Very Rich

by Polly Horvath

  “What took you so long? I was supposed to go home an hour ago,” said a cook to Mrs. Rivers as they ran behind him. “I covered for you by telling Chef Michaels that I asked you to come in late tonight so I could stay on a bit, but shake a leg now! I want to get out of here!”

  “You’re the best,” said Mrs. Rivers. “I’ll just be a tick.”

  She hustled Rupert along until she got him into the changing room. There she quickly found a small chef’s coat hanging on a hook and then flagged down a waitress.

  “Harriet dear, do you have any pins with you? A scissors?”

  “Jeez, Mrs. Rivers,” said the waitress, “I’m being run off my feet as it is. I’ve got some pins in my makeup bag but I don’t have time to get them for you.”

  “Just tell me where it is. And where I can find a scissors.”

  “Back third cubby,” said the waitress. “And for scissors, grab some poultry shears. But not from Andrew’s station. He’s in a mood tonight. He’s messed up three of my orders on purpose already.”

  “The jerk,” said Mrs. Rivers. She fetched poultry sheers and got the pins from Harriet’s makeup bag and put the chef’s coat over Rupert’s emaciated frame. It was quite long. More of a dress than a coat. She knelt down on the floor and did some cutting and pinning, then leaned back to survey her work. “It will have to do,” she said.

  “Now, as I have said, I have a plan.” Mrs. Rivers put her hands on Rupert’s shoulders and looked him in the eye. “You are here because I felt bad about the prizes. But also because I need you. Here is what I want you to do.”

  She whispered it all into Rupert’s ear.

  After that Mrs. Rivers took Rupert to the front of the restaurant. This was a symphony of different sounds. It was less stressed-sounding and more excited. It was the sound of many people happily talking loudly to each other in order to be heard over the general din. There were the gleeful shouts of celebration and release from the humdrum world. Dishes and forks and glasses made clanking sounds as they hit the table where waiters put them down, and there was the whoosh of air moving as waiters glided like whales through currents in the sea. The restaurant was dim except for the candles alight on all the tables and the flash of metal and mirror from the bar area. It all smelled exotically wonderful of butter and garlic and spices and fresh bread and hot meats. It made Rupert dizzy, the smells and sounds and speed. It was all he could do not to grab a basket of steaming rolls as a waiter put them on a nearby table. But Mrs. Rivers continued, yanking him along in her great hurry until they got to the bar.

  There she indicated the end bar stool, and while he clambered up she said to the bartender, “Sam, I’m babysitting young Rupert here tonight. I can’t take him into the kitchen. Can you imagine Chef Michaels?”

  Sam rolled his eyes and nodded.

  “Be a nice guy and let him stay here. He’s very quiet and he’ll be no trouble.”

  “Well, all right, but the bar’s busy tonight,” said Sam. “I can’t be looking after him.”

  “No, no, he’s ten. He doesn’t need watching like a four-year-old. Just let him sit here.”

  “You’ll sit there quiet, Rupert, and cause me no trouble?” asked Sam.

  “Yes, sir,” said Rupert.

  Then a customer flagged Sam and he was off to the other end of the long bar.

  “I’ve got to go.” Mrs. Rivers looked around distractedly and then swung Rupert’s bar stool so he faced her squarely, put both hands on either side of his face, and said clearly and precisely. “Now…DON’T…FORGET!”

  “But…” protested Rupert, for he had no idea, no idea at all, how he would do what Mrs. Rivers had asked him. Oh, this was a disaster. He should never have come. He wasn’t made for this type of thing. He was going to disappoint her terribly.

  He sat on his stool and fidgeted. Because the stool swiveled he found he could turn this way and that to see the entire restaurant. He could also quietly spy on the people eating, his back to the restaurant, watching them in the mirror over the bar. After a half hour though, this palled. The stool had no back, so there was nothing to lean against. He was tired, his back hurt from sitting upright, and he wanted to go to bed. He was so tired he finally leaned forward and put his cheek on the bar. When Sam got a glimpse of this, he threw Rupert such a look from the other end of the bar that Rupert sat bolt upright again. This caused Sam to laugh, and when people stopped clamoring for drinks, Sam took a Coke and a bowl of peanuts down to Rupert saying, “Tough night, eh, kid? Pretty late for someone your age to be up. How’re you going to concentrate in school tomorrow? But listen, you can’t lie on the bar. Looks bad.”

