Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordperson

by George Alec Effinger

  When I got closer I saw that I had made just a little bitty mistake. The station wagon and the Yalies turned into a drastic and severe kind of a fight, a brawl, really, except everybody was using one of these swords and they were using them for real. I mean, Bitsy, my God, blood was pouring all over everywhere and people were actually dying and it was all kind of heroic and all that and very horrible and dramatic. It was people against big, giant things with four arms. No, really. Really. Bitsy, stop laughing. There were these huge old creatures with four arms, and they were chopping away at these normal-sized people, with everybody fighting away with these intense grins on their faces. I never did figure out about that, why they were all smiling while they were whacking away at each other. Anyway, while I stood there the two groups just about wiped each other out, all the giant creatures except one and all the people except this one positively devastating guy. All the other guys and girls were lying very dead on the orange stuff, and it wasn't really surprising. I mean, just imagine something that's twelve feet tall and has arms slashing swords around up where you can barely see, for God's sake. And then this darling boy goes and tangles his adorable legs and falls over backwards.

  Bitsy, are you listening to this, or what? I mean, I don't know why I even bothered—no, look. I didn't have to send you the telegram. I could have called Mother. Except she would have had kittens if she had seen me like this. Do you understand? This was a very moving moment for me, Bitsy, I mean, watching these kids fighting like that and all, and even though I didn't know them, I got very emotional and everything. So I'd appreciate it, I really would, if you'd show a little respect. You've never had to fight for anything except with the burger-brained Amherst freshman you went out with senior year. Of course I remember him. He reminds me a lot of these four-armed things.

  Well, if anything terminal happened to my blond hero, that monster was coming after me next. So, perky little thing that I am, I run up and grab a sword—this sword, I call her "Old Betsy" because that's what Davy Crockett called his rifle or something—I grab Old Betsy and I stand there trying not to look that . . . thing in the eye. This was very easy, believe me, because his eyes are at least six feet over my head. And I'm all nice and balanced—you remember, you were there, you remember how tremendous I was in that six weeks of fencing we had sophomore year, with what's-her name, Miss Duplante? You remember how she was absolutely terrified of me? Anyway, picture me standing there en garde waiting for this four-armed darling to settle into position. But he doesn't, that's what's so scary, he just goes whacko! and takes a swipe at my goddamn head.

  Only I'm not there anymore, I'm about fifty feet away. I remembered that I could jump, but really. So I hop around for a minute or two to get my bearings and to stay away from the thing's sword. I hop, and I jump, bounce, bounce, bounce, all around the landscape. And the creature is watching me, mad as hell. My blond dream is still on the ground, and he's watching, too. "Get a sword, dummy," I yell at him, and he nods. That's something else I forgot to tell you, Bitsy. All the people on this planet speak English. It's really neat and very convenient. So between the two of us we finished the monster off. No, it's just too awful to think about, stabbing and bleeding and hacking and all like that. Fencing was a lot tidier—you know, just a kind of polite poking around with a sharp stick. And I had to do all the heavyweight hacking because my boyfriend couldn't reach anything terribly vital on the four-armed thing. He was taking mighty swings at the giant's knees, and meanwhile good old Muffy is cutting its pathetic head off. Just altogether unreal.

  Well, that's the dynamic, exciting carnage part. After I took care of the immediate danger, the boy starts to talk to me. "Hello," he goes. "You were excellent."

  "Thanks," I go. At this point I feel like I'm riding on a horse with only one rocker, but I don't let it show. The old Greenberg School pride, Bitsy. He goes, "My name is Prince Van."

  "Uh-huh," I go. "I'm Maureen Birnbaum. My daddy is a contract lawyer and I live with my mother. We raise golden retrievers."

