Pish Posh

  An old fireplace had been boarded up, but its mantel was covered with pencil and charcoal sketches. They all looked somehow similar and yet different. It took Clara a moment to realize that all the drawings were of the view outside the window.

  “Did you draw those?” Clara asked.

  “What?” Audrey asked.

  “I said,” Clara repeated in a loud, irritated voice, “DID YOU DRAW THOSE?”

  “Yes,” Audrey replied.

  “They’re not very good,” Clara said.

  “Not very, no,” Audrey agreed. There was something very dignified about Audrey, a fact that Clara hadn’t noticed before. She didn’t like it either. A soup cook should not be dignified.

  “Then why do you continue to do it?”

  Audrey picked up the sketch pad, placed it on the floor, and sat down heavily in the rocker, as if she were suddenly exhausted. After a minute, she replied, “Have you ever felt that if you focused on something long enough, you would find what you were looking for?”

  “On occasion,” Clara said, thinking about the times when she tried to recall memories from her childhood.

  The sunlight from the window washed across Audrey’s face, and Clara looked at her carefully for the first time. Funny, although she’d seen Audrey nearly every day for years, she had never noticed that she had an odd scar that crossed her chin and angled up, like a check mark. Perhaps she’d never noticed because the kitchen lighting was dim, or maybe it was simply that Clara had never bothered to look at Audrey too closely. Yet, now that she did, she noticed something else. This Audrey was made of fine stuff. Her features were smoothly molded, almost aristocratic. Her hands were slender and her neck was long and elegant. Clara thought of her own mother’s hands, which were thick and lumpy at the knuckles. She frowned, annoyed at herself for being so distracted. After adjusting her sunglasses and folding her arms across her chest, she asked Audrey what she had come there to find out.

  “Tell me how you know Dr. Piff,” Clara demanded.

  “That’s really none of your business,” Audrey replied.

  Clara felt the blood rush away from her face as fury bloomed in the middle of her chest. For a moment, she was at a loss for words.

  “Of course it’s my business!” she cried finally. “Everything that happens in the restaurant is my business!”

  Audrey did not rise from her seat. Instead, she gazed out the window, rocking slowly in the chair, and calmly replied, “But you are not in the restaurant, Miss Frankofile. You’re in my home. ”

  This made Clara so angry that she actually stamped her foot. “I absolutely demand that you tell me how you know Dr. Piff!” She was suddenly, painfully aware of how childishly high-pitched her voice sounded.

  “And I absolutely refuse,” Audrey said simply.

  It was unbelievable to Clara that this soup cook, this Nobody, would speak to her like that, and in a fit of rage she walked over and slapped Audrey across the face. She had never hit anyone before, and it made her palm sting. She looked at her own hand and saw that it was red, and that her fingers were thick and knobby like her mother’s. She did not want to look at Audrey, whose skin had felt cold and soft against her hand, but she forced herself to and found that the soup cook was looking at her with something like pity.

  Clara’s face turned as red as her palm. “You’re fired,” Clara declared.

  For the first time a look of fear passed across Audrey’s face, which effectively erased the look of pity. Clara was satisfied.

  “Don’t bother to come to work tonight. You’ll only be sent away, ” Clara added before she turned and left the apartment. She stomped down the stairs and threw open the kitchen door so violently that Lila looked up from her reservation book.

  “Something wrong?” Lila asked.

  “I hate being treated like a child!”

  “Who on earth has been treating you as a child?” Lila asked, genuinely shocked.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Clara shook her head. “The problem is solved. ”

  “Oh, good,” sighed Lila, relieved to get back to her reservation book.

  That evening, Clara walked into the restaurant feeling lighter and happier than she had since Dr. Piff had left. True, she had not exactly solved the mystery that Dr. Piff had mentioned, but at least she had managed to get rid of Audrey, who (Clara was 98 percent certain) was at the heart of it all.

