Bogeywoman (26 page)

He didn’t dare look up from his bed-panioforte. I felt the heat rush up to my ears, for that could only be me he was describing. So he knew I
was funny about fuddies
. If he had divined, who else was hot on my trail? I didn’t mind his love so much: Like I said he looked kind of sweet hunched over his keyboards, and not much of a fuddy at all, maybe a hundred and five girly pounds with sharp little hipbones barely holding up his pants. He looked like a stiff breeze would flatten him, I mean I couldn’t see him and O at all, but, who knows, these musical wizards have fingering, and they see The Importance. If he had to love a Bug Motel, it came down to this: better her than me.

“O …” I opened my mouth. “O … O …” I shut it again and looked hard at the flagpole, that little tent of stars and stripes behind the barber chair, for I had just spotted a pair of gold lamé ballet slippers at the bottom of it. O was among us. Egbert followed the dotted line of my gaze and I saw he saw. What had we said that might egg on a murderess? It seemed like every word of love could have stuck to O as well as to me. Was O
funny about fuddies
?—well who wasn’t? And O of all people
had to stop thinking about men that way
. Was O in the Bug Motels? Did O make bughouse music? I had the words but she had the tubes, the spooky-flute and the gumbo wobble. And as for who saw The Importance: what girlgoyle thinks herself a lightweight?
not even Tinkerbell. We ought to be safe, Egbert and me, but the American flag was muttering under its breath.

There was one way out of this fix: “… a
three
and a
four
and a …” I burst into song.

The words were pure foam off the top of my head, but I knew I had never sung so well. Egbert outdid himself falling in with this doggerel. His double-jointed thumbs on the bed-panioforte dribbled out their usual tender monkey dissonances, his pinkies whisked the jingles on a distant tambourine.

And then I caught wind of sumpm else: O
oowooing
from inside the Stars and Stripes, not mad anymore but sobbing like the lost soul of America she really was. How come she hadn’t jumped me on the general suspicion, as was her habit? I gazed at the flag in perplexity, and right away I saw a certain roundness behind the thirteen colonies where her belly was. Yes, O had been unusually zaftig lately, her momps as a matter of fact had left even Mary Hartline’s in the dust, good godzilla could she be

“You are angels from heaven for the world! My god, where you have learned to make music like that, what nobody can teach—”

In rolled Doctor Zuk, and not only Doctor Zuk, for she had in her hands the wheelchair handles of Emily Nix Peabody.

It was the first I had seen of my see-through princess in months. So much had happened since I burned her up in her
I
CHOCOLATE
bathrobe that a different me struggled to my feet to get a look at her. And of course it was a different Emily. Fatter, way fatter, and it wasn’t just the padding she was wrapped in. Her arms stuck out over the sides of her wheelchair like a blow-up doll’s, each one ending in five gauze sausages. Her thighs were mummied up too and propped wide, but on the other side of her knees her regular old shins and feet dangled, in her regular old dirty white socks and scabby Mary Janes. Her face was puffy, still Emily but too tired to be ugly-cute anymore. She looked plain and sad. When she saw me her beaky little top lip poked out in the old way and her bucked teeth showed, but I wasn’t so sure she was glad to see me. “Hey Em, how ya doing,” I whispered. “Not so good,” she whispered back, the colorless fringes of her tapwater-blue eyes gummed up with tears, and she looked away.

Lemme tell you, such a negative report of herself from Miss Dying Popularity, the nurses’ pet, the Bug Motel most prized for her guts, was a shock and my jaw dropped and I didn’t know what to say. “You look fatter,” I finally observed, “that ain’t bad.” “Miss Peabody is doing better in highest degree,” Doctor Zuk announced. “She will soon be well.” Emily sniffed mightily. “What is wrong, my dear?” Zuk asked, peering into Emily’s face; now even she seemed puzzled. “They played so purty,” Emily said. “Yes indeed, and so shall you,” Zuk said heartily, “what I have promised? why are we here?” But Emily didn’t answer and in a moment madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse leaned over with a handkerchief and wiped her nose, from which a curtain of green snot had descended. “What I have promised, eh?” she soothed, polishing Emily’s little freckled cocktail onion of a nose, flashing her eyes angrily at me over Emily’s head. What did
I
do, I almost asked, but what kinda
question was that, when Emily sat there like Europe in ruins? “You shall sing, you shall play,” Zuk boomed like a prophetess.

All the same I didn’t like that, Zuk telling Emily and all the world that any girl could be a rock star if she only tried. “You could hum along,” I told Emily, and Zuk gave me a look that said
Monster, despair, you shall never have me or be me
.

But come to think of it Emily
could
sing, I suddenly recalled, sing, yes, like a little girl, but not just any little girl,
the
little girl, the fabulous girlgoyle of myth and legend, that is, a high voice straight as a pencil that doesn’t quite land on the blue rule it’s aiming for but pierces to the numbest cochlea … We could use that in the Bug Motels and in fact Emily was a Bug Motel, she had always been a Bug Motel, what was I thinking of?

“Um, er, uh, maybe you can sing after all,” I said. “Soon’s you pick up the tune.” “I couldn’t never make up no wacky words like that,” Emily was sniffling. “Whaddaya mean,” I argued, trying not to look as frog-proud of my word salad as I naturally was, “you just hold your mouth open and the bugs swim out. You’re in the bughouse, right? There’s always some in there.” “Unh-unh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,” Emily whined. It was like her fabulous girlgoyle nerve had burned up with her fingers.

