Thwonk

by Joan Bauer

  My biggest fear in life, along with drying up romantically, is not making it with my photography. When Dad and I used to take our cameras and go looking for pictures together, like we did over the summer—pounding the streets of New York City, shooting roll after roll of Fifth Avenue shoppers and broken-down taxis—I wanted to hug him and tell him how sorry I am that his passion can’t be his career.

  “It’s my hobby now,” Dad insisted, “and that’s enough.”

  If that happens to me, if I can’t make the world listen to what I have to say through my art, I think I’ll die.

  Dad was staring at the boxes of ChocoMallowChunks cereal like they held the secrets to the universe. His phone rang; that’s when he noticed me.

  I coughed. “Hi…”

  Dad looked down and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I need to get the phone,” he muttered.

  “Right.”

  I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet—the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that speak volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you’ve ached over, sweated over. I wondered if my father would ever trust me as an artist. I wondered if Peter Terris even knew I was alive.

  I focused my F2 on a Valentine candy heart lying forlornly by the sink; warm light washed over it. I ate half the heart to add brokenhearted realism, and was standing on a stool for an aerial view when the phone rang, the answering machine clicked on.

  “I hope,” said Pearly Shoemaker’s voice, “that you’re working on the Valentine cover shot, A.J….” She paused here for effect. Pearly was the angst-ridden editor of the Benjamin Franklin High School Oracle, the school paper where I toiled day and night as the principal photographer for absolutely no money. “Since,” she continued, “the rest of the edition can’t go to press without it! An edition I’ve been slaving over for six months!” I closed my eyes; I knew she wasn’t done. “If you’re not working on it, A.J., we’re all finished!”

  I moved in close with my macro lens for a broad, cartoon feel and clicked off three fast shots of the Valentine heart with half its life gone.

  “I’m working on it!” I growled.

  “I know you’re there, A.J.!” She said this snarling and hung up.

  I should have known better than to ever get involved in this lame assignment. The Valentine edition was to be the biggest thing to hit love and high-school journalism since graffiti.

  “I can see it!” Pearly had shouted, when she first approached me with the idea. “An entire edition about love and those tumultuous teenage years. It’ll be hundreds of pages, we’ll market it to local businesses—everyone will buy an ad, A.J., because who can say no to love? I’ll…I mean, we’ll be famous!” She went on to say that the Oracle, normally free, would be selling on Valentine’s Day for two dollars, cold cash, no credit, and for that the A. J. McCreary cover shot had to be perfect.

  I groaned.

  “Just do it, A.J.!” she snarled.

  I’ve shot weird scenes through dark, murky filters, teenage couples hugging out of focus, a boy and girl kissing outside Petrocelli’s Poultry as Mr. Petrocelli hung two seven-pound roasters in the window. Pearly wanted something advertisers could relate to.

  “Think Valentine’s Day, A.J.! Hearts, cupids…!”

  “I don’t do cupids, Pearly. They’re trite.”

  “Couples holding hands…”

  “Primitive…”

  “Nothing weird!” she shrieked. “Nothing depressing! And absolutely nothing oblique or obscure!”

  “What’s left?” I yelled it.

  “Normal, A.J. Normal is left!”

  I don’t do normal. I have a reputation to uphold.

  So I kept combing the streets of Crestport, Connecticut, looking for the essence of love to shoot when my own heart was ground into farina. I saw gray slushy sidewalks and February skies. I saw a little boy punch his sister in the stomach. I saw irritated shoppers, perfectly sculpted evergreens, and then I saw my worst nightmare—Peter Terris and Julia Hart walking hand in hand across Mariah Boulevard looking positively photogenic, oblivious to the winter muck clinging to their designer shoes. Peter brushed a strand of hair off Julia’s face and kissed her pink nose. Julia nuzzled his shoulder like a lovesick kitten. They floated past me, the Perfect Teenage Couple, oozing Valentine’s Day passion and Oracle cover potential.

