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After 20 years I didn't recognize Jimmie, now curly-haired and tired and swamped with kids, at the restaurant in the Panhandle town of Carrabelle where we had agreed to meet. She said I hadn't changed. She stood still a moment while I searched her face. Yes: lively eyes, devilish grin. Frog kisser.
Jimmie and I used to lift the electric meter lid with a stick and find its cool concrete walls crenellated with dew, raining on the inside. And a rain frog or two, possibly a toad, Bufus whateverus, warty and damp and content. These we'd lift, kiss, and after a time, replace with the command, "Stay!" Hours later, the subject of our depredations remained.
Frogs never made good pets. They wouldn't eat like my pet lizards at home would. You can tease a lizard's mouth open, stroke it along its hard lips. They will open in a hiss, a readiness to strike, to clamp the thing that tamed it: your finger. And then you pop in a spider and the lizard licks its lips, tucking in spider legs with its long pink tongue, and it comes to appreciate you. Not so a frog. A frog's mouth is stolid, grim. You cannot tickle it open.
But you can kiss a frog. And you can make a frog stay, like a dog. It's probably shock, an amphibian numbness, the belly nerves shot as it overheats in your sweaty palm. Or maybe its slick skin gives in, drying as you peer and talk over its flat, leathery head. Woe is the frog rescued from a spider's web, a cat's jaw. Woe, next, is the frog in the clamped hand of a kid. Kiss, kiss.
I've read of mutations that occur in frogs in Northeastern ponds. The frogs grow multiple legs, a radiant bouquet. While these frogs look like the freak productions of a nuclear waste dump, their mutations are really the result of a natural parasite gone berserk. The worm enters the developing tadpole as the egg is laid. Environmental pressures are to blame.
Jimmie and I were like tadpoles, suspended in fluid, becoming something other than ourselves. During the school year, I'd trudge home from the bus stop every day with the dismal conclusion that I would have to change in order to remain what I was: a girl. But not yet. Not in the summertime at Grandma's house.
My grandmother - she had married one of Jimmie's cousins in Carrabelle, late - looked me over one day as we drove past the beach. "Why aren't you boy crazy?" There were plenty of boys; they torqued their bodies after Frisbees like breaching whales in the surf. I explained to her solemnly that I wasn't interested in a boy I couldn't have a serious relationship with.
So that summer it was Jimmie, and frogs. The frogs never turned into princes. We weren't budging, either. Jimmie, my never-had-a-sister. Didn't it count, somehow, that she had a boy's name?
- Melanie Hubbard, an Emily Dickinson scholar and frequent contributor to Sunday Journal, teaches English at the University of Tampa.