Chasing Orion (17 page)

When the therapist picked her up from the bed of the iron lung, she was completely limp. She didn’t look unconscious exactly, nor did she look dead. Her weeny little legs flopped over his arms, and her body was plastered against the therapist’s chest like a wet leaf. There was nothing human about her. It was deeply disturbing, but I could not look away. The therapist quickly moved her to the rocking bed. They had barely gotten her into the rocking bed when the first spasm came. I watched, horrified, as her legs began to jerk. Her back arched in a terrible contortion, and her face was pulled into a ghoulish mask. This was not television news. This was not a picture in a newspaper. Despite all my research, this was far worse than I could have ever imagined. The articles never told you about this kind of stuff. I wanted to stop looking. I really did. It was disgusting. But I was disgusted with myself for staying there and looking at this. I wanted someone to come and take me away. I felt ashamed. In the back of my throat, an icky sweetness surged, and then the overwhelming smell of grape. I vomited and then stared in disbelief. There were purple-colored scrambled eggs on my sneakers. The odor was so strong, I was sure they smelled it inside, but I didn’t wait to find out.

When Emmett came home, I was still in the backyard hosing down my sneakers. His shoulders were hunched and his hands jammed in his pockets. His face was absolutely white. I thought he would just rush right by me. But he didn’t. I kept looking down. I prayed that he would not be able to tell from any look on my face that I had seen it all.
Maybe I didn’t see it all,
I thought with sudden alarm. Maybe Phyllis had died. He stopped right in front of me, then grabbed me tight and hugged me. And all he said was, “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.”

I was really scared, but I looked up. “Did she die?”

“No, that would have been too easy.”

He let me go, went upstairs to his bedroom, and slammed the door. I was scared. Scared for everyone — for Phyllis, for Emmett, for me. But really I think I felt most scared, in a funny way, for Emmett. I had never seen Emmett like this, ever.

To me it was sort of eerie the way “life” seemed to continue. I mean life for Phyllis and for Emmett. He kept going over there. Not quite as much since the preseason basketball practice schedule had been stepped up. It always did in the few weeks before school began. I had preseason nothing. So there was no excuse for me not to go over to Phyllis’s, but I just couldn’t, not after what I had seen. Nobody had found out about my spying, which I supposed was good, but I felt somehow different. I didn’t feel as if I were quite the same person anymore and felt that somehow people might sense this. It was as if telltale shreds of those awful minutes clung to me, maybe even a smell of grape vomit. I knew for one thing that I would never ever again eat a grape Popsicle. The worst part of all was that I had actually gone over there thinking that I was doing some dumb Christian thing. I wasn’t spying; I was witnessing! I thought witnessing it would make me more compassionate, not nauseous. I thought that through my compassion, I could understand Phyllis better, therefore help her more. But this just didn’t happen. I only felt shame, disgust, and fear.

It was as if during those few minutes crouching under the windowsill, all my illusions had vanished. I felt old — terribly, freakishly old. Yes, I’d become a freak.

“Georgie! Georgie! Earth to Georgie!” I looked up. Mom had been standing practically in front of me, and I hadn’t even noticed her, I was so lost in my thoughts. I looked up at her. Mom sighed. “Are you reading about polio again, Georgie? You’ve got to stop.”

“No, no.” I had the newspaper in front of me but was not really reading it. Just staring at it. She turned her head a fraction to one side and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. This was her suspicious look. “So,” she said with a kind of chirpiness that signaled she wasn’t going to question me too closely, “you want to go get some new clothes for school?”

“Uh.” I hesitated and looked at her, wondering if she noticed a difference in me. Did I still look like the same Georgie to her? Or was that old person inside me who had replaced the kid that was Georgie peeking out? Did she catch a glimpse of that old person? Or maybe she saw only the empty space where the child had been. I felt this deep anguish inside of me, this grieving for some part of me that I knew was gone.

Going school shopping didn’t help. Usually I loved buying new clothes for school. I couldn’t wait for the weather to turn cold so I could wear my new fall outfits. But all afternoon in the department stores, I stood in front of mirrors in plaid skirts and denim jumpers and felt as if I were looking at a ghost of myself. “Honestly, Georgie,” Mom finally said, “you’ve been so quiet all afternoon. Are you feeling all right?”

“Not exactly,” I said slowly.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not quite feeling myself.” The truth of this seemingly casual answer nearly knocked me over. That icky grape smell rose up inside me again. “Mom, I think I might throw up.”

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

She rushed me off to the ladies’ room. I went into the stall by myself. I retched, but nothing came out. I started crying, not loudly, but certainly wetly.

“You all right, honey?” Mom called into the stall.

“Yeah! Yeah! I’ll be fine. Just a minute.”

When I came out, she clapped her hand on my forehead. “You don’t feel feverish,” she whispered with a trace of relief, then added, “No stiff neck?”

“No, Mom. I don’t have polio!”

“Must have been something you ate. You’ll feel a lot better if you can bring it up.”

This was my parents’ standard response to vomiting. I hated throwing up more than anything in the world. Usually I would rather not feel better than to have to go through the hideousness of having that tsunami of vomit rush out of my mouth. But this time I thought that my mother had a point. Now I wished I could have thrown up that whole experience. I wished that I could throw up that creepy older person who had invaded me when I watched Phyllis being weaned. But nothing came up. Nothing at all.