  I turned from the hated scene drowning in waves of sadness and sank behind an evergreen in epic despair.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “What,” I whispered to my mother, “could possibly happen in forty-eight hours?”

  Mom gave me a we’ll-talk-about-this-later-but-since-you-asked, a-lot-could-happen look from behind the counter at the Emotional Gourmet. We’d been back and forth for weeks about whether I could survive alone in the house for forty-eight hours while my parents went to a gourmet convention in New Orleans. The fact that I was going to be eighteen in thirty-six days, moments away from consummate adulthood, had no impact. They were leaving tonight and from all the angst, you would have thought they were dropping me and Stieglitz from a biplane onto an ice floe to survive by our wits until they returned. Mom adjusted the red satin Valentine heart above the cash register that matched the hanging heartlettes over the door, and nudged me forward to wait on the next customer. It was Saturday morning and the shop was packed, as usual.

  Mrs. T. Alexander Worthington ordered one dozen of Mom’s famous sautéed cashew buns; I put them into an eco-conscious brown bag, grinning in true gourmet style, because Mrs. Worthington was the richest woman in town and expected to be catered to. “That’s twelve dollars,” I said.

  She blistered: “I have an account, dear!” Rich people never carry money.

  I kept smiling because Mrs. Worthington was Mom’s best customer and extolled Mom’s gastronomic virtues to everyone she knew in the Tri-State area. I wrote her order in the charge account book: Old Bat/Twelve bucks. Mom glared at me and slapped the book shut.

  The fabulous smells of hot white chocolate and Mom’s perfect cinnamon rolls wafted through the store. There is something primordial about happiness and food and Mom’s shop plays right into it. The counters bulged with her Saturday creations: mozzarella and prosciutto bread, fat caramel biscuits, pesto-stuffed raviolis, roasted pork with brandied apples. Mom always says that great food should massage the senses.

  Sonia, the plump store manager and resident grandmother, gobbled a butterscotch brownie, wailing that she’d be a size eight if she worked someplace else. Hal Blitzer, Mom’s partner, bowed grandly to the next woman in line. Mom put dense cheddar bread into a bag for a man who said this was his wife’s favorite—he’d driven all the way from New Jersey to buy it because today was their anniversary. Several women in the store jabbed their husbands on hearing this. I hung my head—Peter Terris wouldn’t cross the street to buy me a Twinkie.

  Mom smiled big and wide and handed the man a yellow rose from the vase of flowers she kept by the cash register for special occasions. No one treats her customers better than Christine McCreary, ace chef and businessperson of the century.

  My mother has the Touch. She knows what flowers go with what occasions, what hors d’oeuvres work with what people. She believes passionately in the power of food to heal, restore, and stimulate relationships, and she has built a following of loyal customers who really hope she’s right. If she’s wrong, says Sonia, no one wants to know.

  Moving to Crestport was hard for Mom. She’d had a smattering of hard-earned catering success in Chicago, and found herself starting from scratch in a sleepy little town that didn’t much care for outsiders and didn’t know the difference between a cornichon and a kielbasa. Mom watched the pace of Crestport, Connecticut, from the sidelines, trying to determine her role. Three months later she marched into Hal Blitze
r’s gourmet shop on Seminole Avenue and announced that she could bring him untold business by giving cooking classes to the locals.

  Hal Blitzer’s eyebrows shot up. “What kinds of classes?”

  “Indian lunches, Italian barbecues, Bistro Breakfasts, Amazing Gourmet Baby Foods. Can I be frank?”

  “Please.”

  “Crestport women are bored. They need excitement, nourishment, emotional bedding. If you turn them on to new foods they can prepare themselves, new avenues in which to entertain and amaze their friends, they will count on you for everything, Mr. Blitzer!”

  “Call me Hal.”

