Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “Maybe if you get rid of the law books,” I suggested.

  She sighed. “You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”

  “This is silly, Roxy. There’s no way any of your dresses are going to fit me. I think you’re having a problem with spatial relationships here.”

  “No, no, no. Wait a minute.” She reached and brought out a strapless purple satin summer dress with a fully elasticized bodice. “This is my shortest dress. It’s only knee length and I hardly ever wear it. I bet this will look like a formal gown on you. Here, try it.”

  I pulled the pup tent I was wearing over my head and exchanged it with the purple one. Roxy put the discarded dress on a hanger and returned it to her closet. By the time she turned around, I was just smoothing out the skirt, which barely dusted the floor. It was a pleated godet skirt with contrasting shades of purple, while the bodice hugged my smaller bosom without being bulky. I spun, allowing the skirt to flare around my legs. “Oh, Roxy, it’s perfect!” I saw myself in the full length mirror on her wall. “And, you know, I have a necklace that should go great with this color.”

  She handed me the hanger. “Here. It’s yours for tomorrow. In fact, it’s yours for good.” She waved goodbye to it over one shoulder. “I never wear that one. It makes look like a schoolgirl. What about a wrap? And an evening bag? Earrings?” She began pawing through her closet again and found a silver shoulder wrap, then she explored the shelf above until she found a silver evening bag. “These should work. Do you have purple earrings?

  I had no earrings. I shook my head and pointed to my ears which were not pierced. “I don’t need earrings, Roxy. Really. All this stuff will be fine.”

  “Without earrings you might as well be naked,” she said. “But I don’t have any clip-ons.”

  She stared at my ears, making me uncomfortable. “No, I’m not going to let you draw on my earlobes with a Sharpie. I’ll go without earrings. I’m sure the Secret Service won’t throw me out.” I was very satisfied, but I could tell she wasn’t. If I didn’t lock my bedroom door tonight she would probably sneak in with a bag of ice and a surgical needle smuggled out of Nitro’s room.

  I hung Roxy’s dress and wrap on the hook on the inside of my bedroom door and put the clutch on top of my dresser. Before turning in, I took a hot shower which included a refreshing round of How Hot Can I Stand It until the chill finally left me. After setting my alarm, I crawled under the covers in my cow print flannel nightgown and went to sleep.

  A noise woke me a couple hours later. I’d been having a dream about my father’s exhumation anyway, so I didn’t mind too much. In the dream I saw the coffin opened and his skeleton lying there. He didn’t come back to life, or appear as a ghost or anything like that, but it was still gruesome and disturbing. I woke, reminding myself that there was no reason for them to open the casket. It would just be set aside while they excavated the area and then put back. But a shiver returned and I clutched the thick blanket tighter around myself as I stared into the darkness, listening.

  The floor above me was creaking. It was Billings’ room. He was lifting his weights. As I lay there, I could hear him set the weights down, heard his footsteps move about. The creaking told me he was moving out into the hallway. The house is very old, and I’d been living there long enough to be familiar with most of the nocturnal noises. This wasn’t the house settling, it was Billings creeping out of his room and up the stairs. He wasn’t going down to the kitchen to get a snack, and his room, like all of them, had a private bathroom. I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to determine that he was making a visit to the twins’ room on the fourth floor.

  I smiled. It brought to mind the impending marriage and how things were likely to change soon. I was happy for him, but also worried. This kind of relationship changed the dynamic of the team. I’d been walking a fine line as it was with my son on the team. I kept wanting to assign him the easy, safe tasks, but I knew I couldn’t. Now, I’d have to stop myself from protecting the twins simply because of their relationship with Billings. And I was afraid I would over-compensate and put them in unnecessary danger. Or that Billings might compromise a mission by objecting to an assignment that put them at risk. Stop it, I told myself. They are all adults, they know the risks of their jobs. I couldn’t afford to let this situation change my leadership decisions. I focused on young love and happiness, crawled back under the covers, and returned to sleep with the situation in Illinois the farthest thing from my mind.

