Mimi

by Lucy Ellmann

  For my sister

  MAUD ELLMANN

  And the artists

  Connie Cohen

  Sarindar Dhaliwal

  Carol Dunbar

  Emily Gasquoine

  Phil Kiggell

  Gunnie Moberg

  They work; but don’t you think they overdo it?… And am I never to have a change of air, because the bees don’t?

  Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

  CONTENTS

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 2010

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2011

  MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY

  GROUNDHOG DAY

  VALENTINE’S DAY

  PRESIDENTS’ DAY

  DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

  THE IDES OF MARCH

  THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING

  FULL MOON, MAY 17TH

  CATASTROBURY

  MEMORIAL DAY

  INNISFREE

  FLAG DAY

  FULL MOON, JUNE 15TH

  LABOR DAY

  APPENDIX

  RECIPES

  SONGS

  BRIDGET HANAFAN: THE RETROSPECTIVE

  CACOPHONY

  MANIFESTO OF THE ODALISQUE REVOLUTION

  O.R. CERTIFICATE OF MEMBERSHIP

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  READ MORE LUCY ELLMANN

  Dot in the Universe

  Doctors & Nurses

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 2010

  So I was walking down Madison Avenue reading an article about some Italian reporter who claimed Philip Roth had said something mean about Obama. The guy had interviewed a whole lot of famous writers and they’d all said mean things about Obama and unanimously praised Berlusconi. But it was all baloney. The Italian reporter was probably just some louse in the pay of Berlusconi, one of the worst guys in the world.

  It was at this point that I slipped on the ice at the corner of Madison and 36th, thereby transplanting myself in an instant from the realm of the lofty, vertical and intellectual to that of the lowly and prostrate. I blame the sun in my eyes. I slalomed for half a block, trying to grab hold of fire hydrants, golden poles and other injurious ironmongery, along with the recoiling calves of fellow pedestrians, my well-iced ass drawing me ever closer to the Christmas Eve traffic, that herd of the hopeless hurling themselves toward family get-togethers or finally giving in on the purchase of some exorbitant toy.

  The Good News, I thought as I slid, was that there was now not the slightest chance of my backsliding instead into a half-hearted reconciliation with Gertrude, whom I had only just managed to discard—since even she would have to concede that I was now in no condition to present myself at the mass rally of the faithful currently stringing popcorn and glueing sequins on felt at Gertrude’s Connecticut country cottage, in the annual effort to assuage her sense of having somehow missed out on something during her lonely if lavish childhood.

  Deluded, our first year together, by the elation of conquest, I had actually helped with the decorations, standing at some personal peril on an antique stepladder to wrestle with garlands, or “garland” (as Gertrude perversely called them), miles of coiled strands of once-living foliage dotted with little white lights and big red velvet bows. These we distributed all over Gertrude’s mansion (or “cottage”) in carefully stage-managed fashion, leaving no architectural feature or Picasso print unemphasized. Receiving in return my very own gunky Christmas stocking made of organic hemp hessian adorned with locally carded wool gently shorn from the happiest of pedigree sheep, then dyed in such deep shades of carcinogenic crimson that your hands come out all pink and stinky when you delve in to get at the presents.

  My solution to Gertrude’s Xmas Xtravaganzas in the ensuing wearisome years was to put myself in charge of Eggnog production, turning it into a great art and making the stuff so goddam strong I could usually achieve a nauseous stupor before Gertrude noticed what was going on, entitling me to private porch time—where, if necessary, a guy can vomit into the bushes—a ritual marred only by the guests who followed me out there, and Gertrude’s invariable questions concerning:

  1. The number of mixing bowls used.

  2. The number of days the whole alchemical procedure entailed.

  3. The proliferation of abandoned egg whites.

  For, to throw away spare egg whites would have shaken her already precarious handle on domesticity and Rombaueresque frugality. No holding her back on the Tiffany party-bags though, was there?—those pale blue offerings (otherwise known as guilt trips), bestowed on every blasted gadfly and flibbertigibbet she invited, and blindly accepted by them in conjunction with, but complete contradiction of, the egg-white omelettes and meringues.

