Mister Boots

I’m getting known all over. I can’t walk down the street without that somebody knows me. The problem is, I want to go off, for once in my life, wearing a dress. Just to see what it’s like, but will everybody recognize me? My short hair is a big clue, but I hope, if I’m wearing a dress, they’ll think: This can’t be him—the one and only famous Robert Lassiter, Jr.

The reason I’m thinking about a dress right now is, there’s a girl at our hotel and she’s pretty much my size. I don’t want to get to know her, because she’s not like Rosie, and I promised Rosie she would be my best friend for life. This girl’s name is Madelaine-Ellen and everybody calls her the whole thing. I don’t know if I could stand doing that. She goes to church with her parents and her brother, so I know exactly when and where to get a dress. I’ll pick a plain one so I won’t be too noticeable.

But when it comes right down to it, I don’t pick a plain dress, I pick one I like. It looks as if it ought to be mine in the first place. It’s brown with little black outlines of flowers all over it, and little yellow dots in the center of each flower. It has a white, boy-type collar, so it’s not prissy.

I’m thinner than that girl, so the dress doesn’t look very good. I say, “Hello, Droopy,” to myself. I guess whatever dress I borrow, I’ll look like a clown anyway. My short hair adds to the clown look. Girls don’t have hair like this unless they just had head lice.

I watch myself in the mirror and practice how to be a girl. It feels funny. Airy. Maybe I’m supposed to have a slip. I practice looking delicate. Except Rosie wasn’t like that. She was even tougher than me. Maybe as tough as Aunt Tilly. The more I think about it, the more I don’t know how I should behave.

The dress has pockets. I’ll bring along forty dollars and flash paper and the little magic lighter. I won’t take the pistol. The pockets aren’t big enough.

I don’t want anybody around the hotel to see me, so, although I love the elevator and the elevator man, I take the stairs. There’s nobody. Who would be there when you could ride in the elevator instead?

I run across the lobby as fast as I can, out the hotel door, and down the street. I don’t look to see who’s watching, I just go and keep on going. Then I slow down and walk—still pretty fast though. Nobody pays attention. Is this all there is to it?

There’s a nice big park with swings and slides and teeter-totters. I’ve seen it as we passed by on the way to someplace else, but I never got to go there. I wasn’t heading for it now, but here it is. Since it’s Sunday morning there’s nobody around. I sit on the bottom of a teeter-totter and wish Rosie were here to get on the other end. I think how my skirt goes up and my underwear shows, which is boy’s underwear.

Then I put my skirt under me and slide the slides, all of them, even the baby one, and then I swing. (It’s the opposite of the dressy tails of my costume. Those you have to not sit on. If I don’t put the skirt under me the seat is scratchy. That’s another girl thing you have to find out.)

It’s a wonder I even know how to swing, but I catch on fast. I feel scared and embarrassed even though there’s nobody here, except I feel good, too, but then I start to feel sad. It isn’t that I want to wear dresses so much, I don’t; it’s more that I can never be the truth about myself. And when I think how I’ve hardly ever been in a playground and how Rosie is my only friend and I had to say good-bye to her forever.

All of a sudden I have to swing really hard and high. I go so high the ropes of the swing get loose at the top of the arc. I wonder if you could go all the way around. I wouldn’t like to do that, but I keep on, swinging hard.

Somebody has been watching me all this time, and I didn’t even know it—all this time that I’ve been looking at my boy’s underwear and pulling down my skirt.

I don’t see him till he gets up and starts toward me. I’m still swinging to beat the band, and I keep on. He’d better not come too close or I’ll kick him in the jaw. “Right on the button.” That’s what our father says.

Except he does come close. He’s angry already, and I haven’t said a single word. It’s as if he already knows everything about me and doesn’t like any of it.

I keep swinging hard. “So would you. Besides . . .” (More lies. Why not?) “My mother and my father and my two big brothers . . . They’re there. That counts.”

That’s when he grabs me. It stops the swing so fast I nearly fall off. My skirt is up around my waist. He pulls me all the way off and pulls my skirt even higher.

I try to get away. He hangs on and laughs. “Boys like you go straight to hell. You can struggle all you want, it’s hellfire top to bottom. All the way down.”

Then he grabs me right there and says, “Well, well, well,” surprised, and pushes me flat on my back, pulls my underpants to my knees, and takes a long look. (How long does it take for him to see that I’m a girl?) And then he takes a feel.

