“Remember what I said, Georgie: you’ve got all the air in the world, the whole sky up there. I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world.” What had she meant exactly? I didn’t want to ask Emmett, although I was sure he understood. But Emmett had been kind of weird ever since we met Phyllis. It was going to be hard asking him what he thought of her. I think he’d been back over once or twice since we met her, but I wasn’t sure.
Emmett was late now to dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s. He had said he had something to do and would drive himself out. I was getting hungry, so I hoped he came soon. I jammed my hand down into my shorts pocket and found a Tootsie Roll. I was just rearranging this big wad of Tootsie in my jaw when I saw something flapping in the air. I stopped chewing and looked straight ahead. Damn if that didn’t look like a flamingo had slammed into Grandma’s clothesline. A flamingo in central Indiana? Impossible. I scrambled down the tree and began to walk toward the line.
“Oh, Lordy!” I whispered. It wasn’t a flamingo. It was Grandma’s corset, this pink contraption flapping in the breeze, snapping its elastic straps, silver garter buckles winking at the sky. I just blinked and thought, What a fool I am, and swore I would never ever wear one of those things in the dead heat of an Indiana summer no matter how fat I got or how much I began to sag and bag.
“Whatta ya staring at?” Emmett had sneaked up behind me.
“Grandma’s corset.”
“Is that what that thing is?”
“Yep.”
“What’s that next to it? They look too short for Grandpa.”
There was a pair of pale pink satin chopped-off pants. “Of course they’re too short for Grandpa.” I giggled. “It’s a girdle.”
“How do you know about all this?” Emmett asked me. “Comes with the territory, I guess.”
“What territory you talking about?”
“Being female and all.”
I wasn’t sure if I should take this as a compliment or not. I had almost decided not to, but then I realized that this was my opening for talking to Emmett about Phyllis. I thought for at least half a minute of a good way to get into it. “So what do you think about Phyllis?” I blurted out.
“What do you mean, what do I think of her?”
“I mean what do you think of her?”
“I hardly know her. She seems nice enough. Why are you asking me?”
“Uh . . .” I didn’t know what to say. “Well, don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s beautiful!”
Beautiful! He didn’t have to say that. He didn’t have to go that far. I could see he was turning bright red again.
“I think . . . I think maybe she likes you a teeny bit.” Emmett was pulling up clumps of grass and tossing them up toward a limb as if he were shooting baskets.
“You do?” He looked genuinely confused.
I hurtled ahead. “Emmett, you’re so . . . so . . .”
“So what, Georgie?” His eyes turned hard.
“W-well,” I began to stammer. I was so excited and the next thing I said was really a mistake. “She could be sort of like your starter kit.”
“Starter kit. Jesus Christ, Georgie!” He turned and stomped off.
I shook my head. How could I have been so dumb? I was only trying to help. Starter kit! As if Phyllis were some crafts project!
“Wait up, Emmett,” I called after him. “I didn’t mean it that way! I really didn’t!” I ran to catch up with him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it that way.” I reached out and grabbed his hand. “Stop walking, Emmett.” He stopped and looked down at me.
“So what exactly did you mean?”
“She told me she liked you.”
“She did?” He was surprised, I could tell.
I was not going to blow this. I nodded. “Yes, she really did.”
“Hmm,” was all he said.
I was ready to snore off during Sunday dinner. The conversation was incredibly boring unless you were a basketball star applying to college, hoping for a great basketball scholarship.
“So how many scouts been sniffing around so far?” Grandpa asked.
“None,” Emmett said. “School hasn’t started.”
“But what about roundup? Don’t they usually hang around for that?”
“Canceled,” my dad said.
“Everything’s getting canceled,” I said.
“What else?” Grandma asked.
