Chicks in Chainmail (40 page)

Lucy looked at Moth. "I'll take good care of them," he assured her.

"I want them back by dinnertime," she said. "
Our
dinnertime,
today
, in two of our hours."

"Very well," Moth agreed.

As they started across the yard to the gate, Lucy added, "And if they're not back by then, I'm coming after them."

"They'll be back on time, Lucy," Moth said fervently. "You have my word."

Maybe she's not the Original swordswoman, but Maureen Birnbaum has got my vote for being—now and forever—the Greatest.

MAUREEN BIRNBAUM IN THE MUD

E. J. Spiegelman

(As told to George, Alec Effinger)

«
^

So picture this:

I'm like sitting on the edge of the upstairs bathtub, which in Mums and Daddy's house is half-sunken so my knees are jammed up under my chin, and I'm watching my dear, dear friend, Maureen Birnbaum the Interplanetary Adventuress, apply eye shadow. Maureen is, you know, very finicky about makeup when she uses it, which isn't open these days because she's mostly a barbarian swordsperson who only rarely bothers with normal stuff.

Her style of dress begins and ends with her solid gold-and-jewel brassiere and G-string, and her grooming habits have likewise been put on hiatus in favor of perpetual vigilance. Muffy
—
that was her old nickname back in the Greenberg School days, but you should know how much she hates it now
—
spends her waking hours hacking and hewing villains and monsters. She is, she tern me, a very good hacker and hewer indeed, and I should doubt her? Well, okay
, entre nous
sometimes I have just these little teem suspicions that Muffy's narrations are how-shall-I-say
preposterous.

Be that as it may. Muffy applied the eye makeup

in layers of several different but carefully chosen shades. In the olden days, sometimes she'd end up looking like a surprised raccoon north of her nose. She's gotten more skillful since then
—
though like I still wouldn't want to call the results
tasteful
It seemed to me that she was aiming at a kind of Monet-at-Giverny waterlilies effect between her brows and eyelids
.

The color she was, well
, slathering
is a good verb, was called Azul Jacinto. Muffy was vigorously but like inexpertly blending this weird purple eye shadow with the previous tinctorial stratum, which if I remember correctly was Caramel Smoke. They should've put a
Kids: Don't Try This At Home
warning on the containers
.

She goes, "Finally
, finally,
I've found a way to get back to Mars and my own true beloved, Prince Van. And like I want to look just absolutely devastating. So be
cruel,
Bitsy. Tell me what you really think
. Honestly,
now
."

"
You look
terrific,
sweetie," I go. Let her find out the hard way. That's what she gets for calling me Bitsy. I've told her
a million times
that if she can't stand being called Muffy, I can't stand being called Bitsy. I'm not seventeen anymore. I'm a grown-up divorced mother with responsibilities, and I want to be treated with respect every bit as much as Muffy
—Maureen—
does
.

She smiled at herself in the mirror. "Great," she goes. "I'll only be a little longer." She'd said that an hour ago.

"Should I go out and tell the cab driver? Take him a Coke or some coffee or something?"

Maureen just shrugged. "I'll give him a big tip. He'd rather have that than coffee anyway, for sure. Cab drivers wait for
me all the time."

"Whatever."

"So," she goes, making her mouth into a big open

O and stretching her right eyebrow upward with her pinkie, "where was I?"

Damn it
I was, you know
, praying
that she'd forget about telling me the rest of her most recent thrilling exploit. "You whooshed out of New Orleans and wound up in this bitty little medieval village
."

"Uh huh," she goes, hastily daubing Azul Jacinto like a muralist rushing to met the NEA grant deadline. "Well, be a darling and open that other box of Frango chocolates, the raspberry ones, and I'll just finish up here."

Comment dîtes-vous en français "
Yeah. Right." What follows, I swear, I
am not
making up. I should only be so clever
.

I shouldn't even be like
talking
to you anymore, Bitsy, the way you left me standing there on the sidewalk in New Orleans. Do you mind if I tell you that I thought you were just too
R-U-D-E
for words? Still, all that's forgiven, because we've been best friends
forever
and I can see what a wretched life you've carved out for yourself, but didn't I
warn
you about Josh? And didn't I point out—

All right
. Never mind. I'm sorry I brought it up. So there I was, like simply
abandoned
in a strange city, thank you very much. They call New Orleans "The City That Care Forgot," but they've forgotten other things, too. Like the past participle. All over town, I kept running into "ice tea' and boil shrimp" and "smoke sausage." I really wanted to sample that smoke sausage, just to see if it was like my Nanny's shadow soup. She said when they were too poor to buy a chicken, she'd, you know,
borrow
someone else's and hold it over her pot of boiling water. That's how you make shadow soup.
Cossacks
were involved in that story somehow, but I can't exactly remember how.

I've lost my train of thought, I must be getting old. Oh, for sure, the
village
. You know that I can whoosh through time and space with ease, but that I don't always end up exactly where I planned.
Believe
me, sweetie, I hadn't planned to visit this—well, I hate to call it a
town
, exactly, because it was made up of just five horrible tiny shops and no houses at all. Don't you think that's a little odd?

Sure, the merchants must've lived in the back of their shops, except I didn't
see
any backs. Just these one-room huts made out of sticks. They could've learned some important and useful things about architecture from a Neolithic tribe in New Guinea or somewhere.

So here's Maureen Birnbaum, Protector of the Weak, ankling into this dinky place. It looked like a strip mall of outlet stores during the reign of King Albert.

Albert.
King Albert
. The one who burned the cakes.
You
remember. No, that wasn't Charlemagne. It was King Albert the Great. Or somebody. Hey, Bitsy, it's not even
important
, all right? Jeez!

