Mimi

by Lucy Ellmann

  M. Z. Fortune would have his hands full getting a speech out of me. But before I had a chance to look around for him, Mimi appeared again! My shadow, my familiar, my very own New York nut-job, clutching her own bowl of soup on a tray. Who was following whom? And without asking, she sat down at my table and started ripping her clothes off, her coat anyway, which she dumped on the only other available chair. Where was old Fortune going to sit?

  “What’d you get?” was her only remark, as she peered into my soup.

  “Duck and noodle.”

  “Oh, I got duck.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said. “But, uh, actually, I’m meeting someone… ”

  “So’m I,” she answered, unfazed. “A client.”

  What was she, a hooker? She seemed too sweaty to be a hooker—she kept mopping her brow.

  “So, as I was saying, John—” she began, as if our conversation on Broadway had never been interrupted by separate cabs and a total change of location.

  “What?”

  “The guy who stole my quilt. We were only together a few weeks! And then when we call it quits, he asks for the keys to my apartment, like he just wants to pick up his stuff, and then he makes off with Aunt Phoebe’s quilt. Some lover-boy!”

  “I thought it was your quilt.”

  “She gave it to me.”

  “Ah, hmmm, family heirloom… ” The chick was demonic, even by Manhattan standards. A Baba Yaga from the Bronx who could supernaturally command Christmas Eve traffic, steal canes, threaten lover-boys, and turn up wherever I went! I needed a quiet life…

  “And when I called him up about it, he said he’d sold it! Can you believe that?”

  “Sold it? To whom?” I asked, actually sort of astonished that such depravity could revolve around bedcovers.

  “The museum of annoying folksiness. You know, uptown.”

  “They bought your blanket?”

  “It’s not a blanket, it’s a quilt. Slave art. Slave labor! You know how hard it is to make one of those things?”

  “Uh, no. Not really.”

  “It’s hard work. Very intensive. Subversive too,” she went on, “turning old bits of crap into something fancy. Rags and rage, that’s what quilts are made of!” To emphasize the point, Mimi bit a peapod in half that she’d found in her soup.

  “Sounds like a new name for the Sanitation Department,” I ventured. “Rags and Rage. You know, those 3 a.m. guys.”

  “It was the last one she made before she went berserk!”

  “Who went berserk?”

  “My Aunt Phoebe. From all that stitching and bitching. That’s what did it. See, she belonged to this quilting bee.” Mimi ate some more soup. “They sold her down the river. Called the cops when she started putting cat shit in the quilt stuffing. The creeps had her locked up!” (Bellevue. So it ran in the family.)

  “Not very comforting though, is it, a comforter full of cat shit?” I remarked.

  “It’s not a ‘comforter’! Anyway, Aunt Phoebe had finished my quilt before she hit her cat shit phase.”

  “Well, that’s all pretty, pretty amazing, but I, uh, have to… ” I suddenly remembered I was supposed to display M. Z. Fortune’s book prominently on the table so he’d find me. I fished around in my briefcase and then attempted to position The People’s Guide to Presentations against the wall between our two bowls. Mimi immediately snatched it and started flicking through it in a bored sort of way and getting soup on it!

  “Hey!” I protested.

  “Okay title. Not sure about the cover. Good story?”

  “Could you just put that back over here like a good girl, so the guy I’m meeting will see it when he comes in?”

  “What guy? Oh, the guy.”

  “And no, there’s no ‘story.’?”

  “Subplot then, if it hasn’t got room for a whole plot?”

  “No subplot either,” I said, increasingly concerned about how I would handle M. Z. Fortune’s arrival. Move to another table, I guess.

  “You seem to like this book a lot, huh?” she continued.

  “It’s okay. A bit too much jargon,” I said, lowering my voice in case M. Z. Fortune was in the vicinity.

  Taking this as an invitation for a conspiratorial confab, Mimi leaned forward and whispered, “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Well, things like ‘hooks’ and ‘benchmarks’ and ‘limited-opportunity windows,’?” I feebly replied. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what he’s talking about.”

  “Hmmm. Must be some good bits though,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s funny when he tells you not to jingle your keys and your change in your pockets as you speak, and you’re not supposed to give a speech while unconsciously covering your groin with your hands. That’s the fig-leaf position. It distracts the audience, apparently.”

