Shoebag (11 page)

Eunice was staring at the note Shoebag had left, going over and over the words, as though they were lines she had to memorize.

Mr. Biddle said, “Shoo, Mildred!” as he got up and lifted the microwave into its box.

Mildred jumped from the counter to the table where Mr. Biddle placed the box.

“I’ll just leave these dishes in the sink,” said Mrs. Biddle. “I’m going to be late.”

“I’ll walk with you, dear,” said Mr. Biddle. “We’ll leave this box outside the door for Universal Parcel…. Don’t be late for school, Eunice!”

Mildred tried to follow them, but Mr. Biddle lifted his shoe and pushed her back gently. “You go back upstairs!”

Then Eunice’s parents were gone.

Eunice Biddle was surprised by the drop of moisture that fell from her eyes to her hand. Was she crying?

How could she be crying when there was no script to tell her to cry?

Mildred wound in and out of her legs, and ran to the door and back, trying to get Eunice to let her out, so she could sniff the box in the hall.

Another tear fell from Eunice’s eyes.

This was not good. Her eyes would be red and swollen.

“He was very cute, Mildred,” she said. “He was a nice little brother.”

Mildred scratched on the door and mewed.

Then many tears came from her eyes, and Eunice went to get some Kleenex from the kitchen counter.

If she did not stop crying, she would be late for school.

There beside the toaster was her old mirror, and Eunice picked it up.

Would the old trick which she used to use when she was Pretty Soft work?

She held the mirror in her hands and looked at her reflection.

Then she could not remember the old words. All she could think to say were some words from Shoebag’s note to her.

“It is all right not to miss me. Good-bye is good-bye.”

Instead of the beautiful little girl named Pretty Soft, she saw a seven-year-old with a very red nose and teary eyes.

“Eunice Biddle,” she said, and her reflection stuck out her tongue.

“Right you are!” it said. “Now get me to school. I have a lot of catching up to do.”

Eunice Biddle laughed aloud and hurried to get her bookbag and her coat.

When she opened the door, Mildred ran past her legs into the hall and plunked herself down on top of the box.

“Sit there then,” said Eunice, “but whatever it is you want inside that box, will soon be in the back of the U.P. truck.”

So caught up with what was inside the box, Mildred did not even see a fat, hairy, brown eight-legged jumping spider arriving over the top of the door at the end of the hall. It let down its dragline, landing on the floor near Eunice’s shoe.

“Moving in, are you?” said Eunice, and she was ready to step on it, when she remembered the rest of Shoebag’s message.

Not only did she not grind it out with her shoe, but she carried it between two fingers, by the dragline, and put it safely inside the kitchen.

It was strange to walk down the hill to school without Shoebag. It was sad, too, but wherever Shoebag was, Eunice knew he would miss her, because he had told her he would.

And she had remembered him, she thought, by saving that crawling insect in the hall. For Madam Grande de la Grande had never taught Eunice the difference between insects, which have six legs, and arachnids, which have eight.

By the time she got to the Beacon Hill Elementary school, neighboring roaches had moved into the Biddle apartment and were feasting on the toast crumbs, shocked when they heard the familiar arachnid voice of the other new arrival.

“INSECTS! YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!”

Good-bye is good-bye, Eunice told herself, and she walked right by Tuffy Buck, who called out, “Pretty Soft? Pretty Soft? Wait!”

Eunice kept on going, frowning as the sun hit her eyes, grinning widely as she saw Bark, Handles, Two Times, Fatso, and The Ghost, running after them to play on the swings and the slides.

“W
HAT’S THAT?”

“A cat, that’s all. A cat.”

“Put the box in the back of the truck.”

“Shoo, cat! Scat!”

Then for a long time, there were no human voices. The box they were in was picked up and put down many times. Shoebag had crawled out of the microwave and joined his family in the bottom of the box.

It was a noisy, bumpy ride, full of stops and starts, lasting many days, during which they fed on the glue of the Super-Stik tape.

At last they arrived at their new home, a huge store in a shopping center just outside Boston.

When they landed there, it was evening, almost closing time.

They sneaked out into a section of the store called Appliances, where they stayed up under a new refrigerator while Under The Toaster scouted for a permanent place.

All the television sets across the aisle were on.

“This doesn’t look good to me,” said Drainboard. “What will we eat here?”

“I saw some books in the next aisle,” said Shoebag. “We can always eat the bindings.”

“Ugh!” Drainboard’s wings shuddered with distaste. “I’ve had my fill of sticky picnics. I hope this move isn’t a mistake!”

A new tiny sister of Shoebag’s hopped about nervously.

“Calm down, Frying Pan,” Shoebag said gently. “Daddy will take care of everything.”

“I don’t want to live in Appliances,” Radio said.

“We may have to find the toy department,” said Drainboard. “Children always wander in eating, and we can live on their crumbs.”

“There’re too many people. We’ll get stepped on!” said Wheaties Box.

“Sweethearts, there are no people around in a department store after nine at night. We’ll have the run of the place.”

“What if this store forbids you to eat and shop?” said Shoebag.

“Maybe it’s not that fancy,” Drainboard said.

For a while, the little cockroach family tried to nap, while Drainboard soothed them with an insect lullaby about the noble old order of Orthoptera, which they belonged to, along with grasshoppers and crickets.

A major order we are, sometimes with wings, and sometimes not,

Chewing mouthparts have we, as spiders, ticks, and mites do not!

Or-thop-tera are we! We crawl and fly and …

Shoebag wasn’t paying attention. His mind was back on Beacon Hill.

He could not cry anymore, of course. Roaches never cried. But their memories were very good, which was how they found their way out of crevices and out from under things, into the darkness, for their picnics.

