SCOUT

by Sanjiv Lingard

  “I want Eileen home,” I insisted. “Even if they want to stop me now, I’ll do it when I’m eighteen. She’s my mom.”

  “You sure that’s what you want?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “You may not feel the same in a year’s time. You may not want to chain yourself down. I moved to this town when I was still a teenager. I married, and I worked with my old man at the Doughy Roll factory. Before I knew it, I was forty years old and they were closing the place down. So I put myself through college. Taught myself the law. I always wanted to be a lawyer, ever since I was your age. But I put it off. ‘Couldn’t afford the fees’ - that was my excuse. I spent my youth making confectionary. I used to work the big conveyor, and all the while I dreamt of having my own attorney’s office. Should’a’ done it twenty years earlier, and there’s not a day I don’t regret it. You need to have a long hard think about whether you want to commit to this, Scout. You’re young, and you’re bright. You could get out of town, go to college.”

  That was the second time in as many days that someone had suggested that. I wondered whether there was a reason they were saying it.

  *

  As I was leaving Shona’s office, my cell phone rang. This was a rare enough event to make me fumble with the screen, trying to work out how to unlock it.

  “Miss Mann?!” a voice shouted at me.

  “Yes?” I replied, trying to place the caller.

  “It’s Ephraim Dinkel. So, it’s decided. I’m taking Mrs Dinkel to Florida.”

  “Well – uh – that’s great,” though I couldn’t fathom why he was calling to tell me of his travel plans.

  “So you’ve got the job.”

  “I have?”

  “Yeah – and you’re gonna need an assistant. You know anyone can make coffee?”

  Chapter 27

  Things were not going so well in New Jersey. Riley’s sister had hooked up with a New Guy, and this New Guy did not take too kindly to sharing a roof with two men who loved each other. The sister was made to choose between her brother and her squeeze – and in the end, New Jersey muscle was stronger than blood.

  I called Moyheddin to pass on the news of my job at the very moment that the sister was standing on the porch watching Riley off the premises.

  “It’s like something out of Jersey Shore,” explained Moy, as he hustled his rucksack into the pickup truck.

  “Which one does she look like?” I asked. “Snooki or JWoww?”

  “A mix, with a hint of Kelly Osbourne.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Yeah – too much ink and too much spray tan.”

  As the Jersey Shore clone saw them off, I asked about their plans. Riley thought he might be able to stay with an old school friend, but doubted that Moy would be welcome. His friend was a fireman and hadn’t been too keen on the Saudis since the towers came down.

  *

  By late the next day, Moyheddin was headed back to Vermillion City on a bus from the Port Authority.

  I cleaned out Mom’s room. The drapes had been drawn day and night because Eileen felt threatened by the outside world. At one point she thought that someone was spying on her, so it was easier to leave them closed. They were stiff on the rail as I tugged them open.

  Cold sunlight flooded through the dirty windows and picked out every detail in the room. To Eileen this bedroom had been a cocoon, but now I could see it for what it was:

  Grimy.

  So I scrubbed. Pail after pail of hot water and soap. There weren’t so much dust bunnies under the bed but a whole herd of tumbleweed elephants. I was glad that nothing had taken up roost down there.

  Bedding stripped and replaced, windows polished until they shone, and drapes laundered, the bedroom was ready. Just as I heard Moy’s bicycle on the path, I took one final look at Eileen’s room. It hadn’t taken me long to erase her life from the room, because for the last few years the person who had been Eileen Mann had slowly faded from view.

  Nothing of her remained.

  *

  We stayed up late. Talking a lot about Mike, naturally. Moyheddin was doubtful about the heart-shaped map. He thought it was a coincidence, citing the time that his Aunt Fatima thought she had discovered the name of God in an eggplant, only for the rest of the family to point out that the pattern spelt out ‘Diet Sprite’. But then, Moyheddin wasn’t a romantic. He was into facts and figures, and couldn’t see that the world was alive with emotions and feeling.

  The alarm woke us shortly after we had fallen asleep. We trudged through the dark streets to Mr Dinkel’s.

  It was 4.05am.

  “You’re late,” grumbled Mr Dinkel. The bakery, at least, was warm – the oven roaring and the water boiling. Hunched in a cloud of steam was a young man with the worst case of acne I have ever seen. Even his acne had acne. It was hard to know where to look.

  “This is Sol,” explained Mr. Dinkel. “Mrs. Fierstein’s boy. He gets here at three to start the oven and roll out the bagels. Later on he’ll make the dough for the next day. You two are front of house. You can see why.”

  He pointed his fingers at his cheeks and rolled his eyes. I hoped Sol had a thick skin under his spots.

  “And what’s your name, young man?” he asked my friend.

  “Moyheddin Seirawan.”

  “So you’re a Syrian?”

  “Via Saudi.”

  “You know this is a Jewish bakery?”

  “I guessed as much when I saw the mezuzah,” replied Moy.

  “And how do you feel about it?”

  “As your sworn enemy I should be doing my best to ruin your business and drive away custom. But since the people in my homeland want to cut off my bits, and then stone me to death, I hope we can be friends.”

