Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

my mouth, like modern art only scary. As early as sixth grade my teacher had pulled me aside and said, “Benoîte-Marie, what are you wearing on your lips?”
    “Nothing,” I replied, my first lie to an institutional figure, but I’d felt cornered.
    She looked all around my face. She looked at my earrings, which were silver cake decorations I’d glued on with Elmer’s.
    One of the candies had fallen off in recess and now I had a big scab of glue on my ear. I reached up and picked at it.
    “Are you wearing one color on your top lip and a different one on your bottom?” she asked, incredulous.
    I was. I thought it looked better that way. Why did she have to be so harsh, with her widow’s eagle eye? I had once brought her lilacs, and she’d sent me straight to the principal’s office. She knew they were from a neighbor’s bush and not my own. Our yard had no lilacs.
    “You don’t need that stuff,” she said. “You’re too young.”
    “What stuff?” I said, and she sighed and let me go. (Decades later, in my one lone year of Housewife’s Bathrobe Disease, my husband at work but not me, I would roam through the house, still in slippers and a robe, my face unwashed, my hair unbrushed, but I’d put on lipstick, a bright Indian Red or Scarlett O’Hara, and schluff through the house like that, sort through papers, vacuum.) Our mothers let us do this—wear makeup, and stockings and garter belts, and go off—because they had other concerns. Sils’s mother had a job and sons in a rock band. Mine was at a meeting or church or some information fair for foreign students, and at home, when she wasn’t mimeographing committee memos from a metal box of brownish jelly heated on the stove (pages and pages of purple lettering produced this way from a single typed sheet), she was chatting with Mrs. LeBlanc, or curled on the couch beneath a raincoat, napping off a depression. Sils and I would go downstreet and lurk. Look for “cute guys,” we said. Though when we actually came upon a band of them, my heart always sank.
    But it was those times mostly that bonded me to Sils, and made me able later to spot the slightest thought working its way across her face, like a bit of weather, and that is how I knew that morning, my mother dropping me off in front ofStoryland, and me glimpsing Sils arriving at the same time with Mike, and slipping bowlegged off his bike and scraping her ankle on the hot exhaust pipe, a loss of agility peculiar for her, that she was pregnant. It was the spaciness of her worry, the slight separation both from Mike and from me, whom she seemed to try to reach via quick bolts of light and dark she threw into her eyes and then yanked away, put in storage, her eyes becoming a snowman’s coal. She’d throw, yank, turn away in loneliness. At home in her room she played E-minor 7 to E-major, over and over on her guitar, saying nothing. Then she’d look at me as if I’d only just arrived and say,
“What?”
    She wasn’t telling me, because she thought I was a child. A child with a cottage cheese sandwich. That’s what I believed she thought. I was sure.
    And so that is why, when she finally did tell me, days later—“I can’t believe this, Berie, but I may be pregnant”—I leaped like a hired hand to respond.
    “I’ll help you,” I said.
    Though some part of me also hung back, shocked and disbelieving, unable to proceed through the moment, the information. No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots. We were in the Storyland employees’ lounge, getting dressed, she as Cinderella, me as my usual striped goof in a pinafore and hat.
    “It might not be true,” she said. “I feel so bloated. I feel like I’m going to get my period any day now.”
    “That’s one of the signs,” I