  “So you want to give a speech, huh?”

  “I don’t want to, I have to. At my old school. They asked me to do the graduation speech this year.”

  “What’s it going to be about?”

  Thinking up something on the spot, I answered, “‘How I Hated School.’”

  “You’re going back to your old school to talk about how you hated school?!”

  “Yup.”

  “Great! I hated school too,” she declared, and absent-mindedly pocketed the book.

  “Hey! You’re not going to steal that too, are you?” I asked. “First my cane, now—”

  “I can’t steal it. It’s mine.”

  “What!?”

  She leaned forward again and whispered, “I wrote it,” before turning a deep pink once more. “So I guess you’re my client!”

  “Huh?” Wait a minute. This was the person I’d enlisted to help me calm down about giving a speech? This whirling dervish? With the blushes, with the blankets, with the boyfriends…

  “You’re Harrison Hanafan, right?”

  “You’re M. Z. Fortune?”

  Why I’d assumed M. Z. Fortune was a man I don’t know, but I had. I even had a firm image of him in my head, and he didn’t look anything like Mimi (didn’t have her bone structure).

  “That’s not my real name, ya know,” she was saying. “I took it for professional reasons. The M’s real though: that’s for Mimi.”

  “What’s the Z for?” I asked, trying to recover my equanimity. “Zsa Zsa?”

  “Nada. Business people just expect to see a middle initial. It makes ’em feel safe.”

  “Well, how about the Fortune?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I say! ‘Fortune’ is there to help me make one. You know, like Johnny Cash. Or Neil Diamond, and Goldie Hawn. Goldman Sachs. State your claim in your name, that’s my motto. It doesn’t hurt to remind people you want money!”

  “I’ve met some pretty destitute Goldbergs in my time,” I argued. “And Adrienne Rich isn’t rich… I don’t think.”

  “Bet she wants to be though,” Mimi said, chomping on a piece of duck. “Anyway, can’t hurt.”

  I noodled around in my noodles, wondering what I was getting myself into. Yet, at the same time, I had a feeling this Mimi person would make a fine public-speaking coach: she was so weird and unpredictable, she’d make giving a speech seem a breeze!

  “Maybe you should aim higher,” I told her, “call yourself Fort Knox, or Priceless Gems. Cadillac Chevrolet… Unmarked Fifties…”

  “Yeah, I like that one. President Unmarked Fifties, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “But what about my name? Too much alliteration, right? And no outright begging.”

  “What, Harrison Hanafan? I love your name! That’s why I agreed to meet you! I don’t usually teach people privately. My work’s mostly seminars.” She added with a tinge of gloom, “I help businessmen.”

  “Tough crowd?”

  “You wanna live in New York, you gotta do something for assholes,” she said.

  I nodded. “My work’s pretty reliant on assholes too.”

  Then Mimi grabbed my arm and said, “Hey,
do me a favor, will ya? It wouldn’t take very long… ”

  I didn’t know what to say. This woman had after all saved me from an inglorious fate on Christmas Eve. I owed her! And I liked the feel of her hand on my arm.

  “See, I’ve gotta find my quilt,” she pleaded, “at the museum, and I don’t want to go alone!”

  Ingratitude was not mentioned (this wasn’t Gertrude I was dealing with) but without much further coaxing I canceled my appointments and soon we were in a taxi (the first we ever shared), and there was something about the pull of the meal and the wheels and the woman, or maybe just the combo of taxi upholstery and afternoon off, that made it feel like a date. You hit that taxi interior, tucked into your own cozy little nest back there, and it’s Pavlovian: a kiss seemed imminent.

  But we’d already reached the museum. First we trailed through the Tinware Room.

  “I guess I should’ve been saving up my tinfoil,” I said to Mimi. “I’d probably have enough for a sundial by now. Or a commemorative tea set.”

  “Or a magic, healing nose,” she said, studying some fine Mexican examples of legs, arms and organs cut out of flat pieces of tin.

  The Weathercock Room was full of long-immobilized, formerly revolving emblems in wood and metal—some political, some ironic, some abstract, some figurative, some painfully fragmentary and weatherworn.

