In the kitchen, Mimi’s mother was dressed for the butcher shop in a red sweater, the sleeves rolled up over the elbows. She wore a red bow in her hair, and two bright spots of rouge on her cheeks.
“Hello, honeypie, good morning,” she said to Mimi, stuffing a load of washing into the machine. “There’s cereal for you, bacon, milk, and buttered toast. How’s the bacon, Gary?”
Gary, sitting at the table in his bathrobe, grunted something and stuck his nose into his milk, sucking it up with noises that reminded Mimi of bathroom plungers.
“I’m not very hungry,” Mimi said.
“Put butter, sugar, and cream on the cereal, and it’ll taste delicious. Your brother,” she added, as if she were recounting one of his many virtues, “ate a big bowlful.”
“I don’t have an appetite yet,” Mimi said. “Could I just drink some orange juice and have toast?”
“Absolutely not, missy. A good breakfast—”
“Eileen.” From the butcher shop, Mimi’s father called her mother.
“Coming right away, honeypie,” her mother answered in a trilling voice. Then to Mimi, “A good breakfast is essential for health. Clean up everything in front of you. You can’t expect to grow if you don’t eat! Sometimes I look at you and marvel, where did I get such a thin daughter? You’re like a drink of water, there’s nothing to you. You’re not like anyone else in the family.”
Mimi nodded, looking at her bony knees showing beneath the hem of her nightgown. Bony elbows, bony hands, even her feet were bony. Birdbones, her mother called her. Her parents and her brother were all large people, tall, big-boned, heavy-fleshed, their skins shining as if oiled, perhaps from all the meat and butter and cheese and eggs they ate.
A fly hovered over the butter in its pink plastic bowl. Then it lit on the mouth of the red plastic milk container. Mimi sat on the edge of her chair, and an edge of her dream came back to her, for an instant. To swim away! Up and out of this greasy golden air.
There was a knock on the door connecting apartment and butcher shop. “Eileen!”
“Coming! It’s raining, he’s feeling grumpy today,” Mimi’s mother said confidentially. She opened the door to the butcher shop, then turned to say in a hasty half-whisper, “Eat!”
Mimi swallowed a spoonful of oatmeal. “All right. All right. Go on. He’s waiting for you.”
Mimi’s father was the butcher, her mother worked behind the counter in the shop. She greeted each customer by name, like an old friend. When she was a little girl, Mimi had thought these women, of whom her mother often spoke in intimate terms, really were her friends. While Mimi’s father went into the icebox to take the meat off the hook her mother joked about the weather. If it was winter and sleeting outside, she’d say, “Now isn’t that gorgeous weather. Suntan weather!” And if it was a miserable muggy summer day, the ceiling fan sluggishly stirring the hot air, she’d say, “A fine day, isn’t it, so cool and fresh?” And the customer, Mrs. Grunbacher, or young Mrs. Levinson, or Mrs. Knoblock, or high-voiced Milly Tea—whoever it was—would laugh and say, “Eileen, you’re too much!” By then, Mimi’s father would be cutting the meat, out on the block where the customer could see that it was being properly trimmed. He would weigh the chops and Mimi’s mother would wrap the meat in pink butcher paper and take the money, still making little jokes.
“When people smile, they don’t mind the high prices so much,” Mimi’s mother said. “They don’t blame us, they see we’re all the same, we have to live just the way they do.”
In the shop, every day, six days a week, Mimi’s mother was cheerful. Even if she had a headache, she would still make her little jokes about the weather. But in the apartment, in the rooms behind the butcher shop, Mimi’s mother seemed to fade. She scrubbed the two spots of color off her cheeks and wore a faded housecoat that reached just below her knees. Her voice, too, seemed to fade; when she wanted Mimi to do something she would start off cheerfully, as if Mimi were a customer, but if Mimi were feeling stubborn and argued with her mother, her mother’s voice would quickly lose its bright timbre and cheer, and an aggravated tone would creep in.
“The bathroom needs cleaning,” her mother might announce cheerfully. “And isn’t this a beautiful day to clean it.”
