She frowned and shook her head.
“I’m going out,” I said desperately. “I’m going to see Lennie.” No reaction. “Lennie,” I said more loudly. “Remember Lennie, with one solid eyebrow? We’re meeting at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and we’re running away together!”
“Don’t forget your . . .” Mom began, then forgot what I wasn’t supposed to forget and stood there swaying slightly with her mouth open.
“My what?” I bawled. “Don’t forget my what?”
“Your grandmother,” she murmured, looking at me with unfocused eyes. “Your grandmother wouldn’t understand.”
“It’s me that doesn’t understand,” I said, still hoping for some kind of breakthrough. It was like trying to reach somebody through yards of thick, murky water.
She smiled. “Wait till you’re older, darling,” she said, and she padded over to the window to see herself better (her enchanted self, her lost self). She began to hum a tune, if you could call it that—a kind of whiny drone in three-quarter time, through her nose.
The weird thing was, there were times I’d have been delighted for my mom to just sort of not notice me, not keep track of where I was or who I was with or how long I was on the phone or whatever. Only not now, and not like this. Actually having a mother who literally didn’t know I was there, or care when this notion did penetrate her bemused consciousness for a second or two, was not the blast it was in daydreams. Nothing like it.
Worst of all, Gran hadn’t called. And Mom was—well, like this.
Stick by your mother, Gran had said, in that case. Well, I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand it. I ran out of the apartment, slamming the door behind me.
What was I going to do? Call the cops and tell them that my mother was missing? She wasn’t, not unless you knew. You can bet that Brightner had put a glamour on her too so that nobody else would notice her weird reflection. What in the world would they make of it if they did anyway? Not the truth, that was for sure.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and walked hard and fast with my head down, going no place. He had her, all right. What was left was hardly even my mom anymore, and I just couldn’t stand it.
You have to understand, my mom was this person who, if you jumped in her bed on a Sunday morning, would ask you to scratch her back, or she’d tell you her dreams and ask about yours. Or she would send you to bring in the Sunday paper from the mat outside the apartment door, so the two of you could spread it out all over the floor and do the crossword puzzle together over breakfast.
Maybe if I went back with the paper? Not a chance. Even the New York Times had no strength against Brightner’s magic.
And without Gran, neither did I.
I walked over to the park, which was full of Sunday strollers and bicyclers and skateboarders and so on. The day had turned warmer, though the wind still blew. I walked down to the Wollman Ice Skating Rink.
What I saw when I got there was a little muddy-floored valley cupping at its sunken center a long, low building along the edge of a flat, bleached platter of concrete. The site was enclosed in a chain-link fence with a big gap torn in it, naturally, by the vandals the fence was supposed to keep out; and it was totally deserted. People seemed to avoid that part of the park, maybe because the broken-down skating rink was depressing to look at.
I wriggled through the gap in the fence and walked along the front of the building, looking down the barren face of the slab. The building itself was divided into large rooms with big windows and locked doors. It looked as if no one had done any work there for days, though the fat herringbone tracks in the soft earth around the slab seemed to indicate that maybe the Parks Department or somebody parked heavy machinery there, inside the torn fence.
No way could I conjure the image, let alone the reality, of my poor mom skating here with Dr. Brightner. I turned away and walked out of the park.
My mom, my real mom, was lost and I wanted her back. I stomped down Broadway, jostling people without even noticing, repeating over and over to myself, “I want her back, I want her back.”
There was only one possibility. I had to reach Gran, somehow, to tell her that Brightner had moved with a speed and boldness that she just had not foreseen. He hadn’t been able to “nobble” my Gran, so he’d nobbled Mom instead.
I should go back home and wait in case Gran called after all. What if she already had called, and only the poor ruin of my mom was there to answer? But I could not go back and see Mom like that. Anyway, I was so hungry, I couldn’t even think. If I didn’t eat something soon I was going to pass out.
I trudged over to Fifth Avenue, where street vendors with food carts cluster on the corners to handle business people on the run on weekdays and shoppers on weekends. In particular there are these delicious little shrimp dumplings, four for a dollar, with hot vinegar, which a person could gladly die for.
As I walked hopelessly along, sniffing the air for the aroma of dumplings, suddenly the buildings on my right opened out and I heard music.
I turned my head and looked down the line of trees in marble planters that leads to the heart of Rockefeller Plaza, where the sunken skating rink is.
Skating rink.
With no clear idea in my mind, I headed down the plaza toward the huge golden statue of Prometheus floating in golden ribbons of cloud. He’s stuck up on the wall behind the rink, gazing down benevolently on the ice. He looks young, smooth, pleased with himself, and dumb.
I came to the rail on the near side of the rink, leaned over between two of the flagpoles that march all along the walls, and looked down.
There was no ice. The rink was still in its summer form, which is an outdoor café. I sagged against the railing, listening to some tourists laughing and talking as they took pictures of each other with golden Prometheus in the background.
Something weird and terrible began to happen.