  My alarm went off and I opened my eyes. I got up and padded into the bathroom, deciding to do my usual morning routine. I stood in front of the mirror to brush my hair. While I was brushing, something else caught my eye. I had a gray hair nestled in amongst the dirty blonde, and a lengthy gray hair growing in my right eyebrow. “For Pete’s sake.” They had seemed to sprout overnight. I was pretty sure I would have noticed them when I brushed my teeth the night before. But there they were. One thin strand down the side like a Bride of Frankenstein preview, and the other sticking out over my eye like a single antenna. I stared at them a minute or so, blinking and wishing for them to go away and thinking about how hard my recovery from the broken ribs had been. I’d had injuries before and didn’t remember it being so achy and annoying. No, I refuse to believe it. I’m not getting old. They are nothing but fluke hairs and it means nothing.

  I plucked both gray hairs and flushed them down the toilet. Nevertheless, I brushed my hair and teeth (with different brushes, of course), put on the purple dress and silver wrap, and found a pair of black pumps in the back of my closet. I was in the kitchen by 7:30 for breakfast.

  Billings and Sir Haughty, dressed in brown and gray suits respectively, but wearing aprons, were at the stove taking orders for pancakes and omelets. Nitro, wearing a tan suit under his lab coat, had coffee and an English muffin. He stuffed the bottom half of the muffin into his mouth as he grabbed his jacket and field kit. “Gotta go,” he said. “Inspection team meets at 8:15.”

  “Does it really have to be such a big deal?” Sylvia asked. “You test for Uber all the time and it only takes five minutes. I think they’re just making a spectacle of it.”

  “Of course they are,” explained Sir Haughty. I waved away his offer of an omelet and fixed myself a cup of coffee, helping myself to a three-day-old blueberry muffin which I picked apart with my fingers.

  Nitro shrugged into his jacket and took the English muffin out of his mouth. “There are four other people on the inspection team. We each take a core sample from the block, test it, then rotate until we’ve all tested each sample. The White House isn’t going to take any chances. They have a reputation to uphold. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to damage the public trust of a White House event.” He grabbed a glass of orange juice, downed it in one swig, put the glass back on the table, and dashed out the door.

  Half an hour later, most of us were standing in the foyer. For once, Roxy didn’t look out of place in her sunshine yellow chiffon gown with matching poofy flower for her red hair, and dangling earrings with yellow garnets and opals. In the second-hand purple gown with silver accessories, I was feeling less like myself than usual. Formal dress had never been my thing. The twins were in a double coral dress with A-line skirts, ¾ sleeves and cutouts in the back. Sir Haughty was wearing a black suit and his top hat. Sylvia had yet to come down. “Sylvia!” Roxy called up the stairs. “We have to go!”

  “Coming!”

  I saw her legs come down in an emerald green uneven skirt, then her bodice in lace and her hands and arms in elbow-length white gloves. Finally, she was at the bottom of the stairs and everyone was gasping. The dress was spectacular, but that wasn’t what amazed us. The emerald green of the dress matched her eyes perfectly. Eyes! Two of them! There was no eye patch, but two sparkling green eyes shone from her olive face. Her short dark hair revealed a pale neck with a gold-tone choker and gold hoops hung from her earlobes. Nothing had prepared us for the sight of those eyes.

  “Oh, Sylvia! You are gorgeou
s!” Roxy was the first to speak.

  Sylvia was smiling shyly. “Does it look all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Agnes said. “You didn’t tell us you were getting a glass eye. It’s perfect.”

  “I wanted to surprise you,” she said to the group. “Actually, it’s not glass. It’s acrylic. They last longer.”

  Everyone agreed that she had succeeded in surprising us. After a round of air hugs and kisses we proceeded out to the series of cabs that were waiting. About 40 minutes later we got out on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked over to join the line in front of the guard house. Several guards were there inspecting people’s bags, purses and ID’s before allowing them to walk up the North Portico to the White House doors, which stood open and welcoming, showing a bustling crowd. At each side of the entry stairs stood an inflatable tube man made to look like swiss cheese with a toothy grin. They randomly collapsed and rose, flapping prosthetic rubber arms. Many of the guests were dressed formally, like us, but some were in casual, but nice-looking, clothes. I had to smile. There were people of all sizes, shapes, and colors. There’d been a time in the not too distant past when Americans were not welcome in the White House, and those few that were all looked the same. I liked this much better.