  Irma Rombauer was in fact responsible for my own Eggnog recipe, but I’d cranked it up a notch. Good old Irma, who had the whole nation swinging behind her there for a while, dressing up in checked aprons to open a million cans of mushroom soup, hash, canned oysters even! (Was nothing fresh in 1950?) There they were, saving those leftovers, planning Luncheons, making their One Minute Frosting, Ice Box Cookies, and Milk Toast for the recovering invalid (did they recover? on that?). Without Irma, none of us would have known what a vol-au-vent was, nor seen our mothers stuff old chicken scraps into one. And what about the dangers of undercooking… well, just about anything? King Spock and Queen Irma, our native pair of know-it-alls, who made a fortune telling everybody how to do it the easy way, from bedwetting to borscht.

  Thus, by zigzagging horizontally down Madison Avenue I had saved myself many psychological and physiological torments in the wilds of Connecticut. The Bad News was that I was still on my ass in the gathering gloom, and in Manhattan a man without an upright position hasn’t got a chance. Any minute now I’d freeze permanently to the sidewalk where the Jews and Muslims would find me Christmas morning—Cause of Death: sprained ankle. But I was underestimating New York. Of course there was a wacko broad ready to yank me up before checking if I’d broken anything.

  “Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,” she declared.

  “I was beginning to think that myself,” I replied, as a firm, untrained hand inserted itself under each armpit from behind.

  Once standing (gingerly) on one foot, I was able to inspect my savior—a plump middle-aged gal with brown eyes, and brown curls poking out of her Eskimo hood, her entire torso encased in one of those full-length puffy white numbers that imitate (or are?) bedding—before she plunged into the river of yellow cabs, apparently in order to hail me one. At 4:30, Christmas Eve! 3:30 maybe, 7:30 sure. But 4:30? “Ya gotta be kiddin’, pal!” Time for all good Yemeni taxi-drivers to be home with their fretful families. Sometimes Manhattan goes parochial on you, not cosmopolitan at all but subject to strange suburban rites. The mask slips and you see… america lurking below, what you came to New York to get away from! So it was handy to have a fine example of a Manhattan madwoman on my side, ready to wade into Madison Avenue until a cab either stopped or ran her over, complete with her bags of touching Christmas treats: chocolate éclairs no doubt, or profiteroles maybe, to be consumed later in solitary squalor under the glare of her pet spider and the bare bulb needed to keep the thing alive.

  It worked! Soon ensconced in the fetid folds of a taxicab and distracted by pain (acute), shock (temporary), hypothermia (imaginary), hypochondria (just the usual), and rudeness (innate), I failed to thank the woman. But the sight of her out the back window abruptly erased the sad sack impression I’d formed at first. With her circular face surrounded by fake fur, her pink cheeks radiant (in fact kind of sweaty) from her exertions on my behalf, and a slight smile forming on her lips, she now looked more like something Gertrude would cover with glitter and stick on top of the t
ree.

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  Equipped with my diagnosis (as I thought, sprained ankle), bandages, ice packs, a pretty premature physiotherapy advice sheet, and the few shreds of dignity that had survived all the doctor-as-patient jokes in the Emergency Ward, I slunk around my apartment like Smokey the Bear, weakened, depleted, a-prowlin’ and a-growlin’ and a-sniffin’ the air. That I, Harrison Hanafan, an eminent New York plastic surgeon with a drawer full of affidavits from admiring patients attesting to my ingenuity and aesthetic awareness, should find myself floundering, crawling on the ground! I was one of them now, the hapless, helpless, needy greedy unwell.

  It suddenly seemed clear that I would never ascend Everest, or abseil down the Empire State Building, or fly to the moon—not soon anyway. I’d never be asked to pitch for the Yankees, never carry a bride across a threshold (unless quite a diminutive bride and a very straightforward threshold), I’d probably never be the President of the United States and/or a matador, might never manage to possess a fully equipped toolbox, or conquer athlete’s foot once and for all, and my castration complex. Hell, I didn’t even have the guts to order my usual Szechuan dishes from the take-out! My whole being was now focused on avoiding discomfort.

