Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Page A

Some lover-boy!”
    “I thought it was your quilt.”
    “She gave it to me.”
    “Ah, hmmm, family heirloom. . . ” The chick was demonic, even by Manhattan standards. A Baba Yaga from the Bronx who could supernaturally command Christmas Eve traffic, steal canes, threaten lover-boys, and turn up wherever I went! I needed a quiet life. . .
    “And when I called him up about it, he said he’d sold it! Can you believe that?”
    “Sold it? To whom?” I asked, actually sort of astonished that such depravity could revolve around bedcovers.
    “The museum of annoying folksiness. You know, uptown.”
    “They bought your blanket?”
    “It’s not a blanket , it’s a quilt . Slave art. Slave labor! You know how hard it is to make one of those things?”
    “Uh, no. Not really.”
    “It’s hard work. Very intensive. Subversive too,” she went on, “turning old bits of crap into something fancy. Rags and rage, that’s what quilts are made o f !” To emphasize the point, Mimi bit a peapod in half that she’d found in her soup.
    “Sounds like a new name for the Sanitation Department,” I ventured. “Rags and Rage. You know, those 3 a.m. guys.”
    “It was the last one she made before she went berserk!”
    “Who went berserk?”
    “My Aunt Phoebe. From all that stitching and bitching. That’s what did it. See, she belonged to this quilting bee.” Mimi ate some more soup. “They sold her down the river. Called the cops when she started putting cat shit in the quilt stuffing. The creeps had her locked up!” (Bellevue. So it ran in the family.)
    “Not very comforting though, is it, a comforter full of cat shit?” I remarked.
    “It’s not a ‘comforter’! Anyway, Aunt Phoebe had finished my quilt before she hit her cat shit phase.”
    “Well, that’s all pretty, pretty amazing, but I, uh, have to. . . ” I suddenly remembered I was supposed to display M. Z. Fortune’s book prominently on the table so he’d find me. I fished around in my briefcase and then attempted to position The People’s Guide to Presentations against the wall between our two bowls. Mimi immediately snatched it and started flicking through it in a bored sort of way and getting soup on it!
    “Hey!” I protested.
    “Okay title. Not sure about the cover. Good story?”
    “Could you just put that back over here like a good girl, so the guy I’m meeting will see it when he comes in?”
    “What guy? Oh, the guy .”
    “And no, there’s no ‘story.’?”
    “Subplot then, if it hasn’t got room for a whole plot?”
    “No subplot either,” I said, increasingly concerned about how I would handle M. Z. Fortune’s arrival. Move to another table, I guess.
    “You seem to like this book a lot, huh?” she continued.
    “It’s okay. A bit too much jargon,” I said, lowering my voice in case M. Z. Fortune was in the vicinity.
    Taking this as an invitation for a conspiratorial confab, Mimi leaned forward and whispered, “Yeah? Like what?”
    “Well, things like ‘hooks’ and ‘benchmarks’ and ‘limited-opportunity windows,’?” I feebly replied. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what he’s talking about.”
    “Hmmm. Must be some good bits though,” she said.
    “Yeah, well, it’s funny when he tells you not to jingle your keys and your change in your pockets as you speak, and you’re not supposed to give a speech while unconsciously covering your groin with your hands. That’s the fig-leaf position. It distracts the audience, apparently.”
    “So you want to give a speech, huh?”
    “I don’t want to, I have to. At my old school. They asked me to do the graduation speech this year.”
    “What’s it going to be about?”
    Thinking up something on the spot, I answered, “ ‘How I Hated School. ’ ”
    “You’re going back to your old school to talk about how you hated school?!”
    “Yup.”
    “Great! I hated school too,” she declared, and absent-mindedly pocketed the book.
    “Hey! You’re not