Shoebag

by M. E. Kerr

  “May I come in and sit down before I answer any more questions?” he asked her. “Your father has gone to get me something to wear.”

  “Come in, then,” Pretty Soft said.

  And so it was, that on the third of March, in Boston, Massachusetts, Shoebag entered the life of Eunice Biddle, also known as Pretty Soft, and neither of them would ever be the same again.

  Three

  NOW THIS IS WHAT we are going to do!” said Mr. Biddle, who was a store manager, good at making decisions and seeing to it that they were put into action. “First, we are going to give Shoebag a proper name.”

  “I won’t remember to answer to a new name,” said Shoebag. “I have been called Shoebag all my life.”

  “You’ll remember it if it’s close to Shoebag,” said Mr. Biddle. “When you first said your name, I thought you said Stu Bag, so that’s what we’ll call you, hmmm? Stuart Bag.”

  “Stu Bag,” said Pretty Soft. “Who could forget a name like that?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Shoebag. “What is a stu bag? It sounds like a bag full of stew.”

  “If there’s an extra g on Bag, it will look better,” said Mrs. Biddle, who was an artist, and very concerned with how things looked. “Stuart B a g g. That’s a very decent name.”

  “But what does it even mean?” said Shoebag.

  “It means it’s your name.” Mr. Biddle was a no-nonsense type who had a black mustache he kept clean with a special little comb.

  The Biddles and Shoebag were sitting around the table in the dining room. They had just finished a dinner of spaghetti, which looked to Shoebag like a plate of worms, so he’d enjoyed it, although he’d never eaten a worm, not even on a rainy day, when he’d hopped over them outdoors on the sidewalk.

  “Worms have no backbone!” Drainboard used to comment. “And I have no use for them.”

  Shoebag had a strong suspicion the Biddle family would have no use for him, if he were to tell them he was once a cockroach, so he kept quiet about it.

  He remembered what Under The Toaster used to say. “When the lights are out, we’re all one big happy family in this apartment building, but as soon as they go on, we’re the enemy!”

  “Why?” Shoebag would ask him.

  “Because people just don’t take to us. I think it’s our looks or something.”

  “It is our looks,” said Drainboard. “And this will give you a laugh, Son, they think we’re dirty!”

  “That doesn’t give me a laugh,” Shoebag had answered. “It makes me sad, instead. After all, it’s their dirt we drag around on our feet.”

  “Tell them that,” Drainboard had said. “They think that with all the baths and showers they take, with all the deodorants and mouthwash and perfume they use, they’re clean!”

  “A person never stays clean, though,” Under The Toaster had remarked in his most discouraged tone. “There’s just too much to keep clean on a person.”

  Shoebag knew the truth of that now. He’d no sooner stepped out of the shower than his toes had picked up lint from the bathroom rug, and next his hands had gotten dusty from the staircase railing. His teeth had spaghetti sauce in the crevices right this minute, and there was a milk stain already on the new blue shirt Mr. Biddle had bought for him.

  “The next thing we have to do is enroll Stu in the Beacon Hill Elementary School,” said Mr. Biddle, “unless of course you’re a Catholic? Are you a Catholic?”

  Shoebag said what he always said when he was asked a personal question. “I can’t remember anything but my name.”

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear, you really do have amnesia,” said Mrs. Biddle, the only one still eating, the only plump Biddle.

  “What is amnesia?” Pretty Soft asked.

  Mr. Biddle let out a huge sigh which made his mustache wiggle, and he rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “You don’t know what amnesia is? You’re seven years old and you don’t know that amnesia means a memory loss?”

  “How would I know that?” said Pretty Soft.

  “We are paying Madam Grande de la Grande your hard-earned money to teach you things like that,” said Mr. Biddle.

  “How do you lose your memory?” Pretty Soft asked.

  “We don’t have all the answers on that one,” her father told her, “but sometimes it happens if you hit your head on something hard, and sometimes a person is in a bad accident and he comes out unable to say who he is or where he lives. And often …”

  Pretty Soft began to hold up her hands and make a face. “Please! Stop! Do not tell me about bad things! I will only go to sleep and have a nightmare about not being able to remember my lines! You are not supposed to put ugly thoughts in my head, Daddy!”