  “Okay, I’m not prejudiced. Arabs I have no problem with,” Mr Dinkel huffed. “But if you need to pray, you do it in your own time.”

  I’d never seen Moyheddin pray, so I didn’t think that would be a problem. It turned out that Moy and Mr Dinkel had more in common than they thought. Moy had worked in catering whilst paying his way through accountancy school, so he knew how to ‘schmear’ – which in ordinary language is how to spread cream cheese on a freshly cut bagel. The way Mr Dinkel explained, the filling of a bagel was part-science, part-art. Too much ‘schmear’ and the cheese would splurt from the bagel and drop on the customer’s shoe. Not enough, and the bagel wouldn’t have that special Dinkel ‘thing’. That was the art. Mr Dinkel couldn’t readily explain the ‘thing’ but could tell us if we got it right or wrong.

  Moy got it right first time, whilst I, apparently, “would never get the thing”. I was demoted from ‘schmearing’ to roasting the coffee, which then had to be passed up to Mrs Dinkel for testing.

  Minutes later, Mr Dinkel came back down from giving Mrs D her morning cup, and gave me a nod in acknowledgement.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Work here today, and if I like you I’ll give you the job.”

  *

  Dinkel’s was quieter than The Bean Counter. The folk who came in for their coffee and their bagels were not in such a hurry as those on Main Street, and more often than not stopped to ask my name. If they wanted to talk, I talked back. Talking was never allowed at The Bean Counter, apart from the obligatory “May Your Drink Go With You!”

  Here they wanted to know if I was Mr Dinkel’s granddaughter.

  Mr Dinkel kept watch during the breakfast rush, as if trying to catch us out. By the time that the moms had come over after dropping their kids at the Grace Street Elementary, and were deep in their lattes and gossip, Mr Dinkel had disappeared. I found him in the kitchen, smoking a cigar and flicking through a brochure for holiday villas in Florida.

  With Mr Dinkel in the back room, I posed with a salt-beef bagel and had Moyheddin take a photo. I sent it to Mike, who wrote back straigh
t away saying how jealous he was and could we please FedEx him his favourite lunchtime treat? I sent him another photo, with the bagel stuffed into my mouth, and the caption:

  ‘Sorry, soccer-boy. Bagel’s all eaten.’

  *

  Sol returned late afternoon to start making the dough for the next day. After we closed shop, I sat between the other two on the back step whilst they smoked. Maybe it was a catering thing, but Sol rolled his own like Moy. I guess that they were so used to making food from raw materials, a cigarette was no different.

  We gazed out at the twilight, bone tired.

  “You guys coming back tomorrow?” asked Sol.

  “Maybe,” I coughed.

  “That’ll be cool,” he said. “It’d be nice to have some conversation, you know? Mr Dinkel doesn’t talk much.”

  “You think he’ll keep us on?” asked Moyheddin.

  “You made it through the whole day,” replied Sol. “He’s tried out people before. His niece? She lasted about two hours, but then she chewed gum. He hates gum.”

  “How ‘bout you, Sol?” I asked. “You like working here?”

  “I like making bread. I come from a family of bakers. It’s all I want to do. My dad worked at the Doughy Mill, but I want to make proper bread. Rye, wholemeal, sourdough. Next I want to learn how to make croissants. You think they’d sell?”

  “I think they’d go down fine.”

  “I just love bread,” he said, a smile cracking his rosy face.

  “You make a great bagel,” I said, clutching a paper bag filled with the day’s discards. For a girl on a budget, unused bagels were a bonus.

  Mr Dinkel bustled out behind us, the stub of a cigar in his mouth.

  “Okay, the till balances. You obviously know your retail, young lady.”

  Sol raised an eyebrow at me – this was a rare compliment indeed.

  “I’ll see you both in the morning. And don’t be late.”

  We were hired!

  My elation was dampened by the fact that my bedside alarm was set for 3.15am.

  Chapter 28

  Thank Yahweh for the Shabbat. On Saturday, we slept.

  We’d only been working two days at Dinkel’s, but I felt ten years older. I finally crawled out of bed in the mid-afternoon, to find Moyheddin under a duvet watching a re-run of Drag Race.

  “I’ve seen this season,” I said. “I know who wins.”

  “It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part,” Moy snapped back.

  So we watched glamorous people strut the catwalk, each trying to perfect a new image for themselves. They were proud and fearless and beautiful, even though they knew that only one could win. Most episodes ended in tears.

  When it was over, Moyheddin slapped a pile of envelopes down on the coffee table.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Your college applications. I found them under the couch.”

  I winced. I’d kicked them out the way months ago and forgotten all about them.

  “They’re all there,” he said. “University of Chicago, Columbia, Duke–“

  “I’m never gonna get into Duke.”

  “Your composite ACT score is thirty-five,” he said. “I reckon you only need ask. You apply now, and you may get a hardship loan – even a scholarship.”

  “I’m not doing a thing till Mom’s out of hospital.”

  “You can always defer for a year – but if you don’t apply you won’t know.”

  “I’m not applying – and that’s it!”