  Mom began cooking classes one month later, after lavish advertising created by Dad in the Crestport Crier: “Wrap yourself in the emotions of food!” the ads declared, and Crestport women did, along with a decent cross-section from neighboring New Leonard and the southern tip of Stanwich. I came by every day after school, did my homework in the office, and watched the great culinary drama unfold at my mother’s feet. By my ninth birthday Hal Blitzer had tripled his floor space, and Christine McCreary, the Emotional Gourmet, was firmly rooted in New England sod. In three years she became Hal Blitzer’s full-fledged partner.

  This was not without pain.

  The hours are abhorrent. The people are demanding. The equipment is heavy. But Mom is called to the food business like an artist is called to a canvas. Mom believes there is a flash of brilliance in every person. Dad says she’d change her mind if she had to ride the subway every day.

  I’ve worked with Mom for years, and like all chef’s children I’ve been called upon to perform bizarre tasks—delivering four hundred boxed dinners in a monsoon when the service crew got lost, rinsing lettuce for three hundred in the Maytag (forty seconds on Delicate) when the salad lady saw a mouse in the kitchen and fainted. Mom says it takes a person with lightning-quick reflexes to handle the big gourmet traumas. I say it helps when you believe in your mother’s vision and she pays quite decently above minimum wage. In third grade we had to write an essay on one of the important things our mothers taught us. I entitled mine “Never Trust a Linen Service.” Mom had it plasticized and keeps it in her desk drawer.

  Being a chef, my mother’s downfall is food fixation. She can lose sleep about weaving salmon and swordfish into a braid. She can kill an evening hurling spun sugar onto a towel rack. She can yell at me for not cutting meat on an angle and criticize the way I tie the string on a bakery box. That really frosts me. She could, as she was doing now, rearrange an antipasto platter that I had designed, and fixate on the aesthetic placement of the Calamata olives…

  “Christine,” whispered Sonia, taking her arm, “the olives look very special where they are.”

  They did too.

  Mom made her Hmmmmm sound, which meant she wouldn’t be happy with it even if the Calamata olives did backflips, and relinquished the antipasto. She was tired, waging her constant battle between busyness and rest. Mom loves the business, but feels guilty about the long hours she spends at work and compares herself too often with other mothers who are always around for breakfast.

  “I’m nothing like the other mothers!” she wails.

  I nod.

  “Do you feel deprived, A.J., because we never did little sewing projects together?”

  “You can’t sew, Mom.”

  “I never painted stencils of ballerinas in your bedroom!”

  “I’m sure that’s why I can’t get a decent date, Mother. Ballerina stencils would have turned the tide for me, but it’s too late now…”

  That’s when Mom will usually throw a potholder at me and stop feeling guilty. Once I overheard her telling Sonia, “I’m afraid that if I slow down, it will all go away.”

  We worked into the late afternoon as we always did on Saturdays—slicing bread, bagging orders, kissing up to demanding customers. It takes big lips to succeed in this business. By five o’clock the crowds had thinned and Mom was arranging the food that was left into smaller bowls. Abundance at all cost, even at closing.

  I was packing goodies for the weekly food baskets that Mom sends to the homeless shelter in New Leonard. Every Christmas she joins forces with Crestport Congregational Church—she pudges Dad up as Santa, me as an elf, and throws a party at the shelter with roast beef and turkey and everything in between. She has a sign in her office: TO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN, MUCH IS REQUIRED. Mom doesn’t preach much about helping others, she just goes and does it.

  I don’t know what the world will be like when I get older; I hope it gets better, but it really might not. I worry about my future on a planet with so many problems. Crestport seems unreal to me sometimes. We have so much here; we take our privileges for granted. Mom never bought into the ease of this town. That’s made her something of an outsider.

  Like me.

  Mom was julienning broccoli that hadn’t sold to use for tomorrow’s garnish. Her hair was done up in a french braid that made her face look longer. Her glasses were smudged as usual, which hid the darkness of her eyes. She wore a sunshine-yellow apron that brought out the highlights of her auburn hair.

  “I just wish, sweetie,” Mom said, “that you were going to stay with Trish while your dad and I are gone.”

