DAY TWO
“Don’t forget your lunch, dear.”
I nearly choked on my shredded wheat. My mother hadn’t made my school lunch since the second day of kindergarten.
This morning she was in full uniform, wearing a purple caftan and a red burnoose, which was a hooded thing that draped over her head and shoulders. Her eyes were outlined heavily with black and she had a gold snake bracelet high up on one bare arm.
“Lunch?” I looked warily at the brown paper bag she held.
“Yes, as long as I was making lunch for Cleo, I thought I should make yours as well.”
“You made Cleopatra lunch?” I asked.
“Of course I made Cleo lunch. You didn’t expect to feed the baby in the school cafeteria, did you?” She dropped a second brown bag onto the table, then tousled my hair. “What would you get her, silly? Tuna surprise? Now, what sort of a grade would you get with that?”
This was all making my head spin. My mother had never taken such an interest in my schoolwork before.
“By the way,” she added, “where is your sister?”
“My sister? I thought she was my baby.”
“Your baby?” She laughed. “Bertram Hooks, you’re an eighth-grade boy. The school couldn’t possibly expect you to have a baby. So she must be your sister. Now, where is she?”
“Uh . . . in my knapsack.”
“Well, that just won’t do. She needs fresh air. Carry her to school. I’m sure your teacher will be watching for little things like that. Then I’ll run out this afternoon and buy you one of those dear little papoose holders so you can strap her to your chest.”
“Dad!” I ran from the kitchen.
I caught my father hurrying from the bathroom, buttoning his shirt with one hand, combing his blond hair with the other, all the while talking into a cell phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear. My father was tall, like my mother and me, and thin, like my mother, unlike me. It was as though two string beans had somehow given birth to a butternut squash. I guess being “stocky,” as the clothing saleswoman so tactfully put it, was an occupational hazard of cooking.
“No, you’re wrong,” he was saying into the cell phone. “It’s 14.2359 percent.”
“Dad!”
He held up a hand for me to wait. “I triple-checked the figures myself,” he said. “If we use 14.2358 percent, then we might as well start selling gambler’s insurance to lottery players.”
My father was the head actuary at an insurance company. That meant he calculated the odds on weird things like, what were the chances that a left-handed Eskimo in a red turtleneck was going to get hit by a yellow 1990 Volkswagen driven by a Norwegian sailor on shore leave?
“Dad!” I tugged on his shirttail. “I’ve got to talk to you now! It’s Mom,” I said. “And it’s an emergency.”
“Look, Jim, I’ll call you later,” he said. “I’ve got something very important going on here.” He clicked the button and gave me a tired smile. He was probably up most of the night again, suspended between his laptop and his cell phone.
Sometimes I suspected my father actually thought in numbers, the way immigrants might think in their native language. There was a three-second delay to everything as Dad translated my question into number-ese, then his number-ese answer back into English.
“What’s wrong, Bert?” he asked me now.
“Did you know I have a baby sister?”
“What?” The blood rushed from his face. “You mean your mother is . . . ?”
“No, it’s worse.” My words tumbled out in a rush. “The baby is really just a sack of flour from a school project I’m supposed to take care of to teach me responsibility because I let the class newt Harry escape and dry up and I do get all shaky whenever I think of him but this is ridiculous and Mom thinks I’d get a much better grade by pretending the bag is real because what sort of grade would I get if I bought it tuna surprise for lunch instead of baby mush and I thought maybe she was just getting carried away helping me but she’s really gone overboard and changed the bag from a bag to my baby and then to my baby sister which means now it’s her baby and if it’s her baby then that also makes it yours.”
“I have a baby daughter who’s a newt?” He began to look woozy.
“No, Dad, listen! You don’t have a real baby, you have a flour-sack baby. Mom even named it. Cleopatra,” I added. Now he would realize how serious things were.
Instead, he laughed with what seemed like relief and walked me down the hall. He stopped for a moment at the threshold of the kitchen and looked in. My mother had slipped on a pair of headphones and was singing softly to herself as she switched the contents of her purse from a small black one to a purple one that matched her caftan.
