For these very reasons I had kind of avoided going to Phyllis’s for a couple of days because I knew that we both had different ideas of what my helping meant. But I finally went over one afternoon when I was completely bored. As I walked into the sunroom, the mirrors swiveled and brought my face in closer. There was one mirror that was perfect for holding a conversation between two people if that person sat at about a forty-five degree angle from where Phyllis’s head came out of the cylinder. So I moved to a barstool and perched on it.
“So, Saint Georgie, how are you progressing?”
How am I progressing? Jeez, I thought. Did she mean in furthering the romance? This seemed a little false to me, knowing what I did, and now I was going to have to be equally false and pretend total innocence, pretend as if nothing had happened that night when Evelyn and I saw them. OK, so they didn’t kiss, but almost, and Emmett had slid his hand into the port of the iron lung. I’d seen enough to know that Cupid could retire. I sensed that what she really wanted to know was had Emmett said anything to me about his feelings for her. Dream on, I felt like saying, because Emmett never talked about feelings. I was amazed that lying came so naturally to me — me an aspiring saint. “Well, it’s been hard to catch him because preseason practice is starting, and you know the basketball scouts will be snooping around.”
“Even before school starts?”
“Yeah, they come early and try to catch the practices.” This wasn’t exactly the truth.
“Oh,” Phyllis said quietly. “I see.” Then something began to happen. Phyllis’s face grew pale, and I saw the features begin to twist. She didn’t look so pretty. Every single mirror now flashed with her face that was suddenly ugly, contorted. Her mouth dragged down in a terrible grimace.
“Get Sally.”
“Sally!” I yelled.
Sally appeared in a split second.
“Spasm in the left leg again?” she asked.
“Yes,” Phyllis said. Her voice was taut: the Creature was gasping for her. Nothing was hers, I thought. Nothing went untouched by the Creature — not her giggles, not her gasps.
Sally fetched a hypodermic needle from the small refrigerator in the room. She was on the other side of the iron lung from me, so I couldn’t see everything she did. But I think first she must have slid her hand through one of the sealed ports on that side and swabbed down a patch of skin on Phyllis’s leg with some alcohol. Then her hand came out again and she took the hypodermic needle.
“Maybe your little friend should go.”
“Maybe not!” Phyllis said through her clenched teeth.
I was too scared to move an inch, but despite my fear, a sudden joy flooded through me. She wanted me to be there at this moment. Then Phyllis gave me a quick smile as her face began to relax. “Don’t worry, Georgie. This happens sometimes.” I felt as if the sun, a private little sun, was shining on me, pouring through me. I felt illuminated by her smile. Her eyes were growing heavy.
“She’ll sleep for a little while,” Sally said. She came over with a damp cloth and wiped Phyllis’s forehead, which had broken out in beads of perspiration. Then she went and got a hairbrush. She began brushing Phyllis’s hair back into a ponytail, a beautiful ponytail of blond curls. It didn’t swing, though. It just sort of trembled with the vibrations of the machine. That’s when I got up to leave.
“Bye, Phyllis,” I whispered.
Later that day, I got out my diary. I got the key and opened it and started writing. But the only word I could write, and I wrote it over and over again, was Why? Why, why, why? And while I wrote, a voice beneath the silent cry of that word hissed at me. Finally after the twentieth why, I got up my nerve to actually write what I was thinking. I pressed hard with the pencil, grinding it into the paper. I think God is a jerk if He let this happen to Phyllis. Maybe Jesus, too. He should know better ’cause He suffered.
When I finished writing those lines, I slammed the diary shut and locked it. I was proud. Yes, really proud! And now I knew what I was going to do. It was going to be tricky because I knew, I was sure, they had kissed and other stuff, and yet he probably never really talked to her. I marched right over to Emmett’s room. I knocked loudly on the door.
“Who the heck is it?” He opened the door. “Jeez, Georgie, what are you trying to do? Break down the door?”
“Emmett, you know and I know that she likes you a lot. A whole lot. You’ve got to grow up.” He blinked at this. Yes, it was definitely laughable; me, barely five feet, looking up at all six-five of Emmett and telling him to grow up. “I’m talking about Phyllis. Whenever you go over there, you talk to Dr. Keller. You talk about that stupid machine.”