“You should make Gary clean the tub, he’s the one who always leaves it dirty.”
“Gary’s just a little boy, honeypie.”
“Good Lord! Little! He’s bigger than me.”
“You know what I mean, he’s only nine years old—”
“He’s strong and he’s healthy as a horse. Why don’t you ask him to do the work?”
“Boys are different. Anyway, he doesn’t do a good job like you. You’re so neat—”
“You mean if I start being a slob, I can get out of things like Gary?”
This might go on for five or ten minutes, until her mother said, “Mimi, you do what I say. Do you want me to call your father?” Her mother’s skin glistened as if freshly smeared with oil. “I don’t ask you to do that much,” her mother always said, but in fact Mimi’s mother wanted many things from her. She wanted Mimi to work in the butcher shop on Saturdays, to watch Gary after school, to clean the apartment, to be more open and cheerful, to get good marks but not to be too smart, to help Gary with his homework, to bring friends home, to eat everything on her plate, to grow taller and fatter, and to smile at her father.
Her father had heavy white hairless arms and big heavy hands, raw-looking, like fresh meat. He rarely spoke. If an argument between Mimi and her mother or Mimi and her brother went on too long, if the voices rose beyond a certain threshold known only to him, he would bang on the door between the shop and the house, or heave himself up from his plush chair and boot Mimi in the rear end.
Whenever her father rose like that Mimi wrote in her diary, “Kicked.” Coming on the single word sometimes when she flipped through the pages, it appeared to her mysterious, terrifying, poisonous. Kicked. A word like a steel spring. In the same room with her father, even on peaceful evenings, she sometimes felt as if she were suffocating.
When she left the apartment that morning, it had stopped raining. Coming from those windowless rooms, Mimi stepped into the wet shining world as if she were plunging into a lake. She was sorry the rain was over. There was nothing so wonderful as spring rain. She could walk for hours in a warm rain.
Mimi greedily sniffed the air. The city had the harsh clean look of early spring. Oh, I love wet days! I love spring, I love life! Mimi thought fervently. I love Robert Rovere! Then turning the corner she suddenly saw him ahead of her, walking with several other boys. At once, Mimi slowed down. Her cheeks became hot and moist.
She didn’t dare catch up to Robert and pass him. She was afraid he would look at her and know how she felt about him. But the truth was he never looked at her. They had two classes together every day, but she might as well have been a piece of furniture, a desk, or a map stand, for all that he ever noticed her.
He was exceptionally good-looking. He was tall, slender, carried himself well, and every day wore a fresh crew-neck sweater in the softest wool. He had brown eyes flecked with amber and covered by long dark lashes that gave his face a rather tender look. Several girls were in love with him. However, there were things about Robert that disturbed Mimi: he was always combing his hair; he was not above mocking Miss Grey. Most of the other boys did the same. But Mimi wanted Robert to be perfect.
Only a few days before, a boy passing in the corridor had rapped on the door, shouted out “Hey, hey, Nellie Grey, your father says you may!”
Laughter rocked the class. Nellie was short, round, and gray as her name, gray as a dustball. She darted to the door on tiny bird feet encased in little gray shoes. “You! You there! Come back.” Behind her back Robert stood and silently mimicked her futile gestures. His performance had been well received. Laughter and whistles.
Miss Grey came back to her desk. The pockets of flesh on her face were mottled with tiny red veins. Mimi’s
neck had been damp with pity; she wanted to hate Robert, but found it impossible. Instead, she despised herself. She had sat there and laughed, too, hadn’t she?
In school she met Susan at the lockers. “I walked behind him all the way,” she said at once.
They never said Robert’s name. “Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Too bad!”
“Are you kidding? If he’d seen me—” Mimi shuddered violently. “I was trapped! I couldn’t get past him and those others—Benjie, Paul, and what’s-his-face that’s always following RR around. I just had to keep walking behind him.” She told Susan about her mother’s suggestion for a party. “She was really pushing it. I told her no.”
“Why? It sounds like a good idea.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours. It still sounds like a good idea.”
“Terrific. Who would I invite. You?”
