Mimi

by Lucy Ellmann

  I filled the time by getting all sentimental over my notes on Mimi’s hot flashes, and then—in direct defiance of my arse of an arsonist dad and his disparagement of my early inventions—I got to work inventing the hot flash remedy: Meno-Balls™! I made quick progress during my lonely nights without Mimi, and soon the Meno-Balls™ had progressed from being a whim to a fully formed concept. I’d need a little development help from technicians, chemists, engineers, chemical engineers, and chemical-engineering technicians, before I could patent it—making the things cold was the problem. But I had one little breakthrough all on my own: Space Shuttle tiles. These I thought might offer just the right kind of heat resistance necessary for the cold version of the Meno-Balls™, allowing them to retain their low temperature despite the influence of the woman’s own body heat.

  The Meno-Balls™ were based on letting dualism work for us for once, not against us. They would consist of two separate “balls,” or flattened disks, one red, one blue, or one square, one round (the exact distinction didn’t matter, as long as the woman could quickly differentiate between them in a hot flash emergency). They would be lightweight, rounded, compact, and easily held in the palm of the hand. The woman could keep them in her pockets, on her desk, or under her pillow; one to heat her up, one to cool her down. Perhaps she’d have one in a left-hand pocket, the other in the right, so that she could grab them surreptitiously to offset whichever unpleasant sensation (heat or cold) was currently impending, without anyone else having to know (thus avoiding all the questions that so aggravated Mimi).

  By gripping the ball, she activates the mechanism that heats the ball up or cools it down. It may have been a case of Inventor’s Euphoria Syndrome (a condition I just made up) but I had a hunch that simply knowing these devices were readily available would alleviate many of the symptoms. No more panting, sweating, blushing, nausea, or palpitations with Meno-Balls™! I could hear the jingles already: Feeling hot or feeling cold, now in silver and in gold… Meno-Balls! and Don’t you cry, Don’t be shy, This is why: Meno-Balls!

  The main thing was that the balls would be harmless and non-invasive, with no side effects whatsoever, thereby complying with Mimi’s insistence that the menopause is not a disease. They might even have other applications. Handy for hikers and fishermen, or children with fevers, people stuck in snowdrifts or in the subway in August, who knows? All I really cared about though, was pleasing Mimi.

  But I needed a better name. Meno wasn’t great—women-o would make more sense. And Balls was all wrong: it seemed to imply penis envy. They weren’t necessarily going to be balls anyway: they could be just about any shape, as long as they were rounded, palm-sized, pleasant and easy to hold, with no sharp edges, and unobtrusive in a pocket. I thought of calling them Pockets of Matriarchy™, but that was too long and convoluted: who wants to go to the drugstore and ask for Pockets of Matriarchy™? Even if the woman lived in an actual pocket of matriarchy herself, like Malta, it would still be a mouthful! In the end I fixed on Pocket Change™, a pun I felt I could just about bear.

  At the office I was facing a backlog of my least favorite customers: men, with their penile dysfunction and Berlusconi revamps: nose-jobs, eye-jobs, facelifts, hair transplants, collagen, Botox, even boob-jobs. I blamed Berlusconi; my colleagues loved him, and followed his surgical schedule with great attention, since whenever Berlusconi got his eyelids done, our patients wanted theirs done too—not to look younger, I was beginning to think, just to look like Berlusconi!

  I didn’t see the point in fixing men up. Sure, I could turn a guy’s crow’s feet into hummingbird talons, but there’s no getting rid of his deep soul ache, is there? They were on their own with their erections too—not my problem, man. Take Viagra, or get a hobby, baseball cards, Lego, Bridge, mechanical pencils, just leave me out of it. We don’t all have to be Casanova, you know, or even Berlusconi. I had enough trouble with my own cock.

  You think it’s easy being in charge of a penis? It’s a full-time job! This is how you first learn responsibility, as a boy. You have to keep this vulnerable piece of wandery flesh from getting squashed. Every bout of roughhousing is a threat—this is why these games must be practiced again and again! That’s all sport is for: the honing of prick-protection skills. The thing’s just hanging off you, in constant danger of injury or excision. If it’s true everybody wants a piece of you, this is probably the piece. Dogs are at just the right level to snatch it in one gulp. Chairs, desks, tables, car doors, and doorknobs all seem designed to gouge it. A hundred times a day you have to check on the darn thing, not just to guide it when peeing, but to execute many little sartorial adjustments.