  "How nice," the prince goes. Let me tell you what this guy looked like! You wouldn't believe it! Do you remember that boy who came down to visit that drecky redhead from Staten Island? No, not the boy from Rutgers, the one from—where was it? That place I never heard of—Colby College, in Maine? Sounds like a goddamned cheese factory or something? Anyway, standing beside me on the orange stuff is something just like him, only the prince is awesome. He is strong and blond with perfect teeth and eyes like Paul Newman and he's wearing, well, you see what I'm wearing. Just imagine, honey, if that isn't just too devastating for you. He is beautiful. And his name is Prince Van. I always told you that someday my prince would—

  Okay, okay. I didn't really know what to say to him or anything. I mean, we'd just had this sort of pitched battle and all, and there were all these unpleasant bodies laying around—we were stepping over people here and there, and I was trying not to notice. We stopped and he bent down and took this harness for me from someone he said had been his sister. He didn't seem sad or anything. He was very brave, intensely brave, no tears for Sis, the gang back at the palace wouldn't approve. And all the dead boys looked just like him, all blond and large and uncomfortably cute, and all the girls looked just like Tri-Delts, with feathered blond hair and perfect teeth. They had been his retinue, Prince Van explained, and he said I shouldn't grieve. He could get another one.

  "Where to?" I go. The palace couldn't be too far away, I thought.

  "Well," he says—and his voice is like a handful of Valium; I just wanted to curl up and listen to it—he says, like, "my city is two thousand miles that way," he pointed, "but there is a closer city one thousand miles that way." He pointed behind us.

  I go, "Thousand? You've got to be kidding."

  He says, like, "I have never seen anyone like you." And he smiled. Bitsy, that was just the kind of thing my mother had warned me about, and I had begun to think it didn't really exist. I think I was in love.

  "I'm from another world," I go. I tried to sound like I partied around in space quite a bit.

  "That explains it," he goes. "It explains your strength and agility and your exotic beauty. I am captivated by your raven tresses. No one on our world has hair your color. It is very beautiful." Raven tresses, for God's sake! I think I blushed, and I think he wanted me to. We were holding hands by now. I was thinking about one or two thousand miles alone with Prince Van of Who-Knows-Where. I wondered what boys and girls did on this planet when they were alone. I decided that it was the same everywhere.

  We walked for a long time and I asked a lot of questions. He must have thought I was just really lame, but he never laughed at me. I learned that the cities are so far because we were walking across the bottom of what had been a great ocean, years and years before. There weren't oceans and lakes and things on this planet now. They have all their water delivered or something. I thought, "There's oil down there." I wanted to remember that for when we got to the palace. I don't think anyone had realized it yet.

  "Then where do you go sailing?" I go.

  "Sailing?" he asked innocently.

  "What about swimming?"

  "Swimming?"

  He was cute, absolutely tremendous, in fact, but life without sailing and swimming would be just too terribly triste, you know? And I think he was just being polite before when I mentioned golden retrievers.

  I say, like, "Is there somewhere I can pick up some clothes?" I figured that although his city was two thousand miles away, there were probably isolated little ocean-bottom suburbs along the way or shopping malls where all the blond people came to buy new straps and swords and stuff.

  "Clothes?" he goes. I knew he was going to say that, I just knew it, but as gross as it was, I had to hear it from his own lips.

  I walked along for a while, dying, absolutely dying for a cigarette, not saying anything. Then I couldn't stand it any longer. "Van," I go, "listen. It isn't like it hasn't been wonderful with you, cutting up that big old monster and
all. But, like, there are some things about this relationship that are totally the worst, but really."

  "Relationship?" he goes. He kept smiling. I think I could eventually see enough of it.

  I explained it all to him. There were no horses. There was no sailing, no swimming, no skiing, no racquetball. There were no penny loafers, no mixers at the boy's schools, no yearbooks. There was no Junior Year Abroad, no Franny and Zooey Glass, no Nantucket Island, no Coors. There was no Sunday Times, no Godiva chocolates, no Dustin Hoffman. There was no Joni Mitchell and no food processors and no golden retrievers and no little green Triumphs.

  There were no clothes. Bitsy, there was no shopping!