  Mrs. Biddle said, “Pretty Soft is right.”

  “The child is living in a dream world,” Mr. Biddle grumbled.

  “But that dream world will one day pay for her college education,” said his wife. “Let’s remember that.”

  Shoebag spoke up then. He had been sitting there between Pretty Soft’s parents trying to imagine himself attending Beacon Hill Elementary School. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d hated the idea of being thrown in with other boys and girls who’d had more practice being people than he could ever hope to have.

  What would become of him in such a place? Wasn’t it likely that he’d be slower than the others, and that he’d seem strange and out-of-place there? Wouldn’t they pick on him, call him names, humiliate him, push him, even knock him down in the recess yard?

  “Why do I have to go to school?” he asked Mr. Biddle, who seemed to be in charge. “Why can’t I be tutored as Pretty Soft is?”

  “You can’t afford it,” Pretty Soft said. “You don’t have any money, do you?”

  “Darling, he can’t remember anything,” said Mrs. Biddle.

  “He doesn’t look like someone with money,” Pretty Soft said. “He didn’t even have clothes. He was trying to steal ours from the closet!”

  “I was not!” said Shoebag.

  “Well, you were going through our pockets!” said Pretty Soft, who seemed to Shoebag to be neither pretty nor soft when it came to money.

  “Hush! Hush! Hush!” Mr. Biddle said. “We have a lot to settle tonight, and I have bills to send out…. Pretty Soft, you must learn to be more kind to Stuart Bagg, since we have taken him under our roof.”

  Shoebag felt very much like announcing that it was more his roof than their roof, since his family and his ancestors had been in this old apartment building for generations. But he was in no position to throw his new little human weight around.

  Mr. Biddle said, “And Shoebag, tomorrow morning at seven-thirty, you and I will stroll down to Beacon Hill Elementary School, where I will introduce you to the principal before I go to my store.”

  “Who are you going to say he is?” asked Mrs. Biddle. “I know you’re going to say his name is Stuart Bagg, but what relationship will you say we have with him?”

  “I’ll say he is our new adopted boy,” said Mr. Biddle.

  “You always wanted a son.” Mrs. Biddle smiled.

  “And I always wanted a brother!” said Pretty Soft.

  “So everyone is happy,” Mr. Biddle said.

  “But tell him, Daddy. Be sure he knows the rule.”

  “He has to know the rule,” Mrs. Biddle agreed.

  “Stu, Son,” said Mr. Biddle, “as a rule, we don’t discuss bad things in front of Pretty Soft. It is very important to always emphasize the positive where she’s concerned.

  “And eliminate the negative,” said Pretty Soft.

  “But what do you do when bad things happen?” Shoebag asked. “What do you do if the wind breaks the windows, or the rain comes in, or thunder shakes the whole house with a terrible boom?”

  “We tend to it without disturbing Pretty Soft,” said Mr. Biddle. “It is very dangerous to her career if she becomes upset, you see.”

  “And I know how to deal with anything that might threaten me,” s
aid Pretty Soft. “Come over here, and I’ll show you how I do it.”

  Shoebag climbed down from his chair and went around to hers.

  “Here by my plate I always keep the dining room mirror, which is yellow, because the dining room is yellow,” said Pretty Soft. “Then I look into it, and this is what I say.”

  Shoebag looked into the mirror with her.

  “I say, ‘I see my own beauty, may it last forever.’”

  “That’s what she says,” Mrs. Biddle said.

  “That’s what she always says, and it seems to work,” Mr. Biddle said.

  To Shoebag’s horror, as he looked into the mirror with Pretty Soft, he saw a lovely little blonde face on the right, and on the left, he saw himself, his true self: a cockroach with its antennae trembling.

  “Aren’t we cute together?” Pretty Soft smiled in the reflection, while Shoebag’s brown shell shuddered.

  “We are like brother and sister,” said Pretty Soft.

  “Do you like the way I look?” Shoebag asked.

  “Of course I do!” she replied … and it was then that Shoebag realized she did not see what he saw in that mirror.

