The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [54]
One Saturday afternoon Lydia took me shopping at Marshall Field’s. Lydia and I took a bus uptown to the Loop, and she carried me in her arms, buried in her green hooded sweatshirt, into the store. I was stricken silent with awe at the place. It was like a cathedral, a temple to commerce, to all the potential beauty of human vanity. Floor cascaded above floor through that dizzying shaft of space in the middle of the room—the gilt decorations, the Old World grandeur, the marble everywhere: I thought we had entered some sort of palace.
I liked to look at all the mannequins. It was so fascinating to observe the personality differences in all the different sorts of mannequins. Some of them are deliberately designed to look very humanlike: they have skin and hair and eyes. Sometimes they have icily detached expressions on their beautiful faces. Sometimes their fragile fingers and slender hands looked so realistic that one half-expected them to move. Others are more abstract: some are of unpainted white plastic or plaster. Some of them are realistically proportioned, with detailed hands and feet and skeletomuscular definition under their hard shiny skin, tendons in their necks and clavicles under their shoulders—and yet are eerily missing their heads, as if they have just been executed under the guillotine, for real or imagined crimes. The more impressionistic ones might have hands like mittens, with thumbs separate but the other four fingers fused together, and with no faces, their heads being mere smooth plastic ellipsoids—giving them an alien appearance. Others are half-abstract, with noses and forehead ridges and mouths, but no eyes. Still others are designed to look humanoid, but in a deliberately unrealistic or exaggerated way. These last are the type of mannequins on display in the lingerie department, which happens to be right next to the children’s department, way up on the fourth or fifth floor, where I went with Lydia so I could try clothes on. Lydia picked out some shirts and pants and sweaters and whatnot for me. I appeared to have a predilection for stripes: especially shirts with broad, horizontal stripes. I loved to hold her hot human hand and gaze up at the glittering frescoed ceilings as she flipped through the racks of clothing that were on sale in the children’s section, selecting things for me to try on, folding them over the arm that held mine, the sound of the metal hangers scraping against the rack. Then she took me by the hand back to the fitting rooms and helped me put them on.
“Do you like this, Bruno?” she would say, tugging a shirt over my body as I sat on a bench and she crouched before me in the mirror-walled fitting room. If I did not like it I would fling it away. If I did like it I would pant-hoot with enthusiasm, and Lydia would press a finger to her lips to shush me, lest we be found out. I was wearing my collar, but Lydia always hated to put the leash on me. She kept the leash in her purse, having sworn me to a blood oath of good behavior.
We selected several pairs of jeans, a pair of fancier black slacks, some T-shirts, a stalwart winter coat to fend off the Chicago winter, and a few shirts that snapped rather than buttoned because my then-clumsy fingers were not yet dexterous enough to perform the complicated operation of slipping a button into a buttonhole. She even bought—because I insisted, and she spoiled me—she even bought me a shiny pair of sneakers, extra large ones due to the preposterously unusual shapes of my feet. All of these items had to be bought with an air of utmost secrecy: with me plodding alongside her with a long hairy arm stretched up to hold her hand and the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt pulled low over my face. Lydia had to constantly shoo away commission-eager salesgirls, who were always nosily seeking her eye-contact and asking her in tones that made us panic despite