  “Look at that mermaid!” Mimi called out, dragging me over to a double entendre weather vane from Nantucket, that featured a demure clothed lady on one side and a bare-breasted mermaid on the other. Mimi had instantly detected the best thing in the room.

  “You can just imagine a crowd of sexually frustrated whalers standing below, hoping the wind will turn.”

  The Painted Furniture Rooms I liked, because the black or green or red chairs, decorated with little paintings of fruit, flowers, tall ships, birds’ nests, horses frolicking, and a lot of miniature Jefferson Monticellos, reminded me of Epicure can labels.

  “Do you like Epicure cans?” I ventured to ask Mimi, but got no answer. She’d already charged into the Old Washboard Room, which appeared to be a chilling tribute to housework. Propped up like gravestones stood dozens of riveted slabs—on which a million graying cotton shirts must once have been energetically rubbed, slapped, and squeezed. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  “Boy, how wouldja like to have to do that every day?” Mimi exclaimed.

  “Mimi, I don’t even grate my own cheese,” I said. “Or, not without some kind of calamity.”

  The Rag Rug Room was next, and to my horror Mimi wanted to walk on them.

  “Uh, I don’t think you should take your shoes off—”

  “But it’s the greatest thing, walking in bare feet on rag rugs. They don’t look that nice, but they feel sooo goooood… ” A guard approached, and steered us sternly into the Washington D. C. Handmade Souvenir Room. There we saw about a billion White Houses made out of stamps and bottle tops, Lincoln Memorials done in popsicle sticks, and pencil holders adorned with brutish impressions of Capitol Hill.

  “There seem to be no depths to which patriotism won’t aspire,” I mused, but Mimi seemed oddly enchanted by a group portrait of Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and what looked like Barry Goldwater, painted on a thimble. I felt strangely humbled by her ability to appreciate its well-meant shabbiness.

  The Moccasin and Tomahawk Rooms were kept reverentially dark, out of respect for genocide. We almost tripped over each other trying to get out of there into the Slave Doll Room, which was full of rotten-looking dolls, literally rotting away before our eyes. One display case was stuffed full of antique doll limbs.

  “I don’t know about dolls,” I said. “They kind of give me the creeps.”

  “Me too,” Mimi said, to my relief.

  “But why do girls like them?”

  “They need somebody who can’t fight back.”

  “Is that why they like riding horses too?”

  “Nah, that’s just about power and speed. Nothing can stop you when you’re on a horse.”

  “My sister had an imaginary one.”

  “So did I! Clark Gable.”

  “Hers was Hollenius.”

  We took a spin around the Spinning Wheel Room.

  “Okay, I can see that these things were state-of-the-art technology at some point,” I said. “But do they have to be turned into totemic objects and plopped in the window of every cake shop in New York? ‘Here’s your popover, sir—need anything spun with that?’”

  Mimi smiled. “The idea of women spinning from dawn to dusk gives people an appetite.”

  “The customers should have to spin a few yards of yarn before they get their food.”

  “Or knit something.”

  “Oh, no knitting, please!” I shuddered, thinking of Gertrude’s woolen creations.

  On to the Butter Press and Butter Churn Room: it really stank in there. Just as much as you’d expect, only more so. What was happening to me? I used to be a reasonably useful member of society. Just that morning, I’d performed several creditable functions and now here I was, examining butter molds!

  At last we reached the Quilt Room, a darkened, spotlit cathedral to quilts. Some were laid invitingly on fake beds (well roped off—to deter itinerant sleepers), others hung from the ceiling, or against the walls; and each was individually lit and labeled as if it were a quattrocento masterpiece. I trudged around, unimpressed, but Mimi seemed to be in her element, zigzagging all over the place to look at each one. She obviously knew a lot about these things, even without reading the labels—when she did read them, they only seemed to incense her.

  “Look at this one!” she fumed. “‘Stitched with love’! Quilts are stitched with loathing. That’s what’s good about ’em!”

  “You’re sticking with your ‘rags and rage’ theory, huh?” I just couldn’t see the rebelliousness of bedspreads. Nor could I be convinced that they were significant works of art. After (reluctantly) studying an ornate quilted tableau of historic events, I said to Mimi, “It’s not Leonardo though, is it?”

