Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“What kinda checks you on?” O asked. “Fifteen-minute but mostly they don’t come till twenty.” “Then you’re too late already, it don’t matter, stay with me.” “No I’m not, if I leave right now.” “First pluck me.” “It takes too long and anyhow you don’t need it. Yours is… really really… okay the way it is.” And it was. I dared to look straight at it-an escutcheon of pinkish rosettes, as dainty as the Girl Scout badge for venery. But O was mad. Her eyes pinched to slits and she angrily plunked herself on the toilet seat, folded her arms and peed. The pee boiled in the bowl. Her cotton candy hair vined in and out of her arms. She glared at me. “Who ya going with? Down there on East Five?” “Huh? Nobody. I’m stuck in a quietroom for godzillas sake.” “Who else is there?” “No one. Some old bag opera singer’s in the room under your room, I don’t even know her name.” “You love her, ain’t it, you cheatin jew bulldyke,” she spooky-fluted, sitting all cramped together on the throne like some Old Witch Anti-Birth. “I only even noticed her cause she was in your room,” I said. She softened slightly but softness made her even scarier, squeezed her spooky-flute down to a snaky hiss. Her eyes glowed at the bottom of gratings that were half-erasures of their usual blacking. In a way she had never looked so beautiful. “What’d you come here for?” she wanted to know and I could hardly say To borrow your tweezer , now could I? “I was gonna surprise you,” I mumbled.

She got up and turned to flush the pot and when she turned back around, to my amazement she was wreathed in smiles as well as hair. She draped her long black fingernails about my neck, she could do that of course since I was still standing in the bathtub and therefore half a foot off the floor, otherwise I’d have been no taller than she was-and looked up into my face at its ersatz fuddy altitude and kissed me. “You did,” she said. “So, er, uh, do you like me with a bald coochie like five years old?” She stepped back a little and gazed. “Wooo,” she said. What did that mean? She patted the edge of the bathtub, hinting I should stand up there to get a look at myself (legless, headless) in the mirror over the sink. I climbed up. Well it was terrible, and nuttin like five years old. The halves of the knoll of coochie fit together swollenly, like lips that had been punched, and that once preverbal slit looked deep and dangerous, ready to curse, or spit. “Cheese,” I said, and shuddered. “Now do me ,” she commanded.

I got down on my knees, tweezer shaking between my fingers, but she pulled me back up. Led me to her bed and spread herself out on the edge of it, with one bare foot on the floor. I began. I began with a sense of ruin, of pulling apart some secret of nature like a birdsnest that no human could build or rebuild, but soon I got into it, nibbling my tweezer along the border, making the shield perfectly symmetrical, dexter like sinister, the raw cooked. All the same my hand shook. It was her coochie after all. I tried not to look at the curtained, bubblegum-pink tunnel at the center of it. Neatly I heaped the questionmarky hairs to one side on the hospital sheet. Stepped back to view my work. “It looks like a perfect little keyhole-sumpm from a lady’s writing desk. Lemme leave it like that.” “No, all of it.” “I’m the artiste in this salon and I refuse.” “Sufferin cheeses.” She scrambled up on the side of the bathtub, craned her neck at herself and sniffed: “Take the rest.” And she rearranged herself on the bed.

But now when I knelt to the work I saw a sort of candle glint in the pink tumblers and before I could think she pressed my hand against the wetness there. Somehow I got rid of the tweezer and finally, finally, sank a finger into the dark center of some beauty, felt along the satin muscle banks to her blind end and felt her burst around me. Implode, shudder, dissolve. Her skinny arms flew around my neck and wrenched me to her nuzzies but when I opened my mouth to taste them, she shoved me mightily away. “I ain’t no bull dagger,” she panted, and at last I deduced what this must mean. “I know,” I politicly replied. I rolled away from her, closed my eyes, only now the darkness organized itself around the wet pink jewel of

“Finish me,” she whispered in my ear. She was pressing the tweezer into my fingers but I made a fist against it. “Don’t wanna,” I said, staring into the black, half expecting one of her knives in the gut. “Come on,” she spooky-fluted. “Don’t wanna and anyhow you don’t need it. You’re too pretty down there already.” “Pretty? Cheeses.” To my surprise her hand folded around my hand. Her thumb made lazy circles on my palm. I felt the quick length of her against me, soft swellings and concavities, fluted bones. “I got a joke for you,” she breathed in my ear. “This guy’s walking down the avenue, right? Joe. On the corner he runs into his old friend. Joe, what’s wrong, you look awful. I do? Well I feel good, Joe says, and he keeps going and sees this other old friend. Are you sick, Joe, the other friend says, cheese, you look bad! Well I feel good, Joe says, and walks on and soon he comes across his third old friend. Joe, what happened to you, this one says, you look terrible. But I feel good, says Joe, and he decides he better see a doctor. Doc examines him and shakes his head and says, I don’t know, Joe, I never seen a case like this. He opens this big black book and runs his finger down the column, Hmmm, looks good and feels good, that’s not you, Joe. Looks terrible, feels terrible, that’s not you either. Wait a minute, here it is, looks terrible and feels good. Say, Joe, you’re a vagina!” We snickered, helplessly.

The city glowed at the window bars and its glow pooled on the bed. I dared to look in O’s face. She was unearthly beautiful in that light. She was crude and bloodthirsty, and under her icy billows of hair and fake calm she had turned out to be one of those menstrual fantod types strung tight as a toy violin, but I kind of loved her. “Guess who told me,” she whispered. “Reggie.” “How’d you know?” “Who else?” We laughed into each other’s hair. “I can’t figure out if the Regicide likes girls or hates girls,” I said. O sighed. “What’s the difference? He’s the best we got in here, I mean think of the dreambox mechanics, what a buncha nuttins.”

I did. I sat up like one of those stiffs in their refrigerator drawers, bonk. “I gotta go,” I said. “You better not leave me now,” O spooky-fluted, sinking her black nails into my hand. “I gotta. I told you.” “How come,” she said, “for who?” She peered at me and I bit down hard to heat up the fat between my ears, tried to fry away Zuk, knowing O could see right through my headbone when she got in this state. “ For who? ” “I gotta get off East Five,” I said, “I’m going buggy up there.” That much was the truth. “I gotta make em think I’m getting better.” “Sufferin cheeses, you left more’n an hour ago. Don’t you think they found out by now? They’ll throw you in leg irons or sumpm.” “I gotta go.” “Don’t go,” she sing-sang warningly, “you can hide in my closet.” “I gotta.” I stood on my feet. “You two-timing jew oink, I hate you.” At this I lifted her up by her skinny shoulders and shook her a bit, so that her dark nuzzies trembled. Now that we knew each other down to our coneyholes, I wasn’t going to stand for this kind of talk. “You can call me Jew if you want, that’s not even a cuss word ya know, but if you call me a this jew or a that jew anymore I’ll punch you right in your popey nose. It’s not ladylike.”

Naturally I wouldn’t have done anything to her unless completely necessary, but I was way stronger than she was and people from her side of town understand that kind of thing. She lay there blinking up at me and I took the opportunity to run. On my way I snatched a fuzzy robe from the hook on her bathroom door. I knew that first she would puzzle on that queer pheenom, a Hebrew toughgirl, and next she would come looking for me, maybe throwing knives and maybe not.