“That’s not true. I talk to Phyllis a lot. I bring my scope over and look at the stars with her.”
“You’re hiding behind your telescopes. You’re hiding behind the stars. You’re hiding in the night.” I decided to go for broke at this point. “Do you ever tell her how you feel?”
Emmett grew very quiet. He didn’t blush. He just looked down at his bare feet. “You really think she likes me?”
“I don’t think. I know. She told me so.”
“She told you?”
“Yes, Emmett.” I hesitated. “Emmett, it’s not just that she’s in this horrible contraption. There’s this other thing.”
“What other thing?”
I wasn’t sure how to exactly explain it. “Everyone lies to Phyllis — her mom, her dad. Everyone has this fake cheeriness, and now you.”
“I’m not cheery.”
“Jeez,” I muttered, and rolled my eyes. “No, but you lie. You play that lying game along with the rest of them. And why don’t you just tell her how you like her? Because that’s the truth, isn’t it?”
He dodged the question, dodged it as skillfully as if he were escaping the most incredible blocking move on a basketball court.
“And you don’t lie, Georgie? You tell her some kind of truth?”
“Well, I just don’t always agree that everything is hunky-dory like all those gadgets Dr. Keller puts on the machine. Emmett, you’ve probably said more to Dr. Keller, and when you do talk to her . . . it’s . . . it’s not like you’re really talking to her.” I kept plugging on. I was actually feeling almost saintly. “Emmett, I know. I am an expert at feeling left out. It’s like being sidelined, Emmett!”
“Sidelined?”
“Yeah!” I said this slowly for emphasis. I almost managed to make yeah into a two-syllable word. “It’s happened to you in basketball only a few times, and you got so awful, I heard Mom and Dad talking about taking you to a psychologist.”
“They did?”
I nodded solemnly. This was not quite the truth. Mom said this kind of as a joke, but I know she was plenty worried.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
I wanted to say it’s not just about doing whatever you were doing that night — like feeling up Ralph! But I couldn’t, obviously. So I slipped back into the innocent again. Georgie Mason, master of disguises! “How am I supposed to know? I’m a sixth-grader. Just . . . just . . . just don’t get all wrapped up with Dr. Keller and the machine. She doesn’t have anybody.” Then it just slipped out. “Not even God.” I paused. “And that goes for me, too.”
“What are you talking about, Georgie?”
“I mean, Emmett — and don’t tell Mom and Dad this and not Grandma and Grandpa — but I don’t think I believe in God anymore. I mean, how can I believe in God when someone like Phyllis winds up in an iron lung? If there were really a God, I don’t think there would be polio.”
“Or the Black Death?” Emmett said.
“Exactly. Or the A-bomb,” I said.
“It was Truman who dropped the atom bomb,” Emmett said.
“Yeah, but if there were a God, he wouldn’t have let President Truman do it, and he wouldn’t have let those scientist guys invent it.”
“Yeah. Well, this is all very interesting, Georgie, but I don’t see how this exactly relates to me
and Phyllis.”
“Just talk to her. I mean, Emmett, you like her, don’t you?”
Emmett turned a little bit away from me and began tucking in his T-shirt. “Oh, yeah. I really like her.” There was a huskiness in his voice.
“What’s that?” I asked, suddenly noticing a pile of wire on his desk. I hadn’t noticed what Emmett had been doing. “The lights that your friend Evelyn brought you.” I felt a twinge of guilt. Evelyn had offered to bring them on the night we went and spied. “I’m wiring them together for your Orion thingamajig.”
“My diorama.”
“Yes. You said you really couldn’t get much further without the lights. I found some more for you, too. I can show you how to do this yourself if you’re interested.”
“Gee, yes, thanks, Emmett.” Now of course I felt a little guilty about sticking it to him the way I just had.
I left his room, and just then the phone rang on the upstairs hallway extension. I picked it up. It was Phyllis.
“Saint Georgie?”