  The only way to handle such a responsibility is to make your cock the core of your being, so that you never forget about it, ever. You make a pet of it, give it a name, fondle, pat, and feed it, even try to train it—though it’s like training a stick insect. Every time you take a piss you attempt to discipline it. Hell, just whipping the thing out in time takes practice. And in winter, you teach it to write dirty words in the snow.

  Your dick has a nocturnal existence of its own that you can’t take responsibility for, but both its conscious and unconscious eruptions demand study and assessment, its spasms and jisms dutifully graded from the humdrum to the rum-a-dum-dum. You are your penis’s protector and advocate, its 24-hour carer, its slave and its supervisor, its bodyguard and its biggest fan. When necessary, your fist provides the services of a concubine. You learn your prick’s needs, its desires, and how to encase it in comfort behind a million historic fastenings, from gentle buttons to the more perilous zipper (that might at any time turn on the item it’s supposed to guard). Behind these flaps, your cock is left to nestle cozily in its jockeys or its jockstrap, or its leopardskin posing pouch (I speak as I find). Through barriers of cloth, and mind control, you attempt to restrain it, and only let it loose when you’ve checked the coast is clear.

  But do you really trust your old playpal there an inch? The thing’s an enigma! It’s not just the snap decisions to quadruple in size. Any minute now it’ll go down and stay down, and your whole life will be over—you’ll become one of those guys who give blowjobs, gratis, at gas stations. You’re plagued by fears of plague too, the possibility that your cock might be too cocky some day and bring home a disease, come over all cankerous, unappealing to mouths and cunts alike. Or that you’ll just get prostate trouble like all the other poor zhlubs and that’ll be the end of you. For this is the most important relationship of your life, and not to be trifled with! You clear space for your cock, make room in society for your cock. Cocks demand territory (ask any dog).

  ALL YOU REALLY WANT IS FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO BE NICE TO YOUR COCK.

  Playground joke of my youth: This guy has such a big dick he has to wind it around his neck like a tie. He goes to the theater one night and his date keeps playing with his tie (as women always do). Suddenly, the lights come up and the manager comes out on stage and says, “Could the gentleman in the third row please stop throwing ice cream onto the stage?”

  We killed ourselves over that one.

  Being in love means you’re not in sole charge of your prick anymore—someone else is looking out for it too! And I was pretty pissed at having lost my little assistant. Surely Mimi would be drawn back to me by the miraculous magnetic pull of my cock? Apparently not.

  But Quilt Day at last arrived. The money had gone through in daily installments of $10,000, and Leggy finally called me to announce that the Firefly Quilt was ready for collection. I had a drink on the way, just to gather my faculties, then moseyed on over to the museum, where I was coldly handed a big brown-paper parcel tied up with string—a lot like the ones Ant receives from the whole of England and Kind Dog, when he’s sick in bed, except mine was labeled “Harrison Hanafan”, not “Ant”, and had cost me $48,000. And for something that cost me $48,000, it sure wasn’t very well wrapped! Maybe Leggy had wrenched it peevishly off the wall at the last possible minute.

  I
was planning to rush straight over to Mimi’s and lay it at her feet. If she wasn’t there, I’d use my keys and (in reverse of that kleptomaniac scuzzball, John) leave the quilt there as a love offering, my own act of vulva-worship. But the absolute necessity of getting this operation right made me nervous. I was trembling, dizzy, I was nauseous: I was having a hot flash! (It felt almost as bad as giving a speech.) So I took that old quilt to a place in the Village I knew called Milady’s, where the Bloody Marys are perfect—and pint-sized. The quilt and I had a couple of them, toasting Aunt Phoebe the while, before setting off again for Grove Street. But I forgot the quilt, had to go back for it, and naturally had another Bloody Mary while I was there. Then I got cold feet again (a kind of post-hot-flash cold spell). Deciding I must be drunk(!), I ducked into a grocery store to see if I could get some coffee.

