Donutheart

by Sue Stauffacher

  “Flour?”

  They did indeed appear to be five-pound sacks of Gold Medal flour.

  “I’m afraid I…I haven’t had time to review this lesson,” Miss Mathews told us. “So I will have to read from Mr. Teegarten’s notes.”

  Mr. Teegarten, we learned at the beginning of the year, had taken an unexpected early retirement last fall after breaking his nose in a tumble down the bleachers at the big football game between Pelican View and our archrivals, Wing Rock Middle.

  “You will work in pairs. I’ve got the list right here….” As Miss Mathews sifted through the papers on her desk, I wondered if her embarrassment had more to do with being unprepared than with the subject matter we were discussing. Clearly, these arrangements had just been made this morning. She probably had a whole lesson plan carefully prepared on “first crushes,” a subject that definitely held my interest, and then arrived at school only to find many kilos of flour stacked in her room, and a sticky note from Mr. London, our assistant principal in charge of curriculum.

  “To make it easy, I just used the seating chart, so Joseph-Howerton, Frost-Mirandette, Grandolt-Sprool, Powell-Williams…” Unable to locate her list of partners, Miss Mathews was simply pointing pronged fingers at the students as she went up and down the rows. It was gratifying to see that Marvin Howerton had been paired with Brenda Joseph, the only girl to make the Pelican View Middle Boys’ Hockey Team. Ha!

  I knew long before she got to us that Sarah Kervick would be my partner. Glancing at the sack of flour that now lay between us, I determined that, for the sake of the child, it would probably be best if I was granted full physical custody.

  I swiveled in my seat to see how Glynnis would react to being paired with Tommy Williams. She sat upright, looking modestly at the floor, as he reached forward and grabbed his sack of flour, swinging it the way an orangutan might carry a bunch of bananas.

  “Look here,” he said. “It’s the Gingerbread Boy.”

  “Franklin!” Sarah tugged on my arm. “I don’t get it.”

  “You and I will share this sack of flour and treat it like a baby,” I replied, waving the form that was being passed around. “We have to keep track of when we feed it, when we put it down for a nap…. Basically,” I continued, scanning the assignment, “we have to keep it with us at all times for two weeks.”

  “You gotta be kidding me. I got cousins that don’t get this kind of treatment.”

  “It’s supposed to teach us how hard it is to be a parent so we…you know…think twice,” I answered her in a low voice.

  Sarah Kervick processed what I said for just a moment before making a sour face.

  “I feel the very same way about you,” I informed her, taking one from a stack of oversized paper lunch bags being handed around.

  “You need to think of this as a real baby,” Miss Mathews read from her notebook, “so draw a face on the bag and slip the flour inside it. Remember to keep it with you at all times. No, you may not set it down to jiggle the handle on your locker. If you wouldn’t do it to a real infant, then you can’t do it to your flour baby.

  “You’ll have to have one of your parents review your log at the end of the day and give your baby a ‘well check.’ They have to initial each daily log. I’ve got the forms here.”

  Sarah Kervick was tapping her pencil on the top of the desk in a most annoying manner.

  “Why don’t you think up a name?” I suggested, handing her the “birth certificate.” “I’ll handle the face.”

  Her hand shot up.

  “Yes, Sarah?”

  “What if you know you’re not gonna have any kids? Ever. Do you still have to do it?”

  “But you can’t know that, Sarah. You’re too young.”

  Sarah folded her arms and sunk down in her seat so that her nose was level with the writing surface. “If I said I’m not gonna have any,” she muttered, “I’m not gonna have any.”

  “Well, if it helps, I believe you,” I told her. Sarah Kervick belonged with a gym bag, not a diaper bag.

  “Franklin, I mean it.” Sarah sat up and grabbed my shoulder and shook it. It hurt! “I’m supposed to take this sack of flour home and tell my dad it’s a baby? And have him check on it? He’ll laugh me right out of the trailer!”

