Chasing Orion (27 page)

“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 fair 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.

After lunch we rode the elevator down from the sixth floor, where the tearoom was, to the fifth floor, where the ladies and what they called the Young Deb department was. Evelyn and I were not quite big enough for the department yet, but we wanted to browse. I soon enough realized that I would rather be anywhere but in the Young Deb department. It seemed as if the entire floor was in full prom bloom. Evelyn and Mom and Grandma were oohing and aahing over rainbows of tulle confections. The dresses had layers upon layers of the pastel netty material, some sprinkled with rhinestones and some with confetti-like dots of color. Others had seed pearls embroidered on. There were two mannequins, a girl in a beautiful pale-green tiered dress with a thin silvery thread running through the edge of each tier, and a boy mannequin in a white dinner jacket with a pink carnation pinned to the lapel. They were perched in a dancing position on a rotating platform.

“Georgie!” someone squealed. It was Amy Moncton, accompanied by the Heimer and their mothers and older sisters. They were indeed helping to pick out prom dresses and shoes to go with the Heimer’s sister’s dress. The first thing they did after taking in Evelyn’s odd outfit was to look at our feet. Then Amy said in a low whisper, “Isn’t wearing a garter belt hard? Those little metal garters really dig into you when you sit down.”

She might have just been trying to be friendly, trying to say we are almost teenage girls. Isn’t it great? Isn’t it exciting? Here is something we have in common; you might someday be a Mustard Seed, too. She probably was, but I felt this terrible anger welling up in me. I wasn’t the one who had nothing in common with all the pretty girls in the Young Deb department who were flitting around holding up shoes to dresses and jabbering about would they have to get them dyed or not; it was Phyllis. I think I might have closed my eyes for a second, wishing that it would all simply go away. When I opened them, nothing had gone away, but good old Evelyn had taken up the conversational ball and was talking about garters and then before you knew it, being led over to a dress that Amy’s sister was considering.

“You OK, Georgie?” my mom asked. I was not OK at all. I felt my anger collapse inside of me. I turned to my mother. “She’s not ever going to get to do any of this, is she?” I was half sick with myself for even giving in to this kind of soppy sentimental stuff. There was still a part of me separate from my deep apprehensions about Phyllis and her devious designs on my brother that wanted to see her as a tragic figure. The Lady of Shalott watching the prom as reflections in her mirror!

Mom knew exactly who I was talking about. She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze.

I think it was one night shortly after I went downtown with Mom and Evelyn and Grandma that I realized our dinnertimes had grown kind of quiet. It might have started that day when Emmett got his acceptance and scholarship letter from Purdue. Mom and Dad were ecstatic, but Emmett didn’t seem excited at all, not even relieved. It wasn’t like he had just assumed he would get the scholarship. It seemed to me that he should have been happy just for Mom and Dad’s sake, for saving them so much money. I could tell that Mom and Dad were disappointed that he wasn’t more enthusiastic or excited. But they didn’t say anything.

I knew Mom and Dad had the usual worries of parents as summer approached because summer was polio season. But I also knew that other families just didn’t go quiet at the dinner table the way ours had in recent weeks. It was as if our dining room swirled with unspoken thoughts, unasked questions. There was this terrible tension as if we were all waiting for something to happen. Maybe this was in fact malaise. But we hadn’t a clue how to figure it out, or what to do if something did happen. Maybe, I thought, there was nothing we could do. It was like if the Russians dropped the A-bomb on us. It was useless to build a bomb shelter, because all that stuff was in the air. It would get you in the end. But what was it that would get us now, soon? We were all of us, I knew, feeling helpless.