“You know,” Phyllis was saying, “as soon as Raymond started going out with this other girl, I heard he got a flattop. Not all boys can wear flattops. His head looks like a box, I’m sure. He should have stuck with a crew cut.”
“Yeah,” I said softly.
I was completely in awe of Phyllis. When I went back home, walked into my bedroom, and sat down at my princess vanity in front of my heart-shaped mirror, I could hardly look in it. My only thought was I am soooo ordinary!
I heard the phone ringing and then Mom called upstairs, “Georgie, it’s for you!” There was an unnatural brightness in her voice, or maybe it was a camouflage for her desperation. There would definitely be no timer for this call. I ambled to the phone hoping it was Wendy.
“Hi . . . it’s me.” I have to confess that my heart sank just a little bit. Her voice sounded even more mushroomy over the phone.
“Oh, hi, Evelyn.”
“We got back early, but I think it’s too late to go to the library now.”
“But we can talk!” I said. I wanted to tell her about my conversation with Phyllis.
“Sure!”
“You’re never going to believe this!”
“What?” Evelyn asked eagerly.
I got into my most comfy telephone-talking position, which is lying on the floor with my feet propped up against the wall. “So,” I continued, “I was over at Phyllis’s and guess what?”
“What?”
“Well, she starts asking me all about my brother, Emmett — like does he have a girlfriend, has he ever had a girlfriend . . . and I’m thinking, gads, am I hearing this right? Or am I imagining it? Or does Phyllis actually have some kind of a crush on Emmett and is wanting me to play Cupid?”
“Hmmmm . . .” Evelyn said. If ever a mushroom sighed, that was the sound. I had expected a little more excitement.
“So what do you think? I mean, isn’t it crystal clear?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Now, tell me exactly what you said and she said again.”
So I repeated the conversation as best I could, then waited for Evelyn’s response.
“OK,” she said, a new energy in her voice. My hopes picked up that she would agree with me. “Now, here’s what I think. You can’t rush to conclusions.”
“I don’t think I’m rushing.” I rearranged my feet on the wall. They had left sweaty prints with streaks of dirt. Mom wouldn’t mind. She was desperate about me, after all. But I would try and clean them off afterward. I supposed that I should wash my feet as well.
“You’re not rushing, but you must proceed in a logical fashion. This is the basis of scientific inquiry — hypothesis, exploration through testing the hypothesis, evidence, data, then conclusion. Has she ever used the word date as in, she would like to date him?”
“Evelyn!” I blurted out. “This is romance, not pea shoots.” What she had just described sounded exactly like the science experiment I did last year with pea shoots growing toward light.
Evelyn started laughing so hard she finally, through gulps, gasped, “Pea shoots! I got to go before I pee in my pants.” Then I started laughing, and so ended our second phone conversation. It had been the most fun I had had in a long time.
Five minutes later, the phone rang again. I picked up. It was Evelyn. I knew it would be. “My bladder is under control. We can talk.”
For the women in our family, beginning with my grandmothers, baton twirling was not just a high-school activity, and never a “sport.” It was an art form. For three generations the women had been baton twirlers and all members of the Hoosier Twirlers. Except me. I was too young. You had to be at least thirteen. When I got to eighth grade, I would be able to try out. I couldn’t wait! Ha, ha. No. I was a freak of nature, genetically speaking. I didn’t get the twirling gene or whatever it was that allows one to throw a silver stick high up into the air, catch it, flip it into a flutter twirl, and let it roll down her arm. In fact my one and only trip to the emergency ward was when I tried this and my nose got in the way of the baton and my hand. The baton broke my nose, and there was blood all over me, the baton, and all Mom’s pals, old Hoosier Twirlers who got together for sessions with their daughters. But did that maybe give a teeny-weeny hint to Mom that I was not cut out for this sport? And yes, it is considered a sport. Don’t ever say it’s not a sport, or you’ll get a twenty-minute lecture on all the muscle groups involved in baton twirling. But no, Mom was still convinced that I had the seeds, or whatever you call it, to become a great twirler. So in addition to terminal cowlicks, I had a crooked nose. It turned a little bit east. Thank heavens Mom wasn’t pushing twirling this summer. I think Dad sort of discouraged her, what with the new house, the new school, and all.