“Let’s see.” I sighed and leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes as I tried to remember the listing in that morning’s paper. “The annual fish fry of the Order of the Eastern Star at Saint Joseph’s Church, the Job’s Daughters and Rainbow Girls summer picnic, the city swimming meet at the Riviera Club, the father-son golf tournament at Highland Country Club —”
“What in tarnation!” my grandfather blurted out. I stopped my recitation. Everyone was looking at me like I was some sort of freak.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Does she do this every day?” Grandma turned her head slowly toward Mom.
“Well, Georgie likes to keep up with things.”
“Things like polio,” Emmett whispered. “It’s a little weird.”
“Dorothy Jean.” Grandma only called my mom by her full name when she was very serious. “Do you think this is healthy?”
What was not healthy in my opinion was people talking about you as if you were not there. Now I was really mad. “First of all, I am not dead. So quit talking like I’m not even here at the table. And second, it is unhealthy to go to public swimming pools, to go to the state fair, to go to movies, to not wash your hands after peeing or pooping.” Everybody froze when I said this. “But it is not unhealthy to read about polio in the newspapers.”
Grandpa now looked at me. “Georgia Louise, would you like to excuse yourself for a few minutes until you can behave at the dinner table?” I started to speak, but Dad gave me a fierce look.
“Sorry,” I muttered, and got up from the table.
When I returned after about two minutes, my mom was talking. “The basketball roundup is just delayed until after October. After polio season. But Emmett’s getting lots of letters — Indiana University, Purdue, Michigan.”
“When are the commit dates?” Grandpa asked.
“End of November,” Emmett replied. “But because I’m asking for more scholarship money, I don’t really find out until spring.”
“But Emmett can do what they call a C.C.,” Mom said.
“C.C.?” Grandma asked.
“Commit with contingency,” Emmett said. “If I get the full scholarship I ask for, I’ll go. If not, all bets are off. That kid from South Tech, they say he’s already been offered a thousand-dollar scholarship to Notre Dame.”
“A thousand dollars! My goodness,” Grandma said. “Mercy.”
“No mercy about him,” Emmett replied. “Cyril James. He’s a beast on the court. He’s seven feet tall.”
“Tall, but short on brains,” my mom said.
“Dumb as a box of rocks, but he’s fast. He can shoot. But nothing compared to this freshman at Crispus Attucks,” Emmett said.
“Who’s that?” my grandfather asked.
“Kid named Oscar Robertson. He plays real smart. Great all-around player.”
“But he’s just a freshman,” Grandma said. “Where’s anyone seen him play?”
“Oh, Lil!” Grandpa said. “Where have you been all these years? This is Indiana. You don’t wait until high school.”
Even I knew this. Boys who liked to play basketball played anyplace. It didn’t even have to be a real court. It could be a dirt lot as long as there was a hoop stuck to something.
“You mean down on the south side of town,” Grandma said, and pressed her napkin to her lips in a nervous gesture.
“Yep,” said Emmett. “We all go down there and have pickup games with those guys from Attucks.” I knew what Grandma was thinking. Those guys from Attucks
were colored boys. Crispus Attucks was the all-Negro high school. So Grandma thought they might be playing in a rough part of town. “He’s just a plain great player. He can snap a ball like I’ve never seen. He invents moves. He does this head fake that leads into a driving layup that is phenomenal. And he can think midair like no one else.”
“Sounds like he’ll be getting a thousand-dollar scholarship.”
“By the time he’s a senior, it could be ten thousand dollars,” Emmett said.
Ten thousand dollars! It was unimaginable. “Hey, do they ever give scholarships for baton twirling?” I asked. If they did, I might have to rethink my future as a twirler. For ten thousand dollars, I might manage to overcome my dislike of twirling. There was a sudden silence. Everyone looked at me, and then they started howling with laughter. You would have thought I had said the funniest thing in the world. You would have thought I was Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Lucille Ball rolled into one. The answer was no. Scholarships were not given to baton twirlers. But nobody could stop laughing long enough to tell me this until about five minutes later.
“Look!” I complained. “All I did was ask an honest question. And what? Suddenly I’m the laughingstock of the whole family? Har-de-har-har-har!”