  Although it was cold out, it was sunny. The Entrance Hall was warm and welcoming, even with the doors open. A staircase to the left as we came in was blocked by a velvet rope, as were doorways on the opposite side of the Cross Hall that led to the Red, Blue, and Green Rooms. People mingled in and out of the Cross Hall and Entrance Hall, drinking champagne and wine, which tuxedoed servers carried around on trays for people to take. Some of the glassware had elastic smiley faces wrapped around the stems to indicate non-alcoholic beverages, so that children could participate as well, or for adults who felt that 9 a.m. was too early in the day to imbibe. Sylvia hung back while the others grabbed their chosen beverage and proceeded to join the crowd, calling greetings to Senators and Representatives that they recognized. “Are you nervous?” I asked Sylvia. A couple months ago we had all met Banana Harris, the scientist credited with isolating Uber and the Uber narcotic effect, and Sylvia had confessed to me her fears then. She had found Ms. Harris’ celebrity quite intimidating.

  Sylvia scanned the crowd. President Glenarrow had not yet arrived. “Nope,” she said, smiling, confident with her new glass eye. “Where is it?” she asked, referring to the guest of honor, the big block of cheese.

  I pointed to the door to the East Dining Room. It was still closed. “The inspection team might still be at work.” I tagged a champagne flute. “Mingle. Maybe you’ll meet someone,” I said.

  “Not interested,” she said. “I joined CURDS to get away from that for a while.” Then she peeled off to hang near the East Room doors with a captured glass of Pinot Grigio.

  I enjoyed seeing my people having fun. I sipped my champagne. It wasn’t yet 9, and early for alcoholic beverages, but it was an occasion. I saw Billings talking animatedly with Representative Rokyard of Nevada. He is three inches shorter than Billings, with curly blond hair and a horseshoe moustache. He is on the House Budget Committee and I guessed that Billings was making suggestions for improvements to the CURDS arm of the CDC. Good luck with that, I thought. We recently got a major high tech upgrade that probably used up our budget for the next four years.

  “Helena!” someone called.

  Approaching me was Senator Jacob Quick, who possessed the largest pores of any human I’ve ever seen. A very nice man, but he always looked like he was melting. He reminded me of a New England snowman in late April. I always thought he was in danger of being arrested for decent exposure. He is bald on the top of his head with a fringe like a curtain around the sides which is mostly salt and a little pepper. He is of average height, with the physique of Gru from Despicable Me. “Hello, Senator Quick,” I said.

  “It’s so nice to see you. I wasn’t able to make the Christmas ball.” It was just as well. Aside from myself and the First Family, the only people not plastered were Sister Catherine Mante, a Benedictine nun, and Democratic Representative Imogene Raferson who is currently pregnant with her second child. “I’m told your gown was lovely.” He took my hand and held me at arm’s length. “Oh, this color suits you very well indeed. How are things in the CURDS world?”

  I didn’t really have to answer. Of all the people that could have flagged me down here, he was the best option. Senator Quick did enough talking for both people in a conversation.

  He winked at me and sipped his champagne. “Your tech upgrade! Oh, goodness me. My idea! You folks were working in the Stone Age and controlling Uber is much too important to allow that to continue.” I moved further into the room and he followed along. “They should be opening the East Room soon. Big Block of Cheese Day is so exciting. It’s not every day you get to see cheese at all, let alone such a large block.”

  Actually, I see cheese fairly often. As a non-cheese lover, it’s not my favorite view. It’s worse in the raw form. The process of cheese making resembles stewed vomit from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. In my opinion. I think his point was more seeing cheese in the old fashioned “something we can eat” form rather than potentially poisonous. For the public at large, they only had to watch for the proper labeling, but those of us in the biz, so to speak, had seen enough counterfeiting to make us far more wary. We danced on a fine line between ensuring safety and avoiding out and out panic. We’d already done the panic thing ten years ago. It was a mess. We were supposed to be the barrier that allowed the public to lead their normal lives and eat occasional cheese products. But nothing compared to coming to the White House and knowing the President herself would eat from the exact same block. You couldn’t feel any safer than that.