  So kind of sadly, I kissed him on the cheek and told myself that his couldn't-be-cuter expression was a little sad, too. I say, like, "Adieu, mon cher," and I give him a little wave. Then I stretched myself out toward the sky again—oh, yes, just a little late I told myself that I wasn't absolutely sure about what I was doing, that I might end up God knows where—and waited to whoosh back to the snowy mountaintop in Vermont. I missed. But fortunately it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I mean, I didn't land on Saturn or anything. I turned up on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 45th Street. No one noticed me very much; I fit right into that neighborhood.

  So if I can just ask you a little favor, Bitsy, then I'll be on my way. Yes, on my way, goddamn it, I'm going back. I'm not going to leave that but totally attractive Prince Van to those perky blonde hometown honeys—he is mine. I kept my harness and Old Betsy on the way here, so I think I know how to get back there again with anything I want to take with me. So I want to pick up a few things first. My daddy always told me to Be Prepared. He said that all the time, he's a Mason or something. He sure was prepared when he met Pammy and he's close to fifty years old.

  Never mind. Anyway, let's go rummage in a bin somewhere and suit me up with a plaid skirt or two and some cute jeans and some sweaters and some alligator shirts and Top-siders and a brand-new insulated ski jacket and sunglasses and some Je Reviens and stuff. It'll be fun!

  Oh. And a circle pin. My old one wore out.

  * * * * *

  WE WENT SHOPPING at Saks and Bloomingdale's—I went to Korvettes and got her some cheaper clothes first, though. I didn't want to walk around Manhattan with Muffy while she was wearing nothing but suspenders and no pants. We charged four hundred dollars to Mums' cards, and let me tell you I heard about that a few weeks later. But I was sworn to secrecy. Now Muffy's gone again, back to her secret paradise in the sky, back to Prince Van of the terribly straight teeth. I hope she's happy. I hope she comes back some day to tell me her adventures. I hope she pays me back the four hundred dollars. Perhaps only time will tell. . . .

  Maureen Birnbaum

  at the Earth's Core

  by Bitsy Spiegelman

  (as told to George Alec Effinger)

  ALL I KNOW is that I was supposed to leave for Cancún. The plane was at two, and you know what traffic is like in the sleet to airport, so I was planning to leave the apartment sometimes around noon to get there and get my bags checked through and have enough time to pour three or four drinks into me. I do not like to fly—it doesn't matter if the plane is coining down in Aspen or Cancún or Oz. I do not like to fly. The four drinks wouldn't calm me either, unless they were washing down five of the big Valiums. The baby blue ones. Whatever they are. Tens. I think.

  Anyway, I'd packed two days before and checked everything at least twice, had my passport and my tickets in my purse with cab fare in case my sweet little RX-7 perished heroically somewhere on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and I was all set to start hauling my bags out to the car, when guess what? The phone rang. My mother, I figured. It's always my mother. Mums would be calling to let me know the latest herpes statistics or something, so I just let it ring. It rang and rang and rang. I had all the luggage in the car, and the goddamn telephone was still ringing. Mums only rings ten times. So I answered it. I go "Hello?" And I was in a real rush because I had only two hours to get maybe twelve miles on the best highway system in the Free World.

  "Bitsy?" goes this girl's voice.

  "Look, I really have to run. Got to catch a plane. Call me next week, we'll have lunch."

  "Bitsy? This is Maureen. Muffy."

  I could have died just standing there with the phone against my ear. It was Maureen Birnbaum, giving me a little call on January 15, 1985, exactly four years to the day since she had last disappeared. I didn't know what to say to her for a moment. "Muffy," I managed at last, "you still owe my mother four hundred dollars."

  "I meant to talk to you about that. Can I see you? It's awfully important, I mean really."

  Four years ago she'd shown up in midtown Manhattan wearing a couple of square inches of gold lamé and carrying an honest-to-God sword. She'd just gotten back from Mars, you see. After she gave me her absolutely incredible story, she'd vanished for four solid years without so much as a note or card. Now she wanted to catch up on old times and tell me more about Mars and stuff and the beautiful prince she'd fallen in love with. "Listen, Muffy," I go, "it would be like, great, except I was just going out the door. Club Med, you know. I've saved up all year for this, okay?"