As always, just the sight of her made Dad’s whole face soften and light up. It didn’t matter if a troupe of greenhaired circus dogs was right there juggling flaming torches. If my mother was in the same room, she was all he ever saw.
“You know, Bert,” he said, speaking softly so she would not hear him over the music. “Your mother is a very special person, and she has two main jobs in life. The first is to discover the specialness in other people and to help them see that, and the second is to discover the full extent of her own specialness. Just as your job right now is to go to school and not worry. And mine is to take care of business, because so far, this day has an 87.77 percent chance of being a disaster.” He flipped open the phone and thumbed in a number.
“But Dad, what am I supposed to do?”
“Your very best, son, just like always.”
“Well, sometimes my best isn’t very good,” I said. “If I don’t do this project, I’m going to fail math. I . . . I might even fail eighth grade.” There. I had confessed.
“Fail math?” Genuinely surprised, he shut the phone and put his arm around my shoulder. “No way, champ.”
Champ? Didn’t he ever look at my report card when he signed it? Or did he think Cs stood for “creative,” “clever,” and “capable”? My mother thinks that, deep down, beneath all the piles of numbers, my father is the world’s biggest romantic. I could say he was blinded by love. Sometimes I was afraid he was just inattentive.
He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “It’ll pass, Bert,” he said earnestly. “Whatever it is, it’ll pass. I can say that with a confidence factor of 99.877 percent. That’s how life is. Growing up, too. Things pass. Now go back in there and finish your breakfast. Kids who eat a hearty but healthy breakfast are five and four-sevenths times more likely to go to business school than kids who don’t.”
“Business school?” The phrase was old news but it popped out of my mouth anyway.
“Business school,” he repeated. “Wharton. My alma mater. You’ll enroll in their actuarial science program, just like me. You’re gonna love it!” he said, as if he were giving me the world’s best gift.
“But, Dad, what if . . . ? I mean . . . ” Culinary Institute of America, I kept repeating to myself silently. Maybe if I thought hard enough, I could zap the words into his mind. Of course, it would be easier to just say them, but I hadn’t gotten up the nerve yet.
“What if what?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure? Hmmm?” he persisted. I shook my head. He was ready to listen. I just wasn’t ready to talk. “All right, then, son,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Could it be possible that my father was a bad actuary? I mean, what were the odds that a kid who was failing math and who forever had flour under his fingernails was going to grow up and enroll in an actuarial science program? My father couldn’t foresee probability when it was under his own nose.
—Like when he built a pyramid on our front lawn for my mother at the beginning of her Egyptian craze. Even I saw the probability, and without a calculator, that the neighbors might object. And the zoning board. The only ones who didn’t object were the neighborhood dogs.
—Or when Dad let me have my first kitchen blowtorch so I cou
ld caramelize food. There was a good, maybe an overwhelming, probability that at age nine I wasn’t ready for it. We ended up with new cabinets, which we needed anyway, but for months, the lingering smoke gave all my recipes a barbecue flavor.
—And even way, way back, when he let my mother name me. My mother had been going for her third master’s degree at the time and had been studying Middle English, which I don’t quite understand, because how can English have a middle? And if it does, then where does it end? Anyway, she wanted to call me Beorhthramm, which sounded like something you would spit up during the flu.
Dad wanted to call me John.
Beorhthramm or John. This should not have been a difficult decision. After all, what was the probability that a name like Beorhthramm would later cause all sorts of legal problems because of misspellings, not to mention the personal trauma of walking into kindergarten, saying the name, and being sent to the nurse. But my mother wanted it, and my father gave in—either blinded by love again or inattentive to what was going to be my very painful reality.
Thankfully, some fourth cousin twice removed convinced my mother at my christening to forget the birth certificate and have my name changed to Bertram. When I first hit school, the worst I had to hear was, “Hi, Bert! Where’s Ernie?” At least till Nick Dekker remembered his Aunt Bertha.
