by Yvonne Prinz
After work I get myself right home to partake in the fourth meal in four days that my mom will pretend she cooked. This one’s no dress rehearsal, though. “Jack” is coming to dinner and she says she’s dying for us to meet, something to do with exposing the baggage early in the relationship, I suspect, because I can’t imagine any other scenario where that could possibly be true. I muse over M as I roll down the sidewalk on my skateboard. If I’d had half a chance, if I’d even learned his real name and maybe gotten to know him a bit, I could have invited him along tonight. It’s the kind of thing where I’d want him along. Maybe he’d even come. Maybe he could use a fake home-cooked meal.
Up ahead I see Florence Kobayashi, our neighbor, hobbling up the sidewalk on her way home from work. I slow down as I come up behind her and jump off my board. Florence is a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. She stands there all day, making sure that people don’t touch the priceless paintings or, God forbid, try to make off with them. I’m not really sure what she would do in that particular situation, since she’s just over four feet high and weighs about ninety pounds. I guess she would have to radio for backup. I used to think that she probably knew a lot about art or that she might even love it, but when I asked her about it she just shrugged.
“It makes my hips hurt,” she told me.
Florence has to stand in one spot for seven hours a day. She’s sixty-four years old and she’s been working there for ten years. I don’t understand why they don’t let the guards sit down. She told me that she’s learned to sleep standing up like a horse. She wears black sneakers with thick rubber soles, the kind that young boys wear with baggy jeans that hang down around their knees and boxers underneath.
“Hi, Mrs. Kobayashi,” I call out.
She turns around, startled, until she recognizes me.
“Oh, hi, Allie,” she says.
“How are things at the museum?” I ask.
“Very busy. Matisse, you know?”
“Matisse?”
She nods.
“Very pretty,” I say, although I can’t visualize one single painting right now.
“Very pretty,” she says with zero enthusiasm as she pulls her navy blue sweater tighter around her middle and continues stiffly up the sidewalk, favoring her right side.
When I come up the walk to my house, I’m quite certain I smell bread baking and I know that this simply can’t be right. This warm, comforting aroma can’t possibly be coming from our house. I pull open the front door and find my mom in the kitchen, her brow furrowed as she reads the back of an empty plastic frozen bread package. She’s wearing a soft lavender-colored linen skirt and a white silky blouse. Her hair is piled on her head and escaped tendrils of it cling damply to her pale neck. Her cheeks are flushed. Pierre is not in his usual spot on the dining room table. An abandoned felt catnip mouse lies there in the empty space, cast aside, like us.
“Hi, honey.” My mom peers into the oven and sighs.
“What’s going on in there?” I ask.
“Well, it says here that you’re supposed to let it rise somewhere warm for three hours, but I didn’t know that till an hour ago, so I put it in the bathroom while I was showering and I may have splashed some water on it.” She sighs again.
“Let me have a look.”
My mom stands out of the way and I peer through the glass at the submarine sandwich–size loaf of bread dough sitting in the middle of a baking pan. The drops of water have dried on the surface and resemble a skin disease. It looks anemic and hopeless.
I look at my mom. “What possessed you to bake? We have four bakeries within walking distance.”
She shrugs and grabs her purse off the back of a chair. She pulls a five-dollar bill out of her wallet and hands it to me.
“Is that hush money? Because I won’t keep quiet for anything less than a twenty.”
“Take it. Go to Semifreddi and get a nice loaf of bread. Please.”
“Okay, but I think you’re giving up too easily. That thing in the oven could have a strong future if you’d just give it a chance.”
“Go.” She points to the door.
I take my time because I’m compiling a list of LPs for my top five of the week.