The music on the loudspeaker system began to fade away, as if somebody had wrapped the speakers in layers of cotton. At the same time, the bright green and white stripes of the café umbrellas dimmed in front of my eyes. All the color seemed to be sucked out of what I saw—the flags snapping on the tall poles above the rink, the coats and jackets of people along the wall looking down, even golden Prometheus himself—like a photograph being developed very quickly, getting darker and darker.
Hunger, I thought. You’ve waited too long to eat, you’re about to faint.
Then everything started to spin very slowly. Imagine looking into a very old, very slow clothes dryer, and all the clothes are black or gray.
I clutched the rail.
The center of what I was seeing started to brighten again while the rest got darker. I tried to hang on to the bright center. As I struggled to stay conscious to see it, I realized that what I was looking at was ice.
A shining disc of white ice, with night all around it and a dark crowd of people skating on it in absolute silence. No music, no laughing or shouting, no sound of skates scraping and hissing on the ice. No color—a silent black-and-white movie. People in dark clothes with shadowed faces swept soundlessly by without looking up or at each other or at anything.
I watched them, paralyzed. Frigid air seemed to pour up off that sparkling ice to freeze me where I stood.
I had a very slow, cold thought: this isn’t the Rockefeller rink. The Rockefeller rink is small. This is huge, with too many skaters, and it’s so dark all around the ice.
The shadowy figures pulled away gradually from the clear center of the ice, which was marked off by a circle of traffic cones. They were bright orange, splashes of almost painful color. In that space in the center where color still lived, I saw Dr. Brightner and my mother skating together, all by themselves.
Not my real mother that I’d left at the apartment but a sort of water-paint image of her, translucent and delicate: her reflection, yet solid enough for him to hold her by the hand. They made a slow, weaving sort of dance together, she in her blue jeans and ski jacket and the purp
le wool hat she had pulled down over her hair, and Brightner in the three-piece suit that he wore to school. He didn’t look silly or out of place. He looked powerful.
I wanted to shout, “Mom, Mom, look up, look at me—here I am!”
But I didn’t. I was afraid Brightner would hear me, and he would look up at me. I would be captured too and drawn down onto the ice where I would skate forever and ever around the two of them, helpless and silent and cold.
Besides, I had to keep trying to remember, that wasn’t my real mother down there. It was her magic reflection, the very special fetch Brightner had made for her.
My mother has never really been a sporty person. All her athletic crazes lasted just as long as it took her to decide that the type of man who did that particular sport wasn’t for her.
Now every move she made on the ice was perfect, like the moves of an Olympic athlete. Her eyes were closed. Her face, when she turned so that I could see it, had an expression of bliss. She looked young and beautiful.
This was the reflection I’d seen in my mother’s mirror. But which was more real, more alive: the mindless mom-doll drifting around our apartment, or this dreaming image down below me?
If I cried, my tears would blur this vision. I clutched the rail with both hands and opened my eyes as wide as I could, even though I was scared that my eyeballs were freezing slowly in their sockets from staring and staring at the ice.
Brightner let go of Mom’s hand and drifted back from her a little. She didn’t even try to get away from him. He put his hands behind his back and skated in a circle around her while she made these slow, perfect loops at the very center of the ice. He turned and turned around her, his face always toward her, like a tiger circling a deer.
With no effort, he controlled it all: his own gliding steps, the others drifting dimly past his back, and my mother herself, who had never in her life looked like that, moved like that, smiled like that. Never.
Now he did look up, and he grinned at me, a big, wide, taunting grin.
Everything went gray and woolly and I started to topple over.
I hung onto the railing for dear life. Music broke over my head like a wave—and a siren, car horns, the metal catches on the flag ropes clinking against the flagpoles in the light breeze. And the laughter of two women down below at a café table under a green and white umbrella.
9
Against Orders
WHEN I COULD GET MY LEGS TO WORK AGAIN, I ran home. Mom was there, just as I had left her, mooning around in her nightgown like the heroine of one of the dippy romances that two of her authors wrote. She hadn’t bothered to answer the phone all day. There were six messages on the answering machine, not one of them from Gran.
I could only think of one thing to do: the thing Gran had told me not to do, of course. I had to go find her at Collie’s Kitchen. I slapped some peanut butter on a heel of rye bread and called information.
There was no such restaurant listed, according to the operator. A heavy cloud of despair settled over me. On the other hand—if you could have The Olde Salte Seller, why not cutesify the name of a restaurant? I said, “Maybe both words begin with a K?”
I heard the computer clicking and the operator said doubtfully, “I do show a restaurant with a name like that, spelled with a K.”
“Ha!” I said, hopeful again.
“It’s not ‘Collie,’ ” said the operator. “I show K-A-L-I, Kali’s Kitchen. Could that be what you’re looking for?”
It hit me: not “Collie” as in Lassie Come Home, but Kali, the terrible Indian goddess of death and destruction!
I remembered her from our English class unit on Mythologies of the World last year. Kali is a horrible aspect of a powerful goddess. She has four arms and huge tusks and wears necklaces of snakes, skulls, babies’ heads, and so on, which gives you some idea of her disposition. Her tongue hangs out about a foot and drips blood. I had had a couple of rousing nightmares about her during that study unit.
“Are you there?” I shouted into the phone. “Operator, I don’t want the number, I just need the address!”
