“ALLISON RICE” is the collaborative pseudonym of Jane Rice and Ruth Allison, who report separately (via their agent):
Jane Rice: “Does he want magazines I’ve written for? Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Charm, F&SF, Astounding are the only ones still alive and kicking. My only real claim to fame is my recipe for pickled shrimp and, although I dislike braggarts, I make a superb dry Martini.”
Ruth Allison: “Really have no time to write (I wish I could—write, not have the time). We have torn out the kitchen, completely. There is just a huge hole in the house, starting at the foundation and going all the way up through the attic . . . said hole being full of rusty pipes, insulation and old plaster. It is a horrible mess. Am trying to cook on a lukewarm plate, fix the baby’s bottles, keep the boys out of the excavation, the flies out of the house, the water out of the registers. ... As you can see, am not in a very funny mood. Well, am in a damn funny mood, but I don’t feel too humorous.”
Men who read this story invariably laugh; women, however, especially those with small children, weep. One footnote: Mrs. Allison, who had four boys a year ago, now has five.
* * * *
By Allison Rice
They are. I’ve seen one. He (it?) was standing in the washbasin in our bathroom, during an electrical storm, in the middle of the night. He was about a foot high in his bare feet and he had a whiskery face and he smiled at me . . . slowly. I don’t care to dwell on it. They have more teeth than we do—or something, and this one was wearing a little pockety-looking garment somewhat on the order of a shoemaker’s apron. He must have been able to see in the dark because he was reading a threatening note I had written milord and scotch-taped firmly to the mirror.
In case you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, the answer is—No, I don’t. Nor am I subconsciously fulfilling a psychological need. I am the mother of four small boys and I need a loolie like milord needs a coat hanger caught in the lawnmower.
Anyhow, to the inevitable queries—Why are they called loolies? Where do they come from, et cetera?—I can only reply through a mouthful of clothespins, I haven’t time to bat this over the head with a rolled-up research paper. I guess they’re called loolies for the same reason that brownies are called brownies. It is their name. Maybe they come from the same place. Et cetera. Wherever that is. However and whereas a brownie is a good-natured goblin who performs helpful services at night (that’s what I need, begod, a reliable brownie, with an eyeshade and some counterfeiting equipment) a loolie will leave you lop-legged. And probably already he has. I’m not sure a loolie is a goblin either.
No matter. Think back. Do you own a listless, slump-shouldered voltage-starved appliance that brightens, clicks its dials, and does a sexy Flamenco the minute the repair truck turns into the driveway? Does your gravel sprout grass, your lawn nourish moles, and your iced tea get cloudy? Do your paper bags jump out of the cupboard at you when you’ve got your eggbeater full of runny so that you get splaat all over? Are your children behaving like subversives in the employ of a foreign power? Are your groceries being delivered with the cans on top of the grapes on top of the potato chips? Does someone whom you haven’t seen since your pink tulle and corsage days—such as an old Sigma Chi beau—drop in from Paris en route to the Orient when you’ve just returned from a catfish fry at Thick Lake and are going with your tongue hanging out looking like doodledy squat? Do drawers stick? Gutters runneth over? Sheets split down the middle? What always makes three too many of those floorboard screeks you hear in the dark? Where are your car keys? (Wanna bet?)
That’s enough for a sample. Try them for size. If they fit, Welcome to the Club. The password is May Day and don’t say you weren’t warned. Another thing, pay attention to what your wee ones jabber at you when you find the sink stopped up, the ceiling leaking milk, and the baby licking the flyswatter. Let me be a lesson to you. I didn’t listen and now I wear a size Gulp dress and my house is shrinking. Your motto should be watch out, lest thy hoe handle uprise and whack thee in thy teeth.
If you’re the It Can’t Happen Here type, get down on the kitchen floor where everything else usually is and hunt for eeny-weeny footprints. Act at once. The neck you save may be your own, honey. I learned the hard way, with a stray roller skate as my Cinderella slipper (a typical loolie ploy) and an ironing board for a partner. Recognizing this prone situation as a seldom-come-by pooprtunity [This is not a typographical error.], I rested a spell. Which is how I saw the footprints.
