Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Eventually my obsession with dress-up reached such a fever pitch that Lydia decided it was time I had clothes of my own. I was to be naked no longer.

As it happened, by this time I did own one — only one — article of clothing. Whenever Lydia and I left the home together in those early days — say, on one of our fun/educational outings to the Field Museum or the planetarium — she would bundle me up in a big baggy sweatshirt with droopy sleeves and a kangaroo pocket on the front, and a hood that could be scrunched into a small round window for my face by means of a drawstring. When we went out in public Lydia would pull the hood low over my face to conceal my apeness, and the shirt was big enough that it came down to my ankles, like a dress. Like much of Lydia’s clothing, it was green. I wore this green hooded sweatshirt so often that it had gradually passed into my possession, and Lydia effectively made a present of it to me. This was the first article of clothing I ever owned. As a matter of fact, I suppose it was the first thing I ever personally owned, period, and because of this, the shirt has always had a feeling of juju, of magic power for me. I still have it.

One Saturday afternoon Lydia took me shopping at Marshall Field’s. Lydia and I took a bus uptown to the Loop, and she carried me in her arms, buried in her green hooded sweatshirt, into the store. I was stricken silent with awe at the place. It was like a cathedral, a temple to commerce, to all the potential beauty of human vanity. Floor cascaded above floor through that dizzying shaft of space in the middle of the room — the gilt decorations, the Old World grandeur, the marble everywhere: I thought we had entered some sort of palace.

I liked to look at all the mannequins. It was so fascinating to observe the personality differences in all the different sorts of mannequins. Some of them are deliberately designed to look very humanlike: they have skin and hair and eyes. Sometimes they have icily detached expressions on their beautiful faces. Sometimes their fragile fingers and slender hands looked so realistic that one half-expected them to move. Others are more abstract: some are of unpainted white plastic or plaster. Some of them are realistically proportioned, with detailed hands and feet and skeletomuscular definition under their hard shiny skin, tendons in their necks and clavicles under their shoulders — and yet are eerily missing their heads, as if they have just been executed under the guillotine, for real or imagined crimes. The more impressionistic ones might have hands like mittens, with thumbs separate but the other four fingers fused together, and with no faces, their heads being mere smooth plastic ellipsoids — giving them an alien appearance. Others are half-abstract, with noses and forehead ridges and mouths, but no eyes. Still others are designed to look humanoid, but in a deliberately unrealistic or exaggerated way. These last are the type of mannequins on display in the lingerie department, which happens to be right next to the children’s department, way up on the fourth or fifth floor, where I went with Lydia so I could try clothes on. Lydia picked out some shirts and pants and sweaters and whatnot for me. I appeared to have a predilection for stripes: especially shirts with broad, horizontal stripes. I loved to hold her hot human hand and gaze up at the glittering frescoed ceilings as she flipped through the racks of clothing that were on sale in the children’s section, selecting things for me to try on, folding them over the arm that held mine, the sound of the metal hangers scraping against the rack. Then she took me by the hand back to the fitting rooms and helped me put them on.

“Do you like this, Bruno?” she would say, tugging a shirt over my body as I sat on a bench and she crouched before me in the mirror-walled fitting room. If I did not like it I would fling it away. If I did like it I would pant-hoot with enthusiasm, and Lydia would press a finger to her lips to shush me, lest we be found out. I was wearing my collar, but Lydia always hated to put the leash on me. She kept the leash in her purse, having sworn me to a blood oath of good behavior.

We selected several pairs of jeans, a pair of fancier black slacks, some T-shirts, a stalwart winter coat to fend off the Chicago winter, and a few shirts that snapped rather than buttoned because my then-clumsy fingers were not yet dexterous enough to perform the complicated operation of slipping a button into a buttonhole. She even bought — because I insisted, and she spoiled me — she even bought me a shiny pair of sneakers, extra large ones due to the preposterously unusual shapes of my feet. All of these items had to be bought with an air of utmost secrecy: with me plodding alongside her with a long hairy arm stretched up to hold her hand and the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt pulled low over my face. Lydia had to constantly shoo away commission-eager salesgirls, who were always nosily seeking her eye-contact and asking her in tones that made us panic despite their well-intentioned sweetnesses (whenever anyone spoke to her, I felt a sudden spike of galvanization on the flesh of Lydia’s palm) if she would like help finding anything, and Lydia would always respond by tightening her grip on my hand, fluttering the fingers of her free hand in dismissal, shaking her head back and forth in such a way that the strands of hair not bound back in her ponytail whipped about her face, and brusquely saying, “No thank you, we’re just browsing.” To which the salesgirl would respond with some pleasantry and turn to go — then turn back for a moment, and quizzically scrunch up her brow as she filched another look at me, Bruno, Lydia’s presumed child, her long-armed, ugly, hairy freak of a child — before shrugging with the resignation that all was well, and skulking away on her click-clacking pumps to assist another customer.

As I was saying, though, it was this last variety of mannequin that held the most interest for me: the detailed yet deliberately unrealistic humanoid mannequin, the expressionistically stylized variety, the ones on display in the lingerie section, which adjoined the children’s section of the store. Lydia was paying for my new clothes at a counter in the children’s department; all my new clothes were folded up on the countertop, and the clerk behind the counter was removing the plastic hangers from the garments, pressing their sales tags against something on the counter that for each item produced a shrill electronic beep, then folded the items and put them into big plastic sacks while Lydia waited. I padded away from the counter in boredom during this procedure. My fascination was tugging my attention away from them. Whither was it tugging me? It was tugging Bruno’s feet in the direction of the lingerie department. The mannequins there were unlike any other mannequins on display anywhere else in that palace of commerce. The mannequins here had hair, and facial features, and detailed hands and feet, and yet they were still strangely abstracted: their heads were cartoonishly larger than normal human heads, their huge eyes painted onto their faces. They were also clearly sexualized, with thick lush pouty lips, and with larger breasts and wider hips than the other female humanoid mannequins in the store. I fell in love with those plastic girls. They were so sweet-looking, so elegant and delicately sexy — and so apparently unabashed to stand there in full display in public in their dainty underthings, all their pretty frilly bras and panties and corsets, with all kinds of filigrees and silk and satin ribbons and lace embroidery. This was underwear that existed only to be displayed briefly, then slowly (or rapidly, rabidly) removed…. I crept up onto the dais where all these slender, doe-eyed nymphs stood on display. These girls stood or lounged, icy-expressioned, coyly silent, in various poses or reposes of sumptuous seductiveness. One of them lay semireclining, one leg stretched out and the other half-raised, leaning back on her elbows and throwing her head back, showing her body, begging to be desired, asking to be taken. Another stood in a black negligee with matching high-heeled shoes, her weight sunk into one foot, one hand on her hip, the other seemingly frozen in the act of reaching up to her pretty bare plastic shoulder to remove the first of the two straps of the negligee, and a single springy ringlet of dark glossy hair— real hair — dangled wantonly in her fake-eyed face. I reached up to her with my long hirsute arms and my long purple fingers. I reached up to her, to lift up the hem of her negligee, to peer under it, at that beautiful body, those hard shiny legs, to see what lay beneath…