Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book

by Nancy N. Rue

  I was heaving a huge what-am-I-going-to-do-all-day sigh when Lou turned off the ignition and said to me, “I have a job for you.”

  “I don’t know how to do anything,” I said.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” he said. “But you definitely don’t know how to do this. Most people don’t.”

  “Then how am I supposed to do it?”

  “They’ll teach you.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” My stomach was already in a knot. Teaching meant I was supposed to learn something. I didn’t do that well. And even though this could be yet another move toward home, I still hated the humiliation I was already feeling at the very thought of getting instructions I didn’t understand and making an idiot out of myself trying to follow them.

  “You okay?” Lou said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want a job.”

  “Nobody does, really. But we all have to make a living, right?”

  “A living?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to put you to work and not pay you, do you?”

  “As in money?” I said.

  “Seven fifty an hour,” he said. “You’re barely legal working age but–”

  I missed the rest. Money. Of my own. That meant I could buy a plane ticket. Bus ticket. Cab fare.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I’m not good with mechanical stuff. I don’t think. I never tried it.”

  “You don’t have to be mechanical for this,” Lou said. “Follow me.”

  I did–over to the funky little garden thing and down a path to a building behind the garage and connected to it by another one of those bridges–although this one was big enough for actual people to walk over.

  On each side of a red door was a bush clipped into the shape of–were they motorcycles? A sign over the door said something like Ride American, but we went in too fast for me to get the rest of it.

  Once I was inside, I forgot all about trees shaped like Harleys and signs that made no sense. We were standing in a restaurant with tables that had miniatures of the shape-trees on them and chopsticks rolled up in napkins and that music that sounds like there’s something wrong with it playing in the background.

  “Bonsai!” Lou called out–followed by a bunch of other words that made him sound like Jackie Chan.

  Somebody answered with words just like them from behind a curtain made out of wooden beads, and then a small man with black spiky hair and crinkly eyes came out. He not only sounded like Jackie Chan, he looked kind of like him.

  “Bonsai,” Lou said, “this is my daughter Jessie. Jess, meet Bonsai.”

  “Hi,” I said, lamely.

  He said something to me in whatever language it was they were speaking and then looked at Lou and said, in perfect English, “She can’t be your daughter. She’s too pretty.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Lou said. “Where’s Rose?”

  It was like we were in a play. The beads rattled and a woman came through–dressed in a red kimono like my grandfather brought me when he and New Wife went to Japan or someplace, and which was way too small because he hadn’t seen me for a year and he still thought I was, like, five. This lady wore it as if it was her regular clothes, you could tell that. And the hair folded up on top of her head and held there with chopstick-looking things–that looked like it was for real too. And then she folded her really tiny hands at her waist and came toward me and bowed. Bowed. Like I was the president or something.

  I didn’t know what to do so I bowed back.

  “Rose, my daughter Jessie,” Lou said. “Jess, Rose.”

  She murmured something so low I couldn’t tell whether it was English or what. I kind of murmured back at her.

  “She’s all yours, Bonsai,” Lou said.

  “I’m all his for what?” I said.

  “You’re going to learn the sushi business. Bonsai’s the best sushi chef I know.”

  “I’m the only one you know,” Bonsai said. “Get out of here before you insult me any more.”

  Lou laughed–why, I didn’t know–and told me to have a good morning and he’d see me at the end of the day. My heart was pounding right out of my chest before he even got through the door.

  I looked at Bonsai. “I don’t know anything,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Then we won’t have to break any bad habits. Rose, take her back in the kitchen.”

  Rose bowed again, and I bowed back and wondered if we were going to go through that every time we looked at each other. By then I’d fallen completely off the hamster wheel.

  It was a disaster. Seriously. And for once I didn’t cause it. Well, I caused it, but not on purpose.

  In the first place, I didn’t understand a thing Rose said as she pointed to all these things on the shiny metal counters in the kitchen and named them. I guess that was what she was doing. I saw a bamboo place mat and chopsticks as long as my arm and some kind of evil-looking toothbrush, but I couldn’t have said what any of it was called by the time we were done with that lesson. Besides the fact that she barely moved her lips when she talked, I kept getting hung up on the sight of the knives. They looked like smaller versions of the swords Tom Cruise used in that samurai movie. And when I watched Bonsai cut a fish’s head off like he was slicing butter, I thought I was going to faint–except that I didn’t want to fall on the unidentified fishy stuff on the floor below him.

  Apparently that was all the introduction I was going to get, because Rose bowed at the end of it and tied a white apron around me and demonstrated rubbing some kind of root thing across a bowl that had teeth on it until the root thing came out in thin, wide curls. She made it look easy. I ended up losing control of it twice, and when I finally did get it going, I scraped my knuckles on the teeth and got blood in the shavings and they had to throw it all away. Bonsai wasn’t amused.