“Uh, speaking.”
She giggled.
“Hey, this is the night of the meteor showers.”
“The Perseids.”
“Yes, that’s it. And guess what?”
“What?”
“The stars are aligned, Georgie.” There was silence. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Astrology? Emmett said astrology was a fake science. “You get my meaning?”
“Not exactly.”
“My parents are out. Only the nurses are here, and Emmett and I could have maybe a . . . should I say . . . real date?”
A date, I thought, an honest-to-gosh date! But it was the Perseids, and Emmett always watched them with me. “Put Emmett on the phone.”
“Just a minute.”
I ran to get Emmett. “She wants to talk to you, Emmett.”
He didn’t even have to ask who.
It was mid-August, and the Perseid meteor showers were in full swing. But tonight I would not be going to watch these starry showers. I was a casualty of my own success. Emmett was seeing her more than ever, and they were now talking on the phone a lot, too. Not as much as Evelyn and I talked, but Emmett rarely talked on the phone. Indeed, it appeared that I had managed to penetrate my brother’s brain with the fact that Phyllis really liked him and that he should stop acting so dense. The long and the short of it was as soon as it got dark, dark enough for the stars to break out and start scrambling around up there, Emmett planned to set off with his telescope. He even said to me very plainly, “You can’t come, Georgie. This is a date!”
It was the first time he had ever referred to visiting Phyllis as a date. So my hypothesis had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. All the date data was in, and where was I? Sidelined. Left out! Call it a corollary. We learned about corollaries in the beginning geometry unit we did the previous year in math. A corollary is a proposition that follows from one already proven: a direct or natural result. That’s me — a walking, talking, living corollary.
To contemplate the universe on a star-pricked August night is a recipe for feeling small, insignificant, and alone. I felt especially alone, not looking at the Perseids with Emmett. But this was the price I had to pay for him having an actual date. A girlfriend!
When Emmett and I watched, we had our routine. We did it the same way every year. We got out the plastic lounge chairs and put our sleeping bags on them. We set up a table in between the chairs. Then we made two big thermoses of lemonade. Under the table we had an ice chest with Popsicles. Only orange and grape flavors. He liked grape. I liked orange. In a picnic basket, we had four packages of Hostess Twinkies, which according to Emmett are “the finest baked goods ever invented.” But then we had our own invention, and this was pure genius. I actually had thought it up, even though Emmett liked to take credit. It was the potato-chip sandwich. Here’s the recipe:
Take two pieces of very fresh Wonder bread. (It can’t be stale or it won’t be squishy enough. It’s very important that it be squishy. We call it the squishiness quotient.)
Slather on mayonnaise — lots and lots.
Arrange a layer of potato chips on top of the bottom piece with the slathered mayonnaise. Slather a second layer of mayonnaise over the chips, then add one more layer of chips on top of this. Then put on the top of the sandwich.
It’s not just scrumptious; it is crumptious (another invention of mine — that word). It is the best sandwich in the world. And we usually ate about three or four during a night of meteor showers.
I really did hope he and Phyllis were not eating Twinkies and Popsicles. I wanted things to work out, but there was no banishing the loneliness feeling for me, and I was already beginning to feel spectacularly insignificant when I suddenly was ambushed by the complete injustice of my life. It just seemed all wrong that here I was, the one who had no friends on this side of town. Well, I had one, but she was pretty odd, although I had grown used to Evelyn’s oddness. I wondered what my old friends at my old school would make of Evelyn. And it seemed really unfair that I was the one who had to start at a new school. I was mentally whining to myself. I thought this was all happening just in my head, but somehow my mopiness might have oozed out because after dinner I was very quiet and suddenly Dad said, “What’s bugging you, Georgie?” I immediately started leaking tears.
“Georgie, sweetie, what’s wrong? Is it baton twirling? You don’t have to go to the mother-daughter Hoosier Twirler thing if you don’t want to.” My mom gave my shoulders a squeeze. This of course made me cry harder.
“No, no. Mom and I were discussing that, sweetie.” Dad was now patting my head. “I said just last night, ‘Dottie, let’s ease up on the twirling.’”