“Oh, there are other kids.” Susan was always calm. She was a tall blond girl with a large nose and a creamy complexion. She and Mimi had been friends for about a year.
“Think what you’re saying, Susan. Think! Can you imagine my father staying put in his bedroom? Like a little mouse?”
“I am thinking,” Susan said. “A kitchen party, you could make popcorn, we could fix things up, decorate, I mean. It might be fun. And you could invite him. It would be a way to get to know him.”
“You’re crazy. He’d refuse. Why would he come to a party at my house?”
“I hear he likes parties.”
“Make-out parties, probably.”
Susan plucked at her lower lip. “I have a plan. We’ll find out first how he feels about you. Then, we can decide about the party.”
“Find out how he feels about me! How do we do that?”
“Ask him,” Susan said, sensibly.
“Ask him! Ask him what? Are you crazy, Susan? What do I do, go up to him and say, ‘By the way, how do you feel about me? Oh, you don’t even know who I am? I’m Mimi Holtzer. Now, how do you feel about me?’ Terrific plan.”
“Temper, temper,” Susan said. “Ill think of something, you know me. Anyway, he knows who you are. He knows. He’s been watching you. I saw him watching you yesterday in Nellie’s class.”
“You’re making it up. You’re saying that to make me feel good.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Would you make up things to tell me?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, neither would I.”
They stopped at the door to the science lab. Mimi tried to remember the day before in Nellie Grey’s algebra class. What had she been thinking about? How had she been sitting? A conviction seized her that she had been chewing on her thumbnail, an unconscious habit which her mother said made her look like a rabbit. Had Robert really been watching her?
The bell rang. “Come on, girls, come on,” Mr. Bradford called impatiently. “Inside!”
“Leave it to me,” Susan said as they hurried toward their seats. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Susan, don’t do anything. Nothing!”
“Girls—please!”
Mimi dropped into her seat. She tried to shake her head violently at Susan without attracting Mr. Bradford’s attention.
Susan looked pointedly toward Robert, who sat two seats across from her, then pantomimed writing him a note. Again Mimi shook her head. No! Susan winked at her; her wink said, Relax, I’ll take care of it.
Mr. Bradford asked if someone could define igneous rock. Susan folded a piece of paper and passed it to Robert. Volcanoes erupted in Mimi’s mind: millions of years flashed by in a second. Robert was opening the note. Mimi thought of Nellie Grey’s tenuous grasp on her dignity, of her mother’s fat, shaven white legs, and then of her own hopeless passion for Robert Rovere. Did anything make sense? Her neck was sweating.
It wasn’t till the end of the day that Susan had an answer from Robert. “Give it to me.” Mimi held out her hand.
“You know, it was really a stupid idea to write that note,” Susan said. “One of my lesser genius ideas. In fact, a real dumdum idea.” She folded the note over three times.
“He hates me,” Mimi said. “He wrote that he hates me.”
“No, no. No, really. No, he didn’t say that. But why don’t I just tear it up, anyway.”
“It’s awful, I know it’s craven of me, but I want to see it. You wrote it, and he answered it, and now I want to see it.”
“Don’t be stubborn.”
“Give me the note, Susan.”
“Listen, it’s nothing. Really, it’s nothing. Zero. Total nothing. If you don’t see it, you won’t miss a thing.”
“I want to see it. Anyway.”
Susan folded the note again so that it was very small and thick. “Come on, Mimi. Forget it, okay? Look, you’re going to embarrass me, because it was my dumdum idea, and—”
“Give—me—the—note,” Mimi said. Bugles sounded. Drums rolled. She stood straight-backed, blindfolded, about to be shot through the eyes. She tore away the blindfold. I will face my death like a woman, she shouted. “I want to see it, Susan,” she said. “You have to give it to me.”
“It’s your funeral,” Susan sighed, handing Mimi the wad of notepaper.
Susan had written, “Robert, someone with the initials MH likes you very much. How do you feel about her? Respondez si’l vous pleeze on the other side.”
Mimi turned over the paper. In a cramped scrawl, Robert had answered, “Tell her to go pluck a duck.”
“It’s not that bad,” Susan said.