Being eleven was indescribably awful. It’s as if you’re never really in on the joke. Not only that. You are the joke.
Here are the things I have begged and badgered my big brother for:
to go bowling with him and his friends at Alleys-A-Way
to go to Northwood, the drive-in restaurant, with him and his friends
to have his help with the electrical stuff on this new small world of the Orion story that I was attempting
to have a girlfriend — him, not me
to go to a prom — him, not me
I had been generally unsuccessful. Most of the things I had begged and badgered for meant including me. I didn’t like being left out. Who does? Item number five was different. I wanted him to be a normal teenage boy and have a girlfriend and maybe even go to a prom. I would have been so proud of him all dressed up in a tuxedo, and I would have helped him pick out a corsage for his date. He wouldn’t even have had to rent a tuxedo. Dad had one that would fit him perfectly, and a white dinner jacket, too. More and more boys were wearing white dinner jackets to spring proms. Well, guess what? Although I had still failed on the first three items, number four had a good chance of coming true. Emmett was over at Phyllis’s a lot. And you know what else? I wasn’t. Once again, I was feeling left out. Sidelined, as they say in basketball. I knew how awful Emmett felt when the coach did that to him. Couldn’t he see how I might feel? Couldn’t Phyllis see that, too? I mean, she asked me to find out if he liked her a teensy bit. I did. What thanks did I get? Zero.
Emmett would take his telescope over there. August might be boring on Earth in Indiana during polio time, but up in the sky it was purely exciting. The night simply flowed with stars. And Emmett and Phyllis were out there on the Kellers’ patio looking at it together.
In the meantime I discovered a new word that could have described me exactly. There was a picture in the paper of parents walking into a church behind two small coffins of two little twin girls who had both died of polio. I was looking at it when Mom came into the kitchen and began to read over my shoulder. She sighed. “That is so sad.”
“It’s sadder than sad,” I said.
“Morose. Look at the parents’ faces.”
I had never heard that word before. I liked the sound of it. So I went upstairs and looked it up in my dictionary. The definition for morose surprised me. I had expected something sadder than sad. Romantic sad, maybe, because of the second syllable, rose. It was sad, all right, but in a different way, and not romantic at all. According to Noah, morose was “gloomily or sullenly ill-humored, as a person. Peevish, willful.” I liked that. This wasn’t just plain sad and mopey. This was sad with muscle. This was sad with teeth in it. This was sad that could bite. As morose as I was, I couldn’t compare my situation to the parents of these two little twins. So I had to give that word up. It was only right. I went and got the diary that Grandma had given me for my birthday. I hadn’t written in it since I poured out my heart to it saying how mad I was about not being allowed to go swimming and all that stuff about taking the Fourth of July personally. The diary was covered with pink-and-white checked fabric. It had a lock. I got the tiny key from where I kept it, unlocked the book, turned to the page with the right date, and started writing.
Dear Diary
I saw a picture in the newspaper today of the parents of four-year-old twin girls who died of polio. They both died on the same day within the same hour. Usually unless it was a murder, they don’t give the time of death, but in this case they did. There was an expression on the parents’ faces that Mom called morose. I’m not feeling so hot myself these days. But I can’t say I am morose. The twins’ parents own that word, if you can own a word. And I have to tell you, Diary, I am starting to wonder about being Presbyterian and going to church and God. What happened to “God Bless America”? We’ve got polio all over the place. There are pretty girls and probably ugly ones too in iron lungs. I don’t think God is blessing America. Maybe He doesn’t get it. Maybe we should stop singing the song. It’s sounding stupider every day.
