Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Read Free Book Online

shut-eye.
    These torments, and my dad’s insistence that Bee and I each play an instrument, were the only exposure I got to music apart from the arrival of the Virtue and Chewing Gum Philharmonic in the school gym, one afternoon a year. We all had to file in, sit down, shut up, keep still, and listen to the concert. If the teachers saw a foot tapping, or your head rocking a bit to the music, you were out. Most of my early Beethoven moments were therefore gleaned from the corridor outside. The real point of this cultural event wasn’t the music but the military exercise of making us (and the orchestra) assemble and disassemble. It didn’t help me much with Berlioz.
    Another of my neurotic insomnia strategies was Tongue Bandit. In this game, my tongue was a bandit on the run from a posse of lawmen. The bandit has to scramble along the cliff face of my teeth, looking for a foothold or a gap he could squeeze through. But the rocks are slippery and it’s hard to find purchase (unless I’d just lost a baby tooth). The lynch mob’s closing in, so sometimes the desperado has to make a sudden leap for freedom. This got me through many a bout of sleeplessness or boredom at home and at school until Gus, the class pest, noticed something weird going on in my mouth one day and yelled out in the middle of Geography class, “Hey, Harrison’s about to puke!”
    When I was older, bedtime moved from 6:00 to 7:30, but by then I could climb out of my window at night, slip the six feet to the ground below, and go commune with animals in the woods, or try to. I had a tracker’s book of scat, paw prints, and animal silhouettes, which I hoped would help me locate some entity that wanted to be befriended. But these excursions too were often destroyed by Gus, who’d turn up with a frog he’d just disemboweled, or a squirrel he’d skinned. (Gus’s real name was Fergus but he’d stripped the Fer off that too). He considered himself a rugged outdoorsman, and hunted me down, to lecture me to death on Churchill and World War II (Gus’s favorite war), or serenade me on his stupid guitar.
    Gus was an addict of fright. He was the kind of kid who was always snapping your underpants as you went past his desk, or plotting vengeance against the teachers who of course hated him (everybody did!). But he was a good source of maniac stories, which we were all crazy for—though for quite a while I didn’t even know what a “maniac” was . I had the idea it was something like a midget , probably because of the maniac story in which a maniac manages to hang on to some honeymooners’ car door for miles and miles, after they refused to give him a ride. I figured only a midget could survive a journey like that, hanging on to a door handle. This confusion kind of wrecked The Wizard of Oz for me, and might never have been cleared up if Bee hadn’t called Dad a maniac one day.
    “But he’s six feet tall!” I said.
    “What’s that got to do with it?”
    She’d called him a maniac because of the canoeing lessons. Dad had finally caved on the canoe front—he didn’t get the big old canoe down from the garage but he bought us a cheap inflatable one, a mild act of benevolence he followed up with a lot of denunciation of Bee’s attempts to use it. When verbal scorn failed, he bopped her on the head with the plastic oar one day, and kicked the canoe so hard it shot out into the middle of the river with the tearful Bee inside it. She drifted quickly out of sight downstream, and had to walk home for miles with the deflated canoe under her arm.
    My real friend at school was Pete, the sweetest guy I ever knew. Pete was in love with death: whatever game we played, he had to be the dying cowboy, the dying spaceman, the dying cop or robber. He loved to be carried, twitching, off a battlefield. He was also an expert on melancholy . Everything got Pete down: flightless birds, dying daffodils, the ultimate futility of the patches my mother sewed on the elbows of