by Dar Williams
Who would I invite? Lenore? Hally? Ellen? No, no, and no.
I decided to invite Phyllis. She loved to play tapes of Broadway musicals in her car. I bet she could sing along to the whole show.
But when I went to the office to invite her, Phyllis said she couldn’t come, and she wouldn’t say why.
“When does the play begin, and how long does it go?” she asked.
“It begins at two, and I guess it lasts two hours. Why?”
“Do you think you’ll be home by six o’clock?” she asked secretively.
“Sure,” I said.
Phyllis stopped looking so nervous. “Oh, good,” she said. “Hey, is this the play your friend is in?”
“Sarah? Yeah.”
“Why don’t you invite her over afterward, for a little surprise?”
Surprise? Sarah? I wasn’t sure I knew her well enough. “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” Phyllis laughed. “Oh, this is perfect. You and Sarah come home at six.”
Hm. She was right. Why not?
I didn’t let the problem of the two tickets bother me. I felt like Phyllis. I came up with a plan.
That night, I called Sarah and invited her over on Saturday. She answered the phone and said she’d love to come over, since the after-show party had been canceled.
She said, “This is great. I wanted to do something after a big performance.”
“I’m sure your parents would take you out for ice cream,” I said, curious to know if she had two parents at home.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she said. “My parents can be extremely boring.”
I heard a man and woman laughing in the background. “You hear that, Honey?” I heard a man say. “Don’t mind us, Sarah. We’re going to do something exciting, like go sit on the couch.”
The woman laughed and so did Sarah.
“Actually, she’s my stepmom,” Sarah said. “Is Phyllis Francisco your stepmom?”
“Oh, no. She’s my non-mom, but in a very important way.”
“Ah, I get it,” Sarah replied, and I could tell she did.
“Oh, speaking of which,” I said, “there’s no one who can come with me to the show, so I was wondering, do you need some help? Do you need an extra person to pin costumes or get anybody water or anything?”
Sarah checked the next day and slipped a note in my locker.
Guess who’s going to a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday? Sammy. Guess what Sammy’s job is? To pull the curtains! Come to the stage at one on Saturday, and they’ll show you what to do.
Sincerely, Sarah
On Thursday, I left a bouquet of daffodils backstage, and I wrote a note saying, “Good luck!” And I also left an extremely huge piece of John’s cake, which had still not run out.
On Saturday, I showed up a little before one.
The drama teacher, Ms. Bramson, wore a red skirt and a red sweater and had a red flower in her hair. She was brushing something off the end of her black feather boa. I think she’d dropped it in her caffe latte.
“I’m your curtain puller,” I said.
“Excellent,” she replied. “Excellent. Listen closely. When the lights go down, open the curtain.” She opened her arms wide. She smelled like perfume and mothballs. “At the end of act one, when I signal, CLOSE the curtain.” She closed her arms. “When the lights go down after intermission, OPEN the curtain, and when the show ends …”
I said, “CLOSE the curtain.” I closed my arms.
“Yes, excellent! Oh, but then OPEN the curtain so they can take their bows. And if you don’t do this perfectly, you’ll never work in this town again!” She winked, kissed me on the top of my head, and with a whoosh turned and walked away, laughing.
And so I watched the whole show from the backstage, sitting on the same stool where I’d eaten lunch so many days. But now it was completely different.
The stage lights were on, and the stage glowed in purple, orange, and bright white. Eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds were crowded backstage wearing lipstick. Some of them had white shoe polish in their hair to look older.
Ms. Bramson clutched a cup of coffee with her red fingernails as she stood on the other side of the stage, mouthing all the lines and even dancing some of the steps.
Sarah was truly the star. I was so excited that this nice, funny person was actually my friend. She even grabbed my hand and squeezed it before her first entrance.
“Wish me luck!” she’d whispered, heading out for her song.
I peeked down at the orchestra. For some reason, I felt very excited and choked up. Jimmy, the kid who had pretended to push me down the stairs, was playing the clarinet. He was sweating and nervous. He turned a page in his score, and it almost dropped off the music stand. He sweated some more.