  Then Rose switched me to the evil toothbrush and showed me how to draw it up the body of a fish, from its tail to its head. That didn’t make me want to faint. It made me want to throw up. I was pretty sure the fish was dead, but that eye kept looking at me the whole time I was scraping its scales off. I was freaked-out enough to quit when Rose stopped me anyway because Bonsai barked something to her in what I finally figured out was Japanese. She bowed to me and took the scaler away from me, and then Bonsai barked at me, “You were bruising the fish.”

  “It’s already dead,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  She put me on another scraping duty–this time it was something green that I had to rub with something that looked like the skin of some other fish.

  “Shark,” Rose said, pointing to the skin.

  “I definitely hope that’s dead,” I said.

  She bobbed her head and handed me the green thing. “Wasabi,” she said, and bowed.

  I of course bowed too, and said, “Wasabi.”

  Yeah, well, wasabi did not turn out to be my friend. I grated until my eyes started watering, and when I rubbed them I about went blind and ran screaming to the bathroom in pain. This time they didn’t put me on another job. Bonsai shot me evil looks and called Lou.

  “You’ve never had wasabi?” Lou said as he dabbed at my eyes with a wet towel.

  “I don’t even know what it is!” I said.

  He chuckled. “You do now.”

  “I can’t do this sushi thing,” I said.

  “What do you mean you can’t? You’ve only been at it for two hours.”

  “Is that all?” I said. I was glad my eyes were already running because I thought I might be crying too, and I didn’t want him seeing that, because I had come to the conclusion that he was trying to break me down.

  “The biggest part of learning a new thing is finding out what not to do,” Lou said. “Maybe you could just watch Bonsai for the rest of the day. Get the big picture. How does that sound?”

  It sounded horrible. Bonsai obviously wasn’t thrilled with me being there–but there wasn’t any point in arguing. Lou was denser than–than me.

  Rose evidently didn’t understan
d the word watch.

  As soon as Lou was gone, she handed me a pair of industrial-size tweezers and smiled and bowed and made me pick the bones out of fish.

  Then people started coming in for lunch–most of them guys in sleeveless Tshirts like the one I slept in and bandanas tied around their heads. Seeing them eat little bite-size rolls of rice and raw fish was like watching a football team take a ballet class.

  Rose practically washed my hands for me and had me put glasses of water on tables and wrap more chopsticks in more napkins. But Bonsai wouldn’t let me get near the sushi. He acted like every dish was a work of art or something. They kind of were. Some of them looked like dragons, complete with paper heads and tails. Some of it was more like cones with all this colorful stuff sticking out. Although, once I found out the cones were made of seaweed, I didn’t care what they looked like. That was just gross.

  I got out of eating any of it, even though Rose offered and Bonsai gave me the evil eye when I said I wasn’t hungry. I drank about three Cokes to fill myself up, which meant that by the time I was waiting at the end of the day in Lou’s office for him to get ready to head for “Weezie’s” house, my whole body was on a hamster wheel. I sat on the desk and swung my legs and wished I had some chocolate.

  “Hey, Crash.”

  I glared at the door. Rocky–was that his name?–was getting ready to do a pull-up on the door frame. Show-off. I hated that in a guy. Okay, usually I liked it, but I hated it in him.

  “So they put you out at Rosie and Bonsai’s so you couldn’t hurt anybody, huh?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “They aren’t letting you touch the knives, are they?”

  I rolled my eyes and jumped off the desk and knocked over a cup full of pens.

  “Dude, you need a padded room,” he said.

  He strolled over and tried to put some of them back in the cup, but I smacked his hand away. He curled his fingers around my wrist and laughed into my eyes with his.

  “You are one crazy chick,” he said.

  “Let go,” I said.

  “You promise not to hit me again?”

  “Let go.”

  “Rock. Back off.”

  Rocky pulled both hands up like he was surrendering to the army and grinned at Lou, who was smiling and shaking his head and moving from the doorway to his desk.

  “We were just messin’ around,” Rocky said. “Sorry.”

  “You were messing around,” I said. “I was not. Just so we’re clear.”

  “What are your plans for the weekend?” Lou said.

  I whipped around to look at him. He was not going to ask this creature to join us, was he?

  “A bunch of us are going to the movies tonight,” Rocky said. “You’ve got me working tomorrow. Saturday night’s the pizza thing–which you’re not gonna be at because you’re totally ditching us. Then church Sunday.”

  He was such a liar. He was going to party and make some girl think he was cool, putting his hands on his hips and showing the hole in his smile like he did. What was up with the “church Sunday”? Was he trying to impress Lou because he was his boss?

  “Sounds good,” Lou said.

  “You got Lou-WEE-za this weekend?”

  “Yep. We’re going to pick her up now.”

  Rocky placed his devil-smile on me. “Have fun with that,” he said.

  I had no intention of “having fun with that.” In fact, the minute I saw the little shrimp of a girl-child fly down the front steps of her mini-mansion and into Lou’s arms, I found another plan. She gave him a loud kiss on each cheek and hung her arms around his neck while she chattered into his face. This was so Daddy’s Girl, it would have been sickening if it hadn’t been absolutely perfect. If she didn’t like me, I was as good as gone by Monday.

