Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

I squinted at her suspiciously. Her fingers, as short and skinny as birthday candles, lay on the coverlet and half a cigarette still stuck up from them, fuming. There were ashes in every direction: black smears on the pillowcases, pale gray drifts down the front of her I CHOCOLATE bathrobe. But nothing worse.

“You didn’t puke?” “Unh-unh. I swore. ” “You’re not really going to smoke that thing to the end, are you, Emily?” “I like it with a coddy.” “You swear you ate that coddy? I’m going to get you another one and see.” “Don’t go. Pretty please don’t go. Let’s play Old Maid.”

Old Maid! I remembered the last time Margaret and me played Old Maid: when Merlin got called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and they put us on the B &O to New York all by ourselves. Grandpa Koderer gave the porter five dollars to keep an eye on us but everyone forgot we would be alone on the ferry. We were thrilled. First we exhausted our quarters in the car-deck candy machine. The water looked heavy and black like motor oil and when we were staring into it, eating Caramel Creams, Margaret’s hat fell in. This was so pleasant that some of our cards “blew away” too. At last we watched the Old Maid’s pruny face float, curl, sink. So the deck was ruined. On Central Park West we had colds and Aunt Henrietta Schapiro sat on the bed and taught us Hearts and that was the end of Old Maid. Poor dears. You’re more than half orphans now .

“Don’t go. Let’s play Old Maid.” Why couldn’t I stop? “Only if you eat a coddy,” I bullied. “I ain’t hungry no more. Don’t go.” “Swear you’ll eat a coddy and I’ll come right back.” “I swear. But don’t go. They won’t let you in,” she said, and the bottom lip of her little buggy mouth trembled.

“Don’t worry, I can get in anytime I want. I’ll stay till you stop eating coddies, I swear. Hey, wanna split a Hollywood Bar?” She gave me a sickish smile-her lip curled back on her bucked bad teeth in friendly, bashful disgust. “Unh-unh. Too-maybe,” she said.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

The door hadn’t quite hissed shut behind me when I hit the dayroom, running. “Gimme fifteen cents,” I panted at the Bug Motels’ card table, “I got her to eat a coddy.” The whole place was smoking like an Indian encampment. There were around ninety little aluminum foil ashtrays in that room, and every ashtray had its mental patient. O, Bertie and Dion sat together in the whirly, cobwebby light, in a rubble of gum wrappers and potato chip bags, slapping their cards against the table. “Come on, gimme fifteen cents,” I repeated, “she ate a coddy, the whole thing.” Laughter burped out of the TV.

Bertie lazily shoved a dollar at me. “Who ya talking about-Emily? She ate?” “She ate a coddy.” “So what do you need fifteen cents for?” “Another coddy.” “You think she’s gonna eat another one?” “She swore.” “Cheese, Koderer, you’re doing better than Buzzey, maybe you should open up your own bughouse,” Bertie said with a smile. I squinted at him to see if he meant it. Probably not, but I didn’t care. I was Sigmund Food crossed with Margaret Meat, maybe I’d be Doctor Zuk someday after all.

“So how’d you do it?” O spooky-fluted, one eye narrowing at me in suspicion, the other hidden under the blueblack dip of her forelock. I wondered then, I wonder now, why a dark billow of hair over one eye makes a woman look dangerous, like a pirate’s eye-patch, but beautiful too. O watched me with her other smudgy eye that was telling me, Walk the plank . “How’d you get her to eat?” she asked again, without smiling. She was bristling mad, I could tell, and suddenly I didn’t care to go into that just now. “Tell you later,” I huffed, snatching up the dollar.