When I was a new bride I would’ve thought mice but I have realized that mice ain’t much, comparatively speaking, and that eeeeek don’t solve nuthin’. Therefore I merely shifted onto one elbow and ruminated hmmmmm. If I dipped snuff I’d’ve dipped some.
The prints were too large for mice. And they all had fairly human-looking toes, which is how human toes generally look. Was a lost doll walking around the neighborhood trying to beam in on Ma-Ma? Considering what-all dolls do nowadays this idea wasn’t far-fetched. Could it be a baby robot, for that matter? Or, a ditto Martian, a very likely possibility. Perhaps it was loolies. Maybe it was—
... loolies ...
! and ? Suppose loolies weren’t scapegoats invented by our imaginative progeny? Suppose loolies were the truth? It was idiotic to suppose that loolies had painted our car wheels, when I had collared the syndicate white-handed, but suppose loolies were the Masterminds. Lor’ luv a duck ...
A succession of past events blipped across my inner eye, like the fruit on a slot machine. The Great Sugar Fight and Toothpaste Squirt. The company’s-coming, big, old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner which disinterested the company mightily when milord, probing the golden-brown-turkey-dripping-with-delicious-goodness, came up with a soggy wool-mitten. The day our offspring sneaked their scraggly, half-grown, spook-footed, purple Easter chickens into the car trunk and we didn’t discover the witless, scrawky, whap-flap things until we arrived at our destination, a downtown hotel in Louisville. The day they built the snowman, indoors. The day I was sure I had erected an impregnable barricade to defend a freshly varnished floor when here they came, huffing and puffing, to show me how thistledown worked.
And what about like weevils in the flour. Cobwebs overnight. Holes in socks. All those long lost, tenor, s’wahoo ol’ buddy buddies milord finds at Homecomings, and places. And all those ol’ midnight invitations for beckon and eggsh at our housh while I weigh my chances of beating the rap on a murder charge.
Y’know something? An all-woman jury would be a cinch. They wouldn’t bother to leave the box. They would simply continue to knit one, purl two as they murmured in unison, “Justifiable homicide,” Their modish foreman (not a grease spot on her, not one bead of sweat) would stand and say, “Your Honor ... we find the defendant. . . NOT THE LEAST BITTY BIT GUILTY.” Pandemonium. Judge pounds gavel, to no avail. Jury pounds prosecuting attorney. Snake dance forms . . . flambeaux . . . floats . . . bunting . . . banners . . . loudspeakers . . . Allison Rice for President! A prominent (size 42, D cup) society matron climbs up on the Helen Hayes Theatre marquee and does the split. Huz-zah! Huzzah! Wall Street and ticker tape . . . Pennsylvania Avenue ... the Inaugural Ball . . . and there, beside me, in the spotlight, my fambly. Milord has just met a long-lost, tattooed buddy. Our children have been eating dirt. The smallest is holding a one-eyed alley cat with a bad case of mange. They are showing a prominent society matron a bottle of spit they’ve saved up. They espy Lady Bird (a Mrs. Lady Bird Jackson who is famous for her salt-rising bread) and wave and yell for her to come watch how they can piddle-puddle through a knothole. I confront them with the footprints. Loolies? My voice booms over the microphones. There is a skitter of amusement. A widening sputter of mirth. A surge, a roar of jelly-belly laughter. I am horrified to discover I am the sole lady present who is not wearing a topless evening gown. The scene mercifully fades. . . .
Let’s see. Where—
Ah, there you are. What are you doing way over there? Never mind, let us hurry on, past milord’s theory that the loolie prints could’ve been made by any of the following: turtles, hamsters, cats, kittens, dogs, frogs, hoptoads, rabbits, a salamander with a short tail, or large mice. I make no comment except to remark that at least he doesn’t think they’re mine.
