Lorrie Moore - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

“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.