  Then before Rupert could answer, a waitress ran over with a tray and signaled that she had a drink order for Sam to fill, and he was off again.

  Rupert thought that Sam must not have children himself if he didn’t know this was Christmas vacation and there was no school. He leaned his elbows on the bar and sipped his Coke. He finished the bowl of peanuts. It woke him up a bit and he began to survey the problem. Mrs. Rivers had been very clear when she explained her plan. But she had given him no clue as to how to execute it.

  “This is how the restaurant works,” she had said. “It has its menu on a big chalkboard. There each night posted in chalk are three appetizers, three main courses, and three desserts. Every night the dishes change, so everyone arriving for a meal must view the chalkboard before ordering. Now I, Rupert, have created a new appetizer. If I can somehow get it on the chalkboard without anyone noticing, and if people order my appetizer and it’s successful, then Chef Michaels will have to see that I am more than a line cook. I am a talented, innovative chef. The problem is getting it onto the chalkboard without anyone noticing. I certainly can’t go up to the chalkboard and start writing on it. I’d be out on my ear in seconds. So this is where you come in. You’re so thin you’re barely noticeable. This is why I have brought you. In addition to that whole thing with the prizes. If anyone can do this, Rupert, it is you. I am counting on you.”

  Rupert had been pleased even as he knew he was being flattered.

  “You’re my inside man,” Mrs. Rivers had said, patting him on the shoulder fondly.

  “I am not sure about this plan,” he had tried to tell her.

  “It’s a caper, Rupert!” Mrs. Rivers had admonished him. “Man up! Let go! Let fly! Leave caution to the wind!”

  “Suppose we are arrested?” he had asked.

  “Unlikely,” she had said, and that’s when she led him into the restaurant proper and parked him on his bar stool. She didn’t care to discuss the situation any further.

  But now surveying the restaurant, Rupert thought she was wrong believing he wasn’t conspicuous the way an adult would be. He was, if anything, even more conspicuous. He was very out of place. He looked like a small child in a lab coat.

  He watched people come in, look at the menu, be seated, and then study it again as they ordered. The chalkboard, thought Rupert gloomily, was a focal point. There would be no time that it was not watched. He could not, as Mrs. Rivers had suggested, simply drag a chair over and quickly add TARRAGON SPARKLE SALAD to the list of appetizers. She had written this, her newly created dish, down for him so he would spell it correctly. Perhaps if it was only one word he had to write on the chalkboard he might have managed it, he thought. But TARRAGON SPARKLE SALAD was too long to be written in the blink of a patron’s eye. No, if people were not to notice him, then something else was called for. A distraction. But how could you distract an entire roomful of people? Rupert could think of only one way. But it was such a crazy way.

  In his head rang Mrs. River’s stirring words: Man up! Let go! Let fly! Leave caution to the wind! Rupert had never done any of these things. He had always followed the rules. And where had it gotten him? His cold, starving life being afraid of the bullies at school and his mother at home.

  And that is when Rupert stood up and screamed, “FIRE!”

  AT FIRST nothing happened. There is alway
s a pause in such circumstances while the unexpected alarm makes its way slowly to the brain. And then a woman just a few tables away from Rupert pushed her chair back and said in a voice so low it could hardly be heard, “Did someone yell fire?”

  Rupert gripped the bar with both hands, waiting for someone to figure out it had been he and pick him up to throw him out the front door onto the icy sidewalk. As he looked frantically around the room his eye caught the window of the door into the kitchen and there was Mrs. Rivers’s face, her eyes huge. But her face disappeared almost immediately again and the next thing that happened was that the kitchen door opened a crack and a hand appeared with a burning roll of toilet paper which it hurled under a nearby table. Smoke drifted up from under the table and suddenly the call of “FIRE!” was erupting around the room from the kinds of people who yell it in such circumstances. Shoving and racing for the door was happening from the kinds of people who do that in such circumstances. Delayed reactions and heroic heaving of the elderly out the door was happening by people who do that in such circumstances. But one way or the other, everyone was finding their way out the front door.