As traps are taboo (too many fingers and toes— 260½ to be exact, counting everyone) I left nightly saucers of milk for the loolies. Cookies. The latest issue of House Beautiful. I tried appealing to their sense of fun with a rubber lizard and a Hallowe’en nose. Please be informed that hope will get you nowhere. Our cat produced a litter of seven female kittens, and litter is the one right word, believe me. Our dog had an encounter with a skunk and, subsequently, terrorized the whole neighborhood by acting like an animal out of Mythical Beasts. We went through measles, mumps, green apples, a rash of dents and blown fuses and more baby rabbits and vacuum cleaner trouble. And have you ever, when getting the wash ready, emptied a child’s sock and found yourself holding something terrible with a bite out of it?
Next, I “hexed.” If you must know, I wrote “loolies” in pig Latin on the inside of a peanut-butter sandwich and ate it for lunch. It tasted clean, and good, and true. Yet, within twenty-four hours I was back on the s’wahoo ol’ buddy circuit, and’ there was a whole quartet of the aforementioned s.o.b.s. and one of them had a guitar. If you think I put up with this hootenanny nonsense you win first prize, two pounds of beckon and a dozen eggsh.
And then, out of the Slough of Despond, came the midnight storm. It was a doozy. One of those torrential, lightning-ripped, rumble, blam things, black as cats one second and livid fluroescent green the next. Did the children rouse, frightened and seeking comfort? No. Did milord awaken to batten down the hatches and protect his nearest and dearest from loose electricity? No. ‘Twas I, Minnie the Mermaid (no Ho-Daddy, she!) who crossed the Rubicon without so much as a flashlight (the battery was dead).
Oh, pioneers! I used to think I’d have made a splendid settler woman. Brave. Intrepid. Dauntless. The Indians would have named me Little Bright Rattlesnake. I know, now, I’d have been a dud. For, when I pussyfooted into the bathroom for a towel to mop wet windowsills with and, blam, saw the loolie . . . had an Indian been handy he could have lifted my scalp right off my head, slick as a whistle, without benefit of tomahawk—that’s how high my hair rose and how loose I was all the way up from my knees ... as I vainly flicked the light switch.
From my knees down I was pure steel piston and I was out in the kitchen in nothing flat, desperately trying light switches en route and making thin keening noises as I snatched up suitable weapons.
Armed, I took a deep breath and started back, an inch at a time, keeping close to the walls like they do in the movies. Quietly. Quietly. The storm slammed and glittered about the house but Little Bright Rattlesnake slipped silently—the lights came on suddenly and I screamed.
Milord appeared in the hallway, sleepy and disheveled.
“What ——” he began, and stopped. I think at that moment he’d have traded me in for a used Edsel.
Behind him the bathroom was brilliantly lit, and empty. The note on the mirror was gone. He’d never believe me. Never in the wide world.
“I . . . uh . . . thought I heard something,” I explained, lamely.
“You did,” he said, eyeing my broom, and long-handled barbecue fork, and me. “Thunder.”
Let us, for politeness’ sake, lower the curtain here and raise it again the following morning. This morning, to be exact. Visualize, if you will, the sunny kitchen with its limp rained-on curtains, and me staring bug-eyed and whopper-jawed at the name Chauncey written in strawberry jam on the refrigerator door.
I realize why the loolie’s strange attire. I wonder numbly what else he may have pocketed. The note on the mirror arises Phoenix-like in my mind.
Dearest Chauncey:
Someone who uses barbershop hair tonic used my hairbrush. Pray tell, could it be you? How would you like to be snatched baldheaded?
Love and kisses,
Guess Who
As you have no doubt surmised, Chauncey is milord’s middle name which he keeps under such careful guard that even Agent 007 couldn’t spring it. Well, I thought, it was out now. I could almost see the graffiti on the sidewalk, the locker room floor at the club, the office bulletin board...
Hastily, I soaped a sponge and wiped the refrigerator door, and none too soon, for milord burst into the kitchen as if shot from guns. His expression was deathly, his voice a knell.
“Honey,” he intoned in accents of doom, “I’m . . . I’m getting bald!”