So guess what the name of this village was? No, not Brooklyn. Ha ha, too amusing for words, Bits. No, they called the place Mudville. As in "There is no joy in." I thought, "Like wow, I've traipsed into another literary allusion." I was all set for Casey at the Bat and baseball. Girlfriend, was I ever
wrong
.

Imagine, if you will, Our Hero entering the first of the five shops of sticks. A tinkling bell announced my arrival—further oddness, on account of there was no actual door for the bell to tinkle on. I turned around and saw what was probably the shopkeeper's teenage son, a gawky kid with a face so broken out it looked like a Hayden Planetarium sky show in Technicolor. He was crouched beside the entrance with a little bell and a little hammer. Hey, what the hell, he was learning the trade and you got to start
someplace
, I guess.

The guy behind the counter goes, "Welcome to Scrupulously Honest and Fair Fred's Armor Emporium. May I help you?"

"Are you Scrupulously Honest and Fair Fred?"

"No, he's sick today. I'm his brother, Aethelraed, but never fear, dear lady, I am also scrupulously honest and fair. Pretty much."

"Uh huh," I go, "and don't call me 'dear lady.'"

"May I show you our wares? We just got in a very nice tarnhelm, nearly mint condition. Its previous owner came to a sorry end guarding a hoard."

"Bummer," I go. "So like it didn't do
that
owner a hell of a lot of good. Not a terrific recommendation for the tarnhelm. Still, let me take a look. How much are you asking for it?"

The merchant smiled broadly. "Just three thousand pieces of gold. A wonderful deal. Shall I wrap it for you or will you wear it?"

Well, Bitsy, I had a twenty-dollar bill stuffed in my right bra cup and a one-dollar bill stuffed in the left. 0f course, for emergencies I had a charge card tucked in my G-string. I thought three thousand pieces of gold sounded rand of steep for a tarnhelm—it's
magic
, Bitsy, it turns you into whatever shape you want. I see 'em
all
the time—and I didn't know if this gonif could relate to Daddy's AmEx plastic. Sure, no matter where I go in the Known Universe, they speak English—isn't that neat?—but sometimes their medium of exchange is edible roots and not dollars.

So like anyway, just as I was about to make a totally
withering
reply, what do I hear but—wait for it—my
mother's
voice behind me—not Pammy, Daddy's babe/wife, but like my actual
mother
, who I haven't heard from in
months
. Okay, so I haven't been around much myself, but I'd just assumed Mom had disappeared under a mountain of mah-jongg tiles in Miami Beach or someplace. And she goes, "So is that worthless piece-of-trash tarnhelm still under warranty, Miss Buy-The-First-Thing-You-See?"

I turned around and just stood there, blinking like an idiot. I didn't know what to say to her. I go, "
Mom
? What are you doing here?"

She shrugged. "Shopping. That's a crime now?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again, you know, like dumbfounded. Finally I go, "You're in the market for chainmail today?"

She gave me one of her little
tsk
noises. "What, I can't go into a store and browse around a little? Where does it say I can't just look at prices?"

She picked up a Cloak of Invisibility that she couldn't have paid for if she had all the money Daddy made when he sold his silver to the Hunt brothers. "You don't find quality like this even on Seventh Avenue," she goes, and she tossed the cloak aside like it was some horrible thing I'd given her for her birthday.

That's when I guessed it wasn't really Mom. My
real
Mom would've tossed the cloak aside, all right, but then she'd have given it a disdainful look and told the shopkeeper, "You'll accept ten dollars, I
might
take it off your hands." This near-Mom hadn't even
tried
to bargain.

"Hey," I go, "who are you
really
?"

She took a breath and heaved a sigh. It was very authentic. "My name, Maureen, is Glorian. I am called Glorian of the Knowledge by some, yet I have other names, many other names. I am a supernatural personage of ancient power and wisdom, here to guide you on your appointed quest."

"I h
ate
these goddamn quests," I go. And I
do
, too. Like why can't I accidentally whoosh myself to a nice beach with clean white sand and warm water and a few eager Brad Pitt types and a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris and, you know, no one expecting me to defend or rescue anybody at all for a couple of weeks. That doesn't seem to be in the cards for good old Maureen.

"No one enjoys quests," Glorian goes. "It wouldn't be much of a trial if it was all fun and laughter."

I turn on my Number Three Frown—you know: I Really Don't Have Time For This. And I'm like, "No way I can just whoosh on out of here and bag this whole quest thing, huh?"

Glorian-Mom smiled. "I'm sorry."

So I shrugged A warrior-woman's work is never done. "Then let's rally," I go.

"Cool." like my Mom would
never
say "Cool." Like anybody called "Glorian of the Knowledge" would ever say "Cool," either. Yet, Bitsy, it
happened
: I was there.

Now here's a secret Maureen Birnbaum makeup tip for you. After you put on the darker shade of eye shadow, you want to dab on just an eensy amount of the under-color right in the middle of the eyelid—where did that Caramel Smoke go?—okay, here. Watch. Now, if Prince Van was the disco type, I'd put some gold glitter there instead. But he's not, and I'm not, and you probably wouldn't even
have
—

You
do
? Well, get
rid
of it.

So then this Glorian goes, "There are a number of ground rules, of course, but I'll explain them as we go along. The first thing you must know is that you'll need certain supplies: armor, weapons, magical scrolls and texts, potions and wands, as well as sufficient food and water. By its nature, the quest places certain limitations on you. For instance, you may carry a total of only twenty objects."

"I don't see why—"

Glorian raised a hand "Twenty objects, regardless of their combined weight. Please believe me. The Powers That Be will not permit you to cany more. If you have twenty objects, and you find something more that you wish to take, you must drop one of the other items."

"What about
you
?" I go. "Your arms, are broken, or are you too, you know,
special
to give me a hand? Or don't you mythical types schlep like normal people?"