Dekker. He was getting his own flour-sack baby today. Which meant that today had a much, much better-than-87.77-percent chance of being a disaster.
Mrs. Menendez put a white sack of flour onto Nick Dekker’s desk. His mouth was already open with protest when she shushed him.
“Not a word,” she said, “or you’ll be taking care of that baby so long she’ll be your date for the senior prom.”
Mrs. Menendez walked to the front of the room, folded her arms, and looked from me to Nick and back again. The room was empty except for us. After Spanish, she had kept Nick and me behind at lunch. I hoped she didn’t take long, as lunchtime was usually when I did the homework I was supposed to have done the night before.
“Mr. Hooks, Mr. Dekker—please note that this is not just any brand of flour off the supermarket shelf. The labels show that these are bags of stone-ground flour from Dutch’s Old-Time Oregon Mill. That means if anything happens to your babies, you cannot buy a replacement to try to fool me.”
A slow smile snaked its way across her lips.
“So, in case you are thinking about neglecting your duties, then ordering an extra bag or two from Dutch,” she said, “give it up now. Dutch sold his place over the winter, and it’s now Granny Greta’s Merry Mill. That’s what the new labels say.”
“Granny Greta?” Nick said. “No way. I bet I could go online anytime to this Web site.” He tapped the fine print on the side of the bag.
Did he think she was bluffing? My academic life was on the line, and Dekker was playing poker, with my final grades as chips.
“But who cares about extra flour?” he said, with his own snaky smile. “I bet you can’t make me do this. My dad’s a lawyer, remember? You’ll never get away with it!”
I sank lower in my seat. This was beginning to sound like a bad gangster movie.
“C’mon, Nick,” I pleaded. “You don’t talk like that to a teacher. Just take the sack and go to lunch.”
“It’s good advice,” Mrs. Menendez agreed.
“No!”
“Mr. Dekker, I’ll give you an undeserved break and tell you this: Before you do anything rash, why don’t you talk to your mother the lawyer first? I did. She thought it was a very innovative assignment.”
“You talked to my mother?” Dekker sat up straight. A bright red flush colored his cheeks.
“Of course. And I explained the situation to the principal first before doing anything. I cleared it with your other teachers as well, so that all of them are expecting to see a flour sack from each of you.”
Parents, principal, teachers—Mrs. Menendez had covered everything. Dekker pounded the desk with his fist, grabbed the flour sack, then stomped out of the classroom.
“Gee, thanks, Mrs. M.,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Well, it’s bad enough having to take care of Cl—” I caught myself. “This.” I nudged the sack on my desk. “Now Dekker is mad, and he’ll want to take it out on someone. That always means me.”
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Hooks. This has nothing to do with you.”
I didn’t even try to explain. I pulled myself to my feet, dropped Cleo into my knapsack, and walked out to the schoolyard.
Five minutes later, I was facedown in the grass. At least I wasn’t a city kid, facedown in concrete.
“You know what your problem is, Bertha? Or should I say, what one of your many problems is?” Sitting on my back, Dekker whispered into my ear. “You’re not even really fat, you’re just soft.” He hissed out the word. “Soft and mushy.” He rifled through my knapsack, then started talking loudly so kids would gather around.
“What, oh what, does Aunt Bertha have in her purse today, boys and girls?” he asked. “Let’s see. Here’s our poor little flour baby. Oh look, she has a face. Isn’t that cute?” He held it up with one hand, while rooting in my knapsack with the other. “And there’s this.” He shook his head. “Some people will do anything to suck up.” He showed all the kids Cleo’s brown bag lunch, which my mother had so thoughtfully labeled “The Baby’s.” I bet no one in Dekker’s family would make his flour sack lunch. The thought of Dekker ever meeting my mother sent such a shudder through me, he must have thought I was trying to shake him loose.
He elbowed me in the back, then continued, “And lookie what’s in the bag. An itsy-bitsy jar of strained prunes!”