“It’s terrible.” Mimi crumpled the note and stuck it in her pocket.
“He didn’t say he hated you. He just said—”
“I know what he said.” Mimi walked out of the building followed by Susan. “He hates me.”
“I’m sorry,” Susan said. “It was my dumdum idea.”
“All right! You said that enough times already.” She took out the note and read it again. It hurt even more on the second reading. He could have said he didn’t know her, or was interested in another girl, or not answered at all. She felt dumbly miserable. What had ever made her think even for one insane moment that Robert Rovere, splendid, beautiful RR, would be, could be even remotely interested in Mimi Holtzer, plain, skinny, drink-of-water Mimi?
“Forget him,” she advised herself in her diary. “He’s not worth the misery. He’s crude, without feeling, insensitive. Never think about him again! Wipe him out completely from your mind!”
But she couldn’t do it. All weekend, in fact, as she went about her chores in the house and the shop, she compulsively made up scenes in which (a) Robert followed her into Lincoln Park to confess he was and always had been madly, helplessly in love with her; (b) he was overheard telling another boy that Mimi Holtzer was far, far too good for the likes of him; (c) he implored her to believe the note was a hideous mistake, and begged her to wear his blue Shetland wool sweater as a sign of forgiveness; and (d) barging into her house, he passionately declared he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat, he could only think of her. In turn, Mimi was (a) sweetly understanding; (b) aghast at the poor boy’s crumpled pride; (c) warm and forgiving; and (d) warm and understanding.
Monday, and the rest of the week, Robert stared at her all through science and algebra. Mimi never looked directly at him, but she knew he was staring. Once, in the hall, he seemed about to say something, but she veered away abruptly. She was afraid he would do something horrible. The worst part of the whole humiliating business was that she was still knocked out by him; her stomach knotted every time she walked into a classroom and saw him sitting there, beautiful and perfect.
After school on Friday, she was home, peeling potatoes, when her mother called from the butcher shop for Mimi to pick up the extension phone in the kitchen.
“Mimi? This is Robert. Do you want to go to the dance at the Y tonight?”
“Who?”
“Robert.”
“Oh.” She f
elt dazed and, picking up a pencil, scribbled the word “who” on the wall, then began to shade it in carefully.
“Robert Rovere,” he said.
“Yes. I know.” Her heart seemed to be beating in her ear (she was sure he could hear it), the ear to which she held the phone, the ear through which Robert Rovere’s voice, smooth as salad oil, was sliding down to her thundering heart.
“Well?” he said.
“What?”
“The dance,” he said.
“Oh! Okay.”
“Okay about the dance?”
“Yes. Okay.”
“Well,” he said, “then do you want me to meet you at the Y, or come to your house?”
She tried to remember exactly where the Y was. She wrote “Y” on the wall in a block letter. There was a long silence. She was still trying to remember where the Y was. She had only known its location all her life.
“You there?” he said.
“Yes!”
“I’ll come to your house.”
“Okay.” How many times had she said okay? Couldn’t she say anything else? “Good-bye,” she said, hastily. “Oh! Wait! Robert. Robert Rovere! Do you know where I live?” Why had she said his name that way? She wanted to punch her head against the wall.
“Broad Street,” he said.
“Near the elementary school,” she said. “Come around to the back. Okay?” She’d said it again. “Thank you.” She hung up the phone. At once she was convinced the entire call was a practical joke. And she, the fool, had even said, Thank you!
Her mother came into the kitchen. “Who was that?”
“A boy. I’m going to the Y tonight, to a dance.” The last words came out in a mumble. Was she?
“You’re going out with a boy? To a dance? Well, that’s wonderful, honeypie.”
“Yes.”
“Get dressed up, you’re going to change your clothes, aren’t you? Who’s the boy?”
“Robert Rovere.” Her lips hardly seemed to want to part to say the name.
“Robert Rovere!” her mother repeated in thrilled tones, as if she knew Robert and were as infatuated as Mimi.
Mimi stared at her. “I’ve got to finish peeling the potatoes,” she said, going back to the sink.
Dear Bill, Remember Me? Page 7