Shoebag was not thinking about the good old late night picnics, nor even about this new place filled with the sounds of shoppers and rock music coming from the record department.

Shoebag was thinking of his friend. He did not think of her as Eunice. Even though she was no longer a star, she would always be Pretty Soft in his mind. And he would always see her beauty. It would last forever. For even if she did not know how to miss him, he bet she would remember him.

Good-bye
is
good-bye. But friends remember friends.

Then, as Shoebag peeked out from under the refrigerator, he saw a familiar face.

It was on all the television sets lined up across from him. A dozen big pictures of Gregor Samsa.

“Does
your
smile smell?”

Where the mirrors used to be in his sunglasses, there were pictures of chewing gum packages.

“Chew Great Breath!” Gregor said with a grin.

Shoebag was so happy to see his other friend and his only real pal, he leaped off the defrost timer to the floor.

Just in time he escaped being crushed by a man’s boot, and he ducked inside again.

“Good news! Good news!” he could hear Under The Toaster coming back from his search. “There’s a deli department a floor away, with a dark closet right behind it!”

“Home sweet home,” said Drainboard.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Shoebag series

L
IKE ALL COCKROACHES, SHOEBAG
was named after his place of birth. It was the reason that wherever he was, he looked for a shoebag to snuggle into. The one he found this warm early autumn day was in the school dormitory. There were no shoes in it yet, for the students were just arriving by bus and car in the little village of Wayne, Pennsylvania.

Shoebag was having a strange dream. It was a dream of the magic time he’d become a little boy named Stuart Bagg. In the dream his cerci was missing, and so were his two back legs. So were his two middle legs, and so were his two front legs … and so were his antennae.

“I have tiny hands,” he was crying out. “I have tiny feet! I have a tiny nose and tiny ears! I have a tiny head!”

“Wake
up,
Shoebag!” his mother shouted. “You are talking in your sleep!”

“I have become a tiny person,” Shoebag continued.

“You have become nothing of the kind!” His mother flicked a front leg at his cerci, the cockroach name for a tail. A cerci is a remarkably sensitive structure, and even a light puff of air directed at a cerci can send a cockroach scurrying.

Shoebag sat bolt upright. “Where am I?” he said, wide awake now.

“You’re right where you’ve been for two years,” said Drainboard, his mother. “You’re at Miss Rattray’s School for Girls!”

“For girls,” said Shoebag, “and now one boy.”

“Yes. This year there will be one boy.”

“That’s why I was having the dream of when
I
was a boy.”

“You were having a nightmare,” Drainboard said, “even though it is only four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“I was not afraid, though, Mama. So it was not a nightmare, was it?”

Drainboard said emphatically, “It was a nightmare! I remember all too well when you were a little boy. Your father and I lived in fear that you would step on us!”

“I could never step on you or my father, Under The Toaster, Mama. I was not that much of a person.”

“But you needed three meals a day, Shoebag. You needed a bed and sheets and blankets! You needed clothes!”

“I needed soap and a washcloth,” Shoebag said, remembering. “I needed money. I needed candy. I needed television.”

“It
was
a nightmare!” Drainboard insisted. “You just had a nightmare about the old days when we all lived in Brooklyn, New York.”

“Those days weren’t so bad, Mama.”

“I remember happier ones, son, after you changed back to a roach.”

“Like the times we had at the mall in Boston?”

“Exactly! Remember the dark closet behind the deli department, in that big store?”

“I remember.”

“Home sweet home,” said Drainboard.

“I would sneak down to Appliances to watch my old pal, Gregor Samsa, on television.”

“Yes. Your little brother, Wheaties Box, was still alive then.”

Shoebag smiled. “Remember what Gregor Samsa used to say, Mama?”

“I never watched television, son. You did.”

“Gregor was the Great Breath spokesboy, Mama,” said Shoebag. He scampered out of the shoebag, excited to remember Gregor. “He always said, ‘Chew Great Breath!’”

“Gregor was a traitor to roachdom, son. He preferred being human to being one of us!”

“He couldn’t help it, Mama. He wanted to be a star. A roach never gets to be a star.”

“It is best not to look back,” said Drainboard. “Live in the here and now, son. Here we are at Miss Rattray’s School for Girls.”

“And now one boy,” Shoebag said.

“And now one boy,” Drainboard agreed.

The roach family lived in the Lower School at Miss Rattray’s. It was more peaceful there, where the five-to-ten-year-olds boarded. Lights out at nine o’clock — not like the Upper School, where the racket of noisy young girls lasted right up until the ten o’clock news.

Another reason the roach family preferred to take up residence in the Lower School, was that it was nearer the kitchen.

Under The Toaster spent most of his time in there, foraging for snacks. He was the only member of the family not afraid of Cook’s yellow cat, who always slept by the rag mop.

Drainboard said, “Stay awake now, son. We have to be on guard with all the students arriving today.”

The moment she said that a noise no one
could
have slept through sounded.
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

“Oh, no!” Shoebag said.

“Oh,
no!”
Drainboard moaned.

“The Doll Smasher is back!” both roaches said in unison, shuddering at the thought. “The Doll Smasher is back for another year!”

“S
OMEDAY THIS WILL ALL
be yours,” said Mr. Sweetsong to his only son as the limo swept down the long drive leading from Castle Sweet. “But before you become the sole heir here, you must learn to be a gentleman and a scholar.”

They were on their way to Miss Rattray’s School for Girls (and now one boy).

“I’ll learn to be a girl at Miss Rattray’s, if you ask me,” said Stanley.

“Miss Rattray’s,” said his mother, “was where I went to school, and where your grandmother went to school, and where your great-grandmother went to school. You should be honored to be accepted there.”

“Where did
you
go, Father?” Stanley asked.

“I went to an ordinary school, son.”