Bogeywoman

by Jaimy Gordon

  “Yes.” He was recovering the Buick and the Alps before my eyes, I mean his dignity, the height and bulk of it, and to tell you the truth (maybe I really was getting better) he was easier on the eyes this way than when his baggy jowls shook. “Let us say I expect some-zing more of you now,” he said, after a pause, in a perfectly calm, dreadfully slow voice. “I can treat you as… some-zing of a fellow… seeker… now I see you are getting better. And I know from Doktor Zuk you are a young woman of great nerve… and respond to challenge… in fact I change my mind… I honor our bargain. I answer one last time-about Doktor Zuk’s fazzer-if you promise to respond as grown-up woman to some-zing I set before you…” Does it stink like some animal squashed five days ago under a pickup truck? Did I smell what was coming? I gobbled that ripe old catfish-bait hook line and sinker. “It’s a deal.”

  Foofer settled himself in his chair with an urbane little kick of his pinstripes and folding of knuckles and liquid sparkle of watch chain that told me this interview was going exactly as he had planned. What did it matter as long as I’d find out about her at last?

  “Her fazzer,” he began, in his creakiest, millstoniest voice, “was a writer of, what to say, odd, grotesque tales, in Yiddish. Self-evidently, then, a Jew… but razzer a phantast of z’nowhere… than a portrayer of some-zing very much Jewish. What to call these… promiscuous mystical tendencies…?

  “Born in Poland, in Galicia… fled before German troops to Lvov… deported by z’Soviets to Kazakhstan-ah yes, your six million miles narrows it down very nicely. And here he went hungry. Then did some-zing clever… married an Uzbeki woman from a powerful family. They disappeared, and for a while this saved him…

  “He was a phantast, but smart, you see, he was simply never seen… His stories appeared, out of nowhere, in z’last Yiddish papers… He signed them The Beetle, the one who lives in dung…

  “He was betrayed by a Uigur guide to Stalinist agents, found and liquidated in 1951.

  “Certain persons remained interested for z’daughter. She was hidden in the nomad villages, then sent to university… god knows where, some fantastic capital, Tashkent perhaps, or Samovarobad… She had studies in Vienna, in Paris and a little bit here… wrote in French a curious small essay, about, eh, puberty as ephemeral monstrosity that was translated into English and made for her some little passing celebrity in z’field… Before she is invited here she is Commissar of Mental Science in some Soviet Autonomous Republic, nine tenths desert, z’size perhaps of…” He shrugged. “Kansas?… She calls herself a Foodian, if you will ask me she has to z’world of everyday a hinge quite her own, razzer like her fazzer…”

  Foofer recrossed his legs, comfortably. “Zis is all I know. He was a little famous, The Beetle. You can look under Der Kaifer in z’bigger Jewish encyclopedias… So.

  “And now.” He drew from the inner pocket of his jacket a dirty pink envelope, unfolded a paper and smoothed it in front of me. “What do you say about zis?” It was a mimeographed menu from Stubby’s Seventh Furlong, Track Kitchen No. 2, Indian Mound Downs. I picked it up, turned it over and over in disbelief. On the back were ketchup stains and Margaret’s familiar scrawl:

  My dear sister,

  It’s not like me to dish out my judgment uninvited, but now that I’ve seen you, I take my greasy pen in hand. Ursie! What in godzillas name are you doing in that bughouse! Not that the joint has nuttin to recommend it, that scrambled Egbert is a genius in his shriveled little way, the Greek noodle is a masterpiece of simple cuisine and I could certainly oink that suave and helpful nurse’s aide Reginald once or twice, but the point is: What the hump are you doing in the bughouse? Godzillas sake I know you’re not buggy, Ursie, just crawling with love for womankind.

  There, I said it. For years I’ve kept it to myself. Before, you were too young to know, but now you’re too old not to, especially if you think you’re doomed to spend your life in the loonie bin. What for, to keep the world safe from the Bogeywoman? Just because those chicken-livered Maine girls threw you out of camp, so what, they were only little girlgoyles, they didn’t know any better.

