Free Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon

ya motha (Bertie’s charred old doper’s eyes glowed like furnace doors), wasn’t even on a cart—so we needed all the muscle we could get.
    Bertie faded around the corner, came back in a minute with two surgeon’s tops he had pinched during some other caper, two pale green blouses with only a few smears of sumpm liverbrown and crusty down the front. He handed one to Dion. “Cheese, cool,” Dion said, and waltzed off down the hall with the thing. “No, man, keep away from that mirror!” Bertie called after him but Dion was already turning into his own room. “That’s the last we’ll see of him,” Bertie sighed, and it was. “Hey, what the hump, I guess I can push the thing by myself, it’s got wheels. Okay, girls, climb aboard.” O and I stared at each other while Bertie pulled his own green top over his head. It was big as a bank lobby on him but the smears of ancient gore and baggy fit looked touching on his haggardness, as though he were in med school at theage of twelve, a boy genius whom dissection of dead bodies had shocked out of his growth. I mean he looked plausible in a certain way. Fact was even Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger looked kinda babyish, big-eared and simian in those green smocks. And by the way, what were they doing in there with Emily so long, I wondered. Bertie must have had the same thought. “Is she stand-up?” he asked, squinting at her blank door. “As a fuk in a phone booth,” O replied, in the voice of vast experience. She and I still stared at each other and I saw her heart beating fast in the faint blue fork under her temple.
Climb aboard
, Bertie had said. Did that mean—lie down together on top?
    “Okay, you two, lie down together on top and I’ll wrap you.” To my amazement, she nodded. She was wearing a pilly pink orlon V-neck sweater, sumpm only a drapette would wear, and a black bra you could see through the pink, and the V-neck almost down to her pupik. And so it came about that O and me, the Bogeywoman, lay body to body, or more specifically her lovely head stuck out the top and my bulby nose was pressed to the washboard of bone between her momps, so that I almost swooned for real from hyperventilating while Bertie tucked and patted and sculpted us, under that froth of used sheets, into one improbably thick beauty. “How do we look,” I muttered, for an excuse to move my lips. “Don’t talk, it tickles,” O spooky-fluted. But at least she didn’t say don’t breathe. I turned my chin up a little so my breath was mossing her throat. “Calm,” said Bertie, “you look calm,” for O always did, and down we went to the third floor landing with Bertie pushing.
    Of course every hair of me waved like a sailor at the nearness of her. She was the
shikseh
oxymoron personified, she was the highest girl and the lowest girl and nothing in between: She was a drapette but also Mary Hartline of
Super Circus
, she had thatpublic gorgeosity, she could be famous right now, a star, a TV star at least, and at the same time she was that sullen teenage underbitch calling you a jew, goading you in her peroxide hair and trashy clothes, then beating you up for looking at her funny. She reeked of the last cheap perfume tester she had boosted from Read’s, probably My Sin. I felt my heart budge against her and knew she could feel it too—like a mole under a tent floor. But then, was I right? she swiveled the tiniest bit, toward me not away, and my lips were quivering like a rabbit’s in the gulley between her momps, kinda folded into the dunes that swelled out of her bra and actually quivering, I would just need to stick out my tongue—and all would be lost lost lost! She might even knife me. I pulled myself together. I stayed where I was. I was almost happy: I was on mission, but at the same time I was a snouty cub who’d fallen asleep at the teat and woken up again in sweet milky darkness. Then suddenly her hand pressed the back of my head, her nuzzy pressed my lips and I knew