But today was Mom’s turn for hosting the alumnae of the Hoosier Twirlers.
And Velma, her best friend who had been the captain of the twirlers, was out there now setting the pace. I put my elbows on the windowsill and watched. It was so hot, I didn’t know how they stood it. Gads, I couldn’t believe it when I spotted Winona. Winona Beech was seventy-five years old. She was teensy even in her high-stepping boots, and until she was seventy, she could twirl three batons at once. Only a very few people could do that. I imagined that if I ever attempted it, I would not only break my nose but knock out both my eyes.
I put in earplugs to drown out the music and got my book. It was the newest Ray Bradbury. I was halfway through it now. But the first page was one of the best beginnings ever. I turned back to read the paragraph that I just loved.
Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in colors reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.
Now that is what I call writing.
The book is about a man whose whole body is covered with tattoos, and these tattoos predict the future. I couldn’t figure out how Ray Bradbury thought all this stuff up. He was so totally original. He was a genius. It was like Phyllis. She was original, too. Who else would think of painting a bedroom celery green with silver trim and making a lamp stuffed with prom corsages? I wasn’t original at all. My princess vanity reminded me of this every time I looked at it and saw my stupid face in the heart-shaped mirror. It wasn’t my face that sickened me now, not my stubby hair with its herd of stampeding cowlicks. It was the heart shape of the mirror. The vanity seemed so . . . so vain!
I looked up at the ceiling in my room. I wanted the walls to purr. The ceiling to dissolve into a deep blue. I wanted to be in a place before polio, a place where an iron lung had never been invented, never thought of, never needed. A place where an iron lung would be as strange as a flying saucer and polio would be science fiction. I remembered one graph in my polio folder that said in 1920 there were only something like 325 cases of polio in the entire country. I wondered what life was like then. There weren’t families like the Rileys. The Rileys lived in one of the epidemic states — Wisconsin, I think. They lost four out of their six children in the space of seventy-two hours. The oldest boy was a basketball player. He came home from practice with a sore shoulder and then by the next day had died. That night his four-year-old sister also died, quickly followed by two more. This story haunted me. I suppose it was because the boy, Paul, was a star basketball player like Emmett. It was just too easy to imagine Emmett coming home with a sore muscle. That happened all the time, especially at the beginning of the season. But what if it wasn’t a muscle? What if it was the polio virus attacking his spinal cord? And he’d get sick and die and then I would, and my parents would be left with no kids in a matter of hours. Like an extinction.
How could those stupid Hoosier Twirlers be out there with their batons flashing in the sun as if nothing were wrong? A John Philip Sousa march was blasting out across our nonexistent lawn. I know life was supposed to go on, but sometimes it seemed just plai
n wrong that it did. Nevertheless, life was going on to the accompaniment of a John Philip Sousa march! And there was no escaping. The summer was hot, and swimming pools and movie theaters and every place you could escape to was a breeding ground for this alien thing. So I put down The Illustrated Man and got up and decided to visit a real inmate. The Iron Girl.
When I arrived, they were just wheeling the iron lung inside. It took two nurses to do this. When Phyllis wasn’t on the patio, she was in the family sunroom. There was a whole special panel with electrical stuff there just for operating the iron lung. There was a generator stashed in one corner for if the electricity went out. There was also a lot of other stuff that made it look sort of like a hospital room. It was as completely different from her bedroom as a place could be. Not very elegant. Lots of porch furniture with cushions covered in a sunflower print. I was looking around as they set Phyllis up again, and she must have seen me. Little escaped Phyllis’s mirrors. “Pretty ugly, huh?” she said. There was that hiccup that was her way of laughing.
“No, not really.” I mean, what was I supposed to say?