  That was quick thinking, Mrs. Rivers, thought Rupert admiringly, for he realized she must have heard him and decided, No fire without smoke.

  This was Rupert’s chance! He dumped a glass of water onto the flaming toilet paper roll, grabbed it, and tossed it into the wastebasket behind the bar. Then he ran to the chalkboard, grabbed a chair to stand on, seized the chalk, and, while the restaurant was empty, climbed up and wrote as neatly as he could under the third appetizer: TARRAGON SPARKLE SALAD.

  Next Rupert slipped outside, where he moved among the crowd whispering, “False alarm. Go back inside. False alarm.” Soon this was being repeated by the grown-ups and they began to drift back into the restaurant in the embarrassed way people do after they have reacted perfectly sensibly to an emergency but then found out there was no emergency and are ashamed to have reacted at all.

  It had happened so quickly that none of the cooks or Chef Michaels had been aware of the commotion. Only the wait staff who had been in the restaurant knew what had happened, and they had no time to care. They were too busy serving to be delayed by a little nonsense around a false alarm.

  Everyone had lost interest in the fire. Everyone but the couple at table four, where the smoking toilet paper had been tossed.

  “Who yelled fire, Gloria?” asked the man, whose name was Stanley.

  “Well, it wasn’t us, that’s all I know, even though I did see smoke by my feet,” said Gloria.

  “Madam,” said a waiter, bending over to look beneath the tablecloth, “there is nothing there now.”

  “Well, there was,” she insisted again.

  “Of course there was,” said the waiter, mindful of his tip. “Very observant!”

  “Well, I always have been observant, haven’t I, Stanley?” asked Gloria.

  “Why do there have to be fires everywhere we go?” asked Stanley grumpily.

  “There’s never been a fire anywhere we’ve been,” said Gloria.

  “Well, it seems like if it’s not fire drills it’s always something,” said Stanley.

  “You’re just hungry,” said Gloria.

  “Of course, I am. I’m starving. I need to order.”

  They looked up to survey the chalkboard.

  “What is that sparkly thing on the menu?” asked an old lady at the next table, reaching for her glasses.

  “Oooh, Sparkle salad—I’ll have that to start,” said Gloria. “Why don’t you have it too, Stanley? Chef Michaels has never had that on the menu. It must be something new.”

  “I don’t know, I’m not much for sparkles,” said Stanley. “It’s not going to have sequins in it, is it? Or those horrible silver balls I keep telling you to stop putting on cupcakes.”

  “Oh, honestly, Stanley. Sequins. That’s the whole trouble with men,” said Gloria confidingly to the waiter. “They never want to try anything new.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said the waiter, despite the fact that he was also a man. “But might I say I also loathe sequins. Especially in my food.”

  “Right, well, just bring me the air-dried beef,” said Stanley. “That’s a manly starter.”

  And the restaurant fell back into its busy hum.

  “Listen, kid,” whispered Sam, slinking over to Rupert, “did you see who yelled fire? Did you see anything, because there’s a roll of burnt toilet paper in the garbage back here! I think someone was trying to torch the joint!”

  Rupert shook his head innocently and tried to look shocked.

  Sam had been at the other end of the bar from Rupert when he yelled fire but was one of the first to shove and push his way out the front door. “Women and children and the elderly first” meant nothing to him. He considered it an outdated concept.

  “Whole thing’s crazy,” Sam began, but before he could continue, patrons began to belly up to the bar in a rush, as often happens after a scare. Sam was kept so busy after that that he had no time to dwell on who might have tried to set the restaurant on fire.

  Mrs. Rivers had alerted all the cooks that in addition to the fried fish she was in charge of, she would be doing the sparkle salad station. No one else need make them.