“Feel better?” Mom asked.

“Sort of.”

When we got home, I carefully unpacked all my new clothes from the tissue paper and hung them in my closet. The plaid skirt had a cardigan sweater that went with it that was trimmed in the same plaid. It was really a cute outfit. A perfect first-day-of-school outfit, if the darned temperature would go below ninety.

I hadn’t been over to Phyllis’s for a week. Not since the weaning attempt. Supposedly nothing had changed. She was back in the iron lung, for good, I guess. But I felt I had changed, and for me, Phyllis had changed as well. It scared me. It’s not exactly accurate to say until that horrible day I had only thought of Phyllis as a head sticking out of a machine because I hadn’t seen her whole body. I suppose I had just imagined that the rest of her body was normal-looking even though she had told me that time that her spine was all tangled. I still thought of the polio as most damaging to her ability to breathe. I could never have imagined that her body would look so weird. I kept thinking that if I went over there, all I would think about was this beautiful head attached to a deformed body. So in a sense on that day we had both become freaks of sorts. But Phyllis had called and asked me to come over that afternoon with another small world after Emmett left for basketball practice. I told her about the Orion one and how it wasn’t done. She didn’t mind. She just said how great it would be to see a work in progress. It was still pretty movable. I would just bring the first level, the sea one. I hadn’t attached the waves Orion would walk on to the land.

On my way over, Emmett came jogging out of the grove, almost bumping into me, with the weirdest look on his face. He was sort of laughing to himself and looked quite pleased, but his face was the usual bright red it got when he was embarrassed. Needless to say, I was very curious, but he was in too much of a hurry. As I was about to come into the sunroom, where Phyllis was, I heard Sally talking.

“That’s what you call flirting? Whatcha trying to do with that boy, gal?”

I stopped to listen, thinking that might explain why he was blushing like crazy. I once said that there should be a lipstick color called Emmett’s Embarrassment Red, or maybe Emmett’s Shame. He didn’t think blushing was funny, and Dad tried not to laugh when I said this, but Mom and I were howling. So when I heard Sally say this thing about flirting, it didn’t take me long to put two and two together. The romance must have made some progress. Maybe a little beyond first base, like an inch. But I, of course, pretended I hadn’t heard them and just set down my diorama.

“Just having fun,” Phyllis replied to Sally. I was standing in a hallway off the sunroom, and though she couldn’t see me, I could see Phyllis’s face in a big wall mirror. She looked deadly serious. In fact, she looked so serious it almost scared me. She had narrowed her eyes until they were just these little blue slits. I couldn’t help but wonder what Sally had seen Phyllis and Emmett doing.

“Did you have him wear the rubber gloves in the port?” Sally asked.

“Sure,” Phyllis said.

“I didn’t see any when he left, and he sure did skedaddle out of here.”

“Maybe he wore them home.” Phyllis laughed harshly. “A souvenir of good times.”

“Don’t go talking slutty now.”

I coughed slightly to announce my arrival.

“Well, Saint Georgie.” Phyllis sounded sweet as pie now, and her eyes were no longer those little blue slits. “What do you have there? Another diorama?”

“Yep. It’s a myth.”

“Which one?”

“Orion, but it’s just the first level.”

“You mean it’s going to be on different floors or stories?”

“Yeah, because his life was kind of made up of three different parts.” I explained quickly the Orion myth and held up the seascape so it reflected in the mirrors.

“Oh, my goodness, such detail,” Phyllis said. “Look at this, Sally.”

Sally came over, and Phyllis kept exclaiming about the detail. “You’ve even got the little baby and his mother’s crown and the father’s trident . . . so when does he get to the sky?”

“When he dies.”

“And what is it that kills him?”

“A scorpion. But first he goes blind.”

“How does he go blind?”

“Oh, he falls in love with this girl. That’s in the next part I have to build. He walks across islands to one called Chios. And he falls in love with the king’s daughter, Merope. And the king makes a deal with him that he would let her marry him if first Orion would rid the island of animals, ’cause, you know, Orion was this mighty hunter. But the king reneged on the deal. Orion got mad and went to get the girl, and the king blinded him.”

“End of story, eh?”

“Not exactly. He stumbled around blind for a while, then regained his sight and even found another true love.”

“You don’t say!” Phyllis exclaimed.

“And then finally a scorpion stung him in the heel and then he died.”

“Life’s tragic!” she said almost gaily. There was something very weird in the way she said it that made Sally and me look at each other. “Are you going to put Scorpio in your diorama?”

“Not in the sky part. Orion and Scorpio never appear in the sky at the same time, same season.”

“You need anything else, Phyllis?” Sally asked, shifting her attention.

“Nope,” Phyllis replied quickly. She slid her eyes toward me and gave a slightly impatient look as if she were anxious for Sally to leave. I felt a little tremor of excitement. Was she going to tell me something about why Emmett was blushing? Had there been some action with Ralph? Second base? Phyllis after all had told me herself that although her motor nerves were destroyed, her sensory nerves were all right. So that patch where Ralph resided in her thigh was one of the few motor nerves that worked — and how far was it from Ralph to . . . ? I cut off the thought. In another two seconds, I would be blushing as hard as Emmett.

Phyllis watched in her mirrors as Sally went through the doors of the sunroom to the kitchen.