  Can’t you see, Ursie, you being you, the banquet will be laid for you wherever you land? Already that beautiful dreambox mechanic in the bughouse is crazy in love with you, anybody could see it, for godzillas sake she gave you her phone number didn’t she? Actually I don’t know about that old broad-okay so it’s the covert prude inside the hussy talking, but I don’t claim to be helping anybody, she does, and besides she’s old enough to be your mother. I mean, isn’t there some kind of Olympus you’re not supposed to descend from if you work in the bughouse, otherwise where’s that big difference between the bughouse and life which costs ninety-six dollars a day? Aaaaah what does it matter who am I to talk, love rules the camp, the grove, the track but who woulda thought the bughouse-just lemme know when you want outa there.

  Love,

  Margaret

  You are in serious hot water now Miss Margaret head-in-the-fog Koderer, I radioed my sister, you won’t live down this verblundjet act of treachery for thirty years at least. Wait’ll I get my hands on you, and don’t try to tell me you thought their royal highnesses would respect the sanctity of the U.S. Mail…

  “She’s joking of course,” I said with a feeble snicker, “quite a whipped-cream-pie-in-your-face type, my sister.”

  “Why she would joke about your sexuality, I wonder, some-zing we have never talked about?”

  “She’d joke about it exactly so this would happen, so I’d have to face a world-famous fuddy dreambox mechanic on a highly poisonal subject which is, to put it mildly, embarrassing to a girlgoyle like me. She’d find that sorta funny.”

  “I wonder why zis subject is embarrassing to you?”

  “Hey, no use tryna explain to a royal what a normal person finds embarrassing. You fuddies don’t even see sumpm a little raw in sending Nurse Hageboom to butt in on O Hell and ask us Bug Motels one by one did you have a bowel movement today…”

  “Ahem. Your sister Margaret. She is the closest person to you?”

  “She used to be,” I said.

  “May I ask why she thinks you are troubled by sexual feelings for women?”

  “I don’t see where she said I was troubled. She said crawling not troubled.”

  “You are quite certain there is nuh-zing worth discussing in what your sister says?”

  “Nuttin worth discussing with you,” I said, and we shared a moment of unpleasant silence. “I might discuss it with Doctor Zuk, if she was my dreambox mechanic. And by the way, not to hurt your feelings or anything, but I always thought from the first time I saw her that Doctor Zuk oughta be my dreambox mechanic. Why won’t you let her be my dreambox mechanic? I don’t see why somebody shouldn’t choose their own doctor when they know, absolutely know, they’ll be better off with that person.” I had a queasy spongy feeling in my guts that the timing might be all wrong for this argument, but I also had a hunch it was now or never.

  “Ursula, I tell you frankly because you are so much better. Such a move is simply out of z’question. Can you zink why I might find this not a good plan?”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Doctor Zuk will go along with it.”

  “I’m afraid you are right,” Foofer said gravely.

  I stared at him, trying to gather what this might mean. So hard and clear, so amber, so royal was the glue that stuck the royals together fast in their one big royal popcorn ball, so rare, in fact never, were the holes in it that let you see down to the nothing-but-popcorn at its core-I stared and stared and started filling up with dread like a battery with charge. “We’re not all that good buddies, me and Doctor Zuk,” I panted, afraid I had somehow ratted on her, “she wouldn’t tell me her birth date, or her country, or who she was working for, or whether she’s married or a spy or a Red Army dreambox fixer or what kind of perfume she wears or whether she’s ever been in Caracas or any of that private royal stuff.”

  “Yes, but I see you have p
ut her all these questions.”

  “So what, whaddaya mean,” I said in rising panic, “we all wanna know that stuff about the royals all the time, that’s half of what we talk about in the Bug Motels, you could put out a royal gossip magazine and it would sell like hotcakes-”

  “I zink very little of such talk takes place in telephone calls to private residences of psychiatrists.”

  “Margaret made that part up!” I shouted.

  “Perhaps. Still, plainly it has come to a question of, of far too complicated personal… interest. Perhaps you know I am z’chief of treatment at this clinic. Furzermore, I am one of a staff of fifty-seven treatment personnel including fifteen senior psychiatrists. And I am your psychiatrist. The plan of treatment for every patient in z’Adolescent Wing of Rohring Rohring is discussed regularly before zis whole body. I must tell you that Doktor Zuk has argued long and eloquently in front of zis body for your special friendship, but now, in my judgment and that of many uzzers, it is gone too far and, with my apologies, for I know zis will be difficult for you-it must end.”

  “You mean we’re not supposed to talk to each other any more?”

  “Nuh-zing.”

