western gravestones that had been placed on this side of the hill at angles calculated for a look of decrepitude. I could make out only one of the inscriptions: Leadfoot Fred. Danced too slow and now he’s dead. Over the lake, days late, fireworks began—no doubt, as a distraction. (Pay no attention to that catastrophe in Frontier Village!) I watched as they exploded in the navy blue sky: a star, a heart, electric sea creatures, glittery bell skirts, garnet tarantulas—the delayed boom of each like something witty, and the whistling, zigzag ones so much like the surface of war that they scared me. Perhaps someone had really died. I grabbed up the money box, and headed back to my register.

  The next day there was no word of the bloody Lost Mine crash in the local Horsehearts paper, and not the next
day, either, though the rumor among the ride operators was that a boy had lost his legs. “Morenton wrote the parents a check for a million dollars,” Randi whispered to me at lunch, and I began to understand—again, anew—the cleansing power of money. By the end of a week the Lost Mine was functioning again, and the accident existed only as a persistent rumor, and then by the end of the month a less persistent one, and then a story, as if from long ago.

  On my day off, in the afternoon, I went to Sils’s house, the place athrob with her brothers’ band in the basement, the drums and electric guitars vibrating the windows and screens. Just back from Canada, her brother Kevin, tall with bristly, ochre hair, came up from the basement, to look at the kitchen clock and take a pill. (“He times his drugs,” Sils had said. “Maybe that’s good.”) He saw me at the screen door and sauntered over. He was wearing blue-tinted wire rims and a paisley vest with no shirt underneath. He was potbellied, and his skin was white, amphibious, strange with swirls of hair.

  “Is Sils here?” I asked through the screen.

  “Little Sils?” he repeated, mockingly, lightly, as if both she and I were small, amusing mammals. “Sure,” he said, and without opening the door himself, he simply turned and bellowed, “Sils! Your friend’s at the door for you!” and went back down into the cellar, from which came the steady, whining rock of a guitar solo, then the deep beat of the electric bass, vibrating the windows, frame and sash, straining the glass. It was good the Chaussées lived next door to a cemetery.

  Sils came down the wide, gray-painted stairs of their house. “Hi!” she said, and out of the blue gave me a hug. “Are you hungry? I’m starved,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, determined, always, to be helpful. We went into the kitchen and hunted around. Her mother hadn’t gone grocery shopping in weeks and there was nothing to make a salad or a sandwich with, and so we did as we often did: contented ourselves with raw potatoes, oleo, and salt—the potatoes cut in quarters and peeled, a meal of sororal resourcefulness. We sprinkled them with salt and spread difficult gobs of margarine along the edges. It was, in fact, a snack I loved: the cold bright fat of the Parkay, the apple-cool of the potato; our teeth gliding silently in, then noisily executing the bite through the potato. The damp crunch held a kind of comfort for me, the salt rubbing grainily against my gums. We ate raw potatoes a lot at her house—both in her room upstairs and at the beat-up aluminum dinette set in the kitchen.

  This time we took them upstairs. We sat around a whole plate of them, on her rug, and felt mildly, mockingly bored by our own self-sufficiency. The afternoon was sunny and the light was angled already, spilling through the lattice outside her window, forming diamonds on the wall.

  “Diamonds,” I said. “Not my best suit.”

  “Hearts. I like hearts.” She looked a little tired.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  Sils lit up a cigarette. “Not so bad. I had cramps, but they’re over.”

  “That’s good. Can I bum a smoke?”

  Sils handed over a cigarette. A look of anguish passed over her face. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

  “What?” I filled my lungs with smoke, but felt it best, most comfortingly around my tongue and teeth.

  Sils gulped a little and winced. “A piece of purple skin in my underwear,” she said.

  The confused and stricken girl’s face that had spilled forth this phrase, her eyes grappling with mine in a panicked way, made me moan and turn aside.

  “Oh, god,” I said. And then, not knowing what else to say, I said, “When?”

  “This morning,” she said. She blew smoke out through her nostrils, then stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, took up a chunk of raw potato, and bit into it.

  “Well, at least it’s all over,” I said. Joni Mitchell was keening “Little Green” on Sils’s record player. Sils listened to that song all the time now, like some woeful soundtrack. The soprano slides and oos of the the song always made us both sing along, when I was there. “Little green, be a gypsy dancer.” Twenty years later at a cocktail party, I would watch an entire roomful of women, one by one and in bunches, begin to sing this song when it came on over the sound system. They quit conversations, touched people’s arms, turned toward the corner stereo speakers and sang in a show of memory and surprise. All the women knew the words, every last one of them, and it shocked the men.

  “Now, where were we?” everyone said when the song was over.

  “You don’t really like Mike, do you?” Sils asked now.

  I felt caught. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Come on,” she said. “You can tell me.”

  “It’s just that … I don’t know. He has no texture.”