“Yes, really.”
“Your mother offered to paint this room your favorite colors and get rid of the sunflowers,” Sally said. “I don’t know why you’re so stubborn.”
“You mean you could make this like your bedroom?” I asked.
“She sure could,” Sally said.
“I don’t want it like my bedroom. I’m not the same. Why should my bedroom be the same? Besides it’s not a bedroom. It’s an iron lung, for God’s sake. Next thing you know, Mom will want to be wallpapering the lung.”
“All right, all right, I’ll shut up,” Sally said, and walked out of the sunroom.
“Bitch,” Phyllis muttered. Then she turned. “Me, not her.”
“Maybe I should go.”
“Maybe not?” There was no anger left in her voice, just a plea.
“Sure.” I sat on the barstool and spun myself around slowly.
“So,” Phyllis said, “I want you to tell me more about Emmett.”
I went into super-alert status. My hypothesis was about to be tested. Would I find evidence?
“What’s to tell?” I tried to sound casual. The idea here was to draw out as much information as possible — data!
“You really think that there’s not a chance of him ever liking a girl? Going out on a date?”
This is it! Date data. Or data date. Please, God, I prayed, don’t let me think of pea shoots, because then I’ll think of Evelyn peeing and burst out laughing and all will be lost.
“Well, not never,” I replied, cool as a cucumber. “It’s just it’s hard to imagine.”
“Hard to imagine because you’re his sister.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Not hard for me.” I stopped spinning on the barstool.
“What do you mean?” I asked. My breath caught in my throat.
“I mean I could imagine . . . you know . . .”
“Dating him? Really?” I couldn’t wait to get home and call Evelyn.
“Yes, really, except for, of course, the obvious. Kind of hard to date a girl in an iron lung.” She paused. I felt my heart pounding. It was louder than the beast.
“I . . . I don’t know,” I said softly.
“Don’t know what?” Phyllis asked. The mirrors flickered.
“I . . . I don’t know what. . . . I don’t know.” I laughed slightly.
“Do you think Emmett might like me a little bit?” Her blue eyes seemed huge. Was she about to cry?
“Are you saying that you kind of like Emmett and you sort of hope he likes you?”
“Yeah . . . but I’m kind of a freak, you know.”
“So’s he,” I said. Phyllis laughed out loud at this, a really big two- or three-hiccup laugh.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounds.”
“Oh, Georgie, I love you!” Her eyes flashed with delight.
“You do?” I couldn’t believe it. “I mean, we’re both freaks, I guess.”
“All three of us!” Phyllis added. Then she was quiet and her eyes were serious again. “So maybe you could find out if he likes me just a teeny tiny bit?”
I couldn’t believe she was asking me to do this. This was too neat! I’d do this. I’d not only find out; I would make this happen.
But first, of course, I had to call Evelyn.
The Winklers had a special line for their kids since they were doctors and couldn’t have their telephone tied up with their kids yakking when someone might be dying or having a baby. Evelyn picked up on the second ring. “I got data!” I screamed. “Date data!”
I began to recount carefully, word for word, my conversation with Phyllis. “She began by saying, ‘Tell me more about Emmett.’”
Evelyn and I had been on the phone about five minutes or less. I got to the part when Phyllis asked me if Emmett might like her a little bit, and the dating questions, when she interrupted and said, “Hold on a second. I’ve got to go.”
“Not your bladder again?”
“No. I’m getting index cards to enter the information on. I want to write it all down. Then I’ll color-code it all.”
Talk about taking the romance out of romance — index cards, color-coding! Pure Evelyn!
From the pantry, I heard them talking in their low kitchen voices. These were not the voices they used when they were talking about a disobedient Jell-O mold that had failed to unmold perfectly or how you could hardly whip cream with all this humidity. These were their other voices. The ones that children were not supposed to hear. I heard the words iron lung, and I had a feeling they might have been talking about Emmett and Phyllis.