He finished his part and looked up. Before I knew it, he’d caught my eye. I couldn’t help it. I smiled and gave him a thumbs-up, and I wasn’t kidding. The orchestra sounded good!
Before he could remember that he was about the meanest kid in school, he smiled back. And then he had to play again.
I couldn’t wait to be involved in another play. Maybe I could help with costumes. I loved seeing these kids hunched over and nervous backstage, with coats over their shoulders. Suddenly one or two of them would throw off their coats and stride onto the stage, singing at the top of their lungs.
I felt like we had a little club backstage.
When the show was over, I helped Sarah get her costume packed up. She cleaned off her makeup, and then she hugged her friends. I talked a little bit with Marin, who had some great dance solos and a few lines to sing. We laughed about how nervous the kids in the orchestra were, especially Jimmy.
I said, “I felt bad for him.”
“Oh, me, too!” she agreed.
Sarah came out and said to me and Marin, “My parents are going up to Woodstock next weekend, and they say there’s a really cool candle store up there. You two want to come?”
I thought of the five of us in the car, laughing all the way up to Woodstock. It would be less crowded than a carload of my dad’s friends! It seemed like a very, very good idea.
I got home with Sarah at around five-thirty. My dad was dressed in something other than sweatpants, and even had shoes on.
“Apparently, we’re going out someplace,” he said. “But no one will tell me where.”
I introduced him to Sarah. I had to leave them alone for a few minutes, because I went into the bathroom, turned on the sink faucet, and started to cry.
I realized I never had thought I’d see my dad dressed up and ready to go out again. All those Friday nights I’d groaned through pizza and the movies with his friends, with him driving, humming along to the radio, and laughing at their jokes. Now all I wanted was that. I wanted to see my dad driving his car, humming and smiling, looking forward to the movie, looking forward to his job at the college, and looking forward to his life.
I took a few deep breaths. The first few were stuttery, but then they felt even. I splashed my eyes with water and went out to the living room.
“Sarah’s stepmom and dad work at the college, too!” Dad said.
Joyce walked in, dressed in a beautiful purple silk dress, with a bright green scarf around her neck. “Is this your friend?” she asked, approaching Sarah.
“Yes,” I said. “Joyce, this is Sarah.”
Joyce hugged Sarah, and I hoped she wouldn’t cry. She turned to my dad and spoke while Sarah recovered from her hug. “I’m the driver,” she announced. “Right this way.”
Joyce cleared her junk from the seats in her car, laughing nervously as she picked up the gum wrappers, notebooks, and junk mail.
“I have a very … cluttered life, but an interesting one,” she explained, doing a last arm brush of the seat for Sarah.
She tried to help Dad into the car, but he shook his head and slowly let himself in.
We drove toward town, with Joyce asking all sorts of questions. How was the play?
How did we feel? Scared? Happy? We could have asked Joyce the same thing. She was all aflutter.
Dad was staring out at the town he hadn’t seen for months. There were flowers around the mailboxes where he’d last seen snowbanks. Clearly, he didn’t know where we were going, and he didn’t care. But I did.
“Hey, I have a question,” I butted in. “Where are we going?”
“To a restaurant,” Joyce answered.
“The one where John works?” I asked.
“See for yourself. We’re here.” She stopped the car, and we all stared at the awning. It said, simply, JOHN AND FRIENDS. It was a restaurant. It was John’s restaurant. It was John’s restaurant that belonged to him! Under the awning was a big sign that said, GRAND OPENING!
“It can’t be …” Dad began.
“I’m not going to cry,” Joyce assured us, but her hands were shaking as she opened the door.
Silently, excitedly, we made our way into the building, which had been boarded up for a while. But not anymore. It was crowded! Crowded with people, plants, candles, and walls painted with vines.
The first thing we saw, though, was a simple waiting area, next to the coatroom, with a light-blue tiled floor, white walls, and a light-gray stone fountain — just a stone bowl on a small pillar, with water spouting in three silver sprays.
