by Jaimy Gordon
So. Her hands piled with lather, she sat down on O like a kayaker to hold her in place, reached all business through the hole between fill pipe and toilet and soaped the small ears. “Ouch, sufferin cheeses,” O whined and pulled this way and that way. “Relax head,” commanded the weasel, sinking hard fingers in the blond clouds of Mary Hartline hair, and O instantly sort of broke at the stalk of her neck and the headbone dangled there, with the doctor’s other hand guiding the chin, but it was still stuck. “Ch-ch-choleria!” doctor weasel snarled; it was the most terrible curse I had ever heard, and afterwards I could see little beads of her spit pearling O’s forelock. Angrily she got up again, filled her hands with more foam, roughly sideburned O’s cheeks and chin, pompadoured the bloody brow with pinkening scum, screwed the whole head a little bit east like turning a globe and gave it a jerk not altogether gentle. The head popped free. “Sufferin cheeses Emily where’d you find this brutal bitch,” O muttered ungratefully, rubbing her ears and neck, “who da hump is she anyhow?”
There was a thunder of fuddies’ hooves: Bertie and Dion were cheesing it out of the closet and down the hall, in exact accord with Bug Motels’ operational principles, leaving me and O holding the bag. The weasel showed a commendable lack of interest in their existence. She didn’t even look round. I recalled that my Bug Motel’s duty, now that O was free, was to slink out while the slinking was good. O all by herself was famous for stonewalling cops, and royals. I backed gluily towards the door, but thank godzilla, doctor weasel clamped a hand around my ankle in time. “You,” she said, rising up into my face. “Miss Koderer. Please to explain me what is happened.” I blinked. I couldn’t squeal right in front of two other Bug Motels. But I didn’t want the weasel talking to anybody else either. She was no ordinary dreambox mechanic-if she was a dreambox mechanic-and I was just about to ask her again exactly what she was, when old dying hence ethically exempt Emily piped up: “O had a grandma fizzy fit on the floor, she even had whip cream in her mouth like when a dog bites a frog or sumpm.” The weasel turned to O, who sat hunched and rubbing her neck inside the icy billows of her hair, a lit Lucky hanging from her dry lips. “Miss O’Day?” O shrugged and showed the weasel her back. So it came back to me.
“Miss Koderer. This object. You can explain me please for what you want it?” Her voice thrummed lazily on its low string and she touched with a pointed toe the H of laughing gas, then the clown’s nose lying in its loops of red rubber tubing. “I…” I stammered, glad to have her eye on me, but embarrassed to look like a mastermind of dreambox oils powders and gasses in front of her, for I had a hunch what she would think of that. I mean, she was a mysterious, grown-up woman of the world, next to whom even the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus, looked like a bucktoothed rube. I gasped at my own disloyalty to my first love and for a moment I hated the woman, for how could she ever love my kind, my potato-shaped nose bulb, lips of wornout underpants elastic, body straight as a pencil, rusty hair, hun manners?
“I… had to have sumpm to do in this dump,” I whispered. Until I saw you, I thought. She didn’t smile. I felt her peer through my buggy disguise as through a glass pane; one of her eyebrows arched up mockingly. “How you are called, my dear?” “Bogeywoman,” I said, and O and Emily tittered, because I had never let a dreambox mechanic in on my moniker before. Doctor weasel put out her ugly hand. “Is pleasure,” she said. I stared at the hand floating between us. Then I remembered to take it.
“How… how you are called?” I mimicked her, not only to be fresh to a dreambox adjustor in front of the Bug Motels, though I knew they would be impressed. No, I must have sensed I would have to haggle and track and scheme and beg for every crumb of truth about her as long as I knew her. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Zuk,” she finally said, in her peculiar, salivary accent, sumpm between shook and zook. “Doctor Zuk?” “Zuk,” she repeated, her voice loud and bored, as if she regretted having said so much.