  Half the man I was, I stuck close to home, further injuring myself, in a cruel cycle of fate, one incapacity leaving you peculiarly susceptible to others. Standing on a low shelf in my closet on my one good foot, in search of my sickbed hat (which has seen me through many a minor cold), I fell, wrenching my shoulder and incurring a cascade of shoeboxes upon my bare head. Having never cooked before (unless Eggnog and microwaving count), I incautiously boiled a baking potato, burnt my tongue tasting the half-raw result, then tried to purée the potato and mangled my thumb in the blender I’d never used before, necessitating a splint of my own devising. A Christmas repast worthy of Scrooge himself! With one functioning hand, one serviceable foot, aching shoulder, and burnt tongue, I called my big sister, Bee, in England.

  “I boiled a baking potato, Bee.”

  “How’s the foot?”

  “Elevated. So is my thumb. And I’m wearing my sickbed hat. I look like some kind of crazed hitchhiker.”

  “This would never have happened if you rode a bike, Harry.”

  Cycling was Bee’s solution to everything, and she was the business: Lycra, latex, Playtex (who knows?), helmet, water bottle, pump, puncture-repair kit, banana, raisins, energy bar, GPS, the whole deal.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Those guys don’t last long in New York. They bus a new bunch in every day to make up for the ones that got flattened because they rode on the wrong side of the street and never used their lights. Anyway, it’s snowing outside, Bee! Heavily.”

  “Where’s Gertrude? Hasn’t she turned the whole place into a sanatorium yet?”

  “We broke up.”

  “When?!”

  “A few weeks ago. But I’ve been working on it for some time.”

  “You dumped her?” she asked, struggling to picture my long-awaited rebellion.

  “Dumped her, yes.”

  “Wow. Great!”

  “And now she wants to Talk About It. She wants to review all the ‘misunderstandings’. Ingratitude has been mentioned. Don’t you hate break-up lingo? At first, it’s all so merry: copping a feel, cutting me off a slice, perch and twirl, baby, bumping uglies, my main squeeze. Then all changes to: I’m dumping you. She’s history. Creep. Slut. Asshole. Slimeball.”

  “Hey, does this mean I can call her an asshole now?” Bee asked sweetly. Bee had always been repulsed by Gertrude. And Bee was always right.

  On hearing of my crippledom, Gertrude had indeed offered to desert her Connecticut crowd and come take care of me. But the fact that Claude, her son by parthenogenesis, had probably mastered English primarily in order to object to Gertrude’s perpetually proffered nipples made her offer to come “nurse” me somewhat unenticing. There was actually nothing she could say that would have induced me to see her again voluntarily: in my head was a list about a mile long of things that woman did that bugged me.

  REASON NO. 1: She’s like a slug in your bed.

  REASON NO. 2: Those teeth! It’s like opening a freezer: you’re blinded and chilled at the same time. Nobody ever jokes around with Gertrude for fear of eliciting that smile.

  REASON NO. 3: That menagerie of hers. She’s got pets climbing on the counters, hauling themselves up curtains, throwing their weight against closed doors, cantering across the walls, hibernating in the toilet, hanging upside down from clothes rails—and that’s just the goldfish, desperate to escape their dank tank. Just think of the stink that emanates from a whole nuthouse on the Upper East Side stuffed with cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, marsupials, amphibians (and their accompanying microbes), all of whom would gladly eat each other if left alone for a single moment. (Probably had an iguana in there too somewhere, inching his way towards my neck with savage claws.) One maid was employed solely as zoo-keeper, mopping the vomit and shoveling up a vast variety of turds. It was like a safari, just going over there for lunch. I had to bring my own food, my own paper plates!

  REASON NO. 4: Her fake hips. You might see her from behind, as I did, sauntering up 42nd Street, and think she had magnificent womanly hips, but you’d be wrong. Check her out from the side, bud: there’s nothing there!

  REASON NO. 5: Embroidery. There ain’t world enough nor time to embroider cushions, honey, especially ineptly. Gertrude adorns handkerchiefs with mottoes, sews garish flowers on pillowcases, and issues plaques to commemorate joyous American holidays and baby names. The worst was a heart-shaped pincushion she made me sporting the date of our first encounter—the fact that this occurred on September 11th (2005), didn’t deter her from celebrating it, but it did give me an excuse to hide the obscenity from public view. She also darns, and batiks without irony.