  “He’s got texture,” said Sils. “You’ve just got to beat it out of him.” She lit up another cigarette. “Which, I realize, you shouldn’t have to do with texture.”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  Sils’s eldest brother, Skip, the band’s drummer, pulled up in the driveway, noisy and elegant in his way. Just back from Canada, too, he was in and out of the band; he also popped pills in the kitchen, looking at the clock, glugging white and red tablets down with beer. He had his girlfriend Diane with him. When the girlfriends were there, they and Sils’s brothers took over the house, lying on top of one another on the living room sofas, kissing and rubbing and napping.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Sils, hearing Skip downstairs. She was working a late shift and didn’t have to leave for an hour. Mike was picking her up. “Let’s go for a walk.” So we did. We left her house and walked around in the park, looking for arrowheads and puffballs, until it was time for her to go.

  The next day at Storyland was slow—a warm drizzle keeping people away—and at about five o’clock Mike Suprenante drove up on his Harley. He took off his helmet and glided his motorcycle up to my register.

  “Would you like a ticket, monsieur?” I tried to be funny, friendly, but I sounded full of hate, even to my own ears.

  “I want to see you alone to talk about Sils.”

  I looked at him, trying to let nothing show. I felt secretly pleased. He had, with this request, acknowledged I was her guardian, her confidante, closer to her than he.

  “When can we do that?” he asked sternly.

  I felt powerful. “I don’t know. Tonight, maybe.”

  Herb, the manager, came up and stood behind the ticket tearer’s gate. “Get that thing outta here,” he said angrily, in the direction of the motorcycle.

  Mike started to back it up, slowly.

  “You’d better move faster than that,” said Herb. “We can’t have vehicles in the main entrance of the park.”

  Mike looked at me. “Ten o’clock. Out front here,” he called out. “Ça va?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice hickish and tough.

  Mike glided backward, then turned, started up his bike, and left. Herb came through the gate, then just stood next to me, frowning. I stood there, saying nothing, shifting my weight from one hip to the other.

  “What?” I said finally, impudently.

  “No more pals” is all he said. “No more.” And then he smiled falsely, a grimacing stack of teeth, and walked pompously away.

  “Do you want to go have a drink?” Mike asked me at closing time in front of the main gate to Storyland. It had stopped raining and the night sky had cleared. There was a bar down the road called Fort Ress, owned by a guy named Dickie Ress, and Mike liked to go there. Or there was the Sans Souci.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Wanna go to the Ress?”

  “OK.”

  “Wanna hop on?”

  “No. I’ll walk.” It was a five-minute walk past the public beach to the Ress.

  “Whatever,” said Mike. He grinned. “I’ll get us a good table out on the patio. The one with the least bird turd.” He grinned again.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Promises, promises,” I said. No matter what the situation, a sarcastic
tone was a Horsehearts girl’s best response.

  Mike winked and roared off ahead. “The vroom-vroom gene,” Sils had said the day the exhaust pipe on Mike’s Harley burned a scar into her leg. “All boys are born with it. Vroom-vroom.”

  I trudged up the road. It was after ten o’clock at night, and the sky was still a bluish color and peepers sang from the trees in the park. A frog chorus. The frogs sing for no reason and so do we went a line from a poem I had learned in school, and I imagined these frogs now scattered through the woods, their tiny eyes lit like chips of emerald, while their pumping whistle-chant—part summons, part yearning lullaby—piped through the night. Whoops, wope, who-wopes. I felt accompanied, guarded, by the throb and thrum of it, as I hiked along the beach road up toward the lights of Marvy’s Miniature Golf, where, when I got there, I could no longer hear the peeping—only bar noise and golfers in wide-lipped hats.

  The frogs. Years later, I would read in the paper that frogs were disappearing from the earth, that even in the most pristine of places, scientists were looking and could not find them. It was a warning, said the article. A plague of no frogs. And I thought of those walks up the beach road I’d made any number of times in the sexual evening hum of summer, how called and lovely and desired you felt, how possible, even when you weren’t at all. It was the frogs doing that. Later it seemed true, that I rarely heard frogs anymore. Once in a while a cricket would get trapped on the porch, but that was all. That was different. We would find it with a broom and sweep it off.

  At the Ress, I sat outside with Mike on the patio. He’d already brought beers to the table in large waxed cups. Plus two shots of whiskey for himself.

  “I know,” he said. He threw back one of the whiskeys.

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “Sils told me. About the baby.” At the word “baby” he threw back the second shot. It was very dramatic.

  “What baby?”

  “The one you went to Vermont with. Sils told me. She told me she’d been pregnant. She told me everything.”

  “There was no baby,” I said finally.

  The whiskey was doing its work. Mike leaned forward, hunched over the empty shot glasses, maudlin and drunk, unrolling the waxy rim of his beer cup with his thick fingers. “I would have taken care of it. I would have brought up that kid.” He began to blubber. I was only fifteen, and he was nineteen. But he seemed mawkish and ridiculous to me. Why had Sils told him? I’d thought the whole point had been not to tell him.