  “She’ll never put up with that kinda ridiculous game, pretend you don’t know each other and all that!” I said.

  “No. She has not.”

  “O my godzilla she’s gone-you threw her out…”

  Foofer stared at a point just past me on the wall, and his loose cheeks sagged. “For a time, a very little time, Ursula, we place you again on Accompanied status-this means, as you know, under no circumstances you leave z’hospital, I am sure you understand z’reason, and you have an escort wiz you wherever you-”

  I never meant to hurt him. It’s true the suit of farts was unappetizing to me and his Buick-sized dignity provoked my mental patience to fury, but he was a gaseous nuisance, basically gaseous, and therefore not quite there. He was just a two-hundred-pound fuddy from Europe, a big bald head I could never speak to again whenever I wanted. I had no reason to hurt him.

  But as every mental peon knows, these bug mechanics never close a door behind you without palming alarm buttons up their sleeves or in the kneeholes of their desks, so I had to be fast, whatever I did. I had to get to Doctor Zuk before they locked me up. And if Foofer said escort wiz you wherever, that meant Roper, Mursch or Hageboom starting right now. The three Corny Norns were probably lurking out there in the cholera-green corridor already. Well, clapping a nurse on me again was more than a private person could stand-lemme die first!-and besides I had to get to Doctor Zuk. I had to get out of the bughouse. Damn that Margaret, thanks to her I was now a Lesbo Beknownst To Everybody in this dump, and a buggy, underage, amateur lesbo into the bargain. That was why they had to save me-from myself and Doctor Zuk.

  But I wasn’t about to give up the forbidden love of my life. O she was scary all right. Naked she had more of the crone about her than I could look at without sweating. She might even love me, and her love was like a house fell on me. And maybe I could never have her or be her but no mere Foofer could stop me from trying.

  So I never meant to hurt him but in front of me was Foofer, then his desk, then the door. The brown worsted suit of farts sat on a leather chair; he was pyramidal in shape, and had a certain comic-book dragon effect owing to the popcorn balls of white smoke rising from his lips where a pipe dangled. I leaped off the couch and in one motion pushed him and his chair over backwards. It was a pretty big chair, with lungs of soft leather on the back that softly hissed as they settled. And that had been so easy, once it was done his still-crossed feet dangled absentmindedly in the air above his head, that I pushed his desk over too. This made a great dust-billowing whump on the old wood floor that was sure to bring the nurses running and shrieking on the double. At the same time out of some secret drawer or bunghole in the desk a file marked KODERER URSULA popped and flapped onto the floor. I should have got my mitts on it and not let go, o a thousand times since then I’ve replayed this scene and made my getaway guarding it with my life, but instead I just snatched it up, wheeled and stuffed it out the window, so that hundreds of pages of me went fluttering down Broadway. Then with the superhuman strength of the mental patient I ripped open the steel door, well maybe it wasn’t locked, probably not, and there was Mursch, here came Roper and Hageboom, whipping around the two corners. I backed into Foofer’s office and holed up fast in the kneehole of the overturned desk, getting ready to spring out like a cornered rat, but the nurses just ran around me and now I saw why. Foofer hadn’t moved. He was knocked out cold, his half-closed eyes were all whites, his face why deny it was blue, his pipe was missing though there seemed to be sumpm round and dark O-ing his bloodless mouth, and his wing-tipped foot still nodded at the point of his trousers abstractly, as a butterfly pants with its wings. O my godzilla I’d probably killed the man! Now I ran and nobody stopped me, and this time when I passed Lopes at the front desk in the lobby I wasn’t even a liquid movement in the air, not quite an itch between his eyes-just a vague, exhausted feeling of having cared more once.

  7

  Flight to Caramel-Creamistan

  HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

  I ducked into her lobby around an old fuddy with a grocery cart full of clacking empties and ran up nineteen flights of steps towards Doctor Zuk. I could do that in those days without panting, on account of the superhuman strength of the mental patient, which lasted for the first twelve floors at least. On the thirteenth I slowed up, by the eighteenth I was peeking around every stairwell for guys in white coats or gumshoes of any description. On the twentieth floor, her floor, I was so near to going backwards I had to admit what it was. Cops didn’t scare me-I never had any trouble outrunning a fuddy in uniform-but Zuk was scarier. Probably she’s expecting me, I was thinking, and what if she’s naked.