  I wasn’t actually unraveling any faster than the quilt, which was beginning to curl hazardously out of its packaging. The store was crowded and people kept jolting me. I protested a bit. Half hatched from its cocoon, the quilt was beginning to reveal its most admirable qualities: its silky smoothness, and the dazzling colors. The perfect opportunity, I suddenly realized, to compare the thing to actual Epicure cans! So I went to see if they had any on the shelves. But on my way down the aisle some jerk jerked me, I backed into a whole row of Pepperidge Farm cookies, tripped over the loose corner of the quilt that was dragging on the ground, and ended up rolling across the floor! I came to a stop fully wrapped in the quilt.

  A security guy peered down at me and said, “What’s the story, Grandma Moses?”

  Well, I paid for the cookies I crushed and got the hell out. That quilt had now cost me $48,028.56, and it had better work! But on closer inspection outside, by the light of the setting sun, I noticed my poignant offering appeared to have sustained some damage: a few faint stains, a rip or two. quilt guilt. Now Mimi would never forgive me! I’d not only wrecked her life, but her aunt’s masterpiece too. $48,028.56 down, and no closer to rolling in my sweet baby’s arms! If I didn’t want to be alone with my expensive new bedspread for the rest of my life, I would have to put it in the hands of the dry cleaners and invisible menders around the corner from me on 8th Avenue. So I cabbed it uptown and relinquished my Mimi-bait into their, I hoped, capable hands.

  Keenly disappointed by this delay in the resumption of romance, I rode the elevator glumly up to my apartment, intending to drown myself yet again in the Tempest. But when I got in, my phone was blinking. A message from Mimi? Mimì! Mimì! She had relented, she couldn’t stay mad at me forever. I leapt to the phone, crazy ’bout my baby…

  But the message wasn’t from Mimi. It was from an English policeman, telling me Bee was dead.

  CATASTROBURY

  I was met at the station in Canterbury, the West Station (the one that’s further East), by the same cop who’d left the message on my answering machine the day before. He apologized for that now, but I was in no mood for a discussion of police etiquette. What would be a good way to hear your sister’s dead? Sherry on the veranda, moats, deer, skylarks, ha-has, and him whispering in my ear, “I’m afraid I have something a little awkward to tell you”?

  He asked me if I wanted to go to my hotel first, but I wanted to see Bee, so he took me to the half-assed English morgue they’d set up in a hurry at the hospital, to cater for all the bodies. For Bee was among many—you can really kill a lot of people if you put your mind to it. We wove our way through a crush of journalists, who stuck their long-lens cameras right in my face. (As James Joyce said, all journalists are heartless.)

  The gunman liked shooting people in the face too. The cop warned me of this as we approached Bee on her stretcher. Then the sheet was pulled back so that I could formally identify her. They hadn’t even bothered to wipe the blood off! Maybe it was “evidence” or something. She was all messed up, but it was Bee.

  All the way over I’d clung to the idea that they were wrong. Not my sister. Not that sculptress. Please, someone else. That ignoble hope gone, I searched her face for an explanation. What did she think when he came running at her with a gun? Did she have a chance to think? I pulled Bee to me and hugged her for a long time.

  When I first got the news, I assumed she’d been run over on that stupid bike of hers, or stabbed trying to intervene in another street fight. Unbearable, but at least an accident. How was I supposed to come to terms with the fact that some creep had spotted my sister across a field by chance, and (whether with nonchalance or insane glee) gone out of his way to shoot her?

  I must have signed some forms, but all I remember is wandering the hospital corridors, pestered by policewomen trying to give me sandwiches and cups of tea. Tea: the English answer to all emergencies. They really seem to think it helps! But this tea had scum floating on the top, the scum Bee told me about.

  My personal, po-faced policeman asked me periodically if I had any questions. Yeah! What’ll I do without her? But I said nothing. When he tired of this, he offered a change of scene: would I like to see the place where Bee had died? But I’d had enough by then and asked to be taken to the hotel.

