Lorrie Moore - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

“Perhaps a hoodlum is already politics.”

“You’re no hoodlum.”

“That’s true,” I say, sighing. And in this lie I feel close to him, so grateful to him, so full of pity.

It goes like that. Our talk goes something like that.

It was on a Tuesday, my day off, that I planned to show Sils the money. I cleaned my room. I vacuumed the purple shag carpet, put new Scotch tape on the back of my Desiderata poster so it didn’t billow or droop. Be yourself.… You are a child of the universe.… Be cheerful. Strive to be happy . “Where’s the part that says, ‘Don’t run with scissors in your mouth’?” Claude once asked, studying it. The previous school year I’d also taped up a Let It Be poster, a Spiro Agnew poster (on which I’d inanely scrawled, in eyeliner, “Yeah, right, Spiro Baby!”), and a psychedelic poster that said, in flameglo, swirling script, “Life Is a Gas at 39 Cents a Gallon.” But this summer I had taken them down and left only the Desiderata . Now I dusted the shelves and the dressing table with its loosening, fake-wood contact-paper top and its skirt assembled from an old dyed curtain and some tacks. I had a row of colognes from the drugstore downtown: Eau de Lemon, Eau de Love, Oh! de London (Odekerk! Dad, Odekerk!). I had a small stack of articles from Seventeen , articles that advised you how to prepare for a date in one hour, in fifteen minutes, in five minutes, in thirty seconds. (He’s striding unexpectedly up the walk! What should you do? Quick! Brush your hair and tie a freshly ironed kerchief around it! ) I had an electric makeup mirror with three settings: Day — Evening — Office. The Office setting was greenish and particularly lurid, and now I leaned into it, hunting in the wilds of the looking glass, examining my skin, not good, not bad, scouting for swellings and clogs and squeezing where I could the watery flan from my pores. Then I swabbed them red and pure with rubbing alcohol. I put on makeup in a large, theatrical way — dark and bright — as if my face were meant to be seen at a great distance.

I set my hair on mist rollers plugged in under the vanity. I put on a scoopneck leotard and my Wrangler shorts, which I had unhemmed the bottoms of in March and carefully combed to form a fringe of paler blue. I looped my macramé belt through the belt loops. I put on some records, Laura Nyro, Carole King, my life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue . I dabbed vanilla extract and Jean Naté Friction pour le Bain on separate wrists, then rubbed them together, my own particular mix. I wanted to be original. I wanted to be me ! I removed the rollers and brushed the bobby-pin ridges out of my hair. I fell down on my bed and waited. Actually it was only a mattress, frameless on the floor like Sils’s, which is how I wanted it, and I had covered it with a bright orange and pink Indian print spread, a “tapestry,” we called them, which I had bought at the Macy’s mall in Albany the year before with my mother. “Are you sure you want that?” she had asked.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Well, it’s your room.” The Albany mall was an amazing, bursting palace to me, and I bought badly there, tastelessly, my head dizzy.

I lay on my bed and looked up. I had a pink floodlight in lieu of the regular ceiling fixture and I had affixed a paper beehive-shaped shade to it; probably a fire hazard. What did I care? I owned nothing of value. Everything would turn out fine. Or else — hell — it would burn. I only wanted my body to bloom and bleed and be loved. I was raw with want, but in part it was a simple want, one made for easy satisfaction, quick drama, deep life: I wanted to go places and do things with Sils. So what if the house burned down.

I heard her bicycle crunch up the driveway then stop. She scratched at the screen with a key, and I got up and went to the window.

“Hi,” she smiled, looking up into the house through the rusty grid of our screens. She was wearing her best blue jeans, and her white sleeveless shirt under a jean jacket. I knew her clothes by heart.

“Come on in the front,” I said. “The door’s unlocked.”

“Your parents home?”

“Ehm … just LaRoue and my mother.”

“Brought along a little something,” she said, patting the breast pocket of her jacket. “Leave open the windows of your life, babe.” I watched her wheel her bike off to the front and waited to hear the doorbell ring. LaRoue answered.

“Berie,” LaRoue shouted gruffly, perhaps even angrily, but why? I never asked. “It’s for you. Silsby Chaussée’s at the door.”

“Let her in,” I shouted back.

“You,” replied LaRoue, who pounded off to her own room.

“Girls, stop yelling!” called my mother from upstairs.

I met Sils halfway, in the dining room, already coming in, and I grabbed her jacket cuff, turned, and led her back into my room.

“Typical afternoon at the Carr house,” said Sils.

“I hate this family,” I said, and closed and locked the door. We had old doors in our house: keyholes with skeleton keys we were required to leave in the hole.

Still, I turned the key, locked the bolt in place, and once the door was shut I watched Sils’s smile dissolve to a mumble and a stare. “Fuck,” she said, fumbling for the joint in her pocket and lighting it with Sans Souci matches. She inhaled and held the smoke deep inside, like the worst secret in the world, and then let it burst from her in a cry.

“Here.” She thrust the joint at me and I headed for the back window with it, on my rug-burned knees before the screen, blowing out the smoke.

“I keep thinking about what’s inside me,” Sils said. “The beginning little Tinkertoys of a kid. But I don’t feel anything.”

I turned to look at her, but we were sitting too close, so I turned my head back toward the window, looked toward the middle distance, then farther, looked out past the trees, at and through the leaves, and I again remembered that night last year, the one with the man and the gun springing up like a jack-in-the-box, the light summer midnight just beyond and past the branches. We had run, always heading for the next group of trees, and then for the next and then the next, like an enactment of all of life.

“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.