Shoebag (2 page)

Pretty Soft said, “I see my own beauty, may it last forever.”

“WHAT KIND OF A NAME IS THAT, YOUNG MAN?” her father was downstairs shouting. “TELL ME YOUR REAL NAME IMMEDIATELY!”

Then, as though The Fates were sparing her anymore unnecessary intrusion, Pretty Soft’s music began playing from the television.

She put down the mirror.

She fluffed out her long blonde hair, leaned back against the soft white couch cushions, crossed her legs, and folded her arms, hugging herself. Her light blue eyes twinkled, and her dimples showed, and even though it was a sign of vanity to feel such joy when she saw herself on television, Pretty Soft could not stop the little smile of pleasure that always came to her mouth.

Now the chorus of toilet paper rolls was dancing merrily down the green hill, unfurling amid buttercups and brown-eyed Susans, as they sang:

Six hundred sheets a roll, and soft as any kitty,

We’re double-layered, too, and people say we’re pretty,

We come in shades of blue and beige, green, yellow, and pure white,

We think you’ll like our talcumed scent and say we’re bathroom right.

A close-up as Pretty Soft spoke, holding a Persian cat to her face, “If you have Pretty Soft in your bathroom, your guests will purrrrrr!”

(Mildred, the cat, never purred, though. She hated being on television, where they did not even call her by her own name.)

Fade out as Pretty Soft said, “Won’t they, Whiskers?”

And the announcer’s voice cooed, “You bet they will, Pretty Soft!”

Pretty Soft never played with other boys and girls.

Her manager and tutor, Madam Grande de la Grande, called them civilians, which was her name for all ordinary people who were not stars.

“Civilians,” said Madam G. de la G., “will always be jealous of you, and they will be the first to turn against you. Stay out of their way, child.”

“But what about my own parents? Aren’t they civilians?”

“They are, but they are your parents, so it is all right.”

“And what about
you,
Madam Grande de la Grande?”

“Ah, but I was a star once myself! Gloria Grande de la Grande, known far and wide as Glorious Gloria. My name was on every lip!”

Pretty Soft had asked her, “Then what happened?”

“I had no one to tell me how to prevent wrinkles and lines, so one day my poor face was full of them! I was forced to switch from performing to managing and tutoring.”

“And you found me,” Pretty Soft had said happily.

“Exactly, Precious, but don’t smile so widely. A wide smile leaves marks, child. Keep your joy inside or you’ll ruin the outside.”

Madam Grande de la Grande always wore a long black cape, a velvet one in winter and a silk one in summer, for she was in mourning for her dead career. But around her neck there was a fire-colored scarf, to match her hair, and to represent the flame of talent, so she said, the new, hot promise of someone like Pretty Soft.

It was she who had taught Pretty Soft what to say to her mirror. It was she who had instructed Pretty Soft to always have one nearby.

“A mirror will tell you what you are and who you are and how you are and why you are.”

“And where I am?” Pretty Soft had asked.

“Yes, that, too, if you stand back far enough.”

Pretty Soft turned down the volume of the television and listened.

Everything was so quiet suddenly.

Probably her father had taken the closet thief to the police … and probably her mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

Every night at this time, an hour before the family sat down in the dining room, Pretty Soft read something beautiful and inspiring, so that when she ate her food, it would be properly digested, because her mind was free of all but lovely thoughts.

“‘Beauty is like the surf that never ceases,’” Pretty Soft read from the writings of Struthers Burt. “‘Beauty is like the night that never dies. Beauty is like a forest pool where…’”

“Hello? Hello?” a voice called from the hall. “Pretty Soft? Are you up here?”

“Who is calling me?” said Pretty Soft, who knew every voice that ever said her name in this house, but did not know this one.

“Your father sent me up to be with you,” the voice answered. “My name is Shoebag. Don’t laugh.”

Pretty Soft couldn’t help it. She laughed that lilting way the television people always said she should as she looked down at Whiskers at the end of the commercial. This time it was not forced, and she had not had to do a dozen retakes: It just flowed forth from her insides. For what kind of a name was Shoebag? What kind of a person had a name like that?

She soon discovered that the kind of person who had a name like Shoebag was a small, red-headed boy with blue eyes and freckles, barefoot, and wrapped in a blanket.

