650: “Tootsie Koochikov.”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 4
“TOOTSIE KOOCHIKOV. I allowed myself to be called that for years,” she said, “right on through high school, until one night when I discovered, to my surprise, that I had had enough of it. It was after I had graduated, when I was working at Captain White’s—that clam bar.”
“I remember it well,” I said.
“I was leaning over a table—”
“I seem to remember that, too,” I said.
She gave me a look. “I was giving it a wipe,” she said, “and behind me, sitting in a booth, were some of my former classmates, three little maids from school, and they had a boy with them—a young man, actually—a guy in uniform, not someone I recognized right away.”
“Denny,” I suggested.
“You remember him?” she asked. “You remember Denny?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Oh, Peter, you must have had such a crush on me.”
“I certainly did. I envied Denny. I envied all of them.”
“Well, you’ll have to hold that thought. You’re making me get ahead of my story. There I was in Captain White’s, wiping a table, and I heard it behind my back, whispered: ‘Tootsie Koochikov.’ And then the giggles. When you’ve heard it whispered throughout your formative years, whenever you walk by, it’s hard to miss, and of course there, at the clam bar, my sensitivity was cranked way up, because I felt that everybody was watching me, and of course everybody was watching me. I was part of the show. Let’s face it: I was the main attraction. God! I used to wear that stupid clam hat. Do you remember that?”
“Sure I remember. I remember it all.”
“I looked so ridiculous! Wait! Wait here.”
She ran to another room, leaving me alone in her living room for a few uneasy moments. I didn’t know what to do with myself, and that is exactly what I mean. I felt an odd sense of removal from myself, as if a part of me had stepped aside from what had been just a moment before the whole of me. The missing part was the part that ordinarily kept me functioning at a subconscious level, doing the little things that seem to require no thought—crossing my legs or scratching my ear—and it was now abstracted from me, considering me, taking a vacation from the management of me, leaving the rest of me to decide as if for the first time exactly how, with what motivation and in what style, to cross my legs or scratch my ear or draw a breath. Being in Ariane’s house always had this effect on me.
I heard a door open. I heard something fall and break. Ariane called out, “Shit!”
I chuckled, grinned, and shook my head, as a person would do to demonstrate mild amusement, and I was quite aware of myself as a person registering mild amusement. I took a sip of my drink. Since I was smoking then, I got my pack of Luckies from the pocket of my jacket, took one from the pack, and tapped it on my thumbnail, performing a bit of business that I had copied from my paternal grandfather, who had made the performance of this business preliminary to smoking seem like a manly accomplishment, something that one ought to emulate, as a mark of something or other. Just as I lit up, Ariane burst into the living room.
“Look at this!” she cried.
She was wearing the hat she had worn as a waitress at Captain White’s. It was essentially a beret, made of fuzzy gray fabric, modified to more closely resemble a clam (a hard-shelled clam, Mercenaria mercenaria, the kind sometimes called a quahog). It had bulging eyes made of Ping-Pong balls, which were attached to its upper shell, where no clam has ever had anything resembling eyes, and it wore a goofy grin.
“You kept it?” I asked. I was embarrassed by the theatrically exaggerated surprise and incredulity in my voice. I was overplaying all of this. I told myself to get a grip on myself.
“Sure!” she said. “I have many a weird piece of junk among my souvenirs.”
She took it off her head and looked it in the eyes, shook her head and chuckled, then put it back on her head, tilting it at a jaunty angle, fussing with it a bit until she got it just right.
“It’s kind of cute,” I said.
“Cute! I can hardly believe that I wore it—but then, I have that reaction to a lot of the things I did when I was young and foolish. Sometimes a memory comes to me and I can’t quite believe that it’s one of my memories. It’s as if some strange and sinister phenomenon beyond my control has made me seem to remember things that happened to someone else—sunspots or something. Can that be Ariane I see there, serving bowls of chowder and those little bags of fried clams, wearing that tight little sweater and a pleated skirt so short that her underwear shows? Ye gods, it is!”
“I remember that skirt,” I said. The grin of a lecherous adolescent had spread across my face.
“Oh, I’ll bet you do,” she said. “You were a hot-blooded little thing. I’ll bet you remember my underwear, too.”
“Oh, I do. Pink. With ruffles.”
“You’re right. Exactly right. I figured if the world was going to see my undies, they’d better be pretty. On my bottom I wore ruffled panties, and on my head a grinning clam. The clam rolled its googly eyes when I tilted my head, and the boys rolled their googly eyes when I wiggled my little bottom.”
WHEN SHE HEARD those girls whispering and giggling behind her, she wiggled her famous bottom a couple of times and spun around and said, “Hi, kids. Who’s the colonel?”
To herself, she said, “Girls, you can kiss that soldier boy good-bye, because he’s about to fall for Tootsie Koochikov.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 650, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing from this episode.
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