  It was one of the tiniest hotel rooms I’ve ever seen, with a toilet that didn’t flush. I tried calling Mimi but got no answer, then attempted to achieve temporary oblivion with the help of airline miniatures, and tranquilizers provided by the hospital. I fell asleep staring at the green shiny curtain cords that held the ugly curtains apart: yet another futile fabric fiasco. Why must we have all this disgusting decor? I was perturbed by how tightly wound those cords were. What angry twisted mind had created these angry twisted ropes? They didn’t even go with the stupid curtains, which were yellow, with a kindergartenish peach pattern. It’s all so arbitrary, our decor. We decide a million things arbitrarily. But arbitrariness would never seem innocent to me again: people get murdered arbitrarily.

  I woke to the smell of air freshener used in accusatory quantities. And on every surface, frantic laminated signs:

  TURN OFF THE LIGHTS

  BEFORE YOU LEAVE

  TURN OFF THE TV

  TURN OFF THE HEATING

  DON’T TOUCH

  VERY HOT!

  ARE YOU SURE YOU

  NEED A FRESH TOWEL?

  DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOW

  TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE

  MAY CHANGE

  PLEASE BE CAREFUL

  PHONE CHARGERS ONLY

  There were guilt trips everywhere you looked, telling you everything you could and couldn’t do in that impossible room. All this attention to safety, in a city where people get gunned down willy-nilly! And still the toilet wouldn’t flush.

  I assumed I was too late for the hotel breakfast, and would get my ass kicked for that as well (or my bottom belabored). But no, a whole sorry bunch of breakfasters were there, squeezed into what seemed to be the hallway, munching cold toast while being lectured by the hotel manager who claimed Conrad had lived in Canterbury at some point. I was hungry, but not this hungry. As I left, I heard one of the guests remark, “You never see pictures of Joseph Conrad smiling.”

  I glimpsed the top of the cathedral. Assuming it to be in the center of town, I headed that way, trusting some bearable breakfast might eventually be found. Illogically or not, I wished Bee was there to show me around. The sidewalk was narrow, and ran right beside a busy two-way street full of assholes speeding by in cars, blasting me with their ignoramus pop music and calling out “Cunt!” as they passed. I may be a cunt, man, but you’re the one who has to be sung to all day by sissies on the radio.

  As soon as possible, I took a quieter path beside a shallow river, and had to squeeze past a student with her parents. They were all looking down at the water and she was telling them, “It’s really clear. You can see all the traffic bollards and supermarket trolleys.”

  What a dump. I got to the main street, but the only forms of food offered were “chips,” “burgers,” and something called “bacon butties.” I walked into some kind of café, but the frail girl swee
ping the floor sent me away, on the grounds that it was “too oily” (which I could well believe). I found a small grocery store instead, and bought a load of English newspapers, all of which were bursting with gun massacre stats and stories: I felt I owed it to Bee to check what they were saying about her in there.

  Canterbury really stank, whether it was from the oniony food outlets or the digestive gases farted out by the people who ate at them. The local populace certainly looked abdominally uncomfortable. As a plastic surgeon who thought he’d seen it all, I was left aghast by the medieval physiognomies of the townsfolk, a pasty race, vicious, gnarled, gnawed, and bloodthirsty. They liked a good massacre. There they were, milling around the main street to stare at spots where people had been murdered a few days before. These had been helpfully designated by police tape: “SCENE CRIME SCENE CRIME”—as if a crime had been committed against the picturesque, not people. Canterbury’s about as picturesque as my ass, unless you care about cathedrals. But this one’s a hell of a thing, a monstrosity.

  How does a place like Canterbury recover from a tragedy? By shopping! Everybody there seemed to get a big bang out of carrying a big bag. But what was in those bags? Guns? Ammo? Souvenir mugs of the massacre?

  Everything I saw confirmed the necessity of the American Revolution. How could Bee have lived here for a day, much less a year, a nice New York gal like her? But she’d never wanted to come. She hated the place! How she wailed about the weather, the water, the weariness and wariness. All that trouble with her stingy patrons. Jerks! The English are not a friendly people. She’d come all this way just to make a little money, and they let her down. And when that wasn’t enough, they obliterated her!