So far I’ve got: Bob Dylan, Desire; Pink Floyd, Ummagumma; Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!; Supertramp, Breakfast in America; and The Worst of Jefferson Airplane. I’ve decided to incorporate a rating system using little LPs instead of stars, five out of five LPs being the best. I move on to thoughts of M and how I might dazzle him with my music knowledge, maybe even show him my collection someday, throwing something special on my turntable. I spend the rest of the way home, a loaf of Italian batard under my arm, figuring out what that might be. Maybe my British bootleg Bob Dylan Don’t Look Back outtakes, or a B-side by the Sweet or something by the Nips, Shane MacGowan’s original band. I don’t have much to go on based on what he’s shopped for at Bob’s. He’ll look at me, amazed, and say something cheesy like, “Where have you been all my life?” or, “You’re not like other girls,” and, naturally, I’ll eat it up.
By the time I open the front door to my house again, “Jack” has arrived and he’s situated himself in the middle of our sofa with a glass of white wine in his hand (we have wineglasses?). He regards me the way most adults look at a teenager, sizing me up to decide whether or not I’m going to give him any trouble. I guess he decides I’m not because his mouth turns up into a slow smile and he stands up.
“Allie, I presume.” He extends his hand.
“Jack, I presume.” I take his hand, which is cold and clammy from the wineglass.
He’s wearing khaki chinos, no big sin, but they might be the first pair of khaki chinos ever to come in contact with our sofa. His voice is a little on the high side for a large man. He sits back down on the sofa. His khakis ride up on his ankles, exposing argyle socks. Nice.
“I was just telling your mom that my son is about your age.”
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that. Have you noticed that no one ever says that to old people? You’re eighty? Why, I have an uncle that age!
“Great,” I say. “Excuse me.” I get myself into the kitchen and hand my mom the bread. Even though everything we’re about to eat is coming from a box, she’s worked herself into quite a lather. She’s carefully composing three salads using components from several boxes and a plastic container of dressing.
“Allie, can you put some music on?”
“Sure, what?”
“I don’t know, jazz, classical, something atmospheric?”
“Right.”
I return to the living room, noticing the way that the dining table has been set with napkins, silver, crystal candlesticks and what looks to be fine china. It looks like an estate sale. I stick my head back into the kitchen.
“Hey, where’d all this fancy stuff come from?” I whisper.
“It’s Grandma’s.”
“Does she know you took it?”
“I didn’t take it. She gave it to me. It’s been in a box in the garage.”
One might wonder, then, why we’ve been eating off of mismatched, chipped garage-sale plates all these years when we had access to the queen of England’s booty. Sheesh!
I dig through my mom’s CD collection, all of which I’ve given her. I’m acutely aware that I’m being watched. I pull out Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon; Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain; Willie Nelson, Stardust; and Mark Knopfler, Ragpicker’s Dream. All of my mom’s CDs have her name written across the front of them in black marker. When my dad left there was a lot of “this is mine and that’s yours” going on, and my mom wasn’t about to let him walk off with anything she cherished, so the day before he moved out she stayed up all night and wrote her name on everything. She probably thought that she was using an erasable marker, or maybe she just didn’t care, but it still says her name in big letters on the toaster and the teakettle. I load up the CD carousel and hit play. Jack is flipping through a
book on Russian history that he found on the coffee table, or at least he’s pretending to. It was probably the best he could find. Most women have a copy of Vogue or People on their coffee table. My mom has Smithsonian magazine and a book on hieroglyphics of the Anasazi Indians in Arizona.
“I think dinner’s almost ready,” I assure him, perching on the edge of an overstuffed chair across from him.
“Great. It sure smells good.”
I nod.
“So, how long have you guys lived here?” he asks, looking around at the cleaned-up version of the disaster that is our home.
I look around too, seeing our house from a first-time visitor’s point of view. A chaotic jumble of mismatched, overflowing bookshelves line the walls; African carvings, masks, weird sculpture, and paintings cover every available surface; and all the furniture is draped in brightly colored cotton throws that my mom brought back from her many trips to India in the eighties. I look down at my feet. The Oriental carpet is threadbare and stained. A trail of ants is energetically carrying toast crumbs from the table, onto the carpet and along the wooden floor to a toast-crumb ant banquet in an undisclosed location.
“Forever,” I tell him.