  *

  But those brochures didn’t move from the coffee table. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. The smiling faces on the photographic covers taunted me. Each college sold itself in a similar way – a mixed ethnic group of students, mostly attractive, all sparkling with intelligence, was shot amid soft-focus backgrounds. Some sat over microscopes, others walked on a sunlit campus. All had friends, and all were comfortable in their skin.

  Scout, Scout! I thought to myself. When will you join the human race?

  Sometime on Sunday afternoon, I scooped up the paperwork and took it into my room. I was like Mr Dinkel with his holiday brochures. I folded the books open on the ‘Neuroscience’ page and greedily compared the courses, as if trying to choose between hotels.

  But would they want me? Or would they laugh at me, telling me I was too young, or too stupid?

  Monday came, and Moyheddin and I dragged ourselves from bed at an hour when traditionally Death stalked the streets.

  We worked for twelve hours, on minimum wage, and walked back in the dark. I was so cold and tired that I crawled into bed fully clothed and fell asleep. The alarm hammered me awake at 3.15 the next morning, and I tumbled from bed in an avalanche of slickly printed booklets. I heaped them onto my pillow and ran out into the dark to make coffee and serve bagels.

  Sol was there, as always, in a kitchen as hot as a sauna. He rolled the bagels by hand, boiled them, and coated some in poppy seeds, others in sesame. They were then baked on platters of wood soaked in water. When Sol moved about the bakery, he moved with the grace of a potter – the dough as pliant as clay in his hand, the finished bread a burnished masterwork.

  He had found the thing that made him whole. Now it was my turn.

  *

  I forced myself to stay awake the next night. I took the college brochures into the living room, made black coffee heaped with sugar and sat at the table. I could access all the colleges through the Common Application form, which included in its requirements a brief essay:

  ‘Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.’

  It sounded like they were asking for my entire life story, though I doubted I could compress it into the 500-word limit.

  As an exercise in ‘what if’, I filled out the form. But as I was doing it, I kept on thinking about old Mr Dinkel.

  That morning he had appeared in the shop wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Ordinarily, his preferred colour was brown – brown shoes, beige chinos, cream shirt and brown cardigan. But that day, crested parrots floated on sky-blue cotton. He did not have to explain himself, for Mr Dinkel danced around the store as if were already listening to the band by the pool. Everything we did was just fine – the ‘schmearing’ and the roasting. Sol shook his head in wonder.

  “The man’s transformed, Scout,” he said. “I don’t know what you did, but he’s finally free.”

  The thing is - Mr Dinkel could have gone on holiday anytime he chose. Sol told me that the bakery had paid for itself years ago, and that his sons had no need for a college loan.

  Now Mr D was going to take his first holiday in five decades. He had dreamt about it, sure enough. Smoking contraband Havana cigars; drinking margaritas, slushy, with ice and lime. Fifty years of dreaming, of making little baby steps but getting nowhere.

  My pen hung over the form. Waiting fifty years was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I filled in what I could. It didn’t take long, until I reached the essay topic.

  My head swam as I read it again:

  ‘Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.’

  I had a freakish ability to find people. Up until now it had been a parlour trick, but I had begun to realise that something more powerful was going on. I had already saved Brianna, maybe I could save more. By going to school, I would have to set aside this talent.

  And all the while I was indulging my intellectual curiosity, my mother would be wasting away in a state mental hospital.

  How’s that for an ethical dilemma?

  Chapter 29

  I had to visit Sting.

  That’s Principal Sumner to you - and you won’t get the joke unless you’ve spent your childhood listening to white man’
s reggae from the 1980s. ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ by The Police played in my head each time I saw him.

  Principal Sting.

  Mr Dinkel grumbled, but gave me an hour after the Grace Street Moms had cleared. I borrowed Moyheddin’s bicycle and pedalled as fast as I could to the high school.

  It was weird coming back. I felt like an alien, even though I had spent four unhappy years within these gates. I had been a younger than everyone else, small for my age and with no boobs.

  The first thing someone shouted at me in freshman year was – “Hey! Is that a boy?”

  My boobs never really caught up; and for girls in freshman year, boobs were everything. Some girls even came back as sophomores with a fully grown set, as if they had blossomed miraculously in the summer sunshine rather than under the knife of a cosmetic surgeon.

  Then there was the parking lot – a daily joust to see who could park their car closest to the building. For many students their sweet sixteen was crowned with a set of keys, and the cars they rode varied from beaten-up jalopies to showroom-fresh Mini Coopers. I never got an initial licence, but then, I couldn’t afford the wheels.

  And all through those four years, Mom was declining fast. If she had a heroic illness, like cancer, then I could have spoken about it. It might even have made me a celebrity in the school – ‘The girl with the tragic mom’. But dementia was something suffered by old people, and it wasn’t picturesque. On open day I did a bake sale for the Alzheimer’s Association, but most assumed it was for my grandma. I didn’t have the guts to tell anyone the truth.

  Like Mom, I faded from view. I was a nobody at high school. Everyone had forgotten me, except Principal Sting.

  “How’s your mom?” he asked, just as he did every time we met. He was nearing retirement age, like the real Sting, but was a fitness freak. He coached the girls’ basketball, and jogged everywhere in a tracksuit.