  She sat at her usual table, had her usual meal brought to her, and watched the glittery, fabulous customers. Curiously, the slap she had given Audrey had a strange aftereffect on Clara. She felt a surge of hot, mean energy, and her face, if she had bothered to examine it closely, looked as pink and damp as her father’s always did. To be brutally honest, her armpits were giving off a sourish smell, too, not unlike the armpits of her father. But all Clara could smell was imminent success. Tonight she would scout out a Nobody—she could feel it in her bones. And indeed, she had not been in the restaurant for more than fifteen minutes before she spotted her first Nobody. The fake countess, about whom “Ask Ms. Mandy” had just written, appeared at the door, a limp Pekingese tucked beneath her arm. Up front, Lila was looking down at the reservation book, preparing to seat her.

  Because Clara was in a strange, mean, buoyant mood, she didn’t bother to go quietly to her mother. Instead, she stood up at her table, pointed at the countess, and in her loudest voice declared, “There! That one! She’s a Nobody!” She slapped her hand on the table in triumph.

  The whole restaurant turned to stare at her, and for a moment she felt a little embarrassed. But not for long. Right after Lila had told the mortified woman to leave, John Sickle, the anchorman who had giggled during the earthquake coverage, entered with several other people.

  Oh, this is too easy, Clara thought to herself, her eyes bright as though she had a fever. This time she ran up to the front of the restaurant, knocking her hip painfully against a customer’s chair as she went, then jabbed a finger three times at John Sickle’s nose. “Nobody, Nobody, Nobody!” she cried, and then smiled at her mother, who looked a little taken aback.

  “Are you feeling all right, Clara? ” she whispered as John Sickle and his party backed out the front door.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Why?”

  “You seem a little feverish,” Lila said. She put her hand on Clara’s forehead. It was a nice feeling, having her mother’s hand pressed against her forehead, and Clara closed her eyes, hoping the feeling would last.

  “I suppose you’re a little warm,” Lila said, removing her hand. Clara’s forehead felt shivery cold where her mother’s hand had been. “Maybe you’d better go home, Clara.”

  She didn’t want to go home, and she didn’t really feel sick, except for the strange, jittery, spiteful sensation that she’d had all night. But now that sensation felt tamed, and she suddenly grew a little tired.

  “Okay,” she said. She hesitated, and almost gave her mother a hug, but Lila had already stuck her head back into the reservation book.

  She made her way through the restaurant, aware that some of the customers were looking at her oddly, and went into the kitchen to say good night to her father, who was carefully lifting an entire fried fish out of a pan and onto a plate.

  “Good night, Papa.”

  “Good night already?” he asked without looking up as he spooned some red sauce on the fish.

  “Mother says I have a fever, ” Clara declared. She liked the sound of that and added, in a voice loud enough for the kitchen to hear, “Mother says I should go home immediately and take an aspirin and rest. She’ll be in to check on me when she gets home.” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but it delighted Clara to say it nevertheless, and she quickly glanced around the kitchen to see if the others had heard. It was then that she saw Audrey, standing in her usual place, ladling soup into a bowl. For a moment Clara was too shocked to say anything.

  “Well, then,” Pierre was saying, “go home, if you must, but don’t talk about fevers in the kitchen, or ev
ery single one of these lazy pinheads will suddenly come down with one and—”

  “Why are you still here?” Clara interrupted furiously, pointing a finger at Audrey. Audrey did not turn around.

  “She don’t hear too good,” the dishwasher said to Clara.

  “But I fired her this morning!” she said angrily to her father.

  “Oh, yes, she told me,” Pierre said. For once, his voice was quite calm, almost cheerful, as though he were relieved that someone else was doing the yelling in his kitchen.

  “Then why is she still here?” Clara demanded, smacking her hand on the metal pick-up counter, making the dishes that were lined up on the shelf clatter loudly.

  “Because the woman makes a damn fine soup,” he replied. It was the first kind word he had ever said about an employee, and the entire kitchen staff now stopped what they were doing to stare at him in disbelief. In the uncharacteristic silence, Pierre’s face suddenly collapsed into a livid scowl.

