Bogeywoman

little round blue hatbox forever in blessed memory, like a passenger saint by Lionel), maybe Merlin wasn’t thinking that clearly where care and feeding were concerned, not even the care and feeding of himself. I was small but I was hungry and I had eyes. When I think of the would-be savioresses who came bustling around for the next seven years, earth mother types, and rich! That swelling bodice Karoline von Etzen, for instance, who wrote the Alsatian cookbook-what a stepmother she would have made. To think Merlin chose the cadaverous vice-puppeteer Suzette, who couldn’t cook, handle money, or even act! Thereafter Merlin had to mother Suzette. Margaret and me had to mother ourselves, after our fashion, and Suzette was left to file her nails and answer the telephone. So I guess tracking down redeemers, or redeemeresses, was never Merlin’s strong point.

Anyhow, in Rohring Rohring I became a legend: Not to speak to my dreambox mechanic for nineteen months, almost twenty, fifty minutes, three times a week, not a single word-it took a will, I won’t say of steel, steel being totally dead, of beech then or even mahogany, a mahogany will, if I do say so myself. It helped that I could never think of Foofer without thinking of farts, which started with his name-and there’s another thing that won’t be allowed when I run the bug hospitals, doctors with funny names, especially those old classical strong-and-silent- type dreambox analysts whose names send you secret messages, scaring the crap out of you-like Dr. Schock, Dr. Ante, Dr. Paradiso and Dr. Hellwig, all names on the table of offices at Rohring Rohring.

Dr. Foofer was the old-fashioned kind himself. He made it easy not to talk; he didn’t talk either. He would fart on in, another hopeless case in the department of la beaute since the first and last chance of a body is in the walk, if you know what I mean-sort of spreading through the door like a farty dollop of batter because of his bottom-heavy duckfooted walk. He wasn’t a glandular case like Dewey-just a round middle-aged guy with a gleaming bald spot, in an itchy-looking brown three-piece suit that he must have brought with him from Germany or somewhere, since no American would wear one, and a gold watch chain. From there on it was his silence against my silence, but I could tell I unnerved him by the light zissing of the watch chain under his thumbnail as he rubbed it back and forth, no more than an inch or so each way but tenser and tenser, I could hear it.

You know what he had? (and that’s why I had to get him): Dignity, Foofer had dignity, that scratchy thick brown wool suit though full of farts looked like it was sewn to last two hundred years, matching vest, heavy flesh, gravity, reserve, an amber silk pocket handkerchief. He had dignity, he had rank like somebody else has a Buick or other big stuff you palpably own. I think those European guys whose brains are cultured from the start in a broth of big Sie and little du, vous and tu, ty and pan and Usted and all those other upstairs and downstairs degrees of you every single day radiate that stuff no matter what they think they think and never mind what they say. Foofer had an air of thinking he was, not exactly better but more, in every way more than me, weightier, and coming down at me from an Alpine height. So naturally it was my job to get him.

Was it my job to live or to off myself? When I no longer knew my job, I became a mental patient with my little menu of behaviors, for example I had purloined the Wilkinson blade from Dion’s razor this morning and graphed the logical debate I was having with the mysterious Madame Zuk, in her absence, over whether I should live or die, on the inside of both arms. They were now stuck solid to the lint inside my sweatshirt. Nobody had noticed anything yet. For cutting myself I had arrived at Rohring Rohring with a little natural talent and some amateur performance history, as mentioned. Under that, I had bedrock, I had the primitive but working machinery set on the rock, to wit: I would never, ever tell Merlin I was a Lemme die first! Or anybody else, certainly not Foofer.

Doctor Zuk, on the other hand. Somehow I knew it right off-Zuk I didn’t even have to tell. Zuk could see without my telling, because she was going to like it. I don’t mean she would rub her hands together over it the way Foofer would, heh heh heh, meaning to snitch to Merlin. No, Zuk would like it as a person likes cadmium yellow, licorice or swimming. Not that I would tell her-no more than she was telling me. Then again, if she wouldn’t tell me, I could track her. Old Emily knew Zuk-hadn’t she pulled her into Bertie’s private bathroom by her silvery dress front? I could find out plenty. And I would. It was spring, I was in the bughouse. What else did I have to do?

