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But most people in the crowd thought he was a howl. Just here and there you’d see a few people who saw what I saw. Their smiles weren’t making fun of George. Their smiles were kind of queer and sweet. Their smiles mostly seemed to ask how Jenny worked.

Jenny was radio-controlled, and the controls were in those trick shoes of George’s—under his toes. He would punch buttons with his toes, and the shoes would send out signals to Jenny’s brains in the moving van. Then the brains would signal Jenny what to do. There weren’t any wires between Jenny and George and the van.

It was hard to believe George had anything to do with what Jenny was up to. He had a little pink earphone in his ear, so he could hear everything anybody said to Jenny, even when she was a hundred feet away. And he had little rearview mirrors on the frames of his glasses, so he could turn his back to her and still see everything she did.

When they stopped singing, Jenny picked me out to kid around with. “Hello, tall, dark, and handsome,” she said to me. “Did the old icebox drive you out of the house?” She had a sponge rubber face at the top of the door, with springs embedded in it and a loudspeaker behind it. Her face was so real, I almost had to believe there was a beautiful woman inside the refrigerator—with her face stuck through a hole in the door.

I kidded her back. “Look, Mrs. Frankenstein,” I said to her, “why don’t you go off in a corner somewhere and make some ice cubes? I want to have a private talk with your boss.”

Her face turned from pink to white. Her lips trembled. Then her lips pulled down and dragged her whole face out of shape. She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at such a terrible person. And then, as God is my judge, she squeezed out two fat tears. They ran down her cheeks, then down her white enamelled front to the floor.

I smiled and winked at George to let him know how slick I thought his act was, and that I really did want to see him.

He didn’t smile back. He didn’t like me for talking to Jenny that way. You would have thought I’d spit in the eye of his mother or sister or something.

A kid about ten years old came up to George and said, “Hey, Mister, I bet I know how she works. You got a midget in there.”

“You’re the first one who ever guessed,” George said. “Now that everybody knows, I might as well let the midget out.” He motioned for Jenny to come out on the sidewalk with him.

I expected her to waddle and clank like a tractor, because she weighed seven hundred pounds. But she had a light step to go with that beautiful face of hers. I never saw such a case of mind over matter. I forgot all about the refrigerator. All I saw was her.

She sidled up to George. “What is it, Sweetheart?” she said.

“The jig is up,” George said. “This bright boy knows you’re a midget inside. Might as well come on out and get some fresh air and meet the nice people.” He hesitated just long enough and looked just glum enough to make the people think maybe they were really going to see a midget.

And then there was a whirr and a click, and Jenny’s door swung open. There wasn’t anything inside but cold air, stainless steel, porcelain, and a glass of orange juice. It was a shock to everybody—all that beauty and personality on the outside, and all that cold nothing on the inside.

George took a sip from the glass of orange juice, put it back in Jenny and closed her door.

“I’m certainly glad to see you taking care of yourself for a change,” Jenny said. You could tell she was crazy about him, and that he broke her heart about half the time. “Honestly,” she said to the crowd, “the poor man should be dead of scurvy and rickets by now, the way he eats.”

An audience is the nuttiest thing there is, if you ever stop to think about it. Here George had proved there wasn’t anything inside Jenny, and here the crowd was, twenty seconds later, treating her like a real human being again. The women were shaking their heads to let Jenny know they knew what a trial it was to get a man