She leaned into Bertie’s closet and laid a finger on the cold pebbly cylinder of laughing gas. “Pfui,” she exclaimed, “unpleasant feeling like skin of dead hairless animal. Here is interesting fact: human beings despise everything hairless-at least I think is true. Pig, snake, legs of chicken, wing of bat, bald head of man, tail of opossum and rat, I wonder why is this? Why they would hate everything bald like themselves?”
“Cause they got taste,” I said-talk about an easy question!
She didn’t answer, but her silvery eyes lit on me for maybe five seconds as though I were the most interesting animal on earth. Then she turned and walked away. And I remember her sleek behind flexing like a fist under the velour, and the pinprick her champagne-flute heels made across my forehead as she went-that was as close as I came to taking her in.
Bertie came creeping back as soon as she was gone. “They didn’t even call the cops,” he said in a hurt voice. “Well, maybe they still will,” I consoled him, “she just left.” “Did she look mad?” “Er, not exactly.” Of course we were too nervous now either to sniff the H or to leave it alone, but a few minutes later Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard came in without a word-just shot us a scornful look, kiddie D.O.A.P. it said, like the time we five choked down a whole McCormick’s tin of nutmeg between us and all of us puked for an hour but nothing else happened-and rolled the H bomb away. But two minutes later he left in its place a modest little E cylinder on a cart with its twin oxygen tank and gauges and valves and other appurtenances, all in working order, and said, “Yall damn fool huff-heads got fi-teen minutes with this baby and that’s it, so get to work.” We dutifully sat down and huffed, but all the fun had gone out of that mission. I didn’t see any more giant popcorn. Instead I had a vision of Zuk, the international doctor weasel, skiing in her high-heeled sandals on a sort of slag heap of stars. A great dust of stars flew up all around her-she was brilliant, but she was dust, and she was skidding down down down.
3
Miles from Madame Zuk
She was too many stories above me. Love is a girlgoyle’s proper food, or so Margaret always claimed-the other stuff just plumps up your bra size. And O used to say with a yawn that love at least gave a girl a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Well, I met Zuk and the next morning I woke up out of the tar with a seasick lurch and didn’t care whether I lived or died. So she hadn’t worn any rings-so what-no rings is a quirk of fashion, for godzillas sake, not a marital status. Of course she was married, they all were, probably she had, gag, cute children too. And why did I have to snoop around to find out what she had and didn’t have in the nuptial department, bribe Reggie to check for the dreaded family photos on the desk? Because she had pulled cheap rank on me like a prison matron, firing off poisonal questions and not answering any herself. This offended my mental patient’s democratic principles. Was Zuk a better woman than I was? Well, obviously. But for how long? Just for today? Dream on, Bogeywoman-just for today until the end of time.
The logic is always corrupt which answers the question should I live or should I off myself? Other people hang around in it, audible voices in the wall, as if it were a cheap hotel-snoring in its lobby, shaving at its flatulent sinks, smoking in its bed. The figures lie when I weigh in the girlgoyles who’ve turned me down, since, gone as they are, they weigh nothing. On the one hand I know quite well that life is a dream and every face in it nothing but a lesson for the real world to come, I mean the real world that lies wrapped up in this one like a cheese in cheesecloth. All the same, for every mental patient there comes a moment when this world is ante for every other. The game boils down to you and your dreambox mechanic. Together you argue it out if you should live or die. Gimme somebody I can love or else, you say. Your dreambox mechanic replies you should be whole unto yourself, but she has a date every Saturday night, you’re sure of it.
So shouldn’t they make it illegal? Shouldn’t it be therapeutically incorrect to have a dreambox mechanic like her, Doctor Zuk, Madame Zuk, that disgustingly complete and out of reach? No bughouse doctor too b
eautiful, no, wait, beauty isn’t exactly the problem-well then, no dreambox mechanic too beautiful on her horse, I mean too sure of her seat, too haloed in round white savoir-vivre like a circus equestrienne in her spotlight. She gallops by, she maybe lets a few circus monkeys cling to her mane as she goes, and maybe I’m one of them. But surely Zuk is too favored from birth to be trusted with cripples? How can she have the proper sympathy? So that the message she throws to the mental patient like her garter, never mind the soothing talk from her mere voicebox, is Try, try in vain, you shall never have me or be me. I mean, after that, when you’ve already lost the game, and for good, why get better? What for?