  “Of course she does!” said Mrs. Biddle.

  “Why wouldn’t she?” Mr. Biddle said. “You are a very, very nice-looking young fellow.”

  “Thank you,” came from the cockroach mouth, and Shoebag’s wings lifted and fell in the old roach signal of contentment.

  Four

  FOR AN HOUR BEFORE bedtime, Shoebag was invited to watch television with Pretty Soft, in her all-pink room.

  Pretty Soft always watched her two favorite sitcoms then, each one a half hour long.

  Shoebag was not a regular television viewer, since he and his family always foraged for food in people’s kitchens when they turned on their sets.

  He leaned back on Pretty Soft’s pink velvet chaise and laughed and laughed at all the jokes, but Pretty Soft kept a straight face. She was lathering it with Chase Away, an anti-wrinkle cream. She was propped up against the pink pillows on her bed. She wore a pink kimono, and pink scuffs, and kept her pink mirror beside her.

  Shoebag waited until a commercial for hair spray came on, before he asked her why she watched this sitcom called “Molly Moon,” if she didn’t think it was funny.

  “I think it’s hilarious,” she told him, “and one of the reasons I watch it, is because it has a laugh track.”

  Shoebag didn’t know what that meant.

  “Wherever you came from,” she said, “it couldn’t have been a very civilized place, or you would know more about television. All that laughter you hear is pre-recorded, what we call canned laughter. The television producers stick it in after someone does or says something funny. That’s why I don’t laugh. They do the laughing for me.”

  “But I can’t help laughing,” said Shoebag.

  “Then laugh. Most home viewers do, but I have to save my face.”

  “If most home viewers laugh, why is there a laugh track then?”

  “Because some people don’t get the jokes,” Pretty Soft said, “and because some people don’t like to laugh alone. They feel like they’re having a better time if everyone is laughing.”

  Now Pretty Soft had put down Chase Away to brush her hair, 100 strokes in front, 100 strokes in back, and 100 strokes on both sides. She was counting under her breath.

  Suddenly there was a familiar sight on the big 25 inch screen. Cockroaches. Dozens of them running around a giant chunk of Swiss cheese.

  Shoebag felt a thrill of recognition. Here were his own kind on television! If there were cockroaches featured on prime time on national TV, they could not be as hated as his family had always claimed.

  Shoebag felt proud, and he looked across at Pretty Soft to see her reaction.

  “… twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one,” she was counting as she combed her hair, and although her eyes were on the screen, Shoebag could tell nothing about her feelings.

  He was planning to exclaim on cockroach bravery (risking exposure and eye glare under those bright television lights) and their great beauty (they had chosen only the ones with the shiniest shells and the longest antennae). But something catastrophic happened before Shoebag could speak.

  A great white cloud was puffed at the cockroaches causing them to fall over, legs up, as it mushroomed over their little bodies and hung above them.

  An announcer’s voice with a particularly ominous tone, said “Zap zaps cockroaches dead!”

  “Oh, no,” said Shoebag. “Zap!”

  “It’s awfully smelly stuff, isn’t it?” Pretty Soft commented. “On the first Monday of every month, when they fumigate here, I go to the park with Madam G. de la G. Then mother sprays the house with Fresh Meadow Scent, so there’s no foul odors left when I get back.”

  There was not one survivor on the TV screen … and now a large hand with wrist hairs was holding up a can of Zap.

  “Zap!” said the announcer’s voice. “For things that don’t deserve to live!”

  Shoebag said, “Why don’t they?”

  The announcer couldn’t answer Shoebag, of course, but Pretty Soft did as she ran the pink hairbrush through the left side of her long blonde hair “… sixty … sixty-one, sixty-two … because they’re ugly little insects,” she said. “And they’re filthy!”

  “They’ve been around for 250 million years,” Shoebag said. “They were here 249 million years before you were!”

  “I don’t care what was here before I was,” said Pretty Soft.

  “They don’t harm people.”

  “They hide out in drainboards, under toasters, anywhere they feel like it, in people’s homes.”

  “They were here first!” Shoebag said. “People moved into their homes.”

