She was sure it was a hoax. Why would Robert Rovere ask her to a dance? It didn’t make sense. He hated her. It had sounded like him—sort of. It could have been one of his friends, impersonating him. She called up Susan. “Susan? Listen! Would Robert Rovere do a mean thing like calling me, asking me to go out, and then not show up?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said.
“Do you think it was really him?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Mimi said, laughing half hysterically. “I don’t really know anything about him.”
“Oh, God,” Susan moaned. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”
All through supper, Mimi veered wildly between belief and disbelief. He was coming. He wasn’t coming. It had been him on the phone. It had been a practical joke. She decided not to do anything, not change clothes, not wash her face. Nothing. But her mother wouldn’t leave her alone. She kept popping out of the butcher shop to ask if Mimi had changed yet. Finally, Mimi put on a fresh blouse, combed her hair and cleaned her fingernails. At the last moment she cleaned her ears, too. Every time she looked at the clock, she felt sick in the pit of her stomach. Fool! Fool!
There was a knock at the back door. “You get it,” Gary said. He was eating a chocolate bar and reading a comic.
Robert was standing among the coats and boots in the dark shed, frowning into the light of the kitchen. “Hello,” Mimi said. Her eyes felt damp, and strange. “You called me this afternoon?”
“Sure,” he said.
“You did!” She stared at him. How perfectly beautiful he was. His hair was freshly combed, he wore a sweater she hadn’t seen before, a deep forest green with a vee neck. She felt humble before such beauty. “Come in.” She was astonished to hear that she sounded normal. She put on her jacket and opened the connecting door to the butcher shop. “I’m going.”
“You’re going?” her mother said. “Wait. Wait a minute.” She was washing the inside of one of the glass cases. “Bring him in.”
“What?”
“Bring him in to meet us, meet your father.”
“Mom!” Mimi exclaimed. “No-ooo.” She closed the door hastily. “I’m ready,” she said to Robert. “’Bye, Gary,” she called over her shoulder, leading the way out through the shed.
Outside there was a thin moon rising in the still-light sky. Robert smiled at her. Suddenly she felt wonderful, capable of anything. He was here! He had come to take her to a dance! Robert Rovere! She rose on her toes, almost dancing over the gravel driveway.
“Mimi!” Her mother came running out of the house after them, holding a package wrapped in white paper. “Hello,” she said to Robert. “My daughter didn’t even introduce you! Some manners. I’m Mimi’s mother.”
“Hello, Mrs. Holtzer. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“What a beautiful night for dancing,” Mimi’s mother said. “Do you do all the new dances, Robert?”
Robert smiled politely. “I try to.”
“I like to dance, too, I love to dance. I try to keep up with things. Ask Mimi. Don’t I, Mimi? Don’t I dance right in our kitchen sometimes?” She laughed girlishly.
“Yes, you do.” Stepping back, Mimi made frantic signs to her mother. “Mom, we’re late. We have to go.”
“Oh, I can take a hint, a very subtle hint,” Mimi’s mother held up two fingers. “Two’s company, and three’s a crowd. Right, Robert?” She put the white package into Mimi’s hands. “Limburger cheese for Milly Tea, Mimi. We got a case of imported Limburger in today, Robert. Straight from Belgium. We get it only for our special customers. Mimi, I promised Milly you’d deliver it tonight.”
“Tonight!” Mimi echoed. “We’re not going that way.”
“You’ll be going right by her place.”
“Why don’t you send Gary?” But Mimi knew her mother never asked Gary to do anything.
“Milly’s crazy about Limburger,” her mother said to Robert. “I don’t know why, I can’t get past the smell, myself.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Mimi said, trying to hand back the package of cheese which was already beginning to broadcast its strong odor.
Her mother shook her head. “I promised her, Mimi. I just talked to her on the phone. She’s having company and she’s expecting the cheese. You don’t mind, do you, Robert? A little errand like this?”
“That’s fine, Mrs. Holtzer.”