  “Yes it is!” she replied.

  “It’s not Van Go—”

  “Yes it is.”

  And, standing before a red-and-black Amish number, “It ain’t Rothko.”

  Mimi had had about enough of this. “Look at that Crazy Quilt,” she said, drawing me over to a jazzy-looking blast of color. “That’s abstract, that’s modern…” I did like “Crazy Quilts” a bit better than the rest of these bedspreads. They were like Cubist collages, and at least tried to break up the monotony of all that obsessive repetition. But chintzy or minimalist, innovative or traditional, revolutionary or docile, slavish or self-indulgent, quilts all seemed a little crazy to me. Why waste so much time sewing cloth together, for chrissake? Stitch, stitch, stitch! It’s got to be a major cause of arthritis. I wasn’t too happy about the thought of all those Bellevue cases either, armed with needles, every loop a noose in their minds for some worthless jilter, some Casanova, cad, scoundrel, some nebbish, some nudnik, some no-goodnik who done ’em wrong. All this taut, fraught cloth—no wonder we have castration complexes!

  “What is it with women and cloth?” I murmured. “Do they have to pull the threads so tight?”

  “Thrift,” answered Mimi. “Women are always broke.”

  “That doesn’t explain the pillow fights.”

  I was deep in unhappy contemplation of an ancient quilt dominated by a goofy central rose design made up of at least one million zillion petals—sheesh!—when I heard a commotion going on in some dark corner of the room.

  “Step back from the quilt, ma’am,” said the same guard who’d shown us out of the Rag Rug Room. I went over and there was Mimi standing behind the museum rope, clinging onto a truly beautiful quilt. Her aunt’s, I assumed. The design was abstract and geometrical, with a pattern of thin diamonds of intense color, set against a black background (not wholly unlike the colors of Epicure cans!).

  The Firefly Quilt

  Circa 1960


  The Bronx

  The brighter diamond shapes seemed to twinkle on and off like fireflies. But that didn’t excuse Mimi’s attempt to tear it off the wall! The quilt wouldn’t budge, but Mimi fell awkwardly over the rope—and into my arms.

  “Thanks!” she said, looking up at me, her face glistening madly. Still, there was something luscious about her in that pose.

  We were now escorted down into the bowels of the museum, in order to be reprimanded. As we waited for the elevator, Mimi whispered, “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Huh?! What now?” I asked, a little ungraciously.

  “Just act like you’re my lawyer.”

  “Like I’m… what?! I’m a doctor, Mimi, not a lawyer. Doctors are better than lawyers. Lawyers take your money and don’t even give you an ointment.”

  “You won’t have to say much,” she coaxed. “Don’t forget you owe me. Madison Avenue, Christmas Eve… ”

  “What, were you busy or something? Did I hold you up? I already said thank you!”

  “Think of it as your first lesson in public speaking.”

  “Public sneaking, you mean.”

  After a few walkie-talkie confabs, the guard delivered us into the care of a long-legged arts-and-crafts PhD student, who led us disdainfully through corridors stacked full of folksy clutter: piles of old newspapers, scary bassinets, bashed enamelware, rusty pots and pans… probably a few crapholes of the famous too.

  “Whewee!” I said under my breath. “Time for a garage sale.”

  “Focus!” ordered Mimi.

  “You focus!”

  Any minute now I was going to start laughing. To steady myself, I told myself this was my big 007 moment. The glamorous PhD student’s froideur somehow seemed to demand James Bond suavity in return. But first Mimi and I had to sit in what looked like a couple of old baskets, in a dingy waiting area outside the Director’s office, where one plucky little plant was perversely striving to survive. I was beginning to think it might be a faux plant made by nineteenth-century craftsmen in Arkansas, as light relief in between wrestling those hopeless basket chairs into being—when we were ushered in to see the Director. I was all ready for Donald Pleasence, complete with the white cat clawing its way up his lapel (you can tell Donald doesn’t like that cat—his suit’s been ruined by it). But I was wrong again: another gender switch! The Director was a woman. Is everybody a woman these days? They sure get around.