  I saw Badger was talking with the Chembassador to Ireland. I could hear a little of their conversation, but couldn’t understand it. They were speaking Irish.

  The conversational buzz was interrupted by someone repeatedly rapping on their wine glass. A glance at my watch told me it was 9 o’clock, and I remembered that back home in Springfield it would be 8 a.m. and someone was breaking the ground over my father’s grave. I shivered at the thought, thankful that Mom would be out with Butte, and thankful that I wasn’t going to have to deal with dead bodies today.

  Sir Haughty was calling the room to attention. He stood at the East Room doorway with Sylvia at his side. “Ahem, ladies and gentlemen. Before we adjourn to the East Room, let me tell you a little bit about this particular occasion. Big Block of Cheese Day resulted from two separate incidents in our country’s early days. First, the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts gave President Thomas Jefferson what came to be known as the Mammoth Cheese. Prepared by the women of the Baptist town without the assistance of slaves, it was escorted to Washington D.C. by Elder John Leland and presented to the President on January 1, 1802 to honor Jefferson for his support of religious liberty. It measured 4 feet 4 ½ inches in diameter and was at least 15 inches thick, weighing in at 1230 pounds. It was reported to still exist in some form as late as 1805, served at party functions, but not offered to the public, after which it was most likely disposed of in the Potomac River.

  “Decades later, in 1837, Colonel Thomas S. Meachem of New York created his own giant wheel of cheese measuring 4 feet across and 2 feet high, weighing in at 1400 pounds and presented it to President Andrew Jackson. Like Jefferson, Jackson originally used the cheese for White House functions, but before long, as you can imagine, the White House reeked of the cheese. President-elect Martin van Buren may have persuaded Jackson to get rid of it. At one of his last functions in 1837, a dinner open to the public, Jackson served the cheese. 10,000 people attended and the cheese was disposed of in about 2 hours.

  “Since then, Big Block of Cheese Day became a sporadic and eventually symbolic White House event, marked only by texts, tweets and emails liberally populated with cheese metaphors and puns like ‘Don’t Wimer, Brie Happy’ and ‘Baby, it’s Colby outside.’ When the OOPS hit and it w
as traced to Uber cheese, consumer confidence took a nose dive, followed by an industry-wide belly flop. Only massive subsidies and aggressive, federally funded PR campaigns saved the cheese industry from extinction. One of these campaigns was to bring back Big Block of Cheese Day in a literal sense and there has been one every year since. Today marks the 5th Annual Big Block of Cheese Day hosted by President Sequoia Glenarrow. Each year has been more popular than the one before.

  “This year we are proud to bring you Durrus, a cheese from Southwest Cork, Ireland, which our kind Chembassador to Ireland, Frederick ‘Clancy’ Zickman arranged for us. It is a semi-soft, washed rind cheese, made with raw, unpasteurized cow’s milk. You will find it to have an aroma of sweet hay and a taste of mildly acidic creamy butter. This wheel has been aged a mere 12 days, sealed in wax fresh from the artisanal farm and shipped here to us with great care by oxcart, jumbo jet, and flatbed trailer. This year’s wheel measures 5 feet in diameter, 20 inches in height, and weighs in at nearly 1500 pounds. Needless to say, if you enjoy the flavor, simply ask and the White House server will be happy to package some for you to take with you.” Sensing that he was nearing the end of his speech, people began grabbing new beverages from the trays floating around the room.

  While he’d been speaking, the President and several Secret Service agents had come down the stairs and stood patiently behind the velvet rope. The Sergeant-at-Arms stood in front of the rope. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America, Sequoia Glenarrow!” From somewhere, Hail to the Chief began playing as the sergeant opened the rope and the President and her entourage entered to resounding applause. They crossed the room to stand near Sir Haughty. The sergeant returned the end of the rope to the hook, and stood there to guard access to the stairway.