The diary of a sixteen-year-old bride, begun at her husband's insistence, forms the entire narrative of Sydney Van Scyoc's "Bimmie Says." The opening line—"Bimmie says people are stupid"—establishes a voice that is both naive and sharp, filtered through the wife's reporting of her husband's pronouncements. The diary format allows the reader to trace her shifting perceptions across dated entries, from June 27, 1982, onward.

The story's tension emerges immediately: Bimmie wants a record for when he is famous, while his wife's entries dwell on domestic details—a black cat and dog, red collars refused, a pregnancy she learns about at school. The excerpts show a marriage of unequal power, with Bimmie's laboratory in the basement as a constant, unseen presence.

The Diary as a Record of Control

The diary is not the wife's idea. Bimmie commands her to keep it: "Bimmie said to do this, keep a diary." When she misunderstands, he corrects her sharply: "You deaf, woman? A book!" The purpose is explicitly financial—"for when he's famous"—so they can publish it "anytime we need money." Yet the content quickly subverts this goal. The wife records her own concerns: the cat climbing lace curtains, the puppy's jealousy, her mother's suspicion of pregnancy. Bimmie later reads the diary and complains she does not write enough about his work. The diary thus becomes a site of struggle between his desire for self-promotion and her impulse to document her own life.

Domestic Details and Scientific Ambition

The wife's entries are filled with concrete, everyday observations: she cooks, she wants to sleep late and fix her hair, she argues about the pets' collars. Bimmie, by contrast, is almost always in his basement laboratory. His experiments involve pills and injections—he gives the puppy pills to keep her small, and he has "pills now" for the cat. The wife's pregnancy is met with his "Whoopee!" and an obstetrics book, but the excerpts show no further emotional engagement. Later, in a more distant section, the wife visits a library and checks out volumes on chemistry and nuclear physics, suggesting a shift in her own interests. The contrast between her domestic sphere and his scientific one is stark, yet the boundary begins to blur.

Voice and the Unreliable Narrator

The wife's voice is distinctive: colloquial, unpolished, and often humorous. She writes in short, declarative sentences: "I'm short, sort of cute, and I cook good." Her spelling and grammar are inconsistent—"June 31" appears before Bimmie corrects her. This naive style creates a gap between what she reports and what the reader infers. When she says Bimmie "already knows everything important," the irony is palpable. Her observations about Frankie, who says she is "sexy," and her dismissal of motherhood as "changing soppy diapers" reveal a young woman aware of her limited options. The diary form makes her an unreliable narrator, not because she lies, but because she does not fully understand the implications of what she records.

Readers should pay close attention to what the wife chooses to record—and what she omits. The diary's gaps, its shifts in tone, and the gradual emergence of her own curiosity (as when she checks out science books) all hint at a transformation that the excerpts only partially reveal. The story rewards careful reading of its small, telling details.