by Jaimy Gordon
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 beauté 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 nurses to throw away.
So I knew she wouldn’t scream or rat or throw me out. Still it wasn’t that easy to get in to her, if the Regicide wouldn’t help. I stood behind my door, holding a potted cactus that Suzette had accidentally brought with my stuff-I hadn’t watered it in nineteen months but it wouldn’t die and now
I was glad I’d kept the thing. I peeped through the crack until the nurse’s aide, Delilah not Reggie, came out of Emily’s room pushing the big rattly-bones housekeeping cart with the dirty linen bin trailing behind it, and turned east. I winged the cactus in a perfect blooper pitch over her head so it crashed in front of her, went rolling off in three prickly balls and she froze and stared up at the ceiling-and meanwhile I ran like hump (in my silent tracker’s moccasins) to slip through Emily’s door before its hydraulic moan came to an end.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
She lay there exactly like a wasting princess in some fairy tale, right down to the snowy counterpane with her pipecleaner elbows on it. Her bottom half, where it went under the crackling sheets, made hardly a bump, and under the bunched-around skirt of her quilted pink I CHOCOLATE bathrobe (a present from the nurses) she was like one of those half-dollies that housewives freakish for chintz use to cover the toaster-I mean she was there to the waist and nothing underneath, not even the blank crotch that drives you to distraction in a plastic dolly when you finally get alone with her and take a look. So let it be declared that, from the first time I saw Emily, who I believe had a strong crush on me, mine was a respectfully crotchless love for her crotchless self, you’d be afraid of breaking that popsicle stick body just by jiggling the bed next to it, let alone lying down on top of it. True, I had designs on Emily, but they were on her mind not her body. I mean she wasn’t quite twelve, her bug face was more ugly than cute when you looked into its caves, and her body was not even there. All the same she glowed, and I wanted to finger the wolfram filament of her incandescence, wanted to know to its hot wire core her amazing lack of appetite. I admit I’ve licked out the pig trough to its dregs, from time to time, in the famine of sex, but what do I know of that other thing, the pure want of hunger, a click in the throat and disgusted blank in the gut of a caterpillar who, unless it lands on a muskmelon leaf, doesn’t even know the world is food?
“Hey Em, how you doing?” I whispered as the door whooshed shut behind me. “Ursie!” she peeped, her beak opened up a crack and I could tell she was glad to see me. “Say Em, want me to sneak you up sumpm? How bout a comic or, uh, a Three Musketeers or sumpm?” I whispered. I would have been glad to crawl through enemy fire on my belly to the card and candy shop in the lobby and give up my last nickel to see her fall; I didn’t want to believe in her purity unless I absolutely had to. But she was as ashamed of not eating as I was jealous of it, which gave me a funny feeling it might be true.
Emily’s face crumpled in a smile that pulled the pale freckles even wider over her little bulb of a nose. “That would be nice since it was from you but I prolly couldn’t eat it,” she said sheepishly, and the tops of her ears pinked up, which was sumpm to see, against the yahrzeit candle color of the rest of her. “They’re going to keep you here till you eat. You better eat. How come you don’t eat?” “It looks good but then it don’t go down,” she explained, “at first it tastes like a hamburger or whatever it is, but then it gets sticky, real sticky like I’m eating…” Her voice got thin as a piece of spaghetti just talking about it and then I heard a soft click-her throat closed, her lips pulled back and I could see all her rotten little teeth. “And I got to spit it out,” she finally said, “or throw up.”
I shouldn’t have asked, but I couldn’t help it: “Like you’re eating what?” “Like I’m eating B.M.,” she whispered. “Oooo,” I said. I saw a human dumpling glowing on a plate where a hamburger just had sat, and, like that, her case looked hopeless. But then I recognized the object I was staring at. “A Baby Ruth could be a poop,” I said, “and nuttin looks better than that. Hey, that’s what makes you want to eat it-cause it looks like a nice piece of poop.” Emily laughed, her big eyes widened like happy clams in their red rims and I thought I was getting somewhere.
“Sure,” I argued, “you know it’s true. O’Henrys too. Must be everybody wants to eat sumpm that looks like poop. You better not tell Foofer I said that.” “I wouldn’t never,” Emily said. She stared up at me and got that grave little soap flake of light in each eye like Joan of Arc in the Classic Comic. “Tootsie Rolls too,” I pursued. “And Mounds.” Emily nodded. “And Fifth Avenue.” Emily twisted her nose bulb and shook her head-“Not so poopy,” she said. She never ever went along with a queer idea for the sake of the conversation, not even to save her skinny life. “O come on-if it’s chocolate in a bar it’s poop. You gotta admit.” Her head was still fanning stubbornly back and forth on its baby bird neck but she was grinning a little.