At least that makes him feel for my pockets instead of me. He pulls out my two twenties and then my flash paper, which looks to him like a little nothing tablet. He takes the money and throws the paper down beside us.

He holds me down with his knee across my stomach and tries to put the money in his pocket, but that pocket has a hole in it so he has to find another. He keeps mumbling about how I’ll burn in hellfire. Hellfire is his favorite word.

He can’t find a pocket without holes. He even keeps trying the same pockets. He’s got me pinned, but he’s not watching. I get out the tiny magic lighter that fits on the tips of my fingers.

It makes a big, big flash. It burns my face and I’ll bet his, too. More so, because I threw it right at him.

It’s as if I had looked straight into the sun. By the time I can see again, he’s way, way, way across at the far side of the park and still going, stumbling like he’s blinded even more than I am.

I pull my underpants up and dust myself off. I’m a mess. I’m crying, but everybody would cry after this sort of thing, even boys.

I run all the way back. All the way up the stairs. I just want to be by myself and wash off the smell from that man.

And there’s Aunt Tilly—coming out her door just as I’m going into mine. I try to escape and shut my door on her, but she grabs it and comes right in. I’m still running—to the far corner of the room and then it’s as if I’m running still but there’s no place to go. She grabs me and holds me tight. She’s a strong lady, and I don’t really want to get away.

Pretty soon she pulls back to look at me. At the dress. It’s torn. It’s dirty. I’m dirty. I know I smell bad, too, just like that man.

I don’t say a word. I couldn’t if I wanted to. First I look down because I don’t want to look at her face, and then I do look, and after I’m looking into her eyes, I stay like that. I don’t even dare move my eyeballs. Aunt Tilly looks like she doesn’t dare either. She’s perfectly still, but I can see her thoughts are going round and round inside her.

She says, “My poor . . . Oh, my poor . . .” It’s as if she just this minute realized she doesn’t know my name, which she doesn’t.

Suddenly I realize my fingers are burned and my face feels sunburned and my feet hurt from running in my shoes that are too big. . . .

We go down on the floor then, both of us, Aunt Tilly as big as she is. She leans her back against the bed and holds my head to her big . . . first I’m thinking what Rosie called them: “lung warts” and “knockers.” She’s squashy all over. I always was thinking before how she should be slim like Mother was, but I don’t think that anymore.

Aunt Tilly gives me a bath, and I’m in it utterly naked. The real me. She washes me everywhere. She bandages my burned fingers. (She puts unsalted butter on them and on my face.) She dresses me in my boy pajamas and helps me into bed. And all the time she keeps shaking her head as if everything is, no, no, no, no, no. Then she brings hot milk with vanilla and nutmeg, and she sits next to me while I doze. Every time I move or open my eyes a little bit, she pats my hand.

She says she’ll wash and repair the dress but she’ll not give it back, so we’re in this together now. Then Aunt Tilly says, “Who else knows about you?” and I say, “Just my sister.”

She sits with me until we hear our father calling her. He’s knocking on her door and yelling, “Dear!” His stage voice as always.

I’m thinking he wouldn’t dare walk right into her room. He doesn’t dare anything against Aunt Tilly, and now she’s on my side.

Aunt Tilly says, “There’s my hippopotamus of a lover.” She pats me again. “Are you going to be all right?”

She kisses me, a big loud smack, and then she kisses Wilhelmina just the same way. “I’ll check on you when I come up to bed.”

Things change. Not only do I get a rest because of my burned fingers, but suddenly I get to have toys, and not just boy things—kind of half and half. I get to have a little green felt elephant. I get to have a great big Puss in Boots. I get to wear Wilhelmina all day long. I get to have licorice sticks. Our father doesn’t like it, but he has nothing to say about it. When Aunt Tilly puts her foot down, it stays put down.

Me being a boy is the most important thing there is in his life. Aunt Tilly said he won’t let go of an idea he needs as much as this one: his son and heir, to carry on the name and the profession. Aunt Tilly said that’s what my mother was for. When Aunt Tilly told him she wasn’t about to have a child for him, let alone keep on having them until there was a son or two, he went off to find somebody who would.

And then she warns me. “If he finds out! Having a son is what his whole life is about, though he doesn’t like children.” Then she says, “Any more than I do,” and kisses me—again one of those loud comedy kisses, but I can tell those are real.

“But, Aunt Tilly, he didn’t ever come around back home. I didn’t even know him. Once he tried to teach me things for the show, just once, but then . . . Aunt Tilly, you know how he twists people’s arms up behind them? I think he broke my arm. And then he left for years and years.”