Come Along with Me by Shirley Jackson Page B

like an ape,” Julie said tentatively. “And I got a look at her mate—this Bud. Gargantua.”
    â€œGargantua?”
    â€œAnd M’Tootie,” Julie said. “M’Tootie.”
    By the following Monday night it had stopped being quite so funny. For some reason, probably because I had seen her first, Julie came to regard M’Tootie as my project, and even after a while became a little bitter toward me. “It’s not that I think you could have
warned
me,” she kept saying, “But
some
body ought’ve made me think it
over
.”
    M’Tootie had arrived Monday morning with Bud, an impressive creature of about sixteen, who stopped the Chevvy that would do fifty in front of Julie’s house and disgorged M’Tootie with what looked to Julie, watching from the window, like a sort of desperate relief. M’Tootie shambled in the back door, dropped her jacket on a chair, and said to Julie: “Well, whaddye want me for? Could I have one of them cigarettes?”
    Julie gave her a cigarette and told her to wash the dishes, came out into the kitchen an hour later, and found M’Tootie reading a page from
True Confessions
which had been used to pave a closet shelf.
    â€œAren’t the dishes done yet?” Julie asked.
    â€œJust getting to them,” M’Tootie said. She flipped the page over. “It don’t finish here anyway,” she said.
    Tommy, as I had suspected, fell madly in love with M’Tootie immediately. He loved her red nail polish, the ribbons in her coiffure, and the shrill version of “I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store” with which she used to quiet him when he was nervous. Because of Tommy, Julie was hesitant about attacking the red nail polish, and her first timid attempts at improving M’Tootie were so disastrous that she was forced to reconcile herself to M’Tootie in an anthropoid state. “What happens?” Julie wailed to me, “Where do I get? I give her a bowl of hot water and say, ‘While I’m giving Tommy his bath, Tootie, suppose you wash yourself and then we’ll all go out together, all dressed up—’ nice, you know, like a casual suggestion, and I come upstairs after giving Tommy his bath and the water’s sitting there stone-cold and that damn ape is lying on the bed reading
Jo’s Boys
and when I come in she says ‘All ready? Just wait’ll I finish this chapter and we’ll go,’ and there I am, and so then I figure that if I give her some nice clothes she might want to be clean and look nice and I say ‘Think how much Bud will admire you if you look pretty,’ and she looks at the clothes I have for her and says ‘Them? Say, I got a whole closet-full of them. Look,’ and she shows me the closet and she has ten dresses nicer than any I own, and she took the ones I gave her and gave them to Bud for his sister to wear. And all the time if she isn’t reading
Jo’s Boys
it’s
Heidi
, and she keeps asking me to help her with the long words; while I’m doing the dishes and taking care of Tommy she’s reading
Heidi
.”
    Julie made one attempt on the coiffure, which not only failed miserably, but brought Bud around to have a talk with Julie when Tootie was upstairs reading.
    â€œYou gotta treat her nice, Miz Taylor,” Bud said earnestly. “She’s an independent sort of a kid, like, and you gotta be sure you’re nice to her. All this fooling around trying to get her to change her ways won’t work; she told me about how you come making her wear other clothes and bothering her hair and all this talk about washing dishes and stuff . . .”
    Julie was dangerously near a stroke, but she said: “Don’t you think Tootie ought to do the work she was hired for, Bud?”
    â€œSure,” Bud said, nodding his head profoundly, “that ain’t right, she