  But when I got there she had all her clothes back on, in fact I had never seen her looking better in duds. Course, this was beyond even her everyday beauté, this short black dress of silky stuff with a great cut-out speech balloon across the front, and a diamond choker for a collar. “What are you doing here, Miss Bogey?” she asked me, and I started to wonder how come she always looked, not like your usual Commie bureaucrat in a blue serge suit from Searsiev and Roebuckovsky and baggy cotton hose, but like a Russian spy in the movies, in clothes by Cecil Beaton. How could she dress like Paris if she was raised in an oasis in Outer Hotzeplotz? Maybe she really was top drawer, worth millions to the Kremlin, but if she was the best-dressed spy between Washington and Philadelphia, what was her interest in me?

  “What are you doing here, Miss Bogey? You look red in your face like boiled Maine lobster, and what is this in your hand? Is for Zuk?” I looked down-I was still clutching Margaret’s letter. I stuffed it in my overalls. “You don’t know?” I said. She shook her head, perplexed and amused. She didn’t know. I sank onto the sofa-there was nothing in the room but a white sofa, a white coffee table with a bowl of roses on it, and long curtains of white gauze, like mosquito net, stirring at the windows.

  “Godzillas sake you look like a movie star,” I said, “what are you so dressed up for?” The boiled Maine lobster was a flagrant hint. “I am engaged to dinner,” she confessed. I barked out a doomed and cynical laugh. “I already married mine,” I said, “what the hump I won’t be marrying anyone else.” “Grow up now, I tell you the truth, Miss Bogey,” she said, “because the gentleman is also psychiatrist at Rohring Rohring and he is coming any minute.” “Is it Foofer?” I said, “don’t worry about it, he’ll be late, very late, late or maybe never.” “Dr. Feuffer is never late,” she said stiffly. “So it is him!-cheese…” I burrowed into the sofa and she stood over me sternly with her arms crossed-she looked like a vexed pastry cook, except for the elegant billows in the cut-out front of her dress. “Greedy baby!” she scolded, “I am glad to see you. Your face is red like big baby but, yes, I am happy you are come. All same we land in big trouble if Dr. Feuffer finds you here. Then my
position in clinic is also kaput, yes? and I see nothing more of you unless maybe you move to Soviet Autonomous Republic of Karamul-Karamistan.”

  I felt like slapping her. Here she was forking over her address just like that! If she had told me when I first asked her, I would never have started talking to Foofer, I would never have gotten better, and I wouldn’t be in the fix I was in right now.

  “You might be going back to Caramel-Creamistan or wherever the hump it is sooner than you think,” I muttered, “and you might be taking me with you.” “What are you talking about? You must hide yourself right away, Miss Bogey. You want to wait here at my place until I come back, then we can talk, but now I show you where to go when Feuffer comes.” She rose and her black skirt whirled and her diamond collar flashed: she was headed wouldn’t ya know it for the balcony.

  “Sumpm terrible happened,” I blurted, “with Foofer. It was an accident. He said we couldn’t see each other anymore. He said he was putting me back on Accompanied until they got you out of the way. I think they’re getting rid of you.”

  “My dear Miss Bogey, where you get these crazy ideas,” Doctor Zuk said, whirling back around, “rubbish! is rubbish!” But she didn’t look so sure. After all she had been fighting it out for weeks with the old-style strong and silent type dreambox mechanics. Now her face was still but little gold flecks were churning in her eyes, her nostrils flared and in the cut-out O of her dress her bosom rose and fell. And suddenly she stepped across the line. “All right, Miss Bogey, why you say they get rid of me? What do you know?”

  I handed over Margaret’s letter. After a time she looked up with a thoughtful face. “Ha, you could be right I am leaving, leaving even the country.” “Sorry,” I said. “I should never have said sumpm to my sister, but cheese, I never thought she’d squeal.” “And what has happened with Feuffer.” “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just pushed his chair over backwards on my way out the door. But when I ran away his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was totally blue.” She tipped up an eyebrow, stuck her bottom lip out skeptically: “Come, he is big healthy man, Dr. Feuffer, a little thing like that, how it would kill him?” “I think he swallowed his pipe.” We looked at each other and suddenly both of us were shrieking with laughter. “Possibly you are not joking,” she finally said. “Is seven-fifteen. Reinhold is never late for dinner.”