Shoebag

by M. E. Kerr

  Nothing.

  Pretty Soft said, “Certain Persian cats are dying to be petted but they won’t admit it, so they sit in the dust balls, under things, and where does that get them?”

  Nothing.

  “You had better practice being charming, Mildred…. Just you remember that a slinky Siamese cat is waiting in the wings to take your place next month.”

  That would not work on Mildred. Pretty Soft realized it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Mildred did not relish being a spokescat on national television. It meant being carried to the studio in her cat case, having butter-coated dope pills thrust down her throat, and drooping through the day under bright lights, too weak and powerless to hiss at or scratch the people who picked her up.

  Now across the room, on the television screen, came the chorus of toilet paper rolls dancing merrily down the green hill, unfurling amid buttercups and brown-eyed Susans as they sang.

  Pretty Soft turned up the sound on the TV remote. “Here we are, Mildred!”

  Six hundred sheets a roll, and soft as any kitty, We’re double-layered, too, and people say we’re pretty.

  We come in shades of blue and beige, green, yellow, and …

  Mildred settled down to snooze and dream of the cockroach she had known was in the downstairs hall the night before, under the lily leaves.

  Nine

  “PRETTY SOFT? MAY I come in?” Shoebag asked. “Please do,” said Pretty Soft, “but you just missed my commercial.”

  The moment Shoebag stepped inside, the Persian cat from the third floor came out from under her bed.

  “That cat has escaped from upstairs!” Shoebag said.

  “Mildred doesn’t escape,” said Pretty Soft. “I let her out. Don’t pay attention to her or she’ll hide again.”

  The cat went directly to Shoebag, and as he walked around the room, she walked a few feet behind him.

  “Stop following me around!” said Shoebag. “I don’t like cats!”

  “Mildred doesn’t really like people, either,” Pretty Soft said, “and I’ve never seen her follow someone around that way.”

  “Tell her to stop!” Shoebag said.

  “She won’t do anything anyone tells her to, unless you dope her. Then she just acts dumb and sleepy.”

  “Dope her then!” said Shoebag, while the cat continued following him.

  “I can’t dope her. I don’t have her pills. The television people are the only ones who dope her, so they can film our commercial.”

  “Maybe if I sit down she’ll go away,” said Shoe-bag. He sat in the pink chair across from the bed.

  Mildred sat beside the chair, staring up at him.

  “She never does that,” said Pretty Soft. “Maybe you have a bug on you. That’s the way she acts if there’s a bug around or a mouse.”

  Shoebag had let Drainboard out of the pencil box an hour ago. She had gone to help the family move back from the house next door, where they’d waited while the Zap man was in this one.

  “I don’t think there are any live bugs left,” said Pretty Soft. “Maybe there’s a mouse somewhere.”

  Mildred would not take her eyes off Shoebag.

  “Put her back upstairs where she belongs,” he said.

  “I like her,” Pretty Soft said. “I never get to really look at her because she’s always hiding.”

  “Shoo! Beat it!” Shoebag waved his hands at her and stamped his feet.

  The cat did not budge.

  “Just ignore her,” Pretty Soft said. “Just talk to me and don’t pay any attention to her.”

  “But she makes me nervous!” Shoebag said.

  Pretty Soft picked up her pink mirror and handed it to Shoebag.

  “You’re no fun when you’re nervous. Look in the mirror and say what I say, and you won’t be nervous,” Pretty Soft said.

  “I can’t say I see my own beauty. I’m not a beautiful person.”

  Mildred watched him.

  Pretty Soft said, “Then say ‘I see my own cuteness,’ because you are cute, Shoebag.”

  Shoebag liked it that she called him by his real name. She always called him Stuart Bagg around other people. He also liked hearing that he was cute, something no one had ever said to him before.

  “I’ll try anything to keep from being nervous,” he said.

  He picked up the mirror and told it, “I see my own cuteness, may it last forever.”

  The cockroach reflection trembled.

  And why not? With that terrible Persian cat sitting there licking its chops.