Dinner comes off without a hitch, except for one awkward moment when Jack asks how my mom makes her vinaigrette and I have to think fast and pretend to have a coughing fit to distract him. In the end I think he pretty much figured out that my mom was faking it, which is probably a good thing, because she’d never be able to keep this up; sooner or later he’d find the boxes, and we’d be out of money too.
I watch Jack closely and I notice that he seems to really like my mom a lot. He listens to her carefully and laughs easily at her attempts to be funny. My mom behaves like a shy schoolgirl around him, blushing and talking about things that I never even knew she cared about. Why is she trying so hard to impress this guy? I wonder. Has she seen his socks? There are a lot of moments when I wish I could look across the table at M and roll my eyes.
Just as we’re digging into our dessert, individual lemon meringue tarts, the phone rings. My mom looks at me and shakes her head slightly. I ignore her, put down my fork and leave the table. I pick the phone up off the coffee table in the living room.
“Hello?” I look at my mom defiantly. Until she gets me a cell phone I’ll be answering the phone. She knows that.
“Hello, Miss Allie?”
“Oh, hi, Ravi.”
My mom is watching me. Jack is watching me too.
“Hello. How are you this evening, Miss Allie?”
“Great, Ravi. How are you?”
“Very well, thank you. I apologize for calling during the dinner hour but I have something important to tell your mother. May I speak with her, please?”
I look at my mom and point at her and then at the phone. She shakes her head violently. “Sorry, Ravi, she’s, uh, unavailable right now.”
“Unavailable?”
“Yeah.” I move into the kitchen and lower my voice. “She’s sort of on a date. Can I get her to call you later?”
“A date?” He sounds mystified. “Are you quite certain?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“Yes, well”—his voice catches a bit and he clears his throat—“perhaps you could ask her to call me as soon as possible.”
“Will do, Ravi,” I tell him. I follow up with a lame “Have a nice night.”
He hangs up. That was weird. He sounded so bewildered at the concept of my mom dating.
My mom scrambles to tell Jack all about Ravi. He seems amused at her description of him. It’s clear she doesn’t want to kick off this relationship with any secrets, and Ravi certainly isn’t a secret.
I leave them at the table and head upstairs to listen to Billy Bragg, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry. Billy Bragg is featured on today’s blog. I was talking to Bob about him today at the store and he told me that Billy used to work in a record store in England in the eighties. He became the socialist voice of the working class in England, and a lot of his music is highly politicized, which is cool, but then he’ll come at you with a line like, “She cut her hair and I stopped lovin’ her,” and a song like “Must I Paint You a Picture?” probably one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard. Then, as if he wasn’t cool enough, he took some old Woody Guthrie lyrics that Woody’s daughter was hanging on to and turned them into these amazing songs that he recorded with Wilco. The first time I heard “California Stars” from the Mermaid Avenue album I thought I would die.
Between songs, I hear my mom and Jack downstairs, talking and laughing. I’m not sure what I was expecting but this Jack guy seems okay. Before I went upstairs, as I was saying good night, I asked him if he likes pancakes.
“Well, sure, doesn’t everyone like pancakes?” He smiled like he was humoring a five-year-old. My mom looked at me like I’m an idiot.
All I can say is that he’d better not be here when I get up in the morning. I’m definitely not ready for that.
Chapter 6
Kit’s elaborate scheme to expose her boyfriend, Niles, as a lying shithead involves several steps, the first of which is the two of us assuming new identities. I sit helpless on the toilet lid in Kit’s tiny bathroom amid a virtual explosion of idling curling irons and other implements of beauty while Kit applies more makeup to my face than I’ve ever worn in my entire life. She pins back my own black hair with bobby pins and attaches a wig to my head. I now have waist-length blond hair with bangs. She digs through her eyeglass collection and hands me a pair of tortoiseshell frames. I put them on and check myself out in the bathroom mirror. I look like a prostitute who can do long division. For my final flourish, Kit applies red lipstick to my lips.
“Do this.” She smacks her lips together.
I obey. She looks at me critically, studying her work, and then grins. “You are so hot!”
“I don’t feel hot. I feel stupid.”
