Who Will Run the Frog Hospital Read Online Free PDF Page A

And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful of songs.
    “Where’ve you been?” asked Sils. She and Mike were now out of the car but leaning against it sexily.
    “For a walk.”
    Mike turned toward Sils. “I should get this car back.”
    “Bye,” she said.
    He kissed her again, in front of me. “I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said. He got in the car and did a three-point turn—I’d been learning those at school, in Driver’s Ed—and then he zoomed away.
    In the kitchen we fixed a quick, late-night breakfast: saltines and hot chocolate made from Bosco. We dipped the crackers in the hot chocolate and let them get soggy and float there, like gunk in a pond.
    “Once in third grade,” said Sils, “I didn’t want to go to school, so I chewed up a bunch of saltines, kept them in my mouth and went upstairs, groaning, and spat them at my mother’s feet.”
    “So attractive!” I said, and we giggled in an exhausted way.
    “It worked.” She was dreamy-eyed, drowning the crackers in her cup with a spoon.
    “Ingenious,” I said. I hoped she would glance up from her drink, look at me, say more. But she didn’t.
    Later, sprawled on top of the covers on her bed, which was a mattress on the floor of her room, Sils let out a long, satisfied sigh. At the foot, in the dim light of the little lamp she kept on when I was there, I lay curled in a sleeping bag and looked at her, beginning with her toes: the rubbery blue nexus of veins on top of her feet, the tendons splayed like the bones of a fan, the discolored sheen of the nails shimmery and vague as mother-of-pearl. The nuts and bolts of her were always interesting. She saw me looking.
    “You’ve got wild toes,” I said.
    She yanked one foot toward her chest. “Did I ever show you these?”
    “What?”
    She examined her foot studiously. “In my toenails you can see Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.”
    “What are you talking about?” I pushed deeper into the sleeping bag and pretended to laugh at her.
    “I’m serious,” she said. “You can see their faces.” She lowered her foot. “I’ll show you tomorrow.” She sighed again, thinking of Mike, I was sure. “Thanks, Berie,” she said.
    “For what?”
    “For whatever.” Then she fell completely to sleep, and in the low light for a while I watched my own shadow against the wall, a lumpy mountain range thrusting up peaks and crashing them again to avalanche and rubble, in a long, long restlessness that finally preceded sleep.
    Often when I went over to Sils’s house, she would have the side door unlocked and a salad or a cottage cheese sandwich waiting for me on the kitchen counter. A salad! A cottage cheese sandwich! How odd in memory to conjure it, the dressed cucumbers and celery assembled as if by a wife for her husband; or the sandwich, sweet and sloppy with mayonnaise. I would take it, eat it, then go upstairs to her room and sit next to her, strum the guitar with her, singing harmony to folk songs like “Geordie” or “The Water Is Wide I Cannot Get O’er,” feeling myself a goner in the minor-seven chords, their sad irresolution stirring in me something lost and heartbroken, though how could that be, I was only fifteen. Still, something deeply sad had been born buried in me, stirring occasionally inside like a creature moving in sleep. Often I found myself concentrating on the frog painting, entering it with my eye, as if it were perhaps a dreamy illustration from a real-life fairy tale, or a secret passageway into another secret passageway. A joke into a secret joke into a secret. When we were younger, Sils and I had always looked for caves together, or some small undiscovered duck pond with ducks. We’d go to the Grand Union and cheer on the lobsters who had managed to break free of their rubber bands. We’d build a half-tent out of three open umbrellas and we’d get underneath