Pish Posh

by Ellen Potter

  “Extraordinary!” Lila exclaimed.

  “The museum is going to choose the ‘Face of the Middle Ages’ among New York’s high society—” Bitsey said.

  “Of which we are most certainly the highest,” Prim added.

  “—and whomever they choose will have her face cast in a mold, out of which they will create the mannequins that wear the costumes in the exhibit. Can you imagine! Your own face being on permanent display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Oh, wouldn’t that make one’s friends revoltingly jealous!”

  “Deliciously so!” Prim agreed.

  Clara went into the kitchen to say good night to her father, Pierre Frankofile. He was the owner of Pish Posh, but he was also the chef. Right now, he stood behind the shelves of gleaming metal where they put the plates of food, and was sautéing onions in a black-singed pan. He wore a white chef’s jacket and a white chef’s hat, and his round face was sweaty and pink.

  “I’m going home, Papa,” said Clara. She had to speak very loudly over the clatter of pots and pans and the roar of the dishwasher and the yells of the waiters calling their orders. The kitchen had at least ten other people working in it, chopping garlic, grilling meat, stirring soup, and in the back, washing racks of dishes and glasses in a giant silver dishwasher. Clara did not like the kitchen. It was dirty and hot and chaotic, and the workers were, of course, not the sort she cared to have anything to do with. In fact, she only ever came into the kitchen to say good night to her father.

  Pierre Frankofile turned away from his pan of onions to say good night to his daughter, when his eyes suddenly shifted to the woman ladling up the soup.

  “Audrey, you imbecile! You have garnished the soup with a carrot peel instead of parsley! Can you not tell the difference ? !” He spoke with a slight French accent, having grown up in a luxurious chateau in France, with a slew of nannies and governesses, before moving to the United States as a teenager.

  “I’m sorry, Chef Frankofile,” Audrey, the soup-maker, said. She was a tall, slender young woman with a mass of bright red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her thick glasses were steamed up at the moment from the squid chowder simmering in the pot.

  “Well, have your eyes examined, you blind bat, or I will slice off your right thumb and serve it up as shish kebob, is that understood?!” Mr. Frankofile’s face was perfectly red now and his eyes were bulging. Yet no one else in the kitchen even bothered to look up from what they were doing, since he yelled at them and called them nasty things on a regular basis.

  “Well, good night, Papa, ” Clara said.

  “Oui, bon soir, Cla—hey you! The new dishwasher! Yes, you, the boneheaded moron!” A perspiring, tattooed young man had just pulled a tray full of water glasses out of the steamy dishwasher. “If you break one of those glasses, I will hang you upside down from your—” Clara missed the rest of her father’s tirade as she walked out the back door.

  Outside, the evening was warm, but there was an occasional cool breeze that felt wonderful on Clara’s shoulders. Across the street was Washington Square Park, a busy, loud park with a great marble arch at its entranceway. Her father had told her that he bought the restaurant because it faced the arch, which reminded him of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

  The streets were busy, full of people chatting and laughing on their way to somewhere else—the theater, a party. They were people who would never be allowed in Pish Posh-not in a million years—and it amazed her that they could still be so cheerful.

  On her walk home she thought again of what Dr. Piff had said. What on earth was he talking about? Her mind sifted through all the possibilities, but she could come up with nothing and, frustrated, she resolved not to think about it again.

  At least not until tomorrow.

  The Frankofiles lived in a high-rise luxury apartment building, just a few blocks uptown from Pish Posh. They owned the top two floors, so that Lila and Pierre lived on the thirty-fourth floor and Clara lived on the thirty-fifth floor. This way, Lila and Pierre explained to their friends, no one got in anyone else’s way.

  “Hello?” Clara called when she entered her apartment. Sometimes the maid was still there in the early evening. She listened for whistling, but the apartment was perfectly silent.