  When one of the waiters yelled “Sparkle salad” as he came in with an order, Chef Michaels said, “There’s no sparkle salad on the menu. What—are you crazy? Go back and take the order again, you heard wrong.”

  But the restaurant was busy and he had no time to investigate further. This was what Mrs. Rivers had counted on and she happily began assembling her special salad.

  Rupert watched the first two sparkle salads come out of the kitchen. They were bright green and on top there was a dusting of something pink and sparkly. The sparkle-dusted salads caught the candlelight from the tables, and because the restaurant was otherwise so dim, they glowed. Why, he thought, they’re beautiful. He had never known food to look so magical.

  The sparkle salads were placed in front of people at two tables on opposite sides of the restaurant.

  “My, this looks yummy,” said Gloria. She took a bite and groaned with pleasure. “Oh my God, Stanley. I’ve never tasted anything like this. You have to try it. It’s fantastic!”

  “Good lord, this is amazing, there isn’t a word for what it is…it’s…” began the woman across the room who was digging into her sparkle salad.

  “Honestly, Lacey,” said her husband. “You always tell me not to talk so much about my food.”

  “Well, to heck with that. Taste this,” she said, and passed him a lettuce leaf.

  His expression of irritation was replaced with ecstasy. “Give that to me,” he said rudely, grabbing the plate and taking another heaping forkful.

  Over at her table Gloria was still urging sparkle salad on Stanley.

  At first Stanley objected, then through a full mouth he called out, “Waiter! More sparkle salad! Who wants a main dish when we could be eating this?”

  At that, sparkle salad orders flew into the kitchen and sparkle salads flew out.

  Rupert looked on in awe as the people who had ordered them began turning to people at other tables. To people they didn’t even know, complete strangers, and saying, “You must order this. If you don’t you will regret it. You will regret it for the rest of your lives!”

  “Really,” said a man. “I make it a point never to eat the food of complete strangers.”

  “Oh, shut up and try it,” said a woman at the next table, leaning across the divide and shoving a forkful of sparkling lettuce into his mouth.

  “Lady, lady, germs!” he screeched, but a second later he was saying, “MY GOD! Give me that. You can always order another. I want that one. I want that one RIGHT NOW!”

  He got up and began to wrestle her for it. They each had two hands on the salad plate and were in danger of spilling the salad all over the floor when suddenly they froze in amazement.

  Something even more astonishing
was happening. Stanley and Gloria’s table and chairs were beginning to rise. Slowly but surely they were heading for the ceiling with of course the people in those chairs rising as well.

  “I feel most peculiar,” said Gloria. “It’s as if I’m made of air. As if I’m lighter than air.”

  “What is happening?” asked an old lady in another part of the restaurant as her table began to rise as well. “Margery, what is happening? In eighty-four years I’ve never risen in a restaurant this way. Is this the new trend? Do people float about now? I’m not sure I like it. I’m almost sure it should require seat belts.”

  “LIKE it?” said Stanley, whose table was hovering slightly below the ceiling. “I LOVE it. It’s amazing. I’ve never felt so wonderful in my life. I’m a bird. I’m a plane. I’m SUPER STANLEY!”

  More and more people had begun rising. One woman on the way to the restroom was rising even as she headed there. “Oh, my goodness,” she said as she dangled by a light fixture.

  Another woman who had been walking to the bar joined her. “Isn’t this lovely?” she said. She found by gently flapping her arms she could swim through the air. “Isn’t this divine?”

  “No,” said the woman who had been headed to the bathroom. “I have to pee.”

  All around the restaurant wherever sparkle salads had been consumed people were floating in midair.

  “Is this really happening?” asked another woman. “Perhaps I am dreaming.”

  “No, don’t you see?” said a woman in a feather boa. “It’s the deliciousness of it. It’s so fabulous, so delectable, so extraordinary that it makes you float. It makes you happy. You leave behind all your earthly concerns in the glory of it.”

  “That’s my name,” said Stanley’s wife. “Gloria. Perhaps it all has something to do with me.”