He was standing in the doorway.

“I knew you’d laugh. I told your father you would and you did.”

“I didn’t want to laugh,” Pretty Soft told him. “I’ll get laugh lines, if I laugh that way very often, so I save such a laugh for when I work. But Shoebag is a funny name!”

“So I’m told,” the little boy said.

“What happened to your clothes, Shoebag? Did the closet thief steal them?”

“May I come in and sit down before I answer any more questions?” he asked her. “Your father has gone to get me something to wear.”

“Come in, then,” Pretty Soft said.

And so it was, that on the third of March, in Boston, Massachusetts, Shoebag entered the life of Eunice Biddle, also known as Pretty Soft, and neither of them would ever be the same again.

N
OW THIS IS WHAT
we are going to do!” said Mr. Biddle, who was a store manager, good at making decisions and seeing to it that they were put into action. “First, we are going to give Shoebag a proper name.”

“I won’t remember to answer to a new name,” said Shoebag. “I have been called Shoebag all my life.”

“You’ll remember it if it’s close to Shoebag,” said Mr. Biddle. “When you first said your name, I thought you said Stu Bag, so that’s what we’ll call you, hmmm? Stuart Bag.”

“Stu Bag,” said Pretty Soft. “Who could forget a name like that?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Shoebag. “What is a stu bag? It sounds like a bag full of stew.”

“If there’s an extra
g
on Bag, it will look better,” said Mrs. Biddle, who was an artist, and very concerned with how things looked. “Stuart
B a g g.
That’s a very decent name.”

“But what does it even
mean?”
said Shoebag.

“It means it’s your name.” Mr. Biddle was a no-nonsense type who had a black mustache he kept clean with a special little comb.

The Biddles and Shoebag were sitting around the table in the dining room. They had just finished a dinner of spaghetti, which looked to Shoebag like a plate of worms, so he’d enjoyed it, although he’d never eaten a worm, not even on a rainy day, when he’d hopped over them outdoors on the sidewalk.

“Worms have no backbone!” Drainboard used to comment. “And I have no use for them.”

Shoebag had a strong suspicion the Biddle family would have no use for him, if he were to tell them he was once a cockroach, so he kept quiet about it.

He remembered what Under The Toaster used to say. “When the lights are out, we’re all one big happy family in this apartment building, but as soon as they go on, we’re the enemy!”

“Why?” Shoebag would ask him.

“Because people just don’t take to us. I think it’s our looks or something.”

“It
is
our looks,” said Drainboard. “And this will give you a laugh, Son,
they
think
we’re
dirty!”

“That doesn’t give me a laugh,” Shoebag had answered. “It makes me sad, instead. After all, it’s their dirt we drag around on our feet.”

“Tell
them
that,” Drainboard had said. “They think that with all the baths and showers they take, with all the deodorants and mouthwash and perfume they use, they’re clean!”

“A person never stays clean, though,” Under The Toaster had remarked in his most discouraged tone. “There’s just too much to keep clean on a person.”

Shoebag knew the truth of that now. He’d no sooner stepped out of the shower than his toes had picked up lint from the bathroom rug, and next his hands had gotten dusty from the staircase railing. His teeth had spaghetti sauce in the crevices right this minute, and there was a milk stain already on the new blue shirt Mr. Biddle had bought for him.

“The next thing we have to do is enroll Stu in the Beacon Hill Elementary School,” said Mr. Biddle, “unless of course you’re a Catholic? Are you a Catholic?”

Shoebag said what he always said when he was asked a personal question. “I can’t remember anything but my name.”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear, you really do have amnesia,” said Mrs. Biddle, the only one still eating, the only plump Biddle.

“What is amnesia?” Pretty Soft asked.

Mr. Biddle let out a huge sigh which made his mustache wiggle, and he rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “You don’t know what amnesia is? You’re seven years old and you don’t know that amnesia means a memory loss?”

“How would I know that?” said Pretty Soft.

“We are paying Madam Grande de la Grande your hard-earned money to teach you things like that,” said Mr. Biddle.

“How do you lose your memory?” Pretty Soft asked.