Mimi’s mother gave Robert’s arm an admiring little squeeze. “You’re a sweetheart. Well, good-bye. Mimi, wake me up when you get home. Now you two, have a barrel of fun for yourselves. Wish I was going with you, but I have to get back to work. The master calls.” She laughed. “No rest for the wicked.” She went past them, around the side of the building.
Mimi stared down at the package in her hands, feeling a familiar frustration. Then she took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to let her mother spoil her evening. “Ready?” she said to Robert. The sooner she got rid of the cheese the better.
“Who’s Milly Tea?” Robert said as they started out.
“Milly Thomas. A lady who’s sort of a friend of my mother’s. She comes into the shop all the time.”
“Oh, T like the letter, not golf tees.”
Mimi shook her head. “Tea like tea you drink. Milly went to England on a tour once, and now she only drinks tea.”
“Bloody smashing,” Robert said. “Drinks tea and eats Limburger.”
“That’s the idea. She’s really a nice lady.”
“Little weird, eh?”
“I guess so.” Mimi shifted the package to her other hand. The air was cool and quiet. A few cars passed. It was not yet quite dark. Mimi tried to forget the cheese and her mother and concentrate on being with Robert. Here I am, she said to herself, going to a dance with Robert Rovere. It’s really happening. She glanced up at him. His profile was pure and clean. For the first time she noticed that he had the faintest beginnings of a mustache.
“That cheese smells,” he said.
“I know. I’m sorry.” She held the cheese in the hand farthest from him, but the smell seemed to be creeping up her arm. “Anyway, it’s not a cheap-o smell,” she said. “This stuff costs like the moon.” They turned onto Mont-calm Street. Milly lived in an attic apartment of a large red house.
“What’s the number?” Robert said.
“Number?”
“The house number,” he said distinctly. His voice was controlled.
“I don’t know, but I know the house when I see it. It has a big porch and a red door. Oh, here it is.” Mimi ran up the steps and rang the bell. “I’ll just be a second,” she called. She heard Milly coming down the stairs. Hurry up, hurry up. She wanted to get rid of the lump of cheese and get back to Robert. They were still a little stiff and strange together.
“My mother sent this—” she began as the door was opened, but instead of Milly, a chubby boy who looked a little bit like Gary stood there.
“Hello, where’s Milly? I have the Limburger for her.” She tried to hand him the cheese.
“Phew!” He screwed up his face. “That stinks. There’s no Milly here. You’ve got the wrong house.” He slammed the door.
“Hey,” Mimi called. She put her finger on the bell, then noticed that the little printed name tag under the bell wasn’t Thomas. She had come to the wrong house. Oh, how stupid, how embarrassing. She dropped the cheese into her pocket and rejoined Robert.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Wrong house. I don’t know how I did that. I was so sure she lived there.” For a moment she walked backward, staring at the house with the red door. She could have sworn that was the one. None of the other houses on that block, or on the next block, either, looked like Milly’s.
Mimi put her hand over the cheese in her pocket, hoping to muffle the odor. If she had her way, she’d throw the damn stinking stuff straight into the nearest sewer. But she didn’t dare. The cheese was expensive. Her mother would have purple fits.
She hated to admit it, but the cheese would have to go to the dance with her. Either that, or walk all the way back to her house. She bit her lip. No way. She didn’t dare ask Robert that, after already asking him to go out of his way to Montcalm Street. He was probably already regretting that phone call. Must have done it on the spur of the moment, she thought gloomily. Curious about her. Well, now he knew.
Her first date ever, her first date with RR, and she was botching it up, stuck toting around a large dumb messy package of cheese that, moment by moment, smelled more and more like somebody’s dirty feet. If only her mother had listened to her in the first place, Mimi thought furiously, and let her deliver it tomorrow, instead of always insisting on having her own way. She was always butting in, making suggestions, and shoving things on Mimi. Never left her alone.
“Well, what do we do now?” Robert said, sticking his hands in his back pockets in the manner of a man who is learning patience.
“Well—on to the dance, I guess.” She was so embarrassed she couldn’t think of a thing to say, and they walked the rest of the way in a silence as thick as the odor of the cheese.
