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

while my foster sister LaRoue, and my brother, Claude (in Horsehearts, pronounced
clod
), and I took turns sharing. Because LaRoue had first arrived at our house with another foster child who no longer lived with us—a slow, quiet girl named Nancy who had been beaten retarded by her mother—the two of them shared a room until Nancy went away, and then LaRoue was left with her own. I don’t think I ever actually knew why or where Nancy went; our house was always inhabited by people other than us, all camped out on the Hide-A-Beds. That’s why I’d sought Sils early, when I was nine, found her right there in my homeroom, alphabetized next to me, in the
C
s, and attached myself to her.
    One May someone just came and got Nancy and took her away. It seemed scary to me, that that could just happen. That someone could simply come and take you and go.
    But LaRoue stayed and got her own room—the blue one with its deep white windowsills—and called my mother “Mom.” I was three years younger, though only one grade behind her, and I had the larger, yellow room with my brother Claude with whom I was close, being just a year older than he. Claude and I were “bunk-buddies,” a phrase I used laughingly, ironically, bittersweetly, later in life, with lovers, those nights of an affair I’d sleep with a man but sexlessly, feeling tired, the dumb dog of my body too exhausted for love, running all week in the meadows of it, now desiring merely to sleep, beat, next to someone else but close, like a brother, like Claude. “Bunk-buddies: we can be bunk-buddies.”
    There was actually a bunk my brother and I slept in—sometimes he on top, sometimes I, to equalize things, I suppose. While the house was full of strict bedtimes andrules, all posted to the refrigerator with Bryson Paper Mill magnets, little pine trees with BPM stamped on them in gold, we were essentially unwatched children. We could find ways to do what we wanted, though we made a great deal of the moment at night when one of our parents (we were told, we assumed) would come in to check on us before they went to bed. We were never awake for this moment, but we knew of it, believed in it in a religious way, and sometimes, put to bed too early on a crickety summer evening, we’d prepare for it, like the Last Judgment. We turned it into a kind of body sculpture contest, posing in elaborate ways on our beds—standing on one foot, head hanging off one edge, arms lifted in the air and mouths and teeth and eyeballs arranged in astonished grimaces. “This will really surprise Mom,” we’d say, or “Dad’ll get a kick out of this,” and then we’d try to fall asleep that way. In the morning we’d awake sprawled in ordinary positions, never recalling whether we’d glimpsed a parent or not, or how we had finally fallen off to sleep in this more normal way.
    Claude was my first pal, before Sils, and we were each other’s best friend, bunk-buddy, child spouse, until I was nine and he was eight, and we got separated—in a way, for the rest of our lives. We were too old; it was unseemly for a brother and sister to share a room. So the house got renovated, and each of the children got their own room—mine was downstairs, alone, off the first-floor hall. His was upstairs.
    Soon afterward Claude befriended a new boy down the road, Billy Rickey. I stumbled around, then looked and found Sils, and that was that. Claude and I never really saw each other again, not in a true way. Passing each other in the corridor at school, seeing each other at dinner, then years later at holidays, weddings, and at funerals, we couldn’t figure outwho the other one was anymore. It was as if one of us had grown flippers or feathers or a strange stripe up the side, our species suddenly unclear.
    But he always remained, for me at least, my first love, my child bride, and in a busy family, speaking in tongues, it was important to be married, somehow, to someone. So I was, had been, for a while, to