“Do you like it?” Joyce asked. “I put it together. I worked with someone at Carolyn’s gardening store.”
“It’s really nice, Joyce,” Sarah spoke up.
“You see, Sarah, this is a little embarrassing, but whenever I see something beautiful, I want to cry. There’s nothing wrong with it, except sometimes I realize I think I have to cry or else nobody in the room will feel anything. So the fountain is there to remind me that I don’t have to do all the crying, as it were,” Joyce explained in a rush of words. “Everyone’s a fountain, right?” She gave me and Dad a knowing look.
“Yes, everyone has the right to be lachrymose,” I noted. They all looked at me.
“Well, while John was secretly opening this place, I was secretly learning new words in school!” I exclaimed, and then I looked at the fountain and said, “I love it, Joyce. You are very talented!”
“You think I’m talented.” She laughed. “Hey, Phyllis, come be our tour guide!”
Phyllis appeared at a small podium in the corner. She was wearing a long black dress. Her hair was swooped up in a silver clip, and she was wearing a long silver necklace.
“Look at you!” Dad exclaimed.
“No, David,” she protested, “look at you!” Then she cleared her throat and said, “Come right this way, everyone.”
I saw how the painted vines climbed up and wound their way all around the bottom half of the walls. Very dramatic.
I looked over as a camera flashed. The local paper was taking a picture of Carolyn signing her masterpiece in a corner under a bunch of grapes. So this was the project she had been doing with John!
Sarah and I swung around as we heard another sound. John himself came bursting through the doors that swung out from the kitchen. “Goodness! Look at the crowd!” he exclaimed, addressing us as if he were an emperor in a chef’s hat.
“I put ads in all the papers and on the radio,” Phyllis whispered to us. “The ads said, ‘Come to our new restaurant, and for five dollars you can try everything on the menu.’ Cheap food and a chance to sample everything. It seemed like good marketing.”
So Phyllis had organized this whole thing. I hadn’t even thought to notice all the files, folders, and envelopes she had added to her usual pile. She was always busy working on a few ideas. Now the plan was to make a big splash with the opening for John’s restaurant, and she had obviously succeeded!
“If I can make parents’ night sound like fun, why not a new restaurant?” she added modestly, but I could tell she was very proud.
I saw that the menu had been blown up to poster size, standing on an easel, and I realized all of the dishes were being served in miniature on trays that were being passed around.
John was being very good at being John, making his way through the crowd, saying things like, “You’re sure? You are positively sure the pie crust is flaky and delicious?” and “Well, I could give you the recipe, but then I’d have to kill you,” and “Well, if you love it, then have another one!”
“That’s John,” I said, pointing him out to Sarah. She was eating a little spinach quiche. “Uh-oh. John said we wouldn’t like that until we were fourteen,” I warned her.
“I like it now!” she said with her mouth full, picking another one off the tray. “Can we call my dad and stepmom?”
“Sure!” I said, and Phyllis appeared out of thin air with a phone. Sarah disappeared to call her house.
Everyone was gaping at the beautiful walls.
I snuck up next to Carolyn and said, “That’s some trompe l’oeil.”
Carolyn put her arm around me, bony but strong. Her red hair was extra spiky tonight. Very fancy. “Thank you,” she said. “I know. But what about the plants? The living ones. Do they look healthy? I raised them myself.”
I looked around at the potted trees and the planters on the low walls.
“Hm …” I said. Carolyn watched me nervously. “I’d say they look so good, people will come here just for the beauty of the place.”
Carolyn exhaled. “I thought so myself, but I didn’t want to say it. I’m very modest. Hey, look at that dessert table!”
Sarah had returned, and she and I looked over at a long table covered with desserts. Cakes, custards, linzer torte … everything John and I had made in the kitchen that night and more.
