Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Read Free Book Online Page A

my jacket. . . Over the years Pete pointed out to me the inherent sadness of stale bread, old newspapers, nipples, empty envelopes, house plants, shuffleboard, “Greensleeves,” goose migration, dry tufted grass “like old man hair,” the color pink, babies, lambs, puppies and kittens (the fact that they all grow up), knitwear, unused fireplaces, and my mother’s tomatoes all lined up for bottling (Pete had chanced upon the little-known staring-at-the-produce stage of the preserving process). The world was a cornucopia of melancholy for Pete!
    I still fret about my scuzzy Mr. Potatohead, which I traded one day for Pete’s trusty stopwatch. Does everyone agonize over the unfair swaps of yesteryear?
     
    But now, safe in adulthood, I no longer needed Tongue Bandit because I could watch Bette Davis movies all day! And pat Bubs. Whenever my lap was available, Bubbles would claim it, and it was available to him (her) most of the time, since I was still trying to keep my foot elevated. Bubbles proved a much better moviegoer than Gertrude ever was: Bubbles could concentrate .
    So there I was on Martin Luther King Day, sitting around in shorts and a T-shirt (due to my antipathy to bathrobes) watching Now, Voyager , with Bubbles draped across my legs enjoying a cat nap that had been preceded by an extravagantly long patting and purring session. This had ended in sound slumber only when I let my hand lie still on her. She liked that. Leaving me free to give myself to Bette. But for once I was transfixed not by Bette Davis’s eyes, like two rogue planets trying to found their own solar system, but by her eyebrows . In the first scene Bette—severely depressed, nearing thirty, still living at home with her mother—spends all her time carving ivory boxes and secretly smoking. As a result, apparently, her eyebrows when she first appears are hairier than Claude Rains’s—and his are all over the place! It must have been so long since anyone in Hollywood had seen a real pair of unplucked female eyebrows, the make-up artists (precursors to my own profession) panicked and slapped two walruses on her face. Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) comes in mumbling something about pipe-smoking. Forget the pipe , man, get a load of those brows !
    It was at this point that my cleaner, Deedee, barged into the apartment, my cleaner who had specifically requested long ago that I should never be around when she came to clean. Or, if I had to be home, I was to let her know ahead of time so that she could wear pants —she always wore pants, it seemed, when men were present, to prevent any sexual overtures. I was never at home in the daytime, I assured her, though privately I had felt a little aggrieved. The woman was at least sixty years old, and not top on the list of people I might wish to ravish. Also, I spend my life trying to help women, not violate them. But for five years I had duly made sure I wasn’t home on Deedee’s cleaning days, and left her monthly check on the hall table. The mix-up today had occurred because she’d been off on vacation for a few weeks over Christmas; in the meantime I’d wallowed for so long in sickness, sloth and solitude I’d appropriated my own apartment and clean forgotten about my cleaner!
    But here she was, wearing a spotty, dotty dress (not unlike Bette’s mid-breakdown) and I, barely clothed at all! Apologies, apologies. I stood up and tried to make my way to the bedroom. But at the sight of my limp, Deedee rushed to my aid, and supported me all the way back to bed. She even tucked me in and brought me a sandwich, her own lunch, straight from the deli. I almost couldn’t swallow it, so touched was I by the ministrations of this near-stranger after all those weeks alone. I wasn’t used to compassion—that stuff’s for laymen! To top it off, she admired Bubbles, who cheerfully followed Deedee around, until the vacuuming began.
    At some point in the morning, Deedee brought me my mail. She must have thought I