  REASON NO. 6: She balls my socks, though I repeatedly begged her not to. Give the woman a sock and she’ll stretch and twist it within an inch of its life. Her sock balls gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  REASON NO. 7: Gertrude as a mother. Poor Claude (her latest pet) would have been called Sweet Pea if I hadn’t intervened. But even I couldn’t save him from the maniacal breast-feeding. A fine 8 lb. baby at birth, but Gertrude was so worried he’d starve to death, she emergency-crocheted a sort of harness that positioned the kid firmly against her chest, and this she wore, nonstop, for months. Okay, I too spend most of my days staring at the breasts of rich Manhattanites, but that baby-bra seemed detrimental to Claude’s cognitive development. My opinion counted for nothing though—Gertrude was an expert on parenthood: she’d read an article in Vogue.

  REASON NO. 8: Gertrude’s perforated eardrum, caused (in her opinion) by me, all because I phoned her one day when she was getting out of the shower and she ran to answer the phone with a Q-tip in her ear. Was it my fault she’d arranged a doggy play-date that day and the place was awash with even more hairy hounds than usual tearing from room to room? (I bet there was a chinchilla involved somehow too—those little guys get around!) So Gertrude fell, the Q-tip perforated her eardrum, and I’m in the doghouse, even though I rushed to her aid and got her the best ent guy in the business! Okay, it was painful, but that doesn’t entitle her to warn everyone who’ll listen: “Anybody dumb enough to be Harrison’s girlfriend shouldn’t use Q-tips.” It is not up to Gertrude to dissuade people from sleeping with me, nor from removing ear wax.

  The final straw, REASON NO. 9: Her job as an arts administrator. Gertrude’s one of those rich women who suddenly decides she needs a job, so she steals one off somebody who really does need a job. Once installed high up in the New York arts hierarchy, she proceeded to exert unwarranted power over the lives and work of people she never undertook to comprehend. A staunch proponent of the caprice, Gertrude saw to it that handsome librettists had it made, while other, less “fabulous”, writers, musicians, composers, artists, and film makers had their progress slowed or halted—especially if they were female
and no fun to flirt with. The woman sought power, and executed it, with philistine zeal.

  So why did I ever suggest to my sister, a sculptor, that Gertrude might be able to help her? It was I who invited Bee up to Connecticut for one of our painful weekends. Bee had never been before and had never wanted to go, but came this once, to sleep an uncomfortable night in a pre-Revolution four-poster and endure the sight of Gertrude knee-deep in the ivy grove. Gertrude would always jump straight into a billowy dress as soon as we arrived and go get some grass stains on it to prove how in tune with nature she was. The whole place was maintained by a fleet of full-time gardeners but Gertrude always made a big show of wandering dreamily through the dawn to fetch me something “real” for breakfast, usually coming back with one malformed carrot she’d picked up somewhere. She wouldn’t have known where her fruit trees were if you asked her, and wouldn’t have been caught dead feeling for an egg under one of her prize hens. But she could talk burdock, dandelion, and lovage soup at you all day if you let her.

  By the time Bee asked that evening about the possibility of any grants or public projects she could apply for, Gertrude had spent an ecstatic afternoon among the ferns and the fairies, and answered in full Marie Antoinette dairymaid mode: “But why do you need a grant, Bridget? Why not just live more simply? You could grow vegetables… Who needs fancy stores when you can grow your own asparagus? That grows really well, once you get it started, which only takes about five years. And flowers from the garden are just as good as florists flowers.”

  “I don’t think buying flowers’ is Bee’s major concern, Gertrude.”

  “We have everything we need here, don’t we, Harrison?” she went on.

  “Huh?”

  “Olallieberries, juniper berries, jicama, fiddlehead ferns…” (I think she might even have mentioned those chickens, the hypocrite.)

  “Bee doesn’t own any land, Gertrude.”

  “But even in an apartment, you could have a window box!” she told Bee delightedly.

  Pushed near the limit of endurance, Bee replied, “How self-sufficient am I supposed to get with a window box?”