And that’s a queer phrase right there-get better-as though repairing your dreambox had all the morality of a shopping trip, you have to get sumpm along the way, track it down, pick it up, steal it, beg for it, somehow add it to your equipment or you’re done for. Then here comes Zuk, dreambox mechanic, one of the royals, you gotta have her and worse yet, she isn’t even your dreambox mechanic-you can’t beg, buy or blackmail an appointment with her.
I hated my doctor. Reinhold Feuffer, M.D. Foofer. Especially Foofer, but in fact I despised all the doctors in Rohring Rohring-who were they, the royals, ha ha, to think they could tell what was wrong, really wrong, with a mental peon, especially me? And although at seventeen I was generally more crude than rude, I used to mock any Bug Motel who had a crush on a fuddy of that line. Emily worshipped her doctor, but she was dying and he wasn’t saving her. “Better you should hate old Buzzey and live than love him and croak,” I ragged her. “It iddn’t Dr. Buzzey’s fault I won’t eat,” she said, with plain South Baltimore logic that might have sounded sensible in a fatter person. “Yeah, well if he cooked you anything really good…” I said. (It’s true there was sumpm about not being able to eat I just couldn’t grasp; when I’d taken it up, it was a wrestling match with every chicken leg and pretzel rod, and in the end I cried uncle and fell on the stuff.)
Dr. Marks was O’s new dreambox adjustor; she liked his sturdy buttocks and blond mustache and thought he would be a good oink, which shows how far the royals were getting with her. Bertie hated the nurses, who for some reason were suspicious killjoys about pills, and they cold-shouldered him right back, but he kinda liked the dreambox mechanics. He claimed they thought alike. “Hey, forget about flapping those gums, man,” he said. “Tell em you’re too depressed to talk, five minutes later it’s out with the ballpoint. And then you get air balls or goofers, though the quality is weak, very weak with these pipe suckers, that’s the sad truth.”
“Cheese,” I said, “the bill to Merlin, that’s my old man, is seven hundred a week, and the only one these fuddy dreambox mechanics can save is Jefferson on a nickel, if that.” “They aren’t sposed to save you,” Emily said patiently, and Dion said: “They maintain you, man. Maintain, maintain.” “They’re tryna show you how to get used to stuff the way it is,” Emily elaborated. “Get used to living on these crumbs?” I said, “never! If this is all I’m going to get I want my money back.” “Maybe you could jew em down to five hundred a week,” Dion suggested, “I think my old man got a deal through da guy who put in the basement vending machines.” “I’m talking about life, not the bughouse.” “Aaay,” Dion persisted, looking around in vain for a well-fed person to support him, “the chow here’s okay, whaddaya expect, the Park Plaza?”
Because they were professionally mysterious, rumors flew about the private lives of our dreambox mechanics as if they had been movie stars. What had I heard lately? Dr. Hellwig, who wore a wedding ring, had been seen by the whole school bus walking arm in arm on Charles Street with a tall moon-breasted champagne blonde who by our comic book standards couldn’t be anybody’s wife. Haughty Dr. Dannenberg had been spotted at Pimlico Lanes in a turquoise satin bowling team jacket-someone on weekend furlough had seen him and though we knew it couldn’t be true, the idea was too enchanting: his stock of face plummeted. Dr. Dewey might have got the sack, we liked to think he had, but for sure he left suddenly in the middle of April.