We were out at Grandma and Grandpa’s farm for Sunday dinner. I stayed in the pantry to listen and pretended to study the Holstein breeders’ calendar that Grandpa had hung up there. For August they had a picture of an immense stud bull called Elandor of Eckbow. A caption underneath the picture read:
Sired Caprice. Winner of the Dairymans’ High Yield Award three years running. Distinguished maternal pedigree. Extreme milk yield transmitter backed by two excellent dams with milk yields of over 38,000 pounds.
But I was really just listening and not concentrating on Elandor. “That is so sad. But at least she gets to be at home. Not in a hospital,” Grandma was saying while admiring the three-flavored Jell-O mold with fruit suspended in the green part that had just exited most perfectly from its enamel fluted dish. They talked some more, and then Mom said, “You’ll never guess what.”
“What?”
“Velma’s daughter is pregnant!”
“Oh, my word!” Grandma exclaimed in a loud whisper. “And she’s captain of the Hoosier Twirlers!”
“Yes,” Mama said.
“Well, she won’t be twirling for long!” Grandma sort of snickered. “Babies do get in the way of a baton.” My mom was well into her thirties when she had us, thank the Lord! I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having a teenage mom. Some girl who hadn’t even made it through algebra one. No matter how much teenagers impressed me, I did not want one to be my mother. And it would probably be a dumb teenager who would put Coca-Cola in my bottle, blow cigarette smoke in my face while she fed me, and never change my diapers. Ick! The whole idea made me nauseous. In fact, it gave me real bad malaise.
I was standing in the pantry thinking about all this when Grandma sailed in to get the dish for the butter beans.
“What’re you doing, Georgia?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’ve got a funny look on your face. It’s just a stud bull up there on the calendar.” She guffawed. “Why don’t you go out and practice baton?”
“Too hot.”
“Not under the beech tree, it isn’t. Junior high’s coming faster then you think. Got to be ready when tryouts come up for the Hoosier Twirlers. Can you do an arm roll yet?”
“Almost,” I lied. Was she already thinking of a replacement for Velma’
s pregnant daughter?
“You’re going to look so cute in those new skirts the girls wear now.”
I was not going to look cute at all. The whole idea of me in the short sparkly skirt made me want to puke. I had very skinny legs and knobby knees and of course the stubby hair and let’s not forget the nose that turns east. But it was especially when I thought of myself as a Hoosier Twirler that I began to have doubts about my legs lengthening and the other mysterious transformations that I dreamed about, most specifically my hair. All the twirlers wore their hair in either glistening pageboys that fell in straight orderly sweeps to their shoulders and then curved under perfectly or in wonderfully swingy ponytails. Stubby hair does not swing. It doesn’t fall. It will not curve. It springs. I couldn’t even make a part in my hair — that is how confused it was. To get rid of the cowlicks, I would have had to start all over with a new scalp, a new arrangement of hair holes in my scalp so the hair could grow in a straight, orderly fashion. What we were talking about was major scalp surgery. Once I had suggested to my mom and grandma that I could go down to the colored part of town and get the Madam Walker hair-straightening treatment. When I said this, you would have thought I had asked them if I could smoke a cigarette and a take a shot of whiskey on the side. In any case, I didn’t argue with Grandma. I went to the closet and selected one of about a dozen batons and headed for the beech tree. I wasn’t really going to practice. I’d just climb up to one of the low-spreading limbs that joined the trunk at an angle that was perfect for reading. Of course, I didn’t have anything to read. Well, I would just think. Maybe about that poem I had heard Phyllis’s mom reading the first day I wandered into the grove and heard her voice threading through the mechanical breaths of the Creature. I wanted to find that poem. I had meant to ask Phyllis the name of it. But when she started talking to me about liking Emmett and could I find out, I was so excited I just forgot. I climbed up in the tree and reclined against the trunk. I looked up through the deep copper leaves as pieces of sky floated overhead. I was trying to remember some of the words from the poem, but other words, not the poet’s, came to me instead.