“We don’t have all the answers on that one,” her father told her, “but sometimes it happens if you hit your head on something hard, and sometimes a person is in a bad accident and he comes out unable to say who he is or where he lives. And often …”

Pretty Soft began to hold up her hands and make a face. “Please! Stop! Do not tell me about bad things! I will only go to sleep and have a nightmare about not being able to remember my lines! You are not supposed to put ugly thoughts in my head, Daddy!”

Mrs. Biddle said, “Pretty Soft is right.”

“The child is living in a dream world,” Mr. Biddle grumbled.

“But that dream world will one day pay for her college education,” said his wife. “Let’s remember that.”

Shoebag spoke up then. He had been sitting there between Pretty Soft’s parents trying to imagine himself attending Beacon Hill Elementary School. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d hated the idea of being thrown in with other boys and girls who’d had more practice being people than he could ever hope to have.

What would become of him in such a place? Wasn’t it likely that he’d be slower than the others, and that he’d seem strange and out-of-place there? Wouldn’t they pick on him, call him names, humiliate him, push him, even knock him down in the recess yard?

“Why do I have to go to school?” he asked Mr. Biddle, who seemed to be in charge. “Why can’t I be tutored as Pretty Soft is?”

“You can’t afford it,” Pretty Soft said. “You don’t have any money,
do
you?”

“Darling, he can’t remember anything,” said Mrs. Biddle.

“He doesn’t look like someone with money,” Pretty Soft said. “He didn’t even have clothes. He was trying to steal ours from the closet!”

“I was
not!”
said Shoebag.

“Well, you were going through our pockets!” said Pretty Soft, who seemed to Shoebag to be neither pretty nor soft when it came to money.

“Hush! Hush! Hush!” Mr. Biddle said. “We have a lot to settle tonight, and I have bills to send out…. Pretty Soft, you must learn to be more kind to Stuart Bagg, since we have taken him under our roof.”

Shoebag felt very much like announcing that it was more his roof than their roof, since his family and his ancestors had been in this old apartment building for generations. But he was in no position to throw his new little human weight around.

Mr. Biddle said, “And Shoebag, tomorrow morning at seven-thirty, you and I will stroll down to Beacon Hill Elementary School, where I will introduce you to the principal before I go to my store.”

“Who are you going to say he is?” asked Mrs. Biddle. “I know you’re going to say his name is Stuart Bagg, but what relationship will you say we have with him?”

“I’ll say he is our new adopted boy,” said Mr. Biddle.

“You always wanted a son.” Mrs. Biddle smiled.

“And I always wanted a brother!” said Pretty Soft.

“So everyone is happy,” Mr. Biddle said.

“But tell him, Daddy. Be sure he knows the rule.”

“He has to know the rule,” Mrs. Biddle agreed.

“Stu,
Son,”
said Mr. Biddle, “as a rule, we don’t discuss bad things in front of Pretty Soft. It is very important to always emphasize the positive where she’s concerned.

“And eliminate the negative,” said Pretty Soft.

“But what do you do when bad things happen?” Shoebag asked. “What do you do if the wind breaks the windows, or the rain comes in, or thunder shakes the whole house with a terrible boom?”

“We tend to it without disturbing Pretty Soft,” said Mr. Biddle. “It is very dangerous to her career if she becomes upset, you see.”

“And I know how to deal with anything that might threaten me,” said Pretty Soft. “Come over here, and I’ll show you how I do it.”

Shoebag climbed down from his chair and went around to hers.

“Here by my plate I always keep the dining room mirror, which is yellow, because the dining room is yellow,” said Pretty Soft. “Then I look into it, and this is what I say.”

Shoebag looked into the mirror with her.

“I say, ‘I see my own beauty, may it last forever.’”

“That’s what she says,” Mrs. Biddle said.

“That’s what she always says, and it seems to work,” Mr. Biddle said.

To Shoebag’s horror, as he looked into the mirror with Pretty Soft, he saw a lovely little blonde face on the right, and on the left, he saw himself, his true self: a cockroach with its antennae trembling.

“Aren’t we cute together?” Pretty Soft smiled in the reflection, while Shoebag’s brown shell shuddered.

“We are like brother and sister,” said Pretty Soft.

“Do you like the way I look?” Shoebag asked.

“Of course I do!” she replied … and it was then that Shoebag realized she did not see what he saw in that mirror.

“Of course she does!” said Mrs. Biddle.