Chasing Orion Read Free Page A

real boudoir now,” Mom said.
    “What’s a
boo-dwar
?”
    “Sort of a fancy place for a lady to get dressed in, do her makeup.”
    I was not going to bring it up — or as they say, look a gift horse in the mouth — but I didn’t have any makeup. Just that awful Tangee orange lipstick that didn’t show. So when you really thought about it, I wasn’t much of a candidate for a boudoir. So I might get very bored in my boudoir at my princess vanity dressing table. It didn’t matter. I still wanted it. Maybe I would make it sort of like a desk too, even though I already had a desk. And the mirror was really good. It had little teeny-weeny light bulbs outlining the heart-shaped frame. I could keep a sharp lookout for pimples. That was my one beauty blessing so far. No pimples.
    I was finally cool after my hosing down by Emmett. So I decided to have the perfect afternoon in my boudoir, even if it meant that I had no real equipment to boo with. It was just when I had this thought about nothing to boo with that I thought of a great joke: a boo-dwar — a dressing room for witches!
    I went full throttle into the Georgie Mason heat-reduction program. This meant putting on just my underpants and an old undershirt of my dad’s that came down to my knees. I lowered the blinds, turned on the fan, and went downstairs and got the ice bucket that my parents used for cocktails. I filled it with ice and stuck in four Popsicles — two orange and two grape. Those were my two favorite flavors. I hated green, and so did Emmett. But they always came in the package, and Mom said it was wasteful to throw them out. So she ate them, even though I knew she didn’t like them. I often thought how I would most likely grow up to be a lousy mother, because I was pretty sure that I would never eat a green Popsicle and give up the grape and orange ones for my kid. Maybe you got less selfish with age.
    Anything beyond being a teenager sounded very old to me, and getting old didn’t sound so great. I mean you had to be selfless and economical, you got age spots — Mom had a couple — and worst of all, you got sick. Heart stuff, joints freeze up on you, all that. But then I suddenly thought of the girl next door. She hadn’t even gotten a chance to use up all her selfishness tickets yet. Polio had changed all that. She hadn’t even had a crack at age spots before she got polio.
    I sucked on my Popsicle some more. I had brought up the newspaper to see what movies were playing that we were not going to be allowed to see. There was a ritual, however, to the way I read the newspaper. First I went directly to the community news page. I checked the list of all the hospitals and the newly reported polio cases. This was so scary to read. But I sort of had to do it. Saint Vincent’s had had four cases in one day. That was a lot. Then I read the box called SYMPTOMS ALERT!
    Phase 1: Mild symptoms occur in most cases:
    Mild fever
Headache
Sore throat
Vomiting
Malaise
    Recovery within 24 to 72 hours
    Most patients do not progress to Phase 2 symptoms.
    Phase 2: More severe symptoms including
meningitis
may occur after several days:
    Meningitis — see
symptoms of meningitis
Fever
Severe headache
Stiff neck
Stiff back
Muscle pain
    Very severe symptoms:
    Muscle weakness
Muscle paralysis
Difficulty swallowing
Nasal voice
Difficulty breathing
Respiratory paralysis
    Phase one was easy to check for. I mean, basically, throwing up is not a subtle thing. You do it, or you don’t do it. I did keep a thermometer, an extra one Mom had, in my bathroom and would check my temperature a lot, but no matter how hot I felt, my temperature was always a steady 98.6. The tricky one in phase one was “malaise.” I had to look up the word in the dictionary. The definition was truly a slippery slope. Mr. W. — that was what I called
Webster’s,
or sometimes Noah — described it as being “a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort.” That was the first definition. I