Kit’s own transformation is a little more restricted, because she’s using her sister Roxanne’s fake ID to get us into the club, so she has to look somewhat like the photo on it. Her wig is red and it’s shaped into a pageboy. She’s also wearing a hat so that she can obscure some of her face. It’s tweed with a narrow brim that she pulls low. I’m wearing knee-high boots with a stacked heel and a short skirt with tights. Kit is wearing a navy pleated skirt with oxfords. Her look is naughty schoolgirl.
I point to the general area of Kit’s chest. “What’s with the bodacious ta-tas?” I ask.
“Inserts. They’re part of the disguise.”
“You look a little top-heavy.”
“You think so? Should I go smaller?”
“Maybe a little.”
Kit disappears into her bedroom and comes back slightly smaller.
“Better,” I say.
The plan is to arrive after the band has started playing, try to find a table in the back of the club where it’s darker and stay only until after the first break. Kit is convinced that if Niles is cheating on her, the girl will certainly be there tonight. She checked his phone again yesterday and there were two more calls to this Chelsea person. The 415 area code is San Francisco, so she definitely lives in the city.
The club where Niles is playing is in the Mission District of San Francisco, so we walk the four blocks to the BART station to catch the train into the city, Kit comfortable in her oxfords and me tottering awkwardly behind her in my heels.
“Wait up! Why do you get to wear the comfortable shoes, anyway?”
“Sorry. Those boots are the only thing I could find in your size.”
Kit has tiny feet. Her shoes look like Christmas tree ornaments. Mine are a size nine. My shoes look like commuter ferries.
On College Avenue we pass a guy pushing a shopping cart with a pit bull puppy in it. He stops to get a load of us.
“Evening, ladies,” he says, removing his baseball cap and nodding.
We ignore him and keep walking. By the time we reach the BART station my wig is
really starting to itch and I’m overheating. I can feel my makeup melting and I can’t stop scratching my face. When we finally get on the train and find a seat, my makeup needs an overhaul. Kit pulls out a Ziploc bag of makeup first aid from her purse and touches me up while the other passengers look on, amused.
We get off at the Mission and Twenty-fourth BART stop. The club is called Boom Box. It’s on Mission and Twenty-second. This isn’t exactly a safe neighborhood, especially not on a Saturday night, and especially not if you look like a couple of working girls. There’s a lot of nasty, gang-related crime that happens here. Laz once saw a drive-by shooting happen right in front of him in broad daylight in this very neighborhood. We walk briskly up Mission Street, away from the station. I try not to twist an ankle walking in the boots. That would definitely slow us down.
Part two of Kit’s elaborate plan is that she’ll go in the front door of the club with her fake ID and then she’ll let me in the back door, because I don’t have ID. She knows the club; she’s been there before and she’s assured me that it will be a breeze. Maneuvers of this nature, in my experience, are never “a breeze.” Being the music lover that I am, I have suffered the humiliation of being told No, Tito, the doorman who’s cool with me, is not working tonight, or No, my name is not on the list as was promised to me by a Bob’s customer, or No, that is definitely not me in the photo.
I leave Kit at the front door and scamper down the alley to the back of the building, carefully avoiding broken glass, puddles of I don’t want to know what, piles of garbage, a sleeping homeless person and a vast assortment of used condoms and needles. I stand next to a Dumpster just outside the rotting back door of the club, jumping up and down to the pounding bass of the music in an attempt to avoid having to address the raw fear that’s creeping into my bones. My mom thinks I’m at the movies with Kit, and how I wish I were. If I’m raped and left for dead in this alley with no ID, will they know at the morgue to take off my makeup and my wig so that someone can identify me? I picture myself lying on a slab with a Jane Doe tag attached to my big toe. But that’s assuming I even make it to the morgue. What if my lifeless body is dumped into the Dumpster I’m standing next to, left to rot until some Dumpster diver finds my half-decomposed corpse and tells someone? They’ll have to identify me with dental records. Do I even have dental records? After several horrifying minutes, the door swings open and Kit pulls me quickly inside. I stand there a moment, leaning on the filthy wall, gasping for breath, my heart thumping against my chest.