Sometimes we tried to put Emily on the case. We all knew that dear departing Emily could get an answer, maybe not a yes answer but some kind of answer, to anything she asked. By now they had told Emily her organs were rotting inside her and in fact her breath smelled like nail polish remover, not bad but strange. Her dying gave a certain power, a last quality, to all her requests. Everybody felt it. The Bug Motels hated to see it go to waste: “Hey Emily. Ask Dr. Hellwig if he has a girlfriend, ask Doughy Dewey if he got canned, ask Foofer if he’s oinking Miss Hageboom.” But Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, never asked anything she didn’t really want to know.
Doctor Zuk, I speculated, might be Doughy Dewey’s replacement. I fumed that I couldn’t ask one of the royals straight out. And wouldn’t that be just like the bughouse-to replace the nadir of fudd with the apex of glamour and pretend it was irrelevant to treatment, though an hour with Zuk was as likely to ransack your dreambox as to repair it. No, no, no, no dreambox mechanic too beautiful on her horse, I decreed, though it didn’t help either for a dreambox mechanic to be too ugly-I mean, how far would you get in this life if you thought this mug was the only one who ever loved you? I always figured that was why they’d assigned Doughy Dewey to O, who had been loved or at least oinked by ballplayers and even rock stars of the lower magnitudes. She had to get over thinking about men that way. Dewey had a fat lineless face, skin the color of Gouda cheese, his only whiskers grew out of pink moles and his fat little legs dangled an inch or two above the floor under his leather armchair. O said she used to sit there mostly feeling sorry for him.
“I always wanted to ask him if he had sumpm screwed up in his glands, you know, maybe his nuts never came down or sumpm.” “Why didn’t you?” we asked, to make trouble. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.” “Let’s get Emily to ask him.” But Emily Nix Peabody wouldn’t ask him, because that wasn’t one of the things she really wanted to know.
Chastely I marveled at my see-through princess Emily. And yet what was so all-fired pure about her, come to think of it? I never asked my doctor anything I didn’t want to know. I never asked him anything I did want to know either. I didn’t make idle conversation with the thinkbox adjustor. Ever since he had first farted through the door of the green office where I sat waiting for him on a farty leather couch of oxblood Morocco with brass upholstery nails (which I was always trying, on the side he couldn’t see, to pry out with my fingernails)-one year, seven months and eight days ago-I hadn’t said a word to Foofer. Not a single word. (Well, for the first couple days I had asked him over and over how soon I could go back to Camp Chunkagunk, since nothing was wrong with me except could I please go back to Camp Chunkagunk. “Miss Koderer, vy don’t you tell me vot happened to you at zis camp?” “Whaddaya mean what happened to me, nuttin happened.” “I know you were expelled from a camp where you have gone for many years, a place you liked. I would like to know in your own words how zis came about.” “Nuttin happened, I just got lost one day and accidentally left camp, make them take me back…”)
So how did I land this professional? Merlin picked him out. He was-Merlin still insists (on the phone last week he was telling me this again)-a world-famous diagnostician, whatever that means. “Internationally known, Ursie. I mean, think about it-you got accepted into Rohring Rohring by a world-famous diagnostician of disturbed adolescents.”
That accepted burned me up. “Accepted,” I fumed, “you’d think it was Harvard. And for godzillas sake, it didn’t take a Sigmund Food. What adolescent isn’t disturbed? They oughta lock up the ones who think they’re having a good time.” “You weren’t just in a bad mood, Ursie. You were cutting yourself and all that.” “I can’t believe he told you I was a hopeless case,” I seethed, “how the hump would he know, I never even talked to him.” Merlin read me the letter. It took him awhile to unfold the wretched thing out of his wallet; he’d been carrying it around with him from Haiphong to Upper Sam
ovarobad to Outer Hotzeplotz all this time:
… might someday successfully dress herself and see to her own meals and possibly manage some unstressful employment, but in all likelihood you must be prepared to support her for the rest of both of your lives…
Foofer! For the first time I thought he deserved what he got. “And you my own father believed it.” “A world-famous diagnostician, Ursie. I mean you had a mother too. Those Schapiros, they were always a little strange…”
Not that I’m letting him off, but I gotta admit that after Mama died in a trainwreck (and so hangs on to her 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.