Bitsie was sitting on a toilet in the mall’s public washroom. He was wearing my leopard skin bra and laughing his head off.
I was not laughing.
I was standing against the cubicle door with my arms folded, glaring at him. I had never been so angry in my life.
He was giving a detailed and extremely “humorous”49 account of the chase scene. Like this was just some funny little prank that he’d rigged up for our amusement.
I let him have his fun for a while—and then I ripped into him. I told him he was thoughtless and selfish and just plain stupid. I asked him what he thought would have happened if I hadn’t tracked that old lady down. What would have happened if she’d taken him back to her little retirement home and put him in her shoe closet, miles and miles and miles away from the studio? What would have happened if she’d opened her bag and looked at Bitsie and actually had a heart attack?
“Oh, lighten up,” he said. “It didn’t happen, did it?”
Can you believe it?!
I went wiggy. I mean, even Mel would have been proud.
I said, “What is the matter with you? Don’t you realize you could have gotten lost, and the whole production would have had to shut down?”
He shrugged and said, “They’d just make a new puppet.
It’s not like they don’t have the molds or anything.”
“And who would pay for that?” I was practically screaming by this time.
“I dunno.” Like, who cares?
I told him I’d have to pay for it. Once I got out of jail, that is. But even that didn’t seem to faze him. Bitsie kept on looking at me like I couldn’t take a joke or something.
That’s when I knew I didn’t have any other choice. I said, “I’m never taking you to the mall. Ever. Again.”
Now that fazed him.
Suddenly, he was so, soooo sorry. He realized what a stupid thing he’d done. He was ashamed. Embarrassed.
But reformed! A different puppet. He’d learned from his mistakes. He would never do anything like that again. Ever.
He promised.
Like I was going to fall for that.
I said, “I know you’ll never do it again. Because you’ll never have the chance. I repeat, I am never, ever taking you to the mall again.”
Bitsie was shocked. How mean could I be? He started begging for mercy. He told me this sad, sad story about how horrible it was to be in that little cubicle with a naked lady.
He’d never seen anything like it before, even on the Health Channel. The whole time he was cowering in the corner, ter rified. The shock was such that he could feel all his powers of speech and movement draining away from him. Numbing him. Reducing him to a simple foam-head.
The whole experience was awful, he said. Awful!
Oh, cry me a river. Like having to watch an old lady put on a girdle is the worst thing that’s ever happened to anybody. Bitsie had absolutely no appreciation for what other people go through. He wasn’t getting any sympathy from me. I just looked at him like “So what?”
But that didn’t stop him. He had one more thing to try.
He stood up and stretched his hands out toward me. I knew he was going for that “sad but dignified” look, but he missed it by a mile. (It might have helped if he’d taken off that stupid leopard skin bra.)
“Haven’t I suffered enough?” he said, in this pathetic little whisper. “The remorse…the fear…the never knowing if I’d see my loved ones again? What more can I do? What more can I give? If we are to live together—if civilization is to survive!—we must embrace forgiveness! And that’s all I’m asking for. A little…forgiveness.”
“Very moving,” I said. “It’s just too bad that we watched that episode of Quest for Justice together or I might have fallen for it.”
Bitsie didn’t have time to say anything else. I’d had enough. I grabbed him, stuffed him into my knapsack and took him back to the studio in silence.
I never even stopped to consider what all those ladies in the other toilet stalls must have been thinking.
49 At least that’s what he thought.