  “Who said you could stop working, you putrid heap of bat droppings...”

  His booming voice drowned out Clara’s protests. Furious and mortified, she looked at Audrey, who had finally glanced up from her pot. Behind her thick glasses, her eyes met with Clara’s. They were proud eyes, the sort of eyes a soup cook had no business having.

  She thinks she’s won, thought Clara. She hasn’t. She’s hiding something, and I won’t have things hidden from me. I’ll find out her secret. She has no idea how far I’m willing to take this.

  Clara, in truth, didn’t exactly know herself how far that might be. But as she walked home, the night air skimming across her feverish skin and cooling it, she considered that it might be pretty far indeed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dr. Piff had an office in a very sleek high-rise building across the street from Central Park. Outside the building was a massive red metal sculpture of the office building’s numbers—464—each number twice as tall as Clara.

  Clara did not relish the idea of seeing Dr. Piff again. Once she declared someone a Nobody, it was generally unpleasant to see them again. But it seemed to her that she had no choice now. She took the elevator to the sixteenth floor and walked into Dr. Piff’s big, fancy waiting room. It was completely empty, except for a receptionist who smiled at Clara with a confused look on her face.

  “Can I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

  “I’m here to see Dr. Piff.”

  The receptionist’s face fell, and she blinked rapidly three or four times.

  “And... how do you know him?” she asked, in an overly polite voice.

  Clara paused, then said, “He’s a friend.”

  “Oh. ” She looked at Clara for a moment, nodding. She picked up the phone, dialed an extension, and said, “Would you please come to the reception desk for a moment?”

  Clara sat down on the couch and waited, flipping through some old magazines. Inside one was a large photo of the melancholy actress June Loblolly, and above her picture was the heading “Doom and Gloom June.” This was the very article, in fact, that had turned June Loblolly into a Nobody. Sometimes it happened that way. An article would appear in a magazine or a newspaper, and all of a sudden everyone was talking about it. And everyone had talked about this article. In a matter of days, the nickname Doom and Gloom June had stuck.

  Clara looked at June Loblolly’s photo. It was not so much that she had a sad look on her face, but that her features were strangely set, so that she always gave the appearance of being gloomy.

  Finally, a tall, handsome, auburn-haired woman appeared at the reception desk, and the receptionist said to her, “Ah, Ms. Piff! This young lady is asking for your father. She says she’s a friend of his.”

  Ms. Piff looked at Clara with her auburn eyebrows arched high. Clara had heard Dr. Piff speak about his daughter, but she had always got the feeling that he didn’t like her very much.

  “Come this way, please, ” Ms. Piff said to Clara. She turned, and her heels clicked down the hallway and into an office with a large desk in the center covered with papers, and behind the desk were three file cabinets that were all open and empty. On the floor were a dozen or so cartons.

  “Sit down, please,” said Ms. Piff coolly, gesturing for Clara to sit down on a little chair while she went around and sat behind the desk. “Now, what is this about?”

  “Where’s Dr. Piff?” Clara asked.

  “Dr. Piff is dead, ” she said. Then, seeing the shock on Clara’s face, she added, “I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I believe in being direct in such matters, even with children.”

  “How?” Clara managed to murmur.

  “A heart attack. Just yesterday.” She stiffened when she saw the look on Clara’s face, and added, “If you are going to cry, I can provide you with tissues, or I can put my arm around you. Which would you prefer?”

  “I’m not going to cry. ”

  “That’s good.” Ms. Piff seemed to relax a little.

  In fact, Clara felt a little numb. She had never known anyone who had died.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” Ms. Piff asked in a way that really meant “Now it’s time for you to leave.”

  Clara hesitated, having forgotten momentarily why she had come. “No,” she said absently, and she rose to leave. But then she stopped and said, “Yes. Yes, I have a question about someone. I think she was a patient of Dr. Piff’s. Her name is Audrey—”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t talk to me about my father’s patients!” Ms. Piff had clearly used up all the compassion she had in reserve, and now her tone was downright snappish. “Look around.” She indicated the boxes scattered all over the floor, each marked with letters on the lids, like A-D, and E-G. “I’ve been knee deep in my father’s patients all morning—hundreds of them. Good Lord, he was a terrible slob. ”

  Clara winced. It bothered her somehow to hear Dr. Piff described in those terms.