  Lou carried her over to the truck where I was still standing and put her down in front of me. She was so small her head barely came to my shoulder, and I was no runway model my own self. She tossed her not-quite-as-red-as-mine bob of hair back from her face and smiled at me. Sort of. Let’s just say it wasn’t only the braces on her teeth that made me think of plastic.

  “Weezie, this is Jess,” Lou said. “Jess, Weezie.”

  “I know, Daddy,” Weezie said, rolling her huge blue eyes. They were the same color as his–ours–but twice as big. It was like she got the same genes and then had them upgraded. Even the freckles on her nose looked like they had been perfectly placed there.

  “I mean, who else are you gonna be, right?” she said to me.

  “I could be an imposter,” I said.

  “No, you couldn’t,” she said.

  “Get your stuff, Weez,” Lou said.

  She skipped back to the house, hair swinging, and Lou shook his head. “They’re so literal at ten.”

  They’re such brats at ten, I wanted to say.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I didn’t have to do much to turn Weezie against me. She was halfway there before we ever got to Lou’s house.

  She sat right up next to him in the truck and chattered longer than I could listen to her about this sleepover and that birthday party and when was he going to take her to work with him and were they still going to do all their Saturday-night traditions. Between every sentence she glanced over at me like she was making sure I was getting what an intruder I was.

  Like I could miss it.

  At the dinner table–Yay! Daddy had fixed her favorite coconut shrimp just the way she liked it–she pointed out to me that she was named after him. “He’s Louis–I’m Louisa. Who are you named after?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just Jessie.”

  “Is that short for Jessica?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I like that better. I’m calling you Jessica.”

  “Why don’t you ask her if she wants to be called Jessica?” Lou said. “You don’t like anybody calling you Louisa.”

  Weezie shrugged and went back to eating the coconut off of her shrimp.

  Did he know this kid? I’d only been around her for an hour, and I already had it down that she didn’t care what I wanted or didn’t want. It was all about her.

  There was no doubt about that when it was time to go to bed and she put it together that I had been sleeping in her room and was going to sleep there that night too. At least now I knew why it was pink and had foo-foo curtains. She had probably picked them out herself.

  “You trashed it!” she said.

  I looked around. I’d dumped my suitcase on the floor looking for something to wear that morning, and I’d collected several dishes on my midnight raids on the kitchen–but it didn’t look that different from my room at home.

  She went after it like my mother in a No-Bed Phase, while I looked for the big T-shirt to sleep in and discovered Lou must have put it in the wash. I wasn’t used to somebody else doing the laundry. I stuck on sleep shorts and a cami and flopped down on one of the twin beds and watched Weezie go after the room.

  After she piled all my stuff back into the suitcase and plumped up the pillows on the other bed and did everything but get out the vacuum cleaner, she stood there and stared at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Are you, like, hyperactive or something?”

  I almost swallowed the fingernail I was chewing on.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why are you all wiggling your foot and biting your nails and stuff?”

  “Why are you cleaning up the room like the Tasmanian Devil?”

  She arched an eyebrow, just the way Lou did. “You are weird, Jessica,” she said.

  “Right back at ya, kid,” I said.

  Weezie pulled the covers back on her bed, and something thudded to the floor. She leaned over and picked up the leather book. That RL thing.

  “What’s this, your journal?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  She gave me a long, blue-eyed look. “I know. If it was, you’d be fighting me for it. My babysitter went
nutso one time when I picked hers up. Besides, you aren’t the journal-writing type.”

  “How would you know that?” I said, in spite of the fact that I had silently vowed not to get into a conversation with this child.

  “Because you’re hyperactive.”

  “Would you get off that?” I said.

  “There’s this boy in my class and he’s hyper and he can barely read.”

  “Yeah, well, I can read, okay?”

  “Here.” Weezie tossed the leather book onto my bed. “Read this.”

  I wanted to throw it back at her. The only reason I didn’t was because she wasn’t going to let this go until I proved to her that I wasn’t something that I actually was.

  I flipped open the book. Fine. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read words–I just couldn’t remember them ten seconds after I read them because, let’s face it, concentration wasn’t my thing. It was usually pretty obvious when I had to read something out loud. This little chick would be on that like white on rice.

  I turned to the first page, which didn’t have a lot on it. I opened my mouth and my lips froze. It came right up to me like somebody else was already reading it to me.

  “I knew you couldn’t,” Weezie said.

  I waved her off. “ ‘This is going to sound very strange to you,’” I read, “ ‘but I want you to take this book from the one who gave it to you and eat it.’”

  “What?”

  “ ‘It’s going to taste sweet, but stand by, because it will also upset your stomach.’”

  Weezie made a disgusted sound in her throat. “It does not say that.”

  Yeah, it did. But it wasn’t what it said that had me blinking at the page. It was the fact that I had just read it without stumbling over any words. And that five seconds later I still knew exactly what it said.

  “Let me see that.” Weezie climbed over onto my bed and hung over my shoulder. “Okay, it does say that. But it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You just told me to read it,” I said.