“Come on, say it. When I eat a Clark Bar I’m thinking poop, umm good, and so are you, so is everybody. Now listen, Emily, never mind Foofer, if you tell any dreambox mechanic in this whole dump I said that, I’ll never speak to you again.” “I wouldn’t never.” “Cause I’m getting a new one.” Emily blinked at me. “A new dreambox mechanic. Well, anyhow I’m going to ask for her.” I waited for Emily to wonder who, but she didn’t. “You know, the one you brought to Bertie’s bathroom when O got her head stuck. What was her name.” Emily didn’t choose to tell me. “Er, Doctor Zuk,” I craftily answered myself.
“You can’t just ask for somebody,” Emily said. “Why not?” “You’re sposed to work with what you got. Like in O Hell.” Meaning our card game. “Besides I think Doctor Zuk don’t have no regular patients.” “How come?” “She just goes around talking to you and writing stuff down. I think maybe she’s famous.” No dreambox adjustor too beautiful on her horse-she was famous. Why do they say My head swam-my head drowned, wave-dragged, glug glug, over stone shoals of hunger, sodden sponges of disgust. She was famous. I was never going to get her or be her. Her swirling bluegreen atmospheres of confidence, that equestrienne spotlight she rode in, the mermaid spangles on her brassiere-it all made sense now that she was famous. I double-drowned for envy: she was famous, and she was studying other people, not me.
“How d’you know all that?” “I ast.” My head swam-my dreambox bobbed emptily on the waves, like a bait float. “Why’d you ask?” (Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, never asked anything she didn’t really want to know.) “She’s old but she’s so purty. I never saw anyone like her before.” “What’s she famous for? Is she a dreambox mechanic?” “I din’t ask.” “Didn’t ask!” I stared at Emily so severely that she added, “Prolly,” in a small scared voice. “She’s from Europe,” Emily recollected, “… or somewheres…” I suddenly recalled, for my part, I was here to save my see-through princess, not to bully her. My ears itched hotly for shame.
Yes I was here to feed my fifty-one-pound princess as well as to milk her. I loved her, I always meant to fatten her up, no mistake about that. “Hey Em. Don’t you ever want to put sumpm in your mouth?” I asked, “just to suck it? not to eat it?” She wrinkled her little spotty-toadstool nose. “Sure,” I said, “like some things just say put me in your mouth as soon as you look at em. You don’t know what I mean? Honest?”
I looked around the room for the perfect thing. Kitchens are good for suckable stuff, bakelite spoon handles and pyrex thermometers and marble pestles. Even a writing desk has silky pens and crunchy pencils, but a room in the bughouse is a desert to the mouth, everything fixed down or flimsy white plastic made to throw away. All I saw were the maraschino cherry buttons of Emily’s I CHOCOLATE bathrobe-thank godzilla nurses have pets, I thought, though it’s kind of awkward to suck another girl’s bathrobe buttons, even if you’re a Unbeknownst to her-especially when she’s wearing the thing. Emily and me, we weren’t that close, but we weren’t that innocent either, I couldn’t just suck her buttons I mean.
And all of a sudden I saw it, just what I needed: Emily’s pink pearl plastic three-piece toilet set, maybe the one thing she had from home, with a shoehorn of suckable handle on the hairbrush, an ordinary L-shaped comb, and a mirror like a wreath of pinky lips that twisted to a pink scepter, positively mouthwatering, at one end. “Yum,” I said, picking up the pink comb and smoking it rakishly. I handed the h
airbrush to Emily. I wanted her to notice that mirror handle herself and ask for it. But no, refusal was her middle name. “I wanna smoke like you,” she piped up. “Sure, okay,” I shrugged, and gave her the comb and took back the hairbrush, but then I smoked its fat handle like a big pink cigar. Use your imagination, Peabody, I was trying to say. We smoked her hair set peacefully for a time. Two little kites of spit started glinting in Emily’s mouth corners and I thought I was onto sumpm big.
“Next you gotta try bubblegum,” I said, since it’s pink and you don’t swallow it. I mean, Emily was all of eleven years old. I poisonally despise bubblegum. “Hey,” Emily whispered, “let’s smoke real cigarettes.” “Real cigarettes?” I echoed uneasily. What could I say?-my Pall Malls and matches were in plain view, squaring the front of my overalls. “Real cigarettes? What for?”
I repeat: we teenage mental patients weren’t given to foiling each other’s stupid schemes. Heads were for dreambox mechanics to fix. We were young and set in our ways; it was our job to be crazy, not to be fixed. Time would change us, not our doctors in their wildest dreams, if we were in their wildest dreams, which I doubt. I mean, mental patience is a culture like the one it’s wrapped in; insanity is like sanity, it can’t stay the same or it rots. Fresh bad ideas were not to be sniffed at. And anyhow, everybody smokes in a mental hospital; it’s like drinking wine in France. If my see-through princess wanted a cigarette, it was my job to whip out the smokes, but I didn’t. Not just yet.