  “Sarah, what is the matter?” I asked, trying not to cringe from the pain of her tightening grip. She let go and sat back down at her desk. As I watched her tap manically on her desktop, it occurred to me that something really was very wrong with her circuitry. Normally, she would just shrug her shoulders and do a haphazard job of the assignment. Why was she taking things so seriously all of a sudden?

  I tried again. “Sarah?”

  “Not now,” she whispered, grabbing the handout I passed to her and turning as far away from me as her desk would allow.

  I tried to focus on the assignment and compose a reasonable facsimile of a human baby onto a paper bag with my #2 pencil. All this emotional upheaval with Sarah Kervick was drawing attention away from the real tragedy that had occurred in Room 401B that morning. Glynnis Powell was carrying another man’s sack of flour. Yes, the object of my affection was working out feeding schedules with a boy whose only claim to fame was making fart noises with his armpits.

  Between sketching baby eyebrows, I stole glances at Glynnis as she took a straight edge from her pencil case and began to make a chart. Carefully, she placed the metal edge on her paper, biting her lip in concentration.

  Sarah Kervick was absorbed in her shoes. I glanced over at the “birth certificate” she was supposed to be filling out. Only one item was complete. Next to Baby’s First Name, Sarah had written “Keds.” She sat there, her head in her hands, staring at her own handwriting.

  She was upset. Some sort of response was called for on my part. What would William have done if this were “Go Go”? I put my hand on Sarah’s forearm.

  “Are you okay?”

  Sarah pressed the heels of both her hands into her eyes. When she looked up at me, they were wet with tears.

  “I haven’t seen my dad for the last two nights.”

  She followed this up by declaring through gritted teeth,

  “And if you ever tell anyone what I just told you, I’ll tie your arms in a knot and throw you in the Grand River.”

  “Where exactly are we going again?” I asked after school as my mother hustled me and Sarah into her work van.

  “Her name is Fiona Foster, and the guys down at the rink say she makes the best dresses.” She looked over her shoulder and gazed meaningfully at Sarah in the backseat.

  “Did you say ‘Foster’?” I asked. Was it possible we were about to visit the home of Rebecca Foster? Had she been referring to this meeting when she said Donuthead was on her calendar?

  “You might want to prepare yourself mentally, Sarah,” my mother continued. “She’s going to measure you.”

  “What for?”

  I lowered my voice and turned to Sarah. “Can we just get this over with as quickly as possible? For my sake?”

  Sarah looked at me. “You’re not supposed to let strangers touch you,” she said quietly.

  Despite hours of listening to classic rock at dangerously high volume, my mother has excellent hearing.

  “Fiona Foster is a seamstress, not a stranger. She’s had her hands on practically every girl at the skating rink and they survived. Come on, Sarah.”

  But Sarah didn’t answer. She sat, hunched and silent, staring out the window. The tears from the morning were long gone, but the way she kept her lips pressed together and swallowed hard every so often made me realize they could come back. Anyone else staring at her at that moment might think she was mad as the dickens. But I knew a thing or two about Sarah Kervick.

  I also knew a thing or two about my mother. Sarah’s stubbornness about this dress was getting on her last nerve. I sent a mental suggestion to Sarah to tell my mother what’s going on. Not that I had a complete picture myself. The dress was the least of my worries.
A girl her age should not be left alone all night. Sarah had made me promise not to tell anyone, so all I could do with the information she’d given me was worry!

  Also, I’m not very experienced at keeping secrets. The only other time I’d been asked was when my mother made me promise not to reveal to Rick, her last boyfriend, that she’d ordered prescription-strength Skintactix, the most popular adult acne medication, on the Home Shopping Network. As we sat in the van in silence, I tried to think of something—anything—to say besides Sarah’s father has disappeared!

  We parked next to a split-level with a sign out front that announced FIONA’S FASHIONS. My mother turned around in her seat. “Help us out here, Franklin,” she said.

  As I may have mentioned, shopping under any circumstances is not my mother’s strong suit. I opened the van door for Sarah. Together, our mood could only be described as somber.

  But Fiona Foster, who threw wide the door to her “lower-level fashion studio,” was determined to outcompete our gloom with her enthusiasm.