  To take her mind off Dr. Piff, she thought she should try to amuse herself. She ambled past the grand living room with its sumptuous Moroccan carpets and its green silk couches and armchairs and, hanging above it all, a great chandelier with a hundred crystal teardrops, which always threatened to clink against one another but never actually did.

  After the living room came a tremendously long corridor. There were a great many doors on each side of the corridor, and as Clara walked, she stretched her arms out to the side and let her hands idly drift across the doorknobs.

  No, not that one, not that one..., she thought to herself as she ticked off each room in her head. When the corridor took a sharp turn, she came to a room on her right and stopped.

  “Maybe.” She turned the knob and entered.

  Twisting all across the room, looping over and under itself, was a miniature roller coaster, its highest peak exactly over the room’s door. On the far side, three roller-coaster cars, red, blue, and yellow, were waiting to be boarded. The walls were painted to look like a state fair, complete with sloppy, fat children eating corn dogs and a sinister-looking fortune-teller hunkered under a tent.

  In the center of the room was a real cotton-candy machine, stacked high with paper cones. Clara turned it on, then expertly put the cone in the machine and let the candy billow up around it. She liked the sweet, hot smell and the sight of the whipping pink sugar. But once she had made the cone, she didn’t really want to eat it. Still, it seemed the right sort of thing to have on a roller coaster, and she held on to it as she climbed into the first car—the red one—and pushed a button on its front panel. A great whirring motor started up, and loud music with a heavy beat began to play. The car lurched forward, trailing the other two behind it, and began a slow ascent up the first hill.

  Clara’s father had told her that she used to scream so loudly when she went on the roller coaster, he could hear her in his apartment below. She supposed it must be true, since her father never lied. Yet she could not remember ever having screamed on the roller coaster or anyplace else. In fact, there were so many things that Clara could not remember about being a child that she often wondered if something was terribly wrong with her. Did she have friends when she was little? Had her mother ever zipped up her jacket for her? Had her father ever picked her up when she cried? Had she ever cried? She had no idea. The past was so fuzzy. She might have asked her parents these things, but she was afraid they would consider her questions silly and childish, and she would not risk it.

  Her first clear memory was of when she was eight years old. She tried on a pair of large dark sunglasses in a boutique on Fifth Avenue. Behind those glasses she could stare long and hard at people in the store, and they never even noticed. She purchased the glasses, and soon after that she began to sit at her little round table in the back of Pish Posh, scanning the room for Nobodies.

  Now, as the roller-coaster car climbed the first hill, Clara decided to try to scream. She held her cotton candy firmly in one hand, and at the moment the car began to fly down the hill, she opened her mouth and tested a small scream. It sounded like a toy poodle whose paw had been stepped on. She tried it again on the second hill. She opened her mouth wider, took a deep breath, and pushed. This time a real scream did come out, but it sounded horrible—like someone who had just discovered a dead body in their closet. And that brought her mind right back to Dr. Piff and his mystery, so she pushed the button in the front of the car. The car slowed down and came to a halt at the bottom of the ride.

  The State Fair Room was no good, she decided, and she continued down the hallway to find another diversion. Over the years, her parents had consulted child experts to discover what children enjoyed. Then they had built the rooms accordingly. T
hey reasoned that when Clara grew up and was attending a cocktail party where people were reminiscing about their childhoods, she could speak with authority on the thrill of the roller coaster and the taste of cotton candy. That way no one would think that she had had an odd, abnormal childhood, but she wouldn’t have to go to actual amusement parks where there were all sorts of undesirable people wandering about.