  Pretty Soft could see that her mirror trick did not work for Shoebag. He was still wringing his hands and now his forehead was breaking out in sweat.

  “We have to relax you or you’re no fun to be with,” she said. “We can read my diary. You can read it aloud.”

  “But your father said no one ever reads other people’s diaries or journals, that they’re private.”

  “You are my new little brother, aren’t you?” Pretty Soft smiled. She took out a small pink book from under her pillow.

  She passed it to Shoebag, who had to reach over Mildred’s head to get it.

  “Start at the beginning. January 1,” said Pretty Soft.

  Shoebag opened “My Diary” and began to read.

  January 1

  Dear Diary,

  Cold today. Madam Grande de la Grande not here. Pretty Soft commercial played three times in afternoon, so I earned $450.

  January 2

  Dear Diary,

  Cold today. Madam Grande de la Grande here. Pretty Soft commercial played two times in afternoon, so I earned $300.

  January 3

  Dear Diary,

  Snow and cold today. Madam Grande de la Grande here. Pretty Soft commercial played three times in afternoon, so I earned $450.

  Shoebag looked across at Pretty Soft and said, “But you write the same thing over and over, and it’s only about the weather, Madam Grande de la Grande, and how much you made.”

  “Skip to the first Monday of the month,” she said. Shoebag found it.

  January 5

  Dear Diary,

  Snow and sleet. Madam Grande de la Grande and I go to park. Missed all but one Pretty Soft commercial, but think I earned at least $150.

  Shoebag sighed.

  “What’s the matter?” Pretty Soft asked him.

  “Don’t you ever write about anything else?”

  “You just read that I went to the park on the fifth of January. What do you want?”

  “Don’t you ever write about your feelings?”

  “If it’s cold, I feel cold, don’t I? If I’m making money, I feel rich, don’t I?”

  “I guess so,” said Shoebag. “I suppose so,” he said.

  “This conversation has given me so much to think about,” said Pretty Soft.

  “What has it given you to think about?” Shoebag asked.

  “I was just being charming.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m not nervous anymore,” Shoebag told her.

  Because for a while, anyway, Shoebag had forgotten that the cat was still there, and still watching Shoebag’s every move.

  Ten

  TIME ALWAYS DOES ONE thing: Time passes. It passes for people, and for cockroaches, for jumping spiders, and for Persian cats.

  Time passing always does one thing: It changes people, and it changes cockroaches. It changes jumping spiders, and it even changes Persian cats.

  In time, Mr. and Mrs. Biddle began to count Shoebag as a permanent member of the family. Mrs. Biddle washed and ironed his clothes, and packed a lunch for him every school day. Mr. Biddle gave up his office alcove and turned it into a bedroom for Shoebag.

  At school, Tuffy Buck got meaner and meaner, and in addition to being boss of the cloakroom, the recess yard, the cafeteria, boss of all the slides and swings in the recess yard, and all the blocks that surround the school, he also became boss of the Beacon Hill Park.

  Gregor Samsa had not been seen again,
so every day Shoebag went to school he was picked on, called Stuella, and left poems telling him the next day would be even worse.

  Of course, he could not say anything about this to Pretty Soft, because of the rule. When he mentioned it to Mr. Biddle, Mr. Biddle had this answer. “At that school, they do not think you belong to anyone. If you would let me call you Son, and if you would call me Dad, things might be different.”

  But Shoebag could not do that, for he had promised his mother he would stop it, and he had.

  He had told the Biddles that someday, when his memory came back, he would find his real parents, and they would not like him calling other people Mom and Dad or letting them call him Son.

  Shoebag turned out to be a good student and Mr. Doormatee kept telling him so, and reminding him that his name ended in pal.

  “But I am picked on, sometimes,” Shoebag told him, “and I have no pal then. I am called by a girl’s name, and I have no pal then.”

  “Girls are as good as boys,” said Mr. Doormatee, “so you should not object to being called by a girl’s name, Stuart Bagg.”

  “But I am a boy.”