“It’s not baton twirling,” I sobbed.
“Well, what is it, honey?”
A tiny bubble of snot dripped from my nose. Things had escalated, or at least the mucus had.
“I have no friends. Emmett’s going out tonight on a date. The night of the Perseids.”
“A date!” both my parents blurted out. You would have thought I had said Emmett was running for president of the United States. Emmett had just come down the stairs with his telescope. “Emmett, a date?” Mom almost squealed. Poor Emmett was turning red. If blushing was fatal, he was about three seconds from death.
“Yes, it’s true!” I said. “And this is the first time ever that I haven’t watched the meteor showers with him.”
“Not when you were a newborn baby,” Emmett said feebly.
“That’s not funny, Emmett.”
“Well, I won’t go. I don’t mind,” he replied.
“What? You’ve got to go!” I wanted to say, After all the work I’ve done, you better go!
“Well, maybe Georgie could go with you,” Mom suggested. Whenever moms try to be helpful in situations like this, they always sound so unbelievably stupid. Emmett and I both looked at her.
“Noooo!” I said. “What’s that supposed to be, when the little sister tags along? A date with training wheels?”
I could see Mom and Dad trying not to laugh.
“Tell you what, Georgie,” my dad said. “How about I take you out to play miniature golf this evening.”
“But I want to see the meteor showers.”
“We’ll get you back in time.”
“Would you take me to the movies?”
“Well, we already saw what was playing at the drive-in theater.”
“What about the Ritz?”
“No, Georgie, we’ve been through this before. It’s not safe. Besides, I just read in the paper today that the Vogue Theater is closing and the Ritz probably will be, too.”
“I don’t think there’ll be one open in the city by next week,” my mother said.
“But miniature golf, well,” Dad continued, “no problem there. That’s outdoors in the fresh air. Come on, we could have ourselves a nice little game. I bet we could get in a quick nine holes right after supper, and it won’t be getting dark till late. I’ll
tell you what: I’ll even take you to the drive-in for ice cream.”
“I am not going to go to a drive-in restaurant with my dad, Dad! Teenagers go to drive-ins with dates and friends. And I have no friends.”
“OK. But how about miniature golf?”
“Maybe,” I said, and walked into the kitchen for a second dessert. Emmett followed me.
“Georgie, I can explain to Phyllis.”
I glared at him. “Emmett Mason, if you back out of this, I’ll kill you.”
I took a piece of paper towel. I had to stop this crying. I had to get back into gear as Saint Georgie or Saint Whatever. “Just forget it, Emmett. I’ll be fine.”
I walked over to a kitchen counter, where the newspaper was, and began turning the pages. Mom was right. The Vogue Theater had closed. Then I went to the front page and looked in the corner at the bottom where they always had a report on the most recent polio cases. There had been four more in one day. That made twenty for this week. They never gave the people’s names, but you kind of wondered who they were. Before polio, I used to only read the crime section of the paper. But now sometimes I read the obituaries. It was strange to look at the obituary page, because it wasn’t just old people’s pictures anymore.
I went back into the living room.
“OK, I’ll go play miniature golf. But can we go to Round the World and NOT Old MacDonald’s Farm?” Old MacDonald’s Farm miniature golf course had a giant chicken that clucked very loudly if you sent the ball through its mouth. If we ran into people we knew there, they always made poultry jokes to Dad. Poultry jokes were not that funny, and I didn’t need them in the mood I was in.
“Why don’t you call one of your old friends, like Susie?” Mom said.
“She lives on Park. It’s the other side of town,” I said, trying to make it sound like Siberia, or rather that we were in Siberia and Susie was actually in the city of Indianapolis.
“Don’t worry. We’ll pick her up. She can spend the night. And if she can’t, come ask one of your other old friends.”
I went and dialed Susie’s number. It rang and rang. No answer. I tried Jody, then Ellen. Nothing. Just as I imagined they were all having a slumber party at, say, Minnie’s house, the phone rang. It was Evelyn. So I invited her to come play miniature golf and spend the night. She could do the miniature golf but couldn’t spend the night.