  “Skaters!” she said, waving her free arm in a dramatic curlicue. “You are most welcome.”

  Fiona Foster was, to quote my mother, “a piece of work.” She looked a bit like a Barbie doll that has spent too much time in the sun.

  So this was Rebecca Foster’s gene pool.

  My mother followed Fiona Foster down the stairs into the darkened basement.

  I grabbed Sarah’s arm. “Shouldn’t we do something? I mean, about your dad. Maybe call the police?”

  Sarah looked at me. She seemed disgusted by the suggestion. “Do something? Do what? He’s done it before, Franklin. Just drop it, okay? He’ll be back.” She let out a long sigh through her nose, and headed down.

  I took a deep breath and followed her. In a clatter of steps, we entered a dimly lit room filled with that suffocating moldy-basement smell. Fiona plunged farther into the darkness.

  “I want to turn on the lights all at once so you get the full effect,” she said. “We just finished the remodel. Ta da!”

  The “remodel” seemed to consist of stringing white Christmas lights around the drop ceiling. Surely, the pink shag carpet could not be new since it was already stained in several places. A tall metal cabinet stood along the far wall next to a floor mirror, and a shower rod with a plastic floral curtain was rigged up over a corner of the room.

  Sarah, my mother, and I lined up against the wall as Fiona rushed back toward us. We’d been herded into an alcove next to a wrought-iron café table piled with big books of skating costumes.

  Between Sarah’s home life and Fiona’s home, my senses were so overloaded that I sank into one of the wrought-iron chairs against the wall without examining the seat first. As if on cue, a long-haired cat leapt into my lap and began to purr furiously, releasing clouds of hair and dander all over my carefully maintained khakis.

  “Uh,” I said to Fiona’s mass of blond hair, for that was all we could see of her as she extracted ice cube trays from a mini fridge under the utility sink.

  “Oh, that’s Chester,” she said, straightening. “He loves everybody. Anyone for a refreshing glass of Crystal Light?”

  We shook our heads no. My mother sat down on the other side of the table and heaved a skating book onto her lap.

  “Well, then,” Fiona said cheerfully, dropping the tray onto the plywood that spanned the utility sink, “you must be Sarah.” She picked up a pink clipboard and wound a measuring tape around her neck like a scarf.

  Sarah nodded and looked at the floor.

  Fiona began to read. “According to Julia here, you’re entered in the junior division of the GPVAFSA’s regional tournament, but that’s in”—here she paused to spread her fingers flat across her bony chest—“a little over two weeks…with the exhibition in”—more dramatic clutching—“a week and a half?

  “You gals must think I’m a miracle worker.”

  There was a long pause that we filled by examining the pile on the shag carpet. Not a one of us favored the term “gal.”

  “But… I do have a secret weapon.”

  Fiona trotted over to her metal cabinet and yanked open the doors. The rusted grating of its hinges startled Chester, who released another handful of hair into the atmosphere before digging his claws into my thighs and leaping.

  I cried out, which seemed like the appropriate response to being impaled by a dozen needle-sharp objects. My mother took no action other than a quick glance in my direction, leaving me to sift through drifts of hair to search for puncture wounds on my own.

  Sarah Kervick had withdrawn into herself. One glance at her face was enough to confirm she wasn’t daydreaming. But she wasn’t with us in the room, either. It took several seconds of disregarding my own pain and discomfort to realize that I had never seen this look before. It wasn’t bored (reserved for school), blissful (reserved for skating), hero-worshiping (reserved for my mother), or disgusted, impatient, or frustrated (all reserved for me). No. Sarah Kervick looked sad. Very sad. How could I know that the look on her face would unsettle me even more than the filthy feline lumbering toward a litter box with a funny hitch in his gait?

  I wasn’t sure which made me more uncomfortable. I began plotting our escape.

  “Okay, so what kind of show are you doing? What’s the theme?” Fiona asked, searching through the dresses that were hanging in the cabinet.

  “I keep these in stock for emergencies,” she explained. “There are a dozen different styles here: jazz, country and western, waltz, classical…we need to match your costume to your music.”