  “Now, if that’s all ...” Ms. Piff clapped her knees and stood up. She’d apparently had enough of chatting with an eleven-year-old girl.

  “I think perhaps I am going to cry,” said Clara. “Would you please get me a tissue?”

  Ms. Piff sighed very loudly. “You might have cried before, you know, when I first made the offer. ”

  “It’s just coming on now,” Clara said.

  “Oh, fine.” And Ms. Piff and her clicking heels left the room.

  Clara knelt beside the A-D file box and thumbed through the files quickly. No sign of a file for Audrey Aster.

  She stood up, sighed, lifted her sunglasses, and propped them up on her head. Then she saw it. It was lying on top of a pile of papers and magazines on the floor near the window: a beautifully framed drawing of a goldfish swimming in a lop-sided fishbowl. The goldfish was wearing blue pants, and was smiling. There were braces on its teeth. In the bottom left-hand corner was her own childish, printed signature.

  Oh! She remembered that drawing! She had made it for Dr. Piff when she was six. She remembered drawing it, too, and how she’d labored over the tiny braces. Now she crouched down, staring at it in wonder. It was like finding an ancient relic that had been buried in the earth, forgotten and waiting to be discovered again. And she did remember it! It was a small thing to remember, especially when she had forgotten so many other things about her childhood, but it thrilled her anyway.

  At the sound of the click-clicking of Ms. Piff’s heels, she grabbed the framed picture, upsetting the pile beneath it. It toppled and splayed, and there, underneath an issue of Modern Optics magazine, was a thick manila envelope, its flap tied closed by a frayed string coiled around a round cardboard clasp. The envelope seemed quite old. It was soft and pulpy, and so stuffed that there was a long tear along the bottom edge, out of which poked a piece of paper. Clara could see only two fragments of sentences, handwritten with blue ink: ... but Audrey does not respond. And on the following line, ... from Pish Posh. That would be the worst possible thing I can imagine!

  “What are you doi
ng?” Ms. Piff asked suspiciously, entering the room with a box of tissues in her hand. Clara straightened up quickly.

  “This is mine,” she said, clutching the goldfish picture tightly to her chest. “I drew it for Dr. Piff.”

  “That thing? Take it, I don’t mind. It was in the garbage pile anyway. ” She indicated the mess of papers on the floor.

  “You were going to throw it away?” Clara cried.

  “We can’t keep all my father’s junk, you know.” Then, seeing that she’d offended Clara, she added, “Well, for heaven’s sake, he had the thing up on his wall for years! That should make you happy. ”

  It didn’t. In fact, it made Clara miserable. She felt ensnared in a horrible tangle of guilt and sorrow. She’d banished Dr. Piff from Pish Posh, and he’d died right afterward. And he had kept her picture up on his office wall for so many years. How must he have felt that night when she told him he was a Nobody? Clara’s eyes grew hot, and a strange, thick sensation in her throat made her press her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

  Clara tried to remember when she first met Dr. Piff, but couldn’t. He just always seemed to be standing on the edge of her life—calm and quiet, and watching her with his small, intelligent eyes. Now he was dead. He was not a Somebody or a Nobody anymore. He was simply gone.

  “So, do you need these?” Ms. Piff asked impatiently, holding the box of tissues out toward Clara.

  Clara took a deep breath. No, she was not going to cry. Decidedly not. Absolutely not. She shook her head.

  “No?” Ms. Piff said. “Well, I wish you’d make up your mind. Okay, then”—she gave Clara’s back a little nudge with the tips of her fingers—“off you go.”

  Clara sidestepped away from Ms. Piff, knelt down quickly, and went to grab the old envelope. But before she could pick it up, Ms. Piff’s hard black heel clamped down on the file.