  “But cockroaches don’t have leases,” said Pretty Soft. “People have leases. We have a three-year lease on this apartment, and we’ll probably renew it.”

  “A lease is just a piece of paper!” said Shoebag.

  “But if you don’t have one,” Pretty Soft said, “you can’t live in an apartment … unless of course you buy the building. I very much doubt that cockroaches make any money.”

  “Is money all you care about?” Shoebag asked. He was still badly shaken by the sight of his own species flat on their backs, feet-up, dead.

  “I care about being beautiful first,” said Pretty Soft, “because if I wasn’t beautiful I wouldn’t have so much money.”

  “Aren’t there other ways to make money?” Shoebag asked.

  “Not when you’re only seven years old,” Pretty Soft said. “Wherever you came from, you have forgotten how hard life really is sometimes.”

  No, Shoebag had not forgotten that at all, but he was surprised to hear Pretty Soft say such a thing.

  “You think life is hard?” he asked her.

  “I protect myself against it all the time,” she told him. “I shouldn’t even be having this conversation, for example.”

  “Why not?” Shoebag asked.

  “Because I have already lost count of my brushstrokes,” Pretty Soft said. “I have already broken my routine. It’s not good to break your routine, not when it interferes with the business at hand.”

  With that, she began all over again on the left side of her head, counting, “One, two, three …”

  Shoebag turned his attention back to the sitcom, but not before saying The Cockroach Prayer for the Dead.

  “Go to a better life. Amen.”

  Five

  THE BIDDLE APARTMENT WAS composed of the first two floors of the old brownstone. For all of their lives, Shoebag’s family had lived on the bottom floor, where the kitchen, dining room, and Mrs. Biddle’s studio was. They stayed mainly in the kitchen, behind things, but Shoebag had often played in the studio, where there were always cans of paint in many colors, and great canvases with paintings of the sea on them.

  Shoebag had never seen a real sea with waves and sand and a beach. But sometimes he would run up and down one of t
he pictures, trying to imagine his legs getting wet as they left the tan colors and headed for the gray-green of the ocean, trying to feel the wind as he scampered higher into the blue, resting, out of breath, on one of the white clouds. Mrs. Biddle had just finished making herself a salami sandwich on rye and carried it into the studio, where she was watching the ten o’clock news.

  Shoebag had sneaked down the stairs in his new blue-and-white striped pajamas, with the white terrycloth robe. In his hurry to buy Shoebag clothes quickly, before dinner, Mr. Biddle had forgotten bedroom slippers, so Shoebag wore only socks. He could feel the cold of the linoleum floors right through the cotton. Skin was hard to keep warm, Shoebag realized. He missed the protection of his shell, but that was the least of it when it came to missing things.

  He missed the freedom he had had to roam about at night. Mr. Biddle had made a bed for him on the couch, upstairs in the living room. He had told him lights out by ten P.M., which meant Shoebag was expected to go to sleep at that hour!

  Shoebag also missed the old roach thrill at the approach of the nightly hunt for food. He knew that in back of the stove, under the refrigerator, behind the cupboard, and down near the dishwasher, all his family was gathered with their antennae alert, waiting for the house to settle down, their hopes rising as they speculated over what would be waiting for them, starting with the goodies usually found in the kitchen. (Already Shoebag could see all the bread crumbs on the counter, left by Mrs. Biddle, and the salami grease still streaked across the carving knife.)

  Most of all, though, Shoebag missed Drainboard.

  He worried that Under The Toaster would do what he had always done: run out ahead of her and grab all the best food for himself. Shoebag had been faster than his father, and his eyesight had been better, so that when he was still one of the family, he jumped on choice morsels and saved them for his mother.

  Under The Toaster claimed that the father cockroach came first, because after all he had to shoulder all the responsibility for the family. It was he who had to keep track of when the Zap man came, and it was he who had to decide if they should take a chance and move to a new place when a person packed up anything to be sent somewhere. (Never mind that Under The Toaster probably could not bring himself to leave Boston, or even this brownstone on Beacon Hill, because Shoebag’s father, at heart, was very sentimental about both places.)