  My mother looked at Sarah, waiting for her to engage. Sarah looked at the floor. My mother looked at me.

  It was a simple enough question. “She’s skating to the second half of Ravel’s Bolero,” I informed Fiona, trying to move things along.

  “Aah…Spanish.” Fiona cupped her chin in one thin hand, yanked a dress off the rack, and held it up. “It’s basic black for Bolero, with maybe some red accents. We can modify a ready-made.”

  She held the dress out, her eyes flicking from it to Sarah’s chest.

  Sarah glanced up at the dress. “Yeah, that’s good,” she mumbled.

  “Sarah,” my mother said. “You haven’t even tried it on yet.”

  Fiona hung the dress back in the cabinet and unwound the measuring tape from around her neck. She advanced toward Sarah.

  I closed my eyes, picturing a personal-assault lawsuit involving my family name.

  “Come on, Sarah. I’ll help.” My mother stood up and put her hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Can I?” she asked Fiona as she held out her hand for the tape measure.

  “Well, I guess so,” Fiona said, though clearly she saw this sort of activity as belonging to her. “She has to stand completely still. Moving around corrupts the numbers.”

  As my mother’s hand closed around the tape measure, Sarah took a step back.

  “The most important measure is the torso,” Fiona said, grabbing her clipboard and closing in. “Put the tape on the right shoulder, loop it between the legs, and return.”

  My mother looked at Fiona as if she’d just instructed her to run the measuring tape between the legs of a Bengal tiger.

  Sarah crossed her arms over her chest. “I changed my mind,” she said.

  “I’m sorry…you what?”

  At this exact moment of high tension, a cloud of red-and-white Pelican View Panther came plummeting down the steps.

  “Ma, I gotta be back at school by three-thirty….”

  I knew that voice. I tried to cover my face with my hands, hoping to avoid a scene more unpleasant than this one already was, but Chester’s hair still clung to my fingers…disgusting!

  “Rebecca!” barked Fiona. “It’s business. What did I tell you…?”

  “It’s not you…it’s just…” Sarah’s voice had risen to the point where she now earned our attention. She was speaking to my mother, the expression on her face having descended from sad to miserable.

  “
You have to know it! One of these days…real soon, I’m gonna look up and you’ll be gone….” Her voice trailed off as she turned away from my mother. “And I can’t…”

  Sarah flung out her arm as if to take it all in: the sample dresses, Fiona chewing her thumbnail, the table piled high with skating catalogs. “I can’t do all this by myself.”

  Everyone froze. Somehow, even Rebecca understood that what was going on at the other end of the room trumped the drama of whether or not she would be late for the game bus.

  My mother was stunned. “Sarah,” she said. The tape measure dropped to the floor. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because it happens every time,” Sarah said quietly, her eyes locked on the cement wall over my mother’s shoulder.

  “Even you can’t change it.”

  My mother took a step back, waiting I assume, for Sarah to explain just what she meant by “it.” She was trying to figure out what just happened. I wasn’t sure myself, but I think Sarah wanted us to tell her that whatever she was sure would happen wasn’t going to. I think Sarah Kervick wanted to be reassured.

  “I know you!” Rebecca had snapped out of her stunned silence. “And you.” She pointed at Sarah.

  “You two are supposed to do the presentation in health class on How to Tell If It’s Really Love.”

  Without considering how this would affect things with Glynnis, or even how my words might correlate with future violent acts perpetrated on me by football players who would defend Rebecca’s honor, I said to her: “And I know you, Ms. Foster. Your face is in the dictionary next to the word cretin.”

  “Huh?”

  I thought as much.

  My mother had pulled her wallet out of her back pocket. She handed a credit card to Fiona.

  “I’ll be in the car,” she said.

  Fiona glanced around helplessly. “But don’t you have a preference? Mothers always have a preference! Should I add pleats? A handkerchief hem? For a little extra, I could do rhinestone accents.”

  “But I’m not the mother, am I?” Though she was answering Fiona, my mother was looking directly at Sarah. “Come on, Franklin.”