“Hey, you don’t need a song. I got a song for you, Emily. I got songs for everybody,” I bragged. “Quiet, is enough from you, Miss Bogeywoman,” madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse had the cheek to cut me off in my own clubhouse,
NO ROYALS ALLOWED
, and then she turned to Egbert: “Mr. Stein, you have instrument for Miss Peabody?” “It’s around here somewhere,” Bertie mumbled. I could hardly believe my ears—the two of em had schemed behind my back! Bertie bent down and thrashed around in the big black doctor’s bag he used for his music stuff. “Egbert plays even gooder than Ursie,” Emily commented
helpfully. She was mad at me, not for setting her on fire of course but for forgetting to save her place in the Bug Motels.

Meanwhile Bertie pulled out this wire thing made of godzilla knows what orthopedic appliances and set it on Emily’s head. It looked like the halo from a Sunday school play, only with one rakish antenna spronging out of it and curling around into Emily’s face—some kinda clear plastic laboratory-pipe kazoo or whistle or sumpm was bobbing there at the end of it. Bla-a-a-at! Wouldn’t you know she got a pure A out of it the first time she tried.

Well I had never felt so rudely put in my place in my life but as it was madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse who had put me there, I wouldn’t give up so easily. “Hey, Em, wanna hear my song?” I fired off, “even though yours is better?” Emily stopped blowing, the wastewater whistle dangled there patiently in its off-the-eyebrows orbit, and she said with a sick little smile, “Yeah, sure, Ursie.” “We have heard your song,” Zuk intervened coldly, “it is very fine song, like we told you once already, but now is time for somebody else.” Exactly when she put on these democratic airs, Doctor Zuk was the royalest royal of them all. “Ahem,
NO ROYALS ALLOWED
,” I quoted, pointing to the hand-lettered sign thumbtacked over
NEUROPATHOLOGY
. “Will you please shut up and let Emily play, Ursie,” Bertie said to me. I stared at him in disbelief. He was a whole new person, he was getting better, he was getting even better
than me
. I didn’t like that. Now that he was in love with me I could see he meant to jack me up to the highest standards. I stuck out my chin and announced: “That last tune was just an improv. I got my own song, everybody gets a song.” “Give Em a turn now. We all know you’re the best,” Egbert said. Dead silence after that, since everybody knew who was really the best. They all stared at me,
waiting for me to be a better person. “I ain’t the best, you are and you know it,” I caved in, and was ready to lay my pukelele down or even play humble backup when Emily said, “I got nuttin to sing yet, honest, all-a-youse. Whyncha let Ursie go first.” They looked at each other, shrugging. What could they do? Hah!

Instead of my own ditty, I tuned up my puke and sang

“I think I heard that song before,” said O, wrinkling up her nose. She was always poking that nose into some ragged anthology in the dayroom, maybe she really smelled a rat. “Heh-heh, I don’t think so,” I muttered, but then my eye fell on Zuk. Her ugly hands were on her hips and her dark eyes flashed. “You have steal Miss Peabody’s song,” she said, “I am shocked.” “No I didn’t,” I said uncomfortably, “I just borrowed it.” True, I had sung Emily’s words to
O Susanna
in my sloppy haste. Probably that gave away my larceny even to a dreambox mechanic from
Outer Hotzeplotz. Yes, all at once I was sure that even in Outer Hotzeplotz, third graders sang “O Susanna!” the same way we sang “La Cucaracha” and “Song of the Volga Boatmen” at P.S. 149. I turned red. “Greedy, greedy girl,” Doctor Zuk rolled her guttural
r
’s at me, “what I will do with you? Look what you have done,” and she pointed down at gauze-upholstered little Miss Peabody, refusal was her middle name. Emily had managed to twist her face into her wheelchair so all I could see was the tangled back of her head.

I saw I’d better do sumpm for Emily or Zuk would be disgusted with me for weeks. “Hey Em.” She turned back around and she was a puzzle piece of sad lumps around her face, like all Bug Motels when they wonder how they fit in. But the thing about puzzle pieces is, you can turn them. “Say Em,” I said, “I made up that song just for you and if you don’t like it, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And my neck, it’s a pretty long neck, wilted like a strip of bacon. I got so low and depressed that I even banged my chin on my pukelele, which played a weird, going-nowhere, broken-down fence gate of a chord. Then she had to do sumpm for
me
, see. Then she fit in again. “That ain’t it, Ursie, I love that song,” she said nobly. “It was my best,” I sniffled.

I slid a glance over at Doctor Zuk to see if she bought it. I don’t think so. Her eyes glowed down at me like nuggets of greenblack kryptonite or sumpm. “You are good little horse thief,” she said to me without smiling. “So—what shall be punishment of Bogeywoman, Miss Peabody? She must be punished. You may choose.”

“Whatcha gonna punish her for?” Emily asked in genuine consternation. “For too big will,” Doctor Zuk replied, “she eats too much, she talks too much, she sings too much, she
takes whole room and lives only little bit for somebody else.” “She wrote me that purty song,” Emily pointed out. Doctor Zuk smirked knowingly behind Emily, but only for my benefit. “At everything, everything she touches, Miss Bogeywoman is good,” Doctor Zuk agreed, “but
she can be better
. So what is right punishment for her?” Emily looked around for some kind of help, her grave little Joan of Arc eyes gone watery, almost scared now. “Make her sing her own ugly song,” I whispered in Emily’s ear. “Make her sing her own ugly song,” Emily repeated in relief. “Your song, please,” Doctor Zuk ordered. She was furious. Her eyebrows arched, her eyelids descended; she was imperially bored. “It’s ugly,” I warned em. “I hope is ugly, since you have steal show from Miss Peabody,” Doctor Zuk said, “now please to get it over.”

It was ugly all right, hungry and repulsive. It was Emily puffed up in her yellow salve and white gauze like a cheese stick, and me trying to save her, and Zuk trying to save her from me, and me showing off and feeling rotten. It was me feeling like kissing somebody, but even more like throwing up.