As they climbed the steps of the Y, Mimi made hasty plans. She wiped her hands surreptitiously on the sides of her jacket. Get rid of her coat, go to the bathroom, wash her hands of the cheesy stink, come back to Robert and—well, sparkle.
Inside, the Y was well lit and too warm. Kids were streaming in for the dance. “Hi!” “Oh, hi ya!” Robert seemed to know everybody. Girls kept passing, giving him little playful shoves.
“Hi, Robbie.”
“Roberto!”
“Big R, hel-lo!”
There was a mob around the snack bar, and not an empty inch on the coatrack outside the dance hall. A man standing at the door wearing a little red bow tie was yelling over the noise, “You latecomers, just hang on to your coats, just wear them to dance in. You latecomers, just hang on to your coats—”
“Where’s the girls’ room?” Mimi said, or rather, screamed over the noise of the band. It was a local group, Mother Carey and Her Chickens, two guitarists, a drummer, and a singer.
“No place to hang our coats,” Robert said, apparently misunderstanding.
Oh, no, Mimi thought. She didn’t want to ask again for the bathroom. Her neck was hot and damp. She could smell the cheese as if it were being held under her nose. Maybe no one else noticed. Maybe the cheese smell was blending in with all the other smells. The snack bar was selling hot dogs, Cokes, potato chips. The air was full of grease and the perfumed smells rising from the crowd.
“Want to dance?”
“Sure!” Mimi screamed over the hard, loud exciting sound of Mother Carey and Her Chickens. They squeezed onto the dance floor. So close to him, Mimi noticed that Robert smelled of something sweet, like lily of the valley. She smelled of Limburger cheese. The room was packed with kids dancing, shouting to each other, watching the dancers and each other. There was constant movement of people off and on the floor, in and out of the room, to and from the snack bar.
“Come on, baby, baby,” Mother Carey, the singer, pleaded, shaking her hips energetically, “baby, come on, baby baby mine, baby, you and me gonna show the world what we can do, do do do, do do do, baby, oooooh, ba-aaa-aaa-beeee.…”
Mimi threw herself into the dance, the music, the beat. But whenever she looked at Robert, his eyes were closed as he danced, or he was looking somewhere else. Look at me, she willed him, look at me. But he didn’t. Probably trying to forget her, the smelly lady from the butcher shop.…
“Let’s get a drink,” he said. They pushed through the crowd to the snack bar. Mimi kept her lips frozen in a happy smile so that if Robert did happen to look at her he would know she was having a super time. In her pocket the awful package of cheese bumped against her side.
They made a little space for themselves, holding cans of soda up to their mouths. Kids were screaming to each other. Someone trampled on Mimi’s feet. The floor was littered with crackling, empty chips bags. In the other room the music began again.
Robert stared over Mimi’s head. Bored, she thought desperately. Bored silly with her. Well, the evening was a disaster. Total disaster. Really wrecked. Thanks to her mother. Mimi’s hands curled around the soda can, she puffed despairingly. She couldn’t think of one thing to say, nothing on her mind but cheese, stinking smelly cheese.
Come on, Mimi, there’s more to you than Limburger cheese. Say something. Anything! All the times she and Susan had mapped out sparkling, witty conversations. Never mind that old advice about getting the boy to talk about himself. That was too down on girls. Instead, they’d decided that nothing worked like sincerity. So, Mimi? Be sincere.
What if she told him she sometimes dreamed of being a fish, gliding free, her hair streaming back, half-fish, half-girl. No, she could never tell him that. The way he’d mocked Nellie Grey.
Several people glanced strangely at her. She was hot, sweating. The odor rising from her jacket was growing stronger by the moment. She tried planning how she would tell Susan about all this.… It was really funny, I felt like I was turning into a lump of Limburger myself. Only he didn’t think it was funny. What can you expect? No sense of humor. Blah.… Only her heart wasn’t in it. She thought a little crazily of emptying her Coke over her head, or better still, straight into her pocket to drown the cheese.
They drank another soda. “Do you fight with your folks?” she said, desperate to break the silence.
“Not much. Do you?”
“Some,” she said gloomily.
“It’s just my mother and me,” Robert said. “My father’s dead.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I never knew him.”