  That again. I said what she already knew, that Stieglitz would have to go to a kennel because Trish’s little brother, Devon, is allergic to everything and Stieglitz would sulk in abject devastation for days. I said that Stieglitz would terrorize any bad guys who came to the door.

  “What, Mother, could possibly happen in forty-eight hours?”

  She chose not to answer.

  “I’ll strap a fire extinguisher on my back and lug around the mobile phone, okay?”

  “Even when you sleep…” she insisted.

  I put my hand over my heart. “So help me, Mom, I’ll look so weird, no one will come near me.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Mom stifled a yawn and touched the laugh lines around her mouth like she was trying to erase them. Time was her relentless foe. She was up at four most mornings to begin food preparation, asleep by nine each night. The added tension between Dad and me rankled everyone.

  “Talk to Dad,” I pleaded. “Try to get him to understand.”

  Mom sighed. “I’ve talked to him, A.J. I’ve talked to you. Nothing is going to happen, my darling, until the two of you talk to each other.”

  “He’s not being fair!”

  “It’s complicated, honey. He’s frightened for you.”

  “You’re taking his side now?” I slammed blueberry preserves into the food basket.

  “I am not,” she countered wearily. A buzzer went off in the kitchen. Mom threw up her hands and ran back to check it.

  I slumped on the counter exhausted. The day was only beginning for me. I had agreed to cover the Ben Franklin High School Piranhas basketball game tonight for the Oracle, and it would behoove me to get some decent action shots, or Pearly Shoemaker would have a musk ox on my lawn. I reached my weary arms to the ceiling and did a full body stretch. I did jumping jacks and felt my strength return…

  That’s when the glass-etched double doors of the Emotional Gourmet opened and Peter Terris sauntered in.

  I froze in midjack.

  There he was, in extreme wonderfulness, wearing a red sweater and jeans and a blue ski jacket—walking under Mom’s hanging red satin Valentine hearts! Walking right toward me!

  “I need a pie,” he said.

  I slammed my arms to my sides and hit the floor. “We have those…!”

  “You do aerobics here?” he asked, laughing.

  I caught my breath and wiped sweat on my sunshine-yellow apron. “I was trying to wake up,” I muttered. I lunged toward the pie case: “Pies,” I said lustily.

  Not much was left, because it was the end of a busy day. This was awful, since he’d come all the way here to get a pie. It took twelve minutes from his house—I knew this—I’d made the trip many times, just to drive by. He could have gone to Munson’s Bakery, wh
ich was closer to his house. He’d never set one perfect foot in Mom’s store before, to my knowledge, and now here he was.

  This meant he cared!

  We stood together, sharing oxygen, in front of the pie case. I didn’t want him to leave disappointed, unless the pie was for Julia Hart.

  “What kind have you got?” Peter asked. My heart was pounding, my hands were shaking. I looked at the pie case and lost all familiarity with the English language.

  “Uh…there’s…uh…” I tried pointing.

  “Apple?” he asked. I nodded. He shook his surfer-sandy hair. “My mother wants something unusual.”

  His mother! That was safe. She must be a wonderful person. I smiled deeply. He pointed at the other pie, a strawberry rhubarb piled with whipped cream.

  “That one,” he said.

  I took the luckiest pie in the world from the case and didn’t drop it. I tied it up expertly and had to cut the string because I’d wrapped it around my watch. I had a mild allergy attack at the cash register as Peter looked around, whistling. I wanted to say that it took a special person to pick out a strawberry rhubarb pie. I wanted to say that I hoped he really enjoyed it and there were plenty more where that came from. I took his money; our thumbs touched.

  “Thanks,” he said, smiling.

  “Thank you,” I said. Thank you for making my entire weekend. Thank you for being gorgeous beyond words. I watched him go and spent a few moments leaning against the pie case containing one common apple pie that had always been my favorite, till now. I breathed in the air that Peter Terris had breathed.

  “Well,” said my mother, appearing from the back, “was that a friend of yours?”