My inner chef clucked his disapproval. Jar food? No, no, no! Babies need organic ingredients for their brand-new little bodies. I began to sort through my mental storehouse of recipes.
“Ooh! And here’s an itsy-bitsy baby spoon to go with the itsy-bitsy jar!”
Above the hooting came one lone voice.
“I think it’s funny,” said Indra Sahir.
Please, no, I prayed. Of all days, why did Indra have to pick today to discover I existed?
With Indra and Nick Dekker, it had been true love for longer than anyone could remember. Maybe that’s the reason I had stood shivering outside her house with her schoolwork. Knock on her door, get my head knocked off. I was a coward twice over, nervous about Indra, nervous about Dekker.
But time had been on my side. Between Indra’s bad break and the icy weather that was murder on her crutches, she was out of school two months. She had nothing to do all that time but grow. When she finally returned, instead of being eye-to-eye with her true love, she could eat peanuts off his head without even standing on tiptoe. The height difference didn’t seem to bother her. Heck, if she could see good in Dekker in the first place, she wasn’t going to change her mind over a few inches. But I guess Dekker hated looking up at her. He had barely talked to her since she’d come back. Not that I was allowed to. Ever since I had volunteered to take Indra her schoolwork, Nick’s attitude toward me had worsened. To cap it off, as tall as Indra was, I was taller still.
Dekker had gone from small, wiry, and mean to small, wiry, mean—and out for blood.
And now Indra was trying to save me. Her beautiful brown face was indignant; her long black hair was a shimmering helmet and cape. I sighed. Usually the knight in shining armor was a guy rescuing a girl. I guess she didn’t read the same books I did.
With a swish, Indra tossed her hair over her shoulder, then reached out and grabbed Cleo from Dekker’s hand.
“Strained prunes are just sooo funny,” she said. “I mean, if you have to do this flour-baby thing, do it big and make a joke out of it.”
The other kids wandered away, sensing a fight wasn’t going to happen after all.
Losing his audience made Dekker madder. He leaned close and said, “Who packed the cute little his-and-her bags, Bertha? Your mommy? Is she still making lunch for you? Doe
s she still wipe your big fat tush, too? Oh, I can just imagine your mother!”
No, you couldn’t, I thought. Not in a million years.
“Let Bertie up,” Indra said. “And give him back his prunes.” She dropped Cleo into my knapsack, planted her feet, and crossed her arms.
Bertie. She called me Bertie. She knows my name.
I smiled into the grass.
Dekker growled, “I’m sick of looking at you every day, Bertha. So you can suck up all you want to Mrs. Menendez, but it won’t make a difference. You’re not passing this assignment. Your little flour baby is history. And so are you.” He elbowed my back again, this time more sharply, then said, “You’re a big soft wuss, Bertha, the biggest wuss I ever saw. You couldn’t get any wussier if you tried.”
Suddenly I knew there was something even worse than Nick Dekker finding out about my mother. That something had been inches from his hand in the inside zipper pocket of my knapsack, the secret birthday present I had bought myself at the mall a couple of months ago and kept stuffed there for safety’s sake, in case my mother was hit with a cleaning spell.
It was the badge of my passion, all my hopes made visible, and absolute proof that it certainly was possible for me to get wussier: a genuine toque or, to be less precise, a big, white, floppy chef’s hat.
DAY THREE
“How was school?” my mother asked, as she pulled into the supermarket parking lot. Friday afternoons she picked me up after class and drove me to do the grocery shopping.
“School was okay.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing much.”
She nodded at my answer. Grown-ups were way too easily satisfied. Didn’t they know that “nothing much” usually meant your life was falling apart?
“And how was Cleo’s day?” she asked.
“Boring.”
“Boring?”
“Mom, I think that happens a lot when you’re a flour sack.”
“Bertie, that kind of attitude will not produce a passing grade. Now, how was the baby’s day? Did she behave herself?”
Death by Eggplant Page 2