“Oh,” she said again. It was one of those conversations that couldn’t get off the ground. She was practically grateful when a large redheaded boy who went to one of the parochial schools stopped to talk to Robert about the Minolta his father had bought him for Christmas. “I’m taking some fantastic pictures, man,” the boy said, glancing sideways at Mimi. “I’m a great photographer.” He smiled modestly, then screwed up his nose. “Who took off their shoes here, man?”
Mimi’s heart sank.
“What’s the matter?” Robert said, glancing blandly around.
“Something stinks.”
Here it comes, Mimi thought. She couldn’t look at Robert. In a moment he would point at her and say, She does. Mimi Holtzer stinks!
“I don’t smell anything,” Robert said. “You, Mimi?”
For a moment she thought she’d heard wrong. Robert was smiling conspiratorially at her. She stared at him in utter astonishment. “No, I don’t smell anything,” she managed to say faintly.
“I smell something putrid, man,” the redhead insisted. “Like something’s dead in here.”
“Must be your imagination,” Robert said. “Listen, I heard this funny story I want to tell you. There was this kid who didn’t know the answer to a question and—”
Mimi burst out laughing.
“Wait a second, hold on,” Robert said. But Mimi couldn’t stop laughing. How about that! Robert was sticking up for her. It was too wonderful. The cheese had suddenly become their secret.
“Check the bottom of your shoes,” the redhead said. “I think you stepped in something, Rovere.”
“He’s obsessed,” Robert said to Mimi.
“Poor boy,” she agreed, shaking her head sadly. “Must have a nose problem.” She looked at him innocently. “Do you always smell things?” Robert choked on his Coke and Mimi pounded him on the back.
When they left the Y later, the streets were quiet. They hummed one of the songs they’d danced to. At her house, in the front window of the darkened butcher shop, three meat hooks gleamed. Mimi and Robert walked, hand in hand, around the side of the building, gravel crunching underfoot. The moon was high now, sliced thin, riding like a cheerful boat above them.
“I’m sorry about the cheese,” she said.
“C
heese? What cheese?” he said, and kissed her. She hadn’t known that kissing and laughing together could be so delightful. Robert’s lips tasted sweet, like Coke. They staggered together, laughing, into the dark shed. A box fell over. “Shh!” Mimi wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back. “Thanks, I had a wonderful time. Good night!”
She opened the kitchen door quietly. The house was dark. The familiar smells of her family closed in on her. She took the cheese out of her pocket, fumbled quietly toward the table. Don’t make any noise, she warned herself.
Wake me up, her mother had said, but Mimi wanted to be alone, to think about Robert, the surprising wonderful way things had changed. “Wliat cheese?” she sang out suddenly, unable to keep still. Then clapped her hand over her mouth. But too late.
Her mother’s door opened. “Mimi? That you?” The light snapped on. Her mother was wearing a frilly blue nightgown, but she didn’t look as if she’d been asleep. “I was waiting for you,” she confirmed. “I couldn’t sleep a wink till you got home. How was it? Did you have fun? Did you have a wonderful time? I want to hear everything.”
Mimi put the package of cheese on the table. “It was fine,” she said.
“What did you do? Did you dance a lot? Did a lot of boys ask you to dance?”
“No. I danced just with Robert, and—that’s all. Just danced.”
“It must have been wonderful, he’s such a good-looking boy.” Her mother opened the refrigerator and took out milk and butter. “I’m going to make you toast and cocoa while we talk.”
“I don’t want anything to eat, Mom,” Mimi said, moving toward her room.
“Just a cup of cocoa,” her mother insisted. “You need it after dancing all night.” She put the pan on the stove and measured in cocoa and sugar. “I bet you were popular, the most popular girl there,” she said. “The prettiest girl in the room,” she sang, stirring the milk.
She poured two cups of cocoa and sat down at the table, smiling. “Sit down, honeypie. Let’s talk.”
Reluctantly, Mimi sat down across from her.
“Did they decorate the room? We used to have balloons, crepe-paper twists, even different colored lights for our dances.”
Dear Bill, Remember Me? Page 8