MY SEE-THROUGH PRINCESS

I decided to start with my see-through princess and went looking for her. But Emily wasn’t playing O Hell (favorite card game of the Bug Motels) with O, Bertie and Dion down in the dayroom. I walked into the cavernous morning light of the place and her empty chair suddenly made me afraid. “Where’s old Emily?” Bertie jerked his thumb over his shoulder. The door to 607, Emily’s room, was shut, the little window in the door had its louvers down.

I sashayed carelessly as possible down to the nurse’s station and asked Miss Roper, “Where’s Emily?” “Emily is in seclusion today.” “How come?” “I’m sorry that is not public information,” she rat-nibbled without looking up from some card she was filling out, then suddenly caught me full in the pink zeros of her glasses: “Anyhow it’s none of your beeswax, Koderer.”

I could tell right away they didn’t like me today in the nurses’ room. There was accusation in Miss Roper’s mouth, fallen sideways like a twisted swing on a playground, and in Miss Hageboom’s hard squint-even downright disgust with the Bug Motels who had mooched their own canister of N₂O yesterday, really, the discipline in this so-called bug hospital! Anyhow nurses have their pets. If they take you as their mascot, look out, you’re probably dying-so I could read it in Miss Hageboom’s slitted eyes, What did you juvenile delinquents who belong in reform school not a hospital do to my little Emily yesterday besides put her down the laundry chute, she’s totally beat this morning, throws up when she even looks at the nice piece of cake I brought her and has a great big egg on her forehead.

Well, I knew what to do in cases like this, go ask the Regicide. I found him at the far end of the dayroom, with a mop in his hands for once. It’s true he kept mopping the same four square feet since the TV was on to his favorite story. “Hey Reg.” He glanced up slowly and when he saw who it was, even his eye went cold. “Hey Reg. I can’t find Emily.” He leaned on his mop and chewed his lip, but then he decided to tell me.

“LIT-TA EMILY,” he announced, entitling his report. “Litta Emily has lost again. Two pound. And they ain’t lettin her out her bed till she eat. She gotta put em back. She look terrible. Not that yall buddies who put her down the laundry chute needs to know anything about where she done been ended up at. Oughta be shamed of yall selves.” “Nobody put her down the laundry chute. She… got emptied in. By accident.” “Sho is! Sho is! And I’m Mayor Goldstein, this just my weekend gig.” “Say Reg, you couldn’t get me in there?” “Way at?” “To see Emily.” “Huh! In her room! You must think I’m foolish-let yall murdous crazies in there with that nice litta gal! I ain’t crazy.” And he walked away. So Nurse’s Aide Reggie was mad at me too.

In Crazyland the craziest is queen, in Rohring Rohring Adolescent Wing everybody loved the see-through princess best, including me. And not just because Emily was Miss Dying Popularity. Talk about ugly-cute-she was the ugly-cutest of all the world’s cute-uglies, sumpm between a bug and a baby bird, with those thready limbs and great big eyes shining out of their bone-holes, a no-nose with yellow freckles on it and bucked teeth that pushed the short upper lip out of her tight face like a little beak. The starving whiteness around her freckles made her skin sort of shine, and I never detected in her-it takes one to know one, so believe me I looked-one flyspeck of showmanship in her sincere desire to disappear. She was more like the embarrassed usherette at her own buggy play, or sumpm even lower than the usherette, the candy seller or the hatcheck girl. Artless is what she was. I call her my see- through princess because you sort of had the feeling you could gaze into her and see every lump and bubble, see all the organs where they lay and the heart where it clenched and relaxed, clenched and gave up the fight again. Every coupla months they carried her off to her bed and locked her in there for a week or two and fed her through a tube. She was patient with this treatment.

She was brave and good, old Emily, and though refusal was her middle name, her starved muscles somehow held up their end when we Bug Motels went on mission. She was like Joan of Arc compared to the fuddy boys in our set. She had only this one problem, that food so disgusted her she was doomed to starve herself to death. And when they rolled her off to bed to force-feed her, her limbs hung over the edge of the gurney like long wax tapers that had been left too long in the heat. The first time I ever saw her, they were rolling her through the dayroom and I stood on my chair to get a good look. She glowed in the dark, the white and yellow curls nodded around her small face like petals of some ragged compositae, and though her neck was too weak to hold up her head, the little beak in her cute-ugly bug face opened and she smiled at me. She smiled at me I can only say hopefully, though we hadn’t been introduced. For some reason old Emily loved me at first sight. And she didn’t even need me-she had cooing