  A few doors down Clara paused to peer into the Day at the Beach Room. The second she opened the door, a warm burst of salty ocean air assailed her nose. She slipped her shoes off and stepped inside, her bare feet sinking into the thick, pale sand. Beneath a giant beach umbrella was a giant beach towel splashed with giant pink and yellow flowers. Beside it was a cooler, which the cook replenished every day with Spam sandwiches (even though Clara never ate them). At the edge of the sand was “the ocean.” It was a stretch of salt water, large enough to swim laps across and scarily deep at some points. A sound track played the caw-cawing of gulls and the occasional mother calling out to her child, “Don’t go in too deep, Martha!” “Robbie, come let Mommy put some lotion on your back!” A special machine created waves, which were realistically large when the tide came in. In fact, the waves were crashing down very hard on the beach at the moment—too hard to swim in. Clara dipped her feet into the frothy edge. The water felt delightful against her toes, and she wondered what the real ocean looked like. She had never seen it. In fact, she had no memories of ever having been anywhere outside of Manhattan. Her father had promised to take her back to France one day, to visit her grand-mere, but the Frankofiles were always far too busy with the restaurant to travel.

  A large wave splashed down hard in front of her and splattered her dress. Clara disapproved. Backing up, she frowningly examined the wet spot on her dress, and then left the Day at the Beach Room altogether.

  She passed by the other rooms—the Haunted House Room, the Bumper Cars Room, the Giant Dollhouse Room, the Pie-Eating-Contest Room. Finally she came to a door at the very end of the corridor. The moment she saw it, she knew that it was exactly the room she was looking for. She opened the door. Inside was a single, solitary tree. It had been dug up from an ancient stretch of woods in Yungaburra, Australia, and transported to the Frankofiles’ apartment. It had a massive trunk, and it was so tall that a special ceiling had been constructed, at the top of which was a gray-tinted plastic dome. This was the Tree Climbing Room.

  Clara smiled. She loved that tree—perhaps because it lived alone in this room, strong and majestic and needing no one.

  On the wall was a small hook that held a pair of overalls and a straw hat. According to the child experts, this was the fashion that simple country children wore when they climbed trees. Clara took off her dress and shoes and put on the overalls, then the hat, which she tied under her chin with its green ribbon.

  There was a thick, nubby stump near the base of the tree on which to place your foot and boost yourself up to grasp the lowest branch. All along the length of the tree were thick branches spaced perfectly for a climbing child. Barefoot, Clara shimmied up the giant tree easily. She was not a child who was afraid of heights, and in fact, if she had been brought up in the country, she would have made a magnificent tree climber.

  When she came close to the ceiling, Clara reached out and pressed a yellow button on the control panel set into the wall. Above her head, the plastic dome made a clotch sound. The dome began to separate in the center, the two sides pulling back and disappearing into the wall, laying bare the dark city sky.

  Immediately, Clara could feel the breeze against her skin and smell the delightful semi-stinky city air (not stinky in a nasty way, but in the way the scalp of someone you’re fond of smells). She climbed faster until she reached the very top, and then she nestled into a branch with a smooth crook in it. The tree was taller than the apartment building’s roof, and her head was surrounded by the brilliant night stars.

  Way down below, New York City shimmered with lights-store signs, streetlamps, traffic lights. It was as though the entire city stubbornly rebelled against the night, refusing to be blotted out by the darkness. Clara watched the starry, ceaseless movement of headlights from the cars and buses and taxis gliding through the streets. In the distance she could see an oblong, coal-black strip, which was Central Park. From this height, all the loud street noise was reduced to a smothered drone, except for the piercing wail of police sirens in the distance.

  The warm breeze pushed at the brim of her straw hat and brushed delightfully against her bare feet. She wondered if country children felt like this all the time, and for a moment she experienced a pang of envy. But then she reminded herself that country children would not have a tree from Yungaburra, Australia, nor a bird’s-eye view of New York City.

  The sirens, which were faint at first, had grown louder. Now she could see the police cars weaving in and out of traffic, until they finally stopped right in front of her building. She strained her eyes to see what was happening on the street below. The police officers had gotten out of their cars, and a woman ran up to them and started gesturing wildly. Suddenly all the policemen looked up.

  Are they looking at me? Clara wondered. Because, indeed, they were looking right up toward the top of Clara’s building. Other people on the street stopped and were pointing up in her direction.