I scribbled the information on a napkin, hung up, and took off for the lower East Side where the streets start to turn seedy.
And there it was, on a block with a bakery, closed; a liquor store, closed; a tiny little hole-in-the-wall grocery, open and very high-priced; a hat store for men, closed; a magazine store, open, with foreign magazines and several men clustered near the cash register where they kept the girlie magazines; and a tiny French café.
I walked that block about six times before I got up the nerve to approach the place I was looking for, with its big front window and faded red awning: Kali’s Kitchen, it read, in curly white script.
I leaned close to read the speckled, sun-dried menu taped inside the window next to two ancient newspaper reviews. The sign on the door said, Open. I peeked in the window, over a table draped in a red cloth with a little vase of drooping flowers on it. Somewhere deep inside in the gloom, somebody moved around.
Brightner?
I beat a quick retreat across the street and stood behind a lamppost like a dummy (even I am not that thin).
A little Indian lady in a pink sari looked out of the restaurant doorway, up and down the street. She had a thick braid of black hair and a flash of gold at her ear. Did she see me?
She held the door for a couple of patrons and went inside with them, and I started breathing again.
Now what? If Gran was still around here someplace, spying on Brightner (and she had to be, she was my only hope), she’d be in some kind of disguise. So how was I going to spot her?
I waited for hours, loafing in the magazine store and hoping every time somebody went in or out of Kali’s Kitchen that it would turn out to be Gran and wouldn’t turn out to be Brightner.
At dinnertime a steady stream of street people made their way into the alley that ran alongside the restaurant building. They were let in through a side door that was propped ajar. That was how Dirty Rose and Gran must have gone in for their meal last night.
Gran must still be in there. Maybe she was pretending to be a new waitress, or a kitchen hand. Maybe she was busy going through secret files in some back-room office with a little camera, like a movie spy. Granny Gran and the Restaurant of Doom.
My job: find her! But how? I came up with the bright idea of making my first effort as a burglar.
Having no handy disguises with me and not knowing whether Brightner himself was inside, I could hardly march in the front door. I would have to sneak in through the side entrance, sometime before the place was locked up for the night.
I stayed across the street in the shadow of the magazine-store doorway with my hands in my jacket pockets, hopping from one foot to another to keep warm. My running shoes were not so great for standing around in cold weather. I only left once, to dash up the block and buy a couple of sticks of shish kebab from a street vendor for my dinner. Then I waited some more.
This was not at all like coming out of a late movie with Barb, say; or wandering around with some kids from school down in the Village. This wasn’t like anything I knew.
To tell the truth, I was not used to being out, on my own or in company, so late. The yellow pools of the street lights with all that dark in between, the sounds of traffic whizzing brightly past on the avenue up at the end of the street, and the closed and silent storefronts left and right and across from me all seemed very sinister.
Also my ears were freezing. By this time it was very chilly and very dark, and there was barely any traffic, foot or wheeled, on the street.
Suddenly I heard voices calling in a foreign language, and a door slammed in the alley. A skinny little guy in a leather jacket came out of the dark and walked quickly away down the street. A few minutes later two black-haired women left, chatting and laughing, also by the side door.
I looked at my watch: it was one-thirty in the morning.
Quiet again, except for a car horn far off somewhere
and a faint sound of barking. I tried to think, but my brain felt like ice floating between my icicle ears.
Two more people came out of Kali’s Kitchen with bikes and rode away on them. I heard someone sing out after them, “Good night, good night, don’t be late tomorrow,” from inside the alley doorway.
How many staff people could they crowd into that little restaurant?
I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was now or never.
Now.
I ran across the street and into the alley. The side door opened easily and quietly. I dashed inside, past a glimpse of the bright, empty kitchen with swinging doors in the far wall leading out to the dining area, where somebody might still be cleaning up.
I flung myself down the stairs into the basement. They were steel steps, with little leaf-design treads embossed on them to keep your feet from slipping. A bicycle leaned into the corner of the landing halfway down.
In the basement, a double door stood partially open. I looked back up the stairs. I’d done it, committed myself: now what if Pink Sari or Brightner himself sneaked up behind me and trapped me down here?
Don’t think about it.
I flattened myself against one of the metal doors and peeked inside.
No Claw, no Brightner, no Sari, even, but an odor strong enough to knock out a water buffalo: a mixture of heavy spices, sweaty clothing, and stale liquor. I held my breath and looked into a large room lit only by the dim light spilling in from behind me: bare walls, a cement floor with cracks in it, and high along the walls a few small, grimy, barred windows.
The floor was covered with what I thought were rows of rag bundles. Against the far wall someone had set up a table supporting two big steel pots. The only other item of “furniture” was a large, overflowing garbage can in one corner with a litter of Styrofoam bowls scattered around its base.
One of the bundles coughed and rolled and flung out an arm. Another one groaned and swore. Now that I listened, I could hear them breathing: sleeping people, homeless people who had come in here at dinnertime for a meal and a place to spend the night out of the cold. Looking carefully, I could see holey shoe-soles sticking out of one end of the nearest bundle.