Sincerely, Georgie
So, deprived of a really cool word, I went in search of another. Yes, as I have said, Indiana summers are boring. I went and sat in front of my dumb vanity. I leafed through the dictionary, looking for more sad words. It was pretty much what I expected. Doleful — sounds like pineapples. Grumpy — too cute, one of the seven dwarves. Then broody cropped up. No way. I wasn’t a hen. But I started flipping back through the b’s, and I came across that word Mom had told me when I got the vanity — boudoir. My eyes almost popped out of my head. “Lady’s bedroom or private sitting room.” All right, that was to be expected. But the second part of the definition was unbelievable: “a sulking place,” coming from the French word bouder, which means to sulk, as in boo-hoo. Tears just dripped from this word, and the dictionary went on to explain that the Latin suffix denoted a place. Well, I’ll be! I thought. Or I’ll boo-hoo.
It was a very starry night, and I walked over to the window. There was lots happening up there. It was very clear, and in another few hours the moon was going to whisk by Venus, the closest it would for the whole year. I knew that I couldn’t beg or badger to go over to Phyllis’s. But I really wanted to. Emmett and Phyllis were out there on the Kellers’ patio, looking together. I thought that I could almost hear the iron lung from my window. It was like a ghost breathing, stirring the trees with its pulsing whooshes as it inhaled and exhaled for her all day, all night.
Just then I heard the phone ring, and Mom called up that it was for me. I ran down the hall.
“Hi. It’s me, Evelyn.” There had been many phone conversations, but we had actually only seen each other twice since that first meeting at the library. It seemed to me that she was always having to do stuff with her little sister or, most recently, go all the way to California for a medical convention with her parents. “Guess what?”
“What?” I asked.
“At this medical convention, they talked about how more than a dozen healthy babies had been born to polio moms in iron lungs in Los Angeles.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah. Pretty neat, isn’t it? You said that you thought that girl Phyllis might have a crush on your brother. So I just thought you’d like to know they could have a family.” This was sort of jumping the gun, but I was touched that Evelyn had shared this information with me. I knew that she had really wanted to meet Phyllis and I had kind of held back. An idea popped into my head. “Hey, you want to come over and spend the night? Emmett’s over there now and we could you know . . . sort of spy on them just a little bit.”
Mom was so happy that I at last had made a new friend whom I actually had invited to a sleepover that she offered to go pick Evelyn up. But Evelyn’s
mom dropped her off. I had packed up some stuff for snacks: a thermos of lemonade, a bag of chips, and some Mallomars. Frozen Mallomars. I think I invented this, although Emmett claims he did. You stick a package of Mallomars in the freezer for at least three hours, and it revolutionizes a very ordinary cookie into something else.
I explained to Evelyn before we left about the mirrors and how she always seemed to catch your reflection way before you ever got there. But we could hear the machine almost as soon as we entered the grove.
“Jeez, I never thought it would be so loud,” Evelyn said.
“Yes. When the wind is blowing from that direction, the direction of their house, the sound is louder right here. But if we can get pretty close to the house, I mean upwind of the iron lung, we’ll be able to hear Phyllis and Emmett a lot better, I think.” Evelyn just shrugged. I felt I owed her something more. “I think we might be able to see them.” Then I added, “I think they maybe sometimes kiss.” Evelyn’s pale gray eyes glinted playfully.
“We’ll have to crawl up on our bellies — like the pictures they show of those soldiers in Korea. You know, they slither up on their bellies and dig in their elbows to pull themselves forward. I’ve studied this,” Evelyn said. It was my guess that there was not much that Evelyn hadn’t studied. So we commenced soldier-style to drag ourselves across the Kellers’ perfectly manicured lawn. We had to leave the snacks in the grove to do this. But it was very effective. It was not a full moon, luckily, and Evelyn — always a quick study — had advised when I told her about my shadow theory with the mirrors that we stay in the deep shadow cast by the Kellers’ steep-roofed house. This seemed to take us away from the patio, where Emmett and Phyllis were, but it turned out to be a great idea. Except for one thing: we were in the path of the sprinklers. It felt cool, however, and by the time we were close to the edge of the house, we were pretty well soaked. We then slithered along the foundations until we found a spot that had a perfect view of the patio. We could see them, but still it was hard hearing anything they were talking about.