  They probably think I’m going to jump, Clara thought. How idiotic of them!

  Then, out of the corner of her eye, Clara saw something moving along the roof of her building, below her. At first all she could make out was a patch of darkness. Was it a trick of light? But as she watched it, she began to make out a human form—slim and agile. It was moving around the edge of the roof, looking, it seemed, for a way down.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the street below, an officer with a bullhorn shouted, “Listen up! There are fourteen police officers down here, and there’s one of YOU! Those are not good odds!”

  The figure on the roof stopped momentarily, then ran to the little service entrance that stood in one corner of the roof and pulled at the door. It was locked, but the person yanked and shoved on it for some minutes anyway.

  Clara watched with great interest and surprisingly little fear. If you want to know the truth, Clara had a secret craving for danger, which was very unbecoming for such an elegant girl. But there are some things that one can’t help. Her favorite movies always involved car chases along steep, winding cliffs and fistfights on the wings of airplanes.

  Suddenly, the figure turned and looked at Clara’s tree. The person walked toward it slowly; it would have been easy, at the distance of a few feet, to think that it was simply a tree planted on top of the roof, rather than one growing through the roof. In fact, the figure nearly toppled into the opening around the tree, which would have produced a very nasty fall into the Tree Climbing Room.

  From Clara’s vantage point, several feet above the roof, she saw the figure reach up and try to grab at a branch. The problem was that the hole in the roof was rather wide, and the branches were just out of the person’s reach. The person jumped several times in the air but still could not reach any of the branches.

  The voice in the bullhorn boomed: “Give yourself up! You are completely surrounded!” And that sounded so exactly like something out of a movie (in fact, it was: the officer with the bullhorn also liked action movies and had been waiting fifteen years for the chance to say those very words) that Clara actually laughed. It was just a small laugh—a snort, actually. But it was loud enough for the figure on the roof to hear.

  “Is someone up there?” the person asked. It took Clara a minute to answer, not because she was afraid, but because she was shocked: the person’s voice was that of a girl.

  “Yes,” Clara replied.

  The girl hesitated for a minute, then stepped back and looked up. “Okay, I see you now.” Her voice had a scratchy sound to it, which Clara found interesting. “What do you say you push that branch down a bit, just a few inches?”

  Clara looke
d at the branch she was pointing to. She waited a minute, considering. More police sirens could be heard now, and when Clara glanced down at the street, it looked as if the entire precinct had come out for the event.

  “Please, hey?” the girl said, and now her voice was tinged with panic. Clara climbed down a bit, and with her bare foot she pressed the branch down. The girl grabbed it and, with surprising nimbleness, swung herself up into the tree. Close now, Clara could get a better look at her. She looked about Clara’s age, maybe a little older. She was tall and gangly with a flat face, which was damp with perspiration, and brown hair that reached just below her ears. She was hauling a fat backpack.

  Clara could hear footsteps, lots of them, trampling up the stairs of the service entrance. Hurriedly, she scrambled a ways down the tree, past the girl, until she could reach the control panel on the wall. She punched the button and heard the clotch sound. The tinted-plastic dome stretched back over the top of the tree above them, smoothing itself out like one of those plastic rain bonnets that old ladies wear.

  “Cripes! That’s a first!” the girl said as she watched the dome snap shut over them, and Clara felt strangely pleased that she had impressed the girl.

  The next moment they heard footsteps running on the roof and many voices all at once.

  “Can they see us through the dome?” the girl whispered.

  “I don’t think so, ” Clara whispered back. But just in case, the girls stayed perfectly still. Clara felt her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it actually hurt. Soon the footsteps retreated and it grew silent.

  “I think they’re gone,” the girl said, and she climbed down to a branch beside Clara’s. “My name is Annabelle.” She stuck out her hand.

  “What were you doing on the roof?” Clara said without extending her own hand.