Lorrie Moore, a short story specialist, packs a lot into her 148-page novella, Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? Sils and Berie, 15-year-olds in the upstate New York town of Horsehearts, start the summer of 1972 working in the local amusement park, Storyland. Berie, a physical late-bloomer, handles the cash register at the main entrance, while Sils, who already has a motor-cycle riding 19 year old boyfriend, spends her days as Cinderella. Dressed in a sateen strapless evening gown, she entrances little girls on a park tour in her papier-maché pumpkin coach.
Best friends since grade school, they have advanced to sneaking cigarette breaks in the hidden interstices of the park and teasing young men in local bars in the evening. Sils, the heartthrob at their high school, lives with her single mom who manages a run-down motel in town. Her older brothers flit back and forth between home and Canada, trying to make it as a rock band. Berie’s family is outwardly more structured – Mom and Dad and brother Claude providing a classic nuclear background for her – but are continually welcoming visitors from other countries and cultures to crash on the sofa or share a room with the kids. One of the visitors, foster daughter LaRoue, has become a permanent sibling.
Moore’s main story centers on that summer when Sils and Berie find themselves leaving childhood and falling into serious adult problems of their own making. She provides a soundtrack, calling up popular music of the era to highlight the action. Berie narrates for us, and this first-person perspective allows time shifts to fill out key details of her life. She reminisces about childhood, flashes forward to a Paris vacation in her 40’s with her husband and concludes with a coda at the girls’ 10th reunion.
Their time at Storyland spins them apart, and Moore reveals in two poignant passages how difficult it can be, as John Mellencamp sang, to “Hold onto 16 as long as you can, changes come around real soon, make us women and men.” As Berie leaves that 10th reunion, not realizing she’s seeing Sils and LaRoue for the last time, she
“cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!”
And in Paris, reflecting on the start of her crumbling marriage, she
“longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed – I wanted it back! – those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.”