“Hey, pick me up a coddy too,” Dion said, “while you’re down there. And a pack of Tareytons.” Another dollar fluttered to the table. “Get me a coddy and a chocolate snowball and ten pieces of Bazooka,” someone else chimed in. “Five pretzels. And a strawberry turkish taffy for Mrs. Wilmot.” “A dime’s worth of banana BB bats and a pack of peanut butter crackers.” Pretty soon half the nuts in the dayroom were putting in their orders. “Forget it,” I shouted, “I’m just buying for the Bug Motels.” “Yeah, all you grown-up mental patients ever do is sit on your fat asses and watch TV and fart,” Bertie tactfully assisted me, “go get your own stuff.” “That doesn’t represent my views,” I announced to the dayroom, since I was Sigmund Food crossed with Margaret Meat, “I just have an urgent mission to execute.” Under my breath: “Damn you, Bertie, don’t stir up the mental patients, I’m in a hurry and this could be a matter of life or death.” Bertie laughed. “We might grow up into mental patients ourselves,” I hissed. “We are mental patients,” O reminded me. “Yeah, well we’re not hopeless cases yet,” I said.

I started for the sixth-floor landing where the elevators were, put my hand on the ward door, and all at once I felt O’s pirate eye pegleg it up my back. You’re not loving me and me alone the way you promised , it told me telepathically. You’re no beauty but you’ll pay . I looked around reluctantly. This was when I figured it out that O was insanely jealous (I do not speak figuratively, we were in the bughouse), and like all insanely jealous people she was clairvoyant. It didn’t take a Sigmund Food-I mean everybody’s dreambox is a cellar full of the stuff, hungers half and whole, lost loves, unobtainable oinks, etc. Now she was peering into my dreambox and sniffing another woman in my life and I was making haste to cut Doctor Zuk out of my thoughts with a can opener. “Emily’s organs are rotting,” I said weakly-but everybody knew that already. “Er, how bout you, O?” “What about me?” she echoed spookily. “You want anything from downstairs?” She didn’t even answer. “How bout a Hollywood Bar?” “I can get what I want myself,” she replied. She was scary but-well I’ll bring her up a cherry snowball I thought-just lemme feed old Emily first.

SNOWBALLS SWEATING IN A cardboard six-pack, pretzel rods marching across breast pocket like a squadron of cigars, candy bars crackling low in my overalls, soft warm coddies swinging in a small white bag from my teeth. And one of Dion’s Tareytons fuming away between my knuckles. I had had to ask an intern for a light. Wouldn’t you know, when Emily was ready to eat, it was the world’s lunchtime; the line had stretched from the snack bar to the newspaper kiosk all the way across the lobby. Where had I left my own cigarettes and my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter? Godzillas sakes-on Emily’s bed-fifty-three minutes ago. The first floor, the second floor sank away, beaten-looking people, broken-off chunks of families, got on and off. Yes I’d lost my perfect fix on Emily’s rescue by funding this expedition with Bug Motels’ candy money, that was a mistake, my fault for flouncing around pretending I was Margaret Meat, but now I was on my way back to her cute-ugly, spindly self.

Then the elevator jerked to perfect blackness and stillness and stopped dead and right away I started to be very very sorry just like O had telepathically said I would. I knew O was at the bottom of it, she had the power-some electrician or maintenance guy or orderly she had oinked, or who was praying to oink her next week-she had to stop thinking of men that way. There was an emergency phone in all these elevators. When I felt around for the receiver and pressed it to my ear, O spooky-fluted out of the earpiece: “You ate my heart with ketchup, jewgirl, and now you’re gonna pay,” and hung up. In the black elevator, sweat started to trickle under my dirty bangs. My armpits itched madly. That was when it came back to me, the queer story I’d heard about how O first got to Rohring Rohring. The same old stuff about working the Pratt Street bars from the age of twelve, and busting out her stepfather’s bathroom window where they had locked her in and climbing down the garage roof and never coming back, and ten foster homes and fifteen shows in juvenile court and three years’ probation later-but what I now remembered was the judge finally kicking her case to Rohring Rohring after she nailed her little foster sister, who she liked better than anybody , that was the part I particularly remembered, to the kitchen door with an oyster knife. The little sister had been trying to slip away… Had O thrown the knife like Mary Hartline on Super Circus? I wondered uneasily-Mary Hartline who walked upside down on the knives in her hands, her back arched like a bow.