Carolyn had handwritten the labels: BROOKLYN BLACK-OUT CAKE, WOODSTOCK CARROT CAKE, HUDSON RIVER BLUE-BERRY PIE, SAVANNAH LEMON MERINGUE PIE, and, of course, RASPBERRY LINZER TORTE.
“Amalee, look,” said Carolyn, nodding toward the door. Dr. Nurstrom walked in. I saw him laugh as he shook my dad’s hand. I was glad to see that Dad was sitting. Joyce had been standing close by — protecting him, I think. Dad looked happy. Dr. Nurstrom looked happy. He put his arm around Joyce.
“Dr. Nurstrom is dating Joyce,” Carolyn said. “Didn’t you notice?”
“I only knew about the one date!” I said. Carolyn didn’t have a chance to answer.
“Hey!” came a voice from behind me. “How is my little girl?”
I turned around and saw John. His voice did not match the look on his face. He looked almost bashful, as if he were waiting for my approval.
I remembered what Dad said, about adults wanting kids to like them.
I decided to come clean, right then and there. “John, when I said you’d never open a restaurant I felt terrible! I felt terrible for days! I felt like a jerk. And I’m so glad I was wrong.”
“Oh, Honey, I have to thank you for that!” John assured me cheerfully. “I was so freaked out when you said that, I thought, Have I really been saying this over and over? I decided to get the God’s honest truth about it, so guess who I called?”
“Carolyn?” I guessed.
“That’s right,” he said. “She said whenever I started talking about my job, she felt like she was stuck on an elevator with bad music from her prom.”
He went on to explain that after our night in the kitchen, he’d marched himself into the bank, gotten a loan approved, and made an offer on this very building that afternoon.
“Even after that Friday night when I cursed you by opening my big mouth?” I asked.
“Big and beautiful, Sweetheart, and don’t you go changing!”
I found out that when John bought the building, all his friends jumped in to help. Carolyn painted the inside and some of the outside, designed the menus, and printed all the signs. After painting all those incredibly detailed, beautiful plants, she decided she wanted to grow real plants, and to grow some for the restaurant.
Joyce, as it turned out, didn’t just build the fountain. She had helped Carolyn paint and had picked out the tables and chairs. Sh
e also insisted on buying some fancy kitchen things for John, like a giant stove! She said she’d been saving up money for a rainy day, and one stormy Tuesday she decided this rainy day is as good as any.
Phyllis had not only planned this opening night. She had also hired the waitstaff, created a schedule for them, and made contacts with all the local farmers so that John could work with them. She was going to work at the restaurant at night, taking care of all the money issues, making sure that everything was “in the black,” as she put it.
For his part, John had been dreaming about his restaurant for so long, he merely had to walk in, crack an egg, and start cooking, just like he had at our house.
Phyllis snuck up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Not bad for a bunch of misfits, huh?”
I felt my body get tense. She knew that’s how I had seen them. Suddenly I was right back there on a Friday night, rolling my eyes in my dad’s small car, waiting for his friends to do something, anything, about their problems. And Phyllis knew that’s how I’d felt.
But then I looked up and saw her face. She was beaming with pride. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she asked.
We both looked all the way around the restaurant, at John smiling and eating his own tiny quiches, Carolyn showing a detail of her painting to my art teacher, Joyce laughing, Dr. Nurstrom smiling, Dad picking out a shrimp dumpling from a tray, and all the other people who had shown up tonight, thanks to Phyllis.
“You aren’t misfits,” I mumbled, completely embarrassed.
“Oh, yeah? Well, guess what?” Phyllis asked. “Neither are you. By the way, those girls I saw you with at the beginning of the year, what were their names again?”
“Hally and Ellen?”
“Hally and Ellen, that’s it. I could tell you felt uncomfortable around them.”
“They like to make fun of people.” I was finally understanding how unhappy I had felt, trying to win their favor.
I thought Phyllis didn’t hear me. “I always felt bad for them,” she said. Really? “They’ll never learn about their own lives if they keep on criticizing the way other people walk and talk and dress.” She paused and thought and said, “Ugh. I think I was like them when I was your age.”