  "Bitsy." There was this creepiness in her voice that she'd get sometimes when we were roommates back at the Greenberg School, whenever I suggested—in a kind and thoughtful way, I mean—that she might be putting on a little heftiness, hip-wise.

  It was a traumatic moment for me. I felt this dreadful sinking feeling. What could I do?

  I'll tell you what I did: I went to Cancún, met a dentist from Boston with a face you'd claw your way to get up close to, had a pretty neat time broiling on the sand there with him for a week, found out the last day that he was married, got a couple of little tchatchkes to remember him by because he was feeling so impure and all, and came home. There was a cassette tape sitting on Mums's copy of an Erma Bombeck book she'd lent me to make me feel even guiltier about being her child. I played the tape. Just like that last time, you have your choice of believing any of this or not. A lot I care.

  * * * * *

  BITSY? Bitsy, how do you start—is it running? Is this, like, working? Let me run it back—

  It's working. Great. So how the hell are you, sweetie? I hope you're having a really cruddy time in Mexico, because I went through absolute hell to see you, and you leave me to toast your buns in the sun.

  The last time you saw me, I had on my new clothes and all the rest were packed in the Louis Vuitton bag. I planned to stay in the hotel until about midnight; then I was going to sneak outside, look up in the sky and find Mars, raise my supple, beseeching, cashmere-clad arms to the God of War, and whoosh my way back to Prince Van. I had already figured out how I was going to play him: vivacious, exciting, yet, you know, cool. I'll never forget that gaggy feeling I got when I found out that people on Mars don't know what a relationship is. I was going to have to teach them. I mean him. The rest of them could go on living like animals—I should worry?

  Ten o'clock, eleven o'clock—I had a glass of white wine in the bar and talked with this so-so guy who said he was a production assistant; but he wouldn't ever come out and tell me exactly what he assisted producing. About a quarter to midnight, I flashed him my Number Three smile—Glamorous But Not Inviting—and told him I had to powder my nose. I raced back up to the room, grabbed my bag, and hurried back down to the lobby. It was right then that I realized I didn't have Dime One left over to pay the bill, so I kissed it off and kept the key. They'll either charge Daddy or God will send me to hell, ha ha.

  I realized that I couldn't see much of the sky from that part of town, and the only open place I could think of was Central Park. That's cute, isn't it? Maureen Birnbaum, the Marie Osmond of Long Island, walking alone into the treacherous wastes of Central Park at midnight. Alone, but not unarmed —see, I still had Old Betsy, and if any mugger in that park tried anything funny with me, he'd come home from work with one or two important parts
hacked off his goddamn body.

  So Central Park it had to be. Except—can you believe it?—it was raining. I mean, pouring. You couldn't see the top of the Empire State Building, let alone Mars. Oh, fudge, I said to myself, and I went back into the hotel. I took my bag up to the room, then came back down to the bar and let the production assistant buy me a drink. I told the bartender I wanted a pina colada, and he goes, "A what?" Like he'd never heard it before or nobody drank them anymore. He gave me a look like I was from another planet or something. Well, of course, I did just get back from another planet; but that wasn't really any reason for this measly bartender to make me feel like a social leper, for God's sake. He smirked to himself like I'd ordered some kind of drink that you hear about only in works of literature, like a martini or a mint julep or something. And then he goes, "I'm sorry, miss, but we took all the disco off the jukebox a long time ago." And the production assistant thought that was pretty funny, too. Then he had the nerve—the prod. ass., I mean—to suggest we go someplace else, in the Bronx yet! So I told him I had to get up early because I was going to donate a kidney, and went to my room and watched TV.

  There is nothing more boring in the whole world than killing time. The whole next day I might as well have been socked in at some airport or something, because getting to Mars was going to have to wait until after dark. I tried a little window shopping, but how much fun is that when you don't have any cash and all your credit cards are probably lying in an abandoned ski suit somewhere in Vermont? I mean, even if you don't intend to spend money, you spend money—it's a law of nature or something. When you know you absolutely, positively can't, well, it's like running out of gas in the dark, romantic woods late at night with Father Flanagan. I mean, why torture yourself, you know?