  “Then learn to stand up for yourself. Learn to box, or wrestle. Tell the coach to teach you. Tell him I’m your pal.”

  What the coach told Shoebag was, “You need a pal, Stuart Bagg. You punch like a kitten and you wrestle like a fish.”

  Madam Grande de la Grande grew more and more anxious about Pretty Soft’s next shoot, and if she would have charm.

  Once, she took Shoebag aside.

  “Do you realize that if she loses her spokesgirl job, you’ll be just another mouth to feed in this house, young man?”

  “What can I do to help her?” Shoebag asked.

  “Act like a winner. Tell her how popular you are at school, and how you are better than anyone in everything. Then, always lose any game you play together. If she wins a game from a winner, she will feel like the biggest winner of all.”

  “She is already practicing her charm,” Shoebag said.

  “And so she should,” said Madam Grande de la Grande. “She must be charming, confident, and beautiful to beat out Claudia Clapper … and Claudia Clapper is younger, too. The young ones come along and snatch the dream right out of your heart, Stuart Bagg. I’ve seen it happen!”

  There were other changes, too.

  Shoebag had two cousins move in a box from Atlanta, Georgia, and the very day they arrived, the jumping spider ate them. The spider was changing very fast himself. He was almost as fat as his hairy brown brother from next door.

  When the Persian cat got loose, her only interest was stalking Shoebag. Now she would not only sit and stare at him, but she would reach out and cuff his leg with her paw, or jump up on the arm of his chair and move her jaws at him and drool.

  Under The Toaster had changed so much he hardly spoke to Shoebag. He had other sons now, Shoebag’s new little brothers, who ran from him, and did not believe he was their brother. There was Coffee Cup, Wheaties Box, and Radio.

  “They look exactly like me!” Under The Toaster said often, and proudly. “They’re clean and they’re quiet, too!”

  Drainboard had been terrified by a narrow escape from the jumping spider’s dragline. He had twisted it twice around her cerci and told her, “Your new name is Supper, for that’s what you will be in a few hours. My supper.” It had been a miracle that she was able to wiggle loose and run to safety up under the long white strings of the mop.

  Still, nights the jumping spider would croon out in the darkness, “I feel like having ‘Supper’ soon.”

  Drainboard could not understand why Shoebag would not kill him and protect their home sweet home.

  “All the years we wished that he was dead,” she told Shoebag, “and now you can kill him, but you won’t!”

  “I’m not that much of a person yet,” Shoebag kept insisting, but he felt like a coward and a traitor.

  Of all the changes in the passing of time, Pretty Soft had changed the most. When Shoebag would tell her how popular he was at school, and how he was better than anyone at everything, Pretty Soft would yawn and fidget. When Shoebag let her win at Monopoly and all the Nintendo games hooked into her television, Pretty Soft would complain.

  “It’s no fun to play with someone so dumb!”

  “I’m not dumb, you’re just smarter, Pretty Soft. You’re a winner,” Shoebag said. “You are such a big winner that you are able to beat the most popular boy in Beacon Hill Elementary school, the one who is better than anyone at everything!”

  Pretty Soft shot him a look of disgust. “That is civilian talk, Shoebag. It is obsequious, which means groveling and fawning.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Shoebag, who could not seem to please her anymore, or stop her worrying about shooting her new commercial.

  “My, you’re amusing!” said Pretty Soft.

  “But you just said—”

  She did not let him finish. “I have to give one compliment a conversation,” she told him. “I have to be charming or Claudia Clapper will get my job!”

  Eleven

  ONE FINE DAY IN April, Mr. Doormatee stood up in assembly and read a page Tuffy Buck had written about his father. Mr. Buck had gone on a hunt for alligators down in Florida, and he had killed four of them himself.

  Everyone in school clapped their hands, and Mr. Doormatee said, “Congratulations to your father, Tuffy. Children? When you pass Tuffy in the hall today, say to him, Congratulations to your father!’”

  Before assembly was over, Mr. Doormatee reminded everyone that principal ended in pal, and that on their way out, they should drop some pennies in the Save The Seals can, “because we all know that a seal needs a pal, too.”

  Shoebag was happy to give the three pennies he had left from his milk money to the seals. Still, something bothered him, and he mentioned it to Fatso as they walked down to the cloakroom.

  “If people save seals, why do they kill alligators?”

  “Seals are like panda bears and koalas—they’re cute. Alligators are like snakes and rats—they’re ugly.”

  Shoebag thought of Pretty Soft saying he was cute.

  Fatso continued, “If you’re ugly, people turn against you.”

  “But how do people decide what’s ugly?” Shoe-bag asked.

  “People don’t decide, they just see you and they know. If you’re an animal, it’s better to be soft and furry. It isn’t good to slither around without legs, or to live behind things and have a long tail.”

  “What about bugs?” Shoebag asked. “What about bugs with legs and antennae.”

  “Legs, maybe, if the bugs have nice colors, like ladybugs with red on them, and green walking sticks. But antennae, never! Bugs with antennae get stepped on! So do bugs who live behind or under things!”

  “But why?” said Shoebag.

  Fatso shrugged sadly and said, “Don’t ask me of all people. If Mr. Buck was out on a people hunt, and he saw us walking down this hall together, I’d be the one he’d go after.”

  “Because I’m cute?” Shoebag asked.

  “Because you’re thin, and I’m fat.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair to judge everything by looks,” Shoebag said.

  “Who’s talking about what’s fair?” Fatso said, and then at the approach of Tuffy Buck, he called out “Congratulations to your father!”

  Tuffy was surrounded by kids saying the same thing, and it was hard to know if he had heard Fatso.

  “I’m not taking any chances,” Fatso told Shoebag. “I want to stay on the good side of him.”

  “I didn’t think he had a good side,” Shoebag said, “and I’m not sending congratulations to Mr. Buck. I’m for the poor alligators.”

  “That won’t get you anywhere,” Fatso said.

  Shoebag said, “I’m for the alligators and the snakes and the rats, and the bugs with legs and antenna, and everything that lives behind and under things!” Then he thought of the jumping spider and he added, “Unless one makes
himself my enemy!”

  “What about the seals and the pandas, the koala bears, and the bugs with color?”

  “I’m for them, too, and for you, Fatso. I’m for you, too.”

  “Thanks, Stuart Bagg,” said Fatso, “but I’m not even for me.”

  “How can you not be for yourself?” Shoebag asked him.

  “It’s very risky to be for yourself,” Fatso told him. “If you are, you have to stick up for yourself. That’s too hard.”

  When they got to the cloakroom, while they were getting into their coats, Tuffy Buck appeared again in a group of kids who were patting him on the back, and punching his arm with friendly jabs.

  “Congratulations to your father!” Fatso called out again.

  “I heard you the first time!” Tuffy snarled.

  Shoebag thought of the alligators, the snakes, and the rats, and he thought of his very own family. He did not look across at Tuffy Buck, and he did not speak to him.

  It was such a mild and sunny April afternoon that Shoebag did not feel like going directly home.

  The other reason he did not feel like going directly home was that his father had told him not to come into the kitchen afternoons, since he only woke up Coffee Cup, Wheaties Box, and Radio.

  “They need their sleep, they are just little tykes,” Under The Toaster had said. “Have some consideration. Wipe your feet! You drag dirt around on floors we have to eat off! No wonder your little brothers can’t believe you are one of us, the way you soil where we dine! They are afraid of you, besides.”

  “Tell them I’d never hurt my own brothers.”

  “I’ve told them that, but they just won’t believe me.”

  “Maybe if you’d kill the jumping spider, they’d believe us,” Drainboard had put in.

  “Mama, you ask too much of me. I can not squash anything alive, not yet!”

  “I’ll be that spider’s supper someday, Son.”

  Shoebag felt too guilty to face them all.

  This was a good time to go to the park, too. Tuffy Buck was busy back at school receiving congratulations for his father.

  Shoebag found an empty swing and got on it, closing his eyes as he made it go higher and higher.