There were a lot of quiet little laughs between the two of them. Code time again. Although I have to admit, Emmett didn’t seem quite as relaxed as Phyllis.
It was getting on toward nine thirty, and Mom had said I had to be home by then. I started to leave, then remembered to ask Emmett for something I needed for school.
“Do you have a protractor, Emmett?” I asked him. “I left mine at school.”
“I got at least a half dozen of them up in my room in the right-hand drawer of my desk.”
I said good night and set off across the Kellers’ lawn and through the grove. The whooshing sound seemed to follow close at my heels and breathe right up around my shoulder blades, as if the star dogs were following me home. It gave me a strange feeling.
I went up to Emmett’s room, which was a mess as usual. Mom made him set his basketball sneakers out on his windowsill to air every night because she said nothing stank like a teenage boy’s basketball shoes. I went to his desk and found the protractor. But in the drawer beneath, I saw the tip of something red sticking out. I don’t know if I really thought twice about opening that drawer until after I did it, and then it was too late.
It was a big red envelope with Emmett scrawled on it. It was Phyllis’s handwriting, or rather, mouthwriting. She could write short messages by holding a special pen in her mouth (another invention of Dr. Keller’s). I opened it up.
It was the perfect Valentine for Emmett. I don’t know how she found it. She must have had Sally pick it up for her, or maybe she ordered it from a catalog. There was a constellation of stars that was in the shape of a heart, and when you opened up the card, there was a quote that said:
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And they will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
— William Shakespeare
And then again in Phyllis’s scrawl there were the words I’ll love you forever and a day. P.
I slipped it back into the drawer and felt something grow hot behind my cheeks, behind my eyes, like the way you start to feel before you cry. What did forever mean here? Phyllis’s forever and Emmett’s were different. But did he know that? He was truly in love with her. And she in her twisted way with him. But this couldn’t mean forever. I had to somehow stop forever — now. I’d been such a fool with all my dreams about romance, teenagers. Archie comic books. I had wanted all that for Emmett. Now I just wanted him to live here on Earth and not in the stars.
Carbuncles are not life-threatening in dairy cows. They can, however, invade the ductal system of the milk glands, which then could cause permanent damage to the udder by weakening the suspensory ligaments. And in this case a farmer might be forced to put down the cow rather than to go to the expense of feeding and pasturing it. These are what my grandfather calls “the harsh realities” of life on a farm for an animal: produce or die. So you could say that carbuncles can be fatal. It was my privilege to assist Dr. Vernon Albert, doctor of veterinary medicine, specializing in large animals, in the draining of the carbuncle of a dairy cow named Missy on my grandfather’s farm in Carmel, Indiana. This was a real experience that I think maybe changed my life, as we are supposed to write about in this composition. . . .
Of course that was a lie. It didn’t change my life at all. I didn’t dare write about what was happening that was changing my life, but the Heimer — as in Patty Wertheimer — had just read her composition about how she had helped her sister pick out a prom dress last year and was looking forward to being her “fashion consultant” again when spring came, and how that had changed her life.
Everybody lied in these stupid compositions all the time. We’re sixth-graders, for Lord’s sake! How many life-changing experiences can an eleven-year-old have had? Not ones that they want to stand up in front of a whole class and talk about. I actually got an A on the composition, and the Prune wrote at the bottom of the paper, Georgia, I hope you follow your dreams of becoming a doctor of veterinary medicine. I shall bring Sweetie Pie to you if she is ever sick. Sweetie Pie was the Prune’s poodle. Miniature poodle! Even though it was a lie, the Prune had missed the point that I had been talking about becoming a large animal vet.
I had to go over to Phyllis’s that day after school because Mom had a faculty meeting.
“I really wouldn’t discount it, Phyllis.” Mrs. Keller was knitting, and her mouth was pursed up as if she had just dropped a stitch. “I mean, Tudor Hall is willing to accommodate us so beautifully.”
I wasn’t sure what they were talking about. Was Phyllis maybe going to go back to school or something? “I’m sure Emmett would enjoy it,” Mrs. Keller continued.
Oh, my God, I thought. This cannot be happening.
“All your friends want you to come. The theme is April in Paris.”
“But the prom is in May,” Phyllis said.
“Oh, you’re such a stickler!” Mrs. Keller laughed and stuffed her knitting into the bag. “You talk to her, Georgie,” she said, and gave me a pat as she got up to leave.
“Maybe you should talk to you-know-who!” The mirrors started to flash madly, cutting the soft spring light in the room. “And see how he feels about it?” Phyllis almost hissed.
“Now, now!” Mrs. Keller said softly. She tapped on the iron lung as one might pat a child’s shoulder to calm it.
“Don’t now-now me, Mother!” I had never seen Phyllis so openly angry. But what Mrs. Keller was suggesting was absolutely unbelievable.
Roslyn Keller’s eyes filled up with tears, and she rushed out of the room. The mirrors stilled and now were filled with only my and Phyllis’s faces. “As you might have gathered, Mom and Dad have set their hearts on me going to the Tudor Hall prom with Emmett. Real freak show that would be. They already hired a medical van to transport me and the Creature and Emmett. A merry threesome! Oh, God, and now Mom’s all upset. Georgie, run and get her. I have to apologize.”
Mrs. Keller was in the kitchen, crying softly.
“What am I going to do, Georgie?” she said when she looked up.
All of a sudden I realized that recently several adults had started asking me what they were going to do. First Mom and Dad when they were worried about Emmett, and now Mrs. Keller. I didn’t think that they were really counting on me, but it made me sense how out of control this whole situation was. And then I had the worst thought of all. Nothing was ever going to be in control until Phyllis died. “Uh, Phyllis feels really bad. She asked me to come and get you. She wants to say she’s sorry.”
“She never has to say she’s sorry to me.” Mrs. Keller pressed a dish towel against her mouth as if she were stuffing a sob back inside. She must have had an ocean of unsobbed sobs in her.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m really sorry,” Phyllis said when her mother bent down to give her a kiss.
“It’s all right, dear. Your dad I and just thought it would be a nice way for you to be with your friends in a festive setting.”
I wished Mrs. Keller had not said the word festive. I caught a look in Phyllis’s eye that I had never seen before. It was soft and longing. I knew that in that moment Phyllis would have given anything to touch her mother’s face. When her mom left the room, the look did not linger in Phyllis’s eyes. “So, Georgie, tell me this.”
“What?” I asked.
“Do you believe in God?” It was the non sequitur thing again. Why, I wondered, did God always come up as a non sequitur?
“I don’t know. I used to.”
“I never did, I am proud to say. I take solace in that. There’s no letdown if you don’t believe in God. Even though I went to church, I used to cross my fingers when I said the Creed.”
“The Creed?”
“The Nicene Creed. It’s an Episcopal thing, I guess, and Catholic.”
“We’re Presbyterians.”
“Oh, see, we go to Trinity Church. Very ‘high Episcopalian,’ as they say. Mom l
oves the church. She likes its rituals. Smells and bells but not really Catholic. She likes the fact that Henry the Eighth started the whole thing. Natch, this would appeal to the English literature side of her.”
“What’s a king got to do with religion?”
“Yeah, my sentiments exactly, and what a king! He chopped off his own wife’s head.”
“He what!” I was stunned.
“He surely did, and I told my mom once, before I got sick, that I would never go to a church founded by a man who cut off his wife’s head.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to this. But then Phyllis suddenly caught me in the mirrors again. “Now, come on, tell me truthfully. Do you or don’t you believe in God, Georgie?”
Her eyes bore into me. I knew in that moment what I was supposed to say: No. How can I believe in God if he lets something like this happen to you? But I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to be forced into saying anything about what I believed or didn’t believe. And that was what Phyllis was trying to do — force me to say something. It was a kind of loyalty test: if I believed in one — God, that is — then I couldn’t believe in the other, Phyllis.
But I was quiet. I said nothing. Just at that moment a blast of sunshine poured through the windows and reflected off the mirrors like lightning. I was caught again in this snare of light, and at its center I knew was the dazzling spider-girl weaving a tangled web of death, her death. That was what Phyllis was talking about. She was absolutely masterful at talking about dying without talking about dying. As a matter of fact, I began to think that maybe she really did or had believed in God, and that her death was not solely an act of escape but of vengeance against that God.
“You’re mad at God, aren’t you?” I said quietly.
I saw a pulse tick in Phyllis’s temple. When she laughed there was a hard glitter in her eyes. “How can I be mad at God if I don’t believe in him?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Georgie. I shouldn’t have asked you these questions. They’re personal, I know.”
But you did ask them, I thought. The minutes seemed to drag until four thirty, when I could leave. I’m not sure what we talked about.
“Well, I better be going now. Mom’s home.”
“All right.” I started for the door. “Hey, Georgie, I’m really sorry about all that. It was very intrusive of me. I should mind my own business, eh?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. Her business was death. But as I walked back through the grove, my fear set like cold lead in my gut. And though I was filled with thoughts of death, I began to search for signs of life. It was early March, and I went around our yard looking for the little green points of the daffodils and tulips pushing up through the winter-locked ground. I had helped Mom plant the bulbs last fall.
When I got back to the house, Mom was beaming. “Emmett got a full scholarship to Purdue,” she said, waving an envelope.
“Mom, did you open his mail?”
“I didn’t open it exactly.”
“Well, what exactly did you do?” I asked.
“It’s a fat envelope — see? If they get rejected, it’s always a skinny one, and this was sort of open and I just took a little peek inside.”
“Mom!”
“Don’t tell him I looked — please, Georgie.”
“I won’t. But really, Mom, don’t do that with me. Besides, I’ll probably get a skinny envelope.”
Mom batted me on the shoulder with the envelope. “Nonsense, Georgie. You’re every bit as smart as Emmett.”
It wasn’t true, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. I just wished that Emmett could go off to college right now, today.
By mid-April, all the Mustard Seeds who had either older brothers or sisters were all talking about prom season and going downtown with their mothers and sisters to look for prom dresses. I had gained some stature among the Mustard Seeds because they knew of Emmett being a basketball star at Westridge. One day on the playground, Amy Moncton said, “So who’s Emmett taking to the prom?”
“I don’t know.” Ever since that afternoon at Phyllis’s, the word prom had a terrible meaning for me. When I got home that day, I buried my Archie comic book about the prom at the very bottom of the stack.
“My sister says he’s cute.”
I didn’t know what to say. For a girl, let alone a Mustard Seed who had snubbed me all year, to say something like this was truly daring. You just didn’t go around blabbing stuff like this. It wasn’t cool. There must have been desperation in the Moncton family. My first instinct was to say he’s not the prom type, which of course was the truth, seeing as he never had gone to a prom. I certainly couldn’t say that his girlfriend is in an iron lung. I thought briefly about lying and saying he had a girlfriend but she lived out of town. But that would be so disloyal to Phyllis. I was at a loss. So I just mumbled, “I don’t know.”
Please, please don’t ask Evelyn about her outfit, I thought as Mom, Grandma, Evelyn, and I sat down in Block’s tearoom for lunch. I was staring straight across at the froth of pink frills that gushed from the neckline of the fitted jacket Evelyn was wearing. Her mother had bought her a new outfit. From the top up, she looked kind of like a birthday cake. From the waist down, she looked like an old lady, a chopped-off sixty-five-year-old without wrinkles. Marge, how could you!
I, on the other hand, looked pretty good. I was wearing a gray princess-line dress with a soft cream-colored velvet collar and matching velvet cuffs. Mom and Grandma were both wearing hats, and as I looked at Grandma across the table in what she called her spring-green suit, I knew that underneath, harnessing her in, was the pink flamingo that I had seen flapping on the clothesline last summer. The big thing was that Evelyn and I were both wearing nylon stockings for the first time. And we both had Capezio flats on. She and I had each talked our moms into getting us the shoes and the stockings, and we were very excited about wearing them. There was not much that could go wrong in selecting a pair of flats and nylons. Marge had at least done that part right.
It was always a custom for Grandma and Mom and me to have a Saturday spring lunch downtown at the big department store, the William H. Block Company. They had a tearoom where they served what Dad described as fussy ladies’ food. Drinks came with little parasols in them. And if you ordered chicken that wasn’t à la kinged (meaning, I think, off the bone and stewed in cream sauce), but on the bone, the drumsticks came with little frilly paper pants on them so you wouldn’t get your fingers greasy when you picked them up.
There were fashion models who drifted through and would stop and twirl in front of your table in pretty pastel-colored suits. Mom said that I could bring Evelyn along. It was unbelievable to me that this would be the first time Evelyn had ever been to Block’s tearoom. Every mom took her daughter there. It was like taking a little bitty kid to see Santa Claus. You just did it. Not the Winklers, I guess.
“So it’s getting near the end of school, girls,” Grandma said. “Any plans for summer?”
Not getting polio, I thought, but didn’t say it. We both shrugged.
“Not really,” Evelyn answered.
“Mom,” I said, “I had this neat idea. If we could build a swimming pool in our backyard, a private swimming pool, would you let me go swimming?”
“Georgie, there is no way we are building a swimming pool. They cost too much money, and I don’t want the responsibility of other people’s kids sneaking into a pool.”
“They wouldn’t sneak in. I’d invite only a couple. Like just one — Evelyn.”
“Kids sneak into people’s pools all the time, and then someone drowns or something and you’re liable. So forget it.”
“Why don’t you rent a cottage up north on a lake? Lake swimming is safe,” Grandma suggested.
“That’s an idea,” Mom said.
I wondered whether Emmett would even go if we got a cottage.
Then Grandma turned to Evelyn. “I understand that you and Georgie entered the science f
air together and got third prize.”
“Yep,” Evelyn said.
“Now, what was your experiment?”
“It wasn’t an experiment, Grandma. We built a model of a cell with the nucleus and all that stuff.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. If you are learning all about cells and genes and hereditary things, that’s what interests Grandpa and me in building our herd.”
“Nobody knows what the structure of a chromosome looks like,” Evelyn offered. “It’s a mystery, but my dad says whoever figures it out will get a Nobel Prize.”
“Hmmm,” Grandma said. “You know, we’ve been building our Holstein herd from this one bloodline, and I’m beginning to suspect that some of those prize bulls they advertise, well, they aren’t sending us the good stuff.” I could see that my mother was getting a little nervous over the direction of the conversation. She was twirling the little paper umbrella in her iced tea. It wasn’t the kind of conversation that one usually had in Block’s tearoom. Just as the waitress was setting down our plates, Evelyn’s and my chicken with the frilly pants, Grandma said, “It’s not truth in advertising. I think they’ve been slipping in some puny sperm.” It was one of those unfortunate moments in a restaurant when there is a sudden lull in the conversational din, and that word sperm just sailed right out into the void. The waitress turned bright red. Mom cleared her throat and I think wished for a coughing fit or some sort of camouflage, but the word was out there. It took Grandma a second to realize what she had said — well not what she had said but where she had said it. She just laughed and twirled the paper umbrella in her iced tea. “Well, well, Dot.” She turned to Mom, who looked as if she had been sucker-punched. “You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.” Then she turned to Evelyn and me. “Sorry, girls.” Evelyn, of course, just